Reading Roundup Wrapup: October 2025

Pick of the month: Justice League International Omnibus, Volume 2 by Keith Giffen, J. M. DeMatteis, Adam Hughes, Bart Sears, et al. BWA-HA-HA! But seriously, I didn't have a great month, and this brought me some much-needed joy. My other highlight (for similar reasons) was How Right You Are, Jeeves.

All books read:

1. Black Panther Adventures by Roy Thomas, John Buscema, et al.
2. Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
3. Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles; Or, Pirates of the Second Aether!! by Michael Moorcock
4. How Right You Are, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
5. Rumble Fish by S. E. Hinton
6. Wait, Wait…I’m Not Done Yet! by Carl Kasell
7. Black Panther: The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, Part Four by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Daniel Acuña, et al.
8. Star Trek: The Next Generation #2: The Peacekeepers by Gene DeWeese
9. Doctor Who: Short Trips #26: How The Doctor Changed My Life edited by Simon Guerrier
10. Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation by Mike Johnson & Tim Jones, David Messina, et al.
11. Doctor Who Magazine: Special Edition #63: Showrunners edited by Marcus Hearn
12. Star Trek: More Beautiful than Death by David Mack
13. Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith
14. Star Trek, Volume 1 by Mike Johnson, Steve Molnar, and Joe Phillips
15. Justice League International Omnibus, Volume 2 by Keith Giffen, J. M. DeMatteis, Adam Hughes, Bart Sears, et al.
16. Legends: Black Panther by Tochi Onyebuchi, Setor Fiadzigbey, Fran Galán, Enid Balám, Ramón F. Bachs, et al.

All books acquired:

1. Gabriel Gale's Ages of Oz: A Fiery Friendship by Lisa Fiedler, illustrated by Sebastian Giacobino
2. Hawkeye: The Saga of Barton and Bishop by Matt Fraction, David Aja, Annie Wu, Javier Pulido, et al.
3. Legion of Super-Heroes, Volume 2: The Dominators by Paul Levitz, Francis Portela, Scott Kolins, et al. 
4. Justice League International Omnibus, Volume 2 by Keith Giffen, J. M. DeMatteis, Adam Hughes, Bart Sears, et al.
5. Nostrilia by Cordwainer Smith
6. Peach and the Isle of Monsters by Franco and Agnes Garbowska

Currently reading:

• Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan
• Star Trek: The New Adventures, Volume 2 by Mike Johnson, Ryan Parrott, Stephen Molnar, Erfan Fajar, Claudia Balboni, et al.
• Star Trek, Volume 2 by Mike Johnson, Joe Corroney, and Joe Phillips
• Star Trek: The Unsettling Stars by Alan Dean Foster
• Star Trek: The New Adventures, Volume 5 by Mike Johnson and Tony Shasteen
• Justice League International Omnibus, Volume 3 by Keith Giffen, J. M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire, et al.
• Long Gone, Come Home by Monica Chenault-Kilgore

Because I'm reading my "Kelvin timeline" Star Trek comics in chronological order, I'm jumping between a bunch of different books at once, and thus "currently reading" lots of things.

Up next in my rotations:

1. Formerly Known as the Justice League by Keith Giffen & J. M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire, and Joe Rubinstein
2. The Worthing Chronicle by Orson Scott Card
3. Baby Cat-Face by Barry Gifford 
4. Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Starcrusher Trap by Mike W. Barr 

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 671 (down 12)

Not only did I read a lot of books this month, but they were actually from my reading list! I have never before, in over twenty years of tracking, had my "To be read" list go down by twelve from one month to the next. My previous record was nine, achieved in both June 2008 and August 2010.

Black Panther: Wakanda Unbound by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Daniel Acuña, et al.

Black Panther: The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, Part Four

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 2020-21
Read: October 2025

I finally made it to the end of all the Black Panther comics I got in a comiXology sale to commemorate the death of Chadwick Boseman, but those only go up to 2020... and obviously there are five more years of Black Panther comics after that! So I'll be continuing to discuss them, switching from single issues on comiXology to collected editions on Hoopla. That begins with the fourth and final part of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, branded as "Wakanda Unbound" on the original issues, though not in the trade.

Writer: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Artists: Ryan Bodenheim, Daniel Acuña & Brian Stelfreeze*

Color Artists: Michael Garland, Daniel Acuña, Chris O'Halloran & Laura Martin

Letterer: Joe Sabino

Anyone who's followed my reviews of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther run will not be surprised to hear that it fizzles out instead of coming to any kind of interesting climax. Part one of this storyline was gripping if confusing, part two raised lots of interesting ideas, part three returned to the meandering slow style that is Coates's typical approach... and then part four throws away any interesting ideas in favor of endless superhero punchups. I think the idea of Wakanda as an empire in itself is one that could have really had T'Challa questioning his own principles, but we just get a big battle here. Wakanda is a byword for freedom across the galaxy now! But how can it be that easy? Can a formerly oppressive regime just become a force for good? Interesting questions that a writer could ask, but this story just dodges them all in favor of a totally unearned Big Win.

For some reason, a bunch of non-Wakandan superheroes show up for the final battle, but I think only Black ones.
from Black Panther vol. 7 #24 (art by Daniel Acuña)

In the end, I think Coates bit off more than he could chew time and time again. These are superhero comics, fundamentally they must be about punching bad guys in the face, but the very best superhero comics manage to do more than that. Coates was interested in Big Ideas, which I appreciate, but his run consistently failed to marry those Big Ideas to the conventions of the superhero genre, meaning almost every arc had Big Ideas that were discussed a bit but went nowhere, and boring, tacked on action. (Particularly tedious here is the largely dialogue-less, all-action issue.)

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

* Note that the cover gives credit to Chris Sprouse and Karl Story, but they have no work collected in the volume. I'm assuming someone copied over the cover template of part three, which they did contribute to, and failed to change the names.

Justice League International Year Three, Part II: The Teasdale Imperative (JLA #31-36 / JLE #7-12)

This post covers the second half of the third year of Justice League International, taking us up to JLA's thirty-sixth issue and JLE's twelfth. This sequence begins with a four-part crossover, The Teasdale Imperative, that alternates between the two titles, then each series finishes out the year with four issues of its own.

Unlike in volume 1 of Justice League International Omnibus, where there was some attempt to put the stories in a reading order, the ones in volume 2 seem to just be interwoven in publication order. I don't think it works terribly well to be jumping back and forth between JLA and JLE when they are each running multipart stories that don't intersect, so I did my best to read the book in an order that made more sense. 

from Justice League Europe #7

So, to that end, I recommend following Teasdale Imperative with issues #33-36 of JLA and then doubling back to read issues #9-12 of JLE. Justice League International Special #1 is placed later in the book, but I recommend reading it between issues #10 and 11 of JLE, since Metamorpho's comments about wanting to see his kid indicate he hasn't yet gone looking for him. (Obviously at some point I will need to do a "reading order" post for the series.)

The Teasdale Imperative / "Nitwits, Knuckleheads & Poozers!" / "Club JLI" / "Lifeboat" / "Gnort by Gnortwest" / "Under the Skin" / "After the Fox!" / "The Show Must Go On...and On...and On...and On..." / "Family Ties" / "Bringing Up Baby", from Justice League America #31-32 & Justice League Europe #7-8 (Oct.-Nov. 1989), Justice League America #33-36 (Dec. 1989–Mar. 1990), Justice League Europe #9-10 (Dec. 1989–Jan. 1990), Justice League International Special #1 (1990), and Justice League Europe #11-12 (Feb.-Mar. 1990); reprinted in Justice League International Omnibus, Volume 2 (2020)
plot and layouts by Keith Giffen; scripts by J. M. DeMatteis, Bill Loebs, and Len Wein; pencils by Adam Hughes, Bart Sears, Tom Artis, Art Nichols, and Joe Phillips; inks by Joe Rubinstein, Pablo Marcos, Art Nichols, Bob Smith, Jose Marzon,* Bruce D. Patterson, and Bart Sears; letters by Albert De Guzman, Bob Lappan, and John Costanza; colors by Gene D'Angelo

This run begins with The Teasdale Imperative, a crossover between the two ongoings; the JLA is summoned to a village that the JLE has gone into... and hasn't come out of. I don't think this series is incapable of doing serious, and Giffen in particular has done a great job in portentous mode in other stories (notably his "Five Year Later" run on Legion of Super-Heroes, which was amazingly coming out the same time as this; the man was on fire in 1989!), but I felt like Teasdale Imperative—a somewhat grim story where the team faces down vampires—didn't quite hit the mark. I think maybe, fundamentally, I just don't care about the Gray Man or the Lords of Chaos and Order; I also never really got into the Gray Man story in volume 1 (see entry #1 in the list below).

from Justice League America #33

After this, we shift gears into a run of very comic JLA stories. First, Guy Gardner reunites with fellow Green Lantern Corps member Kilowog, who's at loose ends following the dismantling of the Green Lantern Corps. (I feel like the GLC was being disbanded or destroyed every couple weeks in the 1980s and '90s.) It's a fun story; the two have a knockdown fight... but it's all in good spirits! 

This leads right into the notorious "Club JLI" story, where Blue Beetle and Booster Gold try to make some money by opening a casino on the tropical island of Kooeykooeykooey, which is technically a JLI embassy (following the events of JLI Annual #3; see item #3 below). I found this hilarious: the overly chill but well-educated islanders are always a good gag, Major Disaster and Big Sur of the Injustice League clean out the club financially thanks to card-counting, the island turns out to be alive, Maxwell Lord and a group of JLA members float around the Pacific on a shrinking iceberg. If you don't love this stuff, you don't like life. (Well, maybe you just have different tastes in superhero comics... but surely not very good ones.) Lastly, we get another Gnort story, where he faces down his archenemesis the Scarlet Skier, who he once defeated by accident. Again, hilarity ensues. (The Scarlet Skier is a Silver Surfer parody; instead of working for a massive cosmic force that eats planets, he works for one that redecorates them, but has terrible taste.)

from Justice League Europe #10

Jumping over to JLE, we follow up The Teasdale Imperative by a story where Power Girl, who was injured during the crossover, needs to undergo emergency surgery... only her invulnerability makes it impossible. Sue Dibny has the bright idea to summon Superman, who does it with his heat vision. This issue mostly seems to be there to set up a reduction in Power Girl's powers; I've read enough comics to know an editorial edict when I see one, but it's still a story with some neat moments. Then we get a story where Crimson Fox, a Parisian superhero, joins the team while foiling a group of robbers so incompetent they accidentally try to hide in the JLE embassy.

In the middle of this is the first JLI Special, a one-shot focused on Mister Miracle, setting up some changes for his ongoing series. I actually read this many years ago, but found it much more comprehensible in context... but I didn't really like it. Particularly, I don't think Scott's decision to replace himself with an android duplicate and not tell anyone, even his wife, really makes any sense at all. Like, I get it's there to set up some comedy, but there has to be a basic level of character plausibility for the comedy to work. (Note that the issue is scripted by Len Wein, as opposed to regular JLI scripter J. M. DeMatteis.)

from Justice League Europe #12

The last two issues here focus on Metamorpho tracking down his son. (The son was born while Metamorpho was dead, so he's never met him.) In the first, he faces down Guy Gardner, in the second, the Metal Men. I always like Metamorpho (at least, as he's characterized in JLE, as a Three Stooges–loving bruiser), and he's particularly well served by Bart Sears's exaggerated art style. To be honest, the whole story seems like an excuse for Sears to go all out with wackiness... and is all the better for it.

This is the fourth in a series of posts about Justice League International. The next covers issues #37 of JLA and #13-21 of JLE. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Justice League #1-6 / Justice League International #7-12 (May 1987–Apr. 1988)
2. Justice League International #13-21 (May 1988–Dec. 1988)
3. Justice League International #22-25 / Justice League America #26-30 / Justice League Europe #1-6 (Jan. 1989–Sept. 1989) 

* I assume this is a misspelling of José Marzán, Jr. 

Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things (2013)

If I remember correctly, back in grad school, my friends Dustin and Allison loaned me this book after they read it for some kind of book group. They had hated it, and they wanted me to read it so that I could agree with them. I added it to my reading list. This was back in 2014; by the time I moved away from Connecticut in 2017, I had of course not actually gotten around to reading it. I gave them their copy back—and they expressed disappointment because they didn't want it back!

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

Published: 2013
Read: August 2025

But I did keep it on my reading list, and once it finally surfaced earlier this year, I checked it out from the local library. The novel is about the life story of a woman, from childhood up to old age across the course of the nineteenth century; her father is an English grower of plants, her mother from a Dutch business family; and she is raised by them in America, outside Philadelphia. She is fascinated by mosses, and struggles against the strictures of her father and the world in which she lives and her own limited understanding of herself and others.

I didn't hate it,  but I wouldn't claim to love it either. Gilbert can create an affecting scene at times—the image of the party where the attendees are all positioned like the planets in the solar system, the final meeting between Alma and Alfred Russell Wallace—but I didn't have a strong feeling of what it was all for. Or perhaps more accurately, I didn't feel like the length of the book (around five hundred pages) was proportionate to what it was trying to do. Obviously I don't mind a long book, I'm a Victorianist, but the payoff of what Alma learned about life (and thus what the reader learns about life) didn't really seem to correlate with how much time we had to spend reading about it.

It was a total coincidence of timing, but I definitely benefited from reading the book shortly after Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. The former's depiction of the brutality of the early United States resonated with what we see here; the latter gave a lot of background and context for Alma's ruminations on evolution and eventual meeting with Wallace.

Reading Issue #1 of Oz-story Aloud to My Kids

Oz-story Magazine ran for six years, collecting a mix of archival and original Oz and Oz-adjacent fiction and comic strips. It was published by Hungry Tiger Press, with editing by Hungry Tiger publisher David Maxine and art direction by his partner, Eric Shanower. It contains a number of pieces of Oz short fiction you can't find elsewhere, so I decided to incorporate it into the Oz books I've been reading my kids. Even though it's called a magazine, it's bound like a book and runs 128 pages and even has an ISBN.

Oz-story Magazine, Number One
edited by David Maxine
art director: Eric Shanower

Anthology published: 1995
Contents originally published: 1906-95
Acquired and read aloud: September 2025

The first issue contained four short stories that I read aloud to my kids. The first was "Percy and the Shrinking Violets" by Rachel Cosgrove Payes; this brings back Percy the giant white rat from her novels The Hidden Valley and Wicked Witch of Oz. Unfortunately, even though it was just over a year ago that we read these books, my seven-year-old did not remember Percy at all! The story, where Percy—and then later, Ozma—is shrunk by a magical violet is fun enough, though one feels like Ozma and Percy are a little slow on the uptake at times.

Before Ruth Plumly Thompson became an Oz writer, she published short tales of a kingdom called Pumperdink, which she revealed in Kabumpo in Oz was actually in the Gillikin Country. This volume collects one of those older stories, "The Dragon of Pumperdink," a fun story about a dragon running out of coal (Thompson's dragons die if their internal flame dies out) who needs to seek employment.

The longest short story in the book (I serialized it over three nights) is "Gugu and the Kalidahs" by Eric Shanower. This brings back Gugu the leopard from The Magic of Oz—given we read this back when my kid was three, no way did they remember Gugu! Thankfully, Kalidahs were memorable from their recent experiences of various adaptations of the original book (both the Shanower/Oz comic and the Yoto audio adaptation have gotten recent play), because otherwise there are no familiar Oz characters. The story is about how Gugu's forest gets invaded by Kalidahs, in violation of ancient treaty. and Gugu must do his best to push them out... alone. It's a tense, dark story; it's been a long time since I read The Jungle Book, but it felt like an Oz refraction of Kipling. The illustrations are not in Shanower's usual style, but they are striking.

Lastly, there's "The Balloon-Girl of Oz," credited to Stephen Kane, but actually by Eric Shanower. This focuses on my kids' eternal favorite, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, who here swells up like a balloon, and has to desperately make her way back to the Emerald City for help without floating off into space. I always like Oz stories that put the characters in a weird situation they must think through logically in order to solve, and of course pictures of Scraps looking like a balloon are going to be delightful. My kids were very much into the absurdity of this one. I particularly liked the ending, where Scraps gets to mad at all the people laughing at how funny she looks, so she just lets go and floats off into the sky!

In addition to all this, there's a couple comics; I read "The Pathetic Losers of Oz" by Ed Brubaker, about all the Oz residents with powers not worth mentioning. I did not read Walt Sprouse's comic adaptation of The Marvelous Land of Oz, but my comics-loving seven-year-old did.

Additionally, there's two stories I didn't read to the kids. One is a nice little piece of literary fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Outside the Cabinet-Makers," which mentions Mombi, so I guess Fitzgerald was a fan!

The other is a complete novel (over fifty pages of small type) by L. Frank Baum from 1906: Sam Steele's Adventures on Land and Sea, or The Boy Fortune Hunters in Alaska. This I read to myself after reading everything aloud to the kids. I think I made the right call there, I don't think they would have been into it, but I actually found it surprisingly fun, a boy's-own adventure about an orphan boy to enters into a partnership with his late father's business partner to hunt for gold in Alaska, but ends up finding a whole different adventure instead. (As David Maxine points out in the intro, despite the subtitle, there's only one boy fortune hunter and they never make it to Alaska!) Baum is good at putting people into tough situations they must work they way out of. Maybe once we get through all the issues of Oz-story, I'll seek out the other Sam Steele novels. (The novel was not illustrated originally, but cleverly, Shanower selects a bunch of John R. Neill illustrations from various other projects that work perfectly well; you never would have guessed!)

Doctor Who: How the Doctor Changed My Life by Simon Guerrier (ed.)

When Big Finish's license to produce prose Short Trips anthologies ended, they did a big sale to get rid of their remaining stock before they would be unable to sell it. I snapped up the ones that sounded interesting to me but had never gotten around to; over fifteen years later, I've finally read the last of that lot.

I went into How the Doctor Changed My Life feeling a bit nervous; over the past couple years, I've read three Short Trips anthologies and, to be honest, found my enjoyment of each fairly limited. On top of that, I knew the book was the result of a fan writing contest; Big Finish had originally reserved one spot in Short Trips: Defining Patterns for a previously unpublished writer, but had gotten so many good entries that they'd published twenty-five runners-up in their own volume. But if the three volumes of Short Trips by professional writers I'd read had been mediocre, what did I have to anticipate from a volume by people who'd never been professionally published?

Well, to my delight, the book not only defied my low expectations, but it turned out to be one of the very best Short Trips volumes I can remember reading. Surely it at least partially benefits from the fact there are so many stories here: with twenty-five stories in 184 pages, that means they average six-to-seven pages in length. So the good ones are punchy, and the bad ones are mercifully short! (Not that, however, there were honestly very many bad ones.) Additionally, the book very much benefits from the theme, which you can see right in the title: the stories had to be about the Doctor changing someone's life. This encourages perspectives from characters who are not the Doctor and his companions, and telling stories about key significant moments in those characters' lives, which plays to the strengths of the medium of the short story—no one here makes the mistake a lot of first-time Doctor Who short story writers do, and tries to cram a four-part 1970s-style serial into 6½ pages.

Doctor Who: Short Trips #26: How The Doctor Changed My Life
edited by Simon Guerrier

Published: 2008
Acquired: May 2009
Read: October 2025

I enjoyed a lot of these, as I said, so here I'll just try to gloss some of the ones I particularly liked and why.

Many of the stories focus on ordinary people who encounter the Doctor and find some kind of courage within in themselves, a trope that I think probably owes something to the original Russell T Davies television era (which this book came out during), but is here imported back into "classic" Doctor Who (at the time this was published, Big Finish's license only went up to the 1996 tv movie). It's a trope that works well, especially when it leans into one of my favorite things about the Doctor Who format, the juxtaposition of the fantastic with the mundane. Ones along these lines I particularly liked included "Change Management" by Simon Moore:

Fair enough, it would be bad for the economy if the Flux Beast was allowed to devour the tourist worlds, but there must be a better way of containing the Beast than trapping it in space and feeding it lots of poor people. Pip had been going to complain, but when the guy sitting next to him got vaporised while raising similar concerns, he decided to keep his head down. He would definitely do something about it if he ever got into management.

Along these lines, I also really liked "The Shopping Trolleys of Doom" by Caleb Woodbridge, where the Doctor intervenes when shopping carts begin attacking people; "The Man on the Phone" by Mark Smith, told from the perspective of someone working in a call center selling mediocre kitchens who accidentally dials the TARDIS; and "£436" by Nick May, about a cab driver who drives the Doctor and Peri around as they fight off an alien invasion.

(In one story, this even kind of happens without the Doctor turning up; in John Callaghan's "The Andrew Invasion," a guy named Andrew gets mistaken for the Doctor, and hilarity ensues. I think John Dorney's The Diary of River Song story "My Dinner with Andrew," about a guy who looks exactly like the fifth Doctor and is played by Peter Davison, is a stealth sequel to this story, but maybe I am crazy because no one else seems to have noticed this if so.)

Even though this is probably the book's most common approach, other stories go in different directions. I liked "Second Chances" by Bernard O'Toole a lot, which follows a maniacal mad scientist after he is defeated by the Doctor and Charley. How does an adult man move back in with his parents and rebuild his life after all his dreams of conquest have been crushed? Or there's Michael Montoure's "Relativity," where a kid loses his twin brother in a weird time accident thanks to the Doctor and Ace, but eventually has an even weirder chance to get him back. I also liked Violet Addison's "Those Left Behind," about one of Susan's classmates at Coal Hill School meeting the fourth Doctor. (One oddity of the book, if I'm not mistaken, is that among its twenty-five stories, it has one from every "classic" Doctor... except the first!) There's also "Evitability" by Andrew K Purvis, where the Doctor finds someone who's going to do a terrible thing as an adult and shows them the future as a child to help put them on a better path. Michael Rees's "Swamp of Horrors (1957) – Viewing Notes" is inventively told in the form of a blog post about a B-horror movie that costars the Doctor and Mel!

One of my very favorites was "The Monster in the Wardrobe" by James C McFetridge, about a man who dies every day defending his daughter from a monster in the wardrobe, but always comes back to life the next, when he always has a new job that he's not very good at but enjoys a lot, like ice cream taster or bikini inspector.

It feels a bit churlish to complain about ones you don't like, especially when they come from first-time writers, but I did find a few unsatisfying and/or undercooked: "Curiosity" by Mike Amberry and "The Last Thing You'll Ever See" by Richard Goff among them. The only outright bad one, though, was "Time Shear" by Steven Alexander, where two alien kids see their mother brutally gunned down in front of them, and the story and the character just shrug this off as a minor inconvenience in its rush to get to a happy ending.

If there's an overall fault to the volume, it's that, despite what Paul Cornell hopes for in his foreword, few of these writers ever went on to make many more contributions to Doctor Who; there were just two Short Trips volumes after this, and some contributed to one of those, and some others I think wrote for the Bernice Summerfield anthologies. Other than that, though, the only writer to go onto publishing more Doctor Who stories is LM Myles, who here writes the story "Child's Play," and has since written a number of Big Finish audio dramas. But that's not a slight on this book, it's a slight on the stale community of Doctor Who tie-in writers, whose bright young things of the 1990s and early 2000s have never moved on thirty years later.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Prisoner of the Daleks

Impulse: Bart Saves the Universe by Christopher Priest, Jason Johnson, and Edwin Rosell

I don't have much experience with Impulse a.k.a. Bart Allen, who was essentially the Kid Flash to Wally West's Flash—that will have to wait until I finally read my Mark Waid Flash Omnibus volumes. But as I've been investigating what JSA-related stories I might somehow have missed in my fifty-installment journey through the history of that superhero team, I discovered there was an Impulse one-shot involving time travel and the JSA, so I added it to my list.

The book came out in 1999 and is set in the then-present of the DC universe, where Impulse is trying to be of use to somebody, anybody, but keeps getting rebuffed. No one wants his help, not Superman, not Wonder Woman, not Green Lantern, especially not Batman. When will he get a chance to save the world... or even the universe?

Well, he gets his chance when Extant (villain of the then-recent Zero Hour) travels back to 1941, battles the JSA, and tricks the Linear Men into changing history. Because he was born in the future, only Impulse remembers the original timeline, and thus only Impulse can do anything to restore it. But can the hyperfast hyperactive kid keep his mind on the job long enough to do it?

Poor Impulse.

The JSA are more of a plot point than actual characters here; they spend most of the story dead, except for one sequence where Impulse crashes one of their meetings. From that perspective, I probably needn't have bothered including it in my sequence of stories. But, you know, if the point of all of this is to be entertained, then this story does a good job of it. 

I don't blame Johnny.

I always like a bit of Christopher Priest, and Impulse is a character well-suited to Priest's techniques of rapid cuts and abrupt juxtapositions, as well as his tendency to mix darkness with comedy. Yes, there's a lot of Impulse goofiness here... but there's also some real tragedy as Impulse needs to reckon with the deaths of those important to him, and the fact that Barry Allen does exist in this alternate timeline, and will have to die to restore the proper the universe. (Ain't that always the case.) Artists Jason Johnson and Edwin Rosell are new to me, but they have that manga-influence, exaggerated design sense that I associate with 1990s comics in general and Impulse in particular, so that works well.

Aw, Max,

I particularly liked Impulse's relationship with the Golden Age speedster Max Mercury here, and I finished the one-shot looking forward to reading more about Impulse whenever I get around to reading all my Flash Omnibus volumes. (Impulse himself seems to have only received a single collected edition, alas. I do remember, a long time ago, reading a trade where Bart himself had become the Flash, but he was portrayed as very much a sad sack (I think this one?), nothing like the character here, and then he got murdered in Countdown. Bleh.) 

Impulse: Bart Saves the Universe originally appeared in one issue (1999). The story was written by Christopher Priest, pencilled by Jason Johnson, inked by Edwin Rosell, type designed by Willie Schubert, and edited by Paul Kupperberg & L. A. Williams.

 

This post is the fifty-second in an improbably long series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Dr. Mid-Nite. Previous installments are listed below:

Star Trek at the Hugos, Part II: 2018–25

Back in 2018, when Star Trek received its first Hugo nomination during the CBS All Access (later Paramount Plus) era, I wrote a blog post chronicling the fortunes of Star Trek at the Hugo Awards from 1967 up to then. Well, this year, Star Trek received not just one but two Hugo Awards, so it seemed time to bring that blog post up to date by covering the last seven years.

2018: Discovery

As chronicled in my previous post, 2018 was the first time Star Trek had been a Hugo finalist since 2010. The 2018 nomination (in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form) was for the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," which in my mind was definitely the best episode of Discovery's somewhat bumpy first "chapter"—and probably still is one of the best Discovery episodes over all, a clever time loop story for the postmodern era.

I was not surprised, however, that Disco did not win the award; the category was won by perennial Hugo darling The Good Place, and Star Trek placed down in fifth on the final ballot, below Black Mirror (a Star Trek–centric episode of it, actually), another episode of The Good Place, and Doctor Who. Most of those I can just about buy... though "Twice Upon a Time" was not, in my mind, a particularly worthy episode of Doctor Who.

Looking at the longlist reveals just one other Star Trek installment... but not an official one; an episode of the dull and mediocre fan series Star Trek Continues, "What Ships Are For," came in tenth. Fairly inexplicable, to be honest. 

2019–21: Nothing

2018 was not the beginning of some kind of Star Trek Hugo renaissance, because in 2019, Star Trek didn't land on the ballot at all. The longlist reveals one Star Trek episode, down in fourteenth, so pretty far from making the ballot, the Discovery episode "What's Past Is Prologue." This is a pretty baffling choice; it was the finale of the mirror universe story arc of the first season... and like a lot of Discovery finales, long on spectacle and short on sense.

In 2020, there was no Star Trek on the final ballot or even the longlist. The second season of Discovery would have been eligible. I liked the first half of this season a lot, even though the second half got quite awful, but I don't know that there's an obvious standout for enthusiasm to coalesce around, so it's not very surprising.

2021 would also bring no Star Trek on the final ballot... but the longlist was replete with Star Trek! The Picard episode "Nepenthe" (a fan favorite where Picard catches up with Riker and Troi and their cute kid) came in seventh, just two nominating votes behind the sixth-place recipient, which did make it! Another Picard episode, "Remembrance," was down in fourteenth. Additionally, the longlist featured two episodes of Disco season 3, "Unification III" and "That Hope Is You." But on top of all that, Discovery season 3 was also on the longlist as a complete unit in Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form, though decently far down. Probably Star Trek was a victim of its own success here; as 2020 had new episodes in three different Star Trek series (Disco, Picard, and Lower Decks), nominating votes would have been diffused across a bunch of different stuff, making it hard for anything to end up on the ballot. 

2022–23: Lower Decks 

Finally, in 2022, Star Trek would land on the ballot again, this time for a Lower Decks episode; this one I remember I actually nominated myself! "wej Duj" is a cute episode showing parallel adventures of lower decks crews on three different ships (the title means "three ships" in Klingonese). It would not win, placing in third after episodes of The Expanse and Loki, but thankfully it did beat Arcane. Another episode of Lower Decks, "First First Contact," was on the longlist as well.

We should be skeptical of we're told about the 2023 Hugo Awards, but there was no Star Trek on the final ballot that year. However, there were three different Star Trek episodes on the longlist, from two different Star Trek series: Strange New Worlds's "A Quality of Mercy" and "Spock Amok" (which I nominated) and Lower Decks's "Hear All, Trust Nothing." If we believe the nominating data (and we should not), "Quality of Mercy" had one more vote than one of the actual finalists, but didn't make the ballot due to the way EPH redistributes nominations to increase finalist diversity.

Also, it's not branded as "Star Trek," but there was a finalist that was about Star Trek in the Best Related Work category in 2023, Wil Wheaton's memoir Still Just a Geek. This is, I think, the only Star Trek–related finalist in the history of the category; it finished in fourth.

2024: Strange New Worlds 

After getting two on the longlist in 2023 for its first season, Strange New Worlds finally made the ballot in 2024 for its second, with two finalists. They are both the kind of thing Hugo voters love, with fan-pleasing premises. In "Those Old Scientists," two characters from Lower Decks come aboard Pike's Enterprise, transforming from cartoons into live action, while "Subspace Rhapsody" is a musical episode.

I loved both, but neither won; "Those Old Scientists" finished in a very close second, with "Subspace Rhapsody" down in fifth. The Last of Us seems a worthy enough victor, but I'm less convinced that Doctor Who's "The Giggle" was better than "Subspace Rhapsody"!

It was a very good year for Strange New Worlds, with two other episodes on the longlist: "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" and "Ad Astra Per Aspera."

I am a bit surprised, though, that no episode of the fan-favorite Picard season 3 was even on the longlist!

2025: Lower Decks, Lower Decks! 

In 2025, Lower Decks got on the Best Dramatic Presentation ballot again... twice! The last two episodes of the entire series, "Fissure Quest" and "The New Next Generation," were both finalists. Honestly, this was a bit disappointing to me, in that when I caught up on the series, I found there were three 2024 episodes of Lower Decks I would have placed above either of these. To my surprise, "The New Next Generation" ended up winning; as I feel like often happens with the Hugo, it seems more like a vote for the series as a whole than for the specific episode per se. But series creator Mike McMahan gave a pretty nice speech about what the Hugos meant to him.

Season five of Lower Decks as a whole was also on the longlist for Long Form, and a nonfiction book about Star Trek, Nana Visitor's A Woman's Trek, on the longlist for Best Related Work.

But the real surprise was that a work of Star Trek fiction was a finalist in Best Graphic Story. An original tie-in graphic novel, Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, placed on the ballot. 

Tie-in fiction has not often made the Hugo ballot. To the extent that it has, it's largely been confined to the Best Graphic Story category: comics based on The Dresden Files, Serenity, Doctor Who, Cyberpunk 2077, and the Dune movie have all been on the ballot. There was also one year where a Magic: The Gathering story made the ballot for Best Short Story. None of these have ever won.

But all that changed this year, when not only was a Star Trek tie-in a finalist for the first time ever, but Warp Your Own Way actually won the category! And justifiably so, in my opinion. Most tie-in fiction, in my opinion, is frankly not Hugo-worthy (the tie-ins that have made the ballot since I began voting in 2017 certainly haven't been), but Warp Your Own Way does genuinely clever stuff with the narrative form of the choose-your-own-adventure story.

So, thanks to Lower Decks, Star Trek not only scored its first Hugo Award in thirty years (it last won in 1995 for The Next Generation's "All Good Things..."), it actually scored two!

Final Thoughts 

There have been five Star Trek shows of the streaming era. Of these five, two have never made the Hugo ballot: Picard and Prodigy. And while Picard made the longlist a few times, Prodigy never even did that.

I'll be curious to see if Star Trek makes the ballot again any time soon; with Lower Decks over and Strange New Worlds winding down, it seems like the opportunities are dwindling. But perhaps Starfleet Academy will surprise us all and produce some smashing episodes!

Three Stories from Black Panther Adventures by Marc Sumerak, Ig Guara, Jay Leisten, Elliott Kalan, Christopher Jones, et al.

Black Panther Adventures

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 1968-2013
Read: October 2025

This collection of Black Panther comics was recently added to Hoopla; it consists of six stories from non–Black Panther books (mostly Avengers, with one Fantastic Four story), mostly not set in the "main" Marvel Universe. In original release order (which is not the order the stories are collected here), they come from The Avengers #52 and 62, Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four #10, Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #22, The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #1, and Marvel Universe: The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #8. Of these six, I'd already read three of them: the two regular Avengers stories were collected in Mighty Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther, Volume 1 and the Fantastic Four story in Marvel-Verse: Black Panther. 

Thus, I'm just reading and reviewing the three new-to-me stories collected here.

Writers: Jeff Parker, Marc Sumerak, Christopher Yost, Elliott Kalan, Roy Thomas

Pencilers: Manuel Garcia, Ig Guara, Patrick Scherberger, Christopher Jones, John Buscema

Inkers: Scott Koblish, Jay Leisten, Patrick Scherberger, Pond Scum, Vince Colletta, George Klein

Colorists: Andrew Crossley, Ulises Arreola, Jean-François Beaulieu

Letterers: Dave Sharpe, Clayton Cowles, Sam Rosen, Art Simek

I think that far too many Black Panther stories released prior to the character's MCU debut feel the need to introduce him by making him the ruler of this mysterious land our heroes know nothing about. That was the approach taken in Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four #10, collected here, among other stories, and it's also the approach taken in Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #22 ("Wakanda the Wild Side!" by Marc Sumerak, Ig Guara, and Jay Leisten). I guess it's a perfectly valid approach to introduce the character... but it also makes for a pretty boring story in this particular instance, as the Black Panther is thus mostly a side presence. Which I guess is okay, this is an Avengers comic, not a Black Panther one... but then why put it in a Black Panther book? Anyway, I didn't think this one had much going on. Also, what a weird Avengers line-up: Captain America, Wolverine, Storm, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Giant-Girl (nee the Wasp)... can you even have X-Men on the Avengers? It doesn't seem right.

The other two stories are, thankfully, ones where Black Panther actually is in the Avengers. The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #1 ("Trust" by Christopher Yost and Patrick Scherberger*) is a six-pager about Black Panther teaming up with Hawkeye. It's fine, though I didn't find the bickering terribly believable.

Next panel: Black Panther getting overwhelmed, of course.
from Marvel Universe: The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #8

I did find the bickering believable in Marvel Universe: The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #8 ("Mayhem of the Madbomb!" by Elliott Kalan, Christopher Jones, and... Pond Scum!? I guess not everyone's parents can be good at naming kids), where Black Panther is forced to team up with the Hulk when literally no other Avenger is available to stop terrorists from setting off a "madbomb" on the Empire State Building. Never were two superheroes less well-matched, and both story and art are fun. Clearly the best of the three new-to-me stories.

 ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE 

* On the collection's credit page, the artist is given as Scott Wegener, but in the actual story, Patrick Scherberger. As far as I can tell from the GCD, Wegener did the art for the main story in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #1, not the back-up, which is what's actually collected here.

Batman: Blackhawk Down by Royal McGraw, Marcos Marz, et al.

The last pre-Flashpoint Blackhawk story was Blackhawk Down, which appeared in four issues of the continuity-light Batman title Batman Confidential. In this story, Batman investigates a theft at Blackhawk Industries only to run into Zinda "Lady Blackhawk" Blake who is investigating the same thing, and faces machinations of various Blackhawk villains... only to discover that the supposedly long-dead Janos "Blackhawk" Prohaska himself is actually alive!

It is, to be quite honest, pretty bad, full of twists for the sake of twists and an execrable ending where Blackhawk and Lady Blackhawk become a romantic item for no reason other than to demonstrate that old men deserve hot women as long as they are alive. Lady Blackhawk is particularly poorly done by here, serving as a damsel-in-distress and no more. The art is muddy and dull in a way that feels annoyingly typical of 2010s comics. It's one of those comics that's so bad but so uninterestingly bad, that I can't even must up any enthusiasm for writing a detailed negative review. Read it if you're a completist (I am) but know what you're in for if so.

Did not expect a Sky Skull reference in the year 2010! At least Royal McGraw read his classic Blackhawk issues. (Or perhaps the DC wiki.)
from Batman Confidential #38

The only to thing to like here, as far as I am concerned, is the book's catholic approach to Blackhawk continuity. Blackhawk is called Janos Prohaska, as he was post-Crisis, when Lady Blackhawk was Natalie Reed... but Lady Blackhawk is Zinda Blake, as she was pre-Crisis, back when Blackhawk was Bart Hawk. Obviously there have been post-Crisis stories with Janos and post-Crisis stories with Zinda, but I think this is the first story to mix the two. There's a lot of other pre-Crisis Blackhawk continuity thrown in here, too, like Ted Gaynor, the Chop-Chop substitute from the Evanier/Spiegle run (see item #9 below); references to the clone Blackhawk, also from that run; a subplot about Zinda's time as Queen Killer Shark (see #5); and even the Sky Skull from the short-lived late 1960s revival (see #6), the first time that's ever been referenced as far as I know. Post-Crisis it can be pretty hard to tell what "counts," but I appreciate any writer whose attitude is that it all counts.

The artist was so proud of this that on the full page, it's got their enormous signature emblazoned on it.
from Batman Confidential #38

Blackhawk Down originally appeared in issues #36-39 of Batman Confidential (Early Jan.–Late Feb. 2010). The story was written by Royal McGraw, pencilled by Marcos Marz, inked by Luciana Del Negro, colored by David Baron, lettered by Sal Cipriano, and edited by Mike Marts.

This is the penultimate in a series of posts about the Blackhawks. The last installment covers their post-Crisis continuity. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64) 
5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
6. Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
7. Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 / The Brave and the Bold #167 (1976-80)
8. Blackhawk (1982) 
9. Blackhawk vol. 1 #251-73 / DC Comics Presents #69 (1982-84) 
• Pre-Crisis Continuity 
10. Blackhawk: Blood & Iron (1987-89)
11. Blackhawk vol. 3 (1989-92) 
12. Guy Gardner: Warrior #24, 29, 36, 38-43 / Annual #1 (1994-96)
13. JLA: Year One (1998-99) 
14. Guns of the Dragon (1998-99)