Black Panther: Doomwar by Jonathan Maberry, Scot Eaton, Robert Campanella, Andy Lanning, et al.

Doomwar is a six-part miniseries (with a double-length first issue) published in 2010; even though it was not branded as belonging to a particular Marvel series, it is clearly a Black Panther story. Despite having guest characters from across the Marvel universe (e.g., the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, War Machine, even Deadpool), the story picks right up from the end of Black Panther volume 5 by the same writer, and the protagonists are definitely T'Challa and Shuri as they struggle to defend Wakanda from an invasion by Doctor Doom.

from Doomwar #5

As a result, I didn't expect to enjoy it very much, having not really enjoyed Jonathan Maberry's "Prelude to Doomwar"... but by the time I was partway through issue #2, I realized I was pretty into this! I had been afraid this would be a big generic Marvel event, but as I said, it's very much a Black Panther story about the characters of T'Challa and Shuri, and about the politics of Wakanda. It would fit right into, for example, Christopher Priest's run without a lot of tweaking. Though I still feel like Shuri isn't a very strong character, mostly just being an angry young woman, I felt Maberry had a good handle on T'Challa here, showing how dedicated he was to his country even in trying circumstances. And while I felt like the populist uprising in vol. 5 was kind of contrived, Maberry does a good job with its consequences here. 

On top of all this, I kind of groaned when Deadpool showed up (especially when they put him on the cover of issue #4, but he didn't appear until the very end, presumably so they could also put him on the cover of #5), but Maberry makes good use of him, and he doesn't derail the book like I was afraid he might.

from Doomwar #4

The story was aided by two other things. One is definitely the artwork; Scot Eaton (mostly inked here by Andy Lanning & Robert Campanella) is the best penciler assigned to Black Panther since Jefte Palo's Secret Invasion story in volume 4, with clear storytelling and good character work. (I think he was doing Ioan Gruffud for Mister Fantastic and Denzel Washington for T'Challa. Of course I approve of the former.) And John-Francois Beaulieu, who I really liked on the Marvel Oz comics, does a great job as the colorist. Bad coloring can muddy the storytelling, but I felt that even with dark colors, everything popped and was visually clear—even though he obviously uses a very different palette here than he did in Oz!

The other is Doom himself. I haven't read many Fantastic Four comics, so I don't have much of a handle on the character, but I really liked Maberry's take on him here, especially when we find out how Doom was able to overcome T'Challa's locks on the Wakandan vibranium vault. It plays out exactly how I expected... but was nevertheless perfectly done. A great depiction of a great villain.

from Doomwar #4

I found the ending both interesting and frustrating. The characters can kill Doom, but don't, so that they're "better" than him. While I believe that, say, Reed Richards would have this philosophy, it doesn't make any sense for T'Challa and Shuri, and surely it only happens this way because Doomwar is part of a wider Marvel universe, and can't be the story that kills off a key character. On top of this, T'Challa makes a very interesting choice: he destroys all Wakandan vibranium rather than let Doom make off with some of it, preserving Wakandan values but perhaps at the cost of Wakandan security. But this happens at the very end of the story, so we get no implications of his choice. This isn't so much an issue for Doomwar itself (though I think the way that the country's rebuilding gets a single panel is) but one that I am afraid future Black Panther stories will not really engage with. I guess we'll see!

Doomwar originally appeared in six issues (Apr.-Sept. 2010). The story was written by Jonathan Maberry; penciled by Scot Eaton; inked by Andy Lanning (#1-5), Robert Campanella (#1-6), Jaime Mendoza (#6), and David Meikis (#6); colored by John-Francois Beaulieu; lettered by Cory Petit (#1-5) and Joe Caramagna (#6); and edited by Axel Alonso. (Note that issue #2 is called "Part 1" and #6 "Part 5" on their title pages.)

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Batman/Wildcat by Chuck Dixon, Beau Smith, Sergio Cariello, et al.

Batman/Wildcat

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 1970-98
Acquired: March 2023
Read: April 2023

Writers: Chuck Dixon, Beau Smith, Bob Haney

Pencillers: Sergio Cariello, Irv Novick, Bob Brown, Jim Aparo
Inkers: Art Thibert, Danny Miki, Jaime Mendoza, Tom Palmer, Mike Esposito, Nick Cardy, Jim Aparo

Colorists: Jason Wright, Pat Garrahy

Letterers: Kevin Cunningham, Clem Robins

As I said when writing up Catwoman: Her Sister's Keeper, the discovery of a preexisting Ted Grant–Selina Kyle relationship in JSA Classified had me curious as to its origins; one of the stories that lead me to was a 1998 miniseries called Catwoman/Wildcat by Chuck Dixon, Beau Smith, and Sergio Cariello. I discovered it had been collected along with a 1997 mini from the same team, Batman/Wildcat, and five issues of The Brave and the Bold from the 1970s where Batman teams up with Wildcat. So, I picked up the whole collection.

Batman/Wildcat is fine. Like many Wildcat stories, it has to contrive some way to be about boxing. In this case, it's that old standby: the forced fight. Criminals are kidnapping people, mostly supervillains, and forcing them to fight each other on a super-secret pay-per-view channel (hey, it was the '90s). A mentee of Wildcat's get scooped up in it, though, and is forced to duke it out in a Wildcat costume, and so Batman and Wildcat run parallel investigations, then get kidnapped and forced to fight, and of course team up to dismantle the entire operation. I could probably go the rest of my life without reading another story where superheroes are forced to fight so rich people can gamble on it, to be honest; there's nothing about that premise that's ever interesting. What beggars belief is the bad guys don't even take Batman's and Wildcat's masks off to find out who they are; indeed, they put extra masks on them so they can't see who they're fighting! I think the story would have also benefited from making Ted's status quo clearer; at the end, he comes out of retirement to go back to fighting crime as Wildcat, but that was the moment I learned he was in retirement to begin with! (This would be set after the Justice Society falls apart in Zero Hour, before it reunites in Justice Be Done.)

Oracle! Ah, 1990s Birds of Prey nostalgia...
from Batman/Wildcat #2 (script by Chuck Dixon & Beau Smith, art by Sergio Cariello and Art Thibert, Danny Miki, & Jaime Mendoza)

The follow-up, Catwoman/Wildcat, is a bit better. Catwoman travels to Las Vegas to carry out a heist where, coincidentally, Ted Grant is in some kind of exhibition match. The heist, honestly, was very confusing. Selina's competing with like two other groups of criminals and there's a lot of double-crossing, and a lot of characters I didn't care about. What was consistently fun was the flirting between Selina and Ted. Selina knows who she is dealing with right away, but it takes most of the story for Ted to figure out who she is (there's a brief flashback to Her Sister's Keeper, despite Catwoman: Year 2's implication it didn't count), and so he doesn't get why this attractive younger woman is coming on to him. Whenever the story focuses on the antics of the two of them it is fun; whenever it focuses on the other characters, I hoped it would get back to Ted and Selina. Thankfully boxing has little to do with it.

It's a very different Selina to the one who seemed shocked at what Ted Grant might ask of her for defense training!
from Catwoman/Wildcat #3 (script by Chuck Dixon & Beau Smith, art by Sergio Cariello & Tom Palmer)

Both stories are pencilled by Sergio Cariello who has a... I guess I would say perfectly adequate 1990s style. It's not my jam, and I think he draws Selina/Catwoman a bit weird, but it's a good artistic fit for Chuck Dixon's over-the-top action-focused style of writing.

Cats in heat.
from Catwoman/Wildcat #1 (script by Chuck Dixon & Beau Smith, art by Sergio Cariello & Tom Palmer)

The five stories from The Brave and the Bold run the gamut. Each has to have some weird reason for Batman to pull Wildcat into the case; some are more compelling than others. The first, "Count Ten... and Die!" is probably the best. Bruce Wayne is coaching the American team in the World Youth Games in fencing, while Ted Grant is coaching the boxing team. Ted is heckled by the coach of the Russian team, but then also there's a lot of stuff about a spy and needing to transfer a secret tape. Boxing is worked in pretty organically here, and it has its moments, even if it can get a bit contrived. (At one point, Ted Grant sneaks out of a boxing match he is participating in to track Batman to a river in the countryside, rescues Batman from kidnappers after a pitched battle, and returns, all while forcibly dragging his opponent with him... and no one notices this because the lights are out!) I thought the culmination of Ted being goaded was going to be him rising above it, but Batman points out that if Ted Grant doesn't wallop this Russian guy, America may as well give up the Cold War, so Ted punches his lights out for patriotism.

If your story is set in Cold War Vienna, it is mandatory to have a key scene set on the Wiener Riesenrad.
from The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #88 (script by Bob Haney, art by Irv Novick & Mike Esposito)

A couple feel like they could have been about any character, and Ted is barely even in them: in "The Smile of Choclotan!" he's mostly in a trance, in "A Very Special Spy!" Ted is for some reason an exec at an energy firm, and in "Dead Man's Quadrangle" he's running a health spa in the Caribbean. I guess post-JSA he made a run a lot of different businesses?

For some reason, everyone in Mexico calls him "Bat-Hombre." Not, say, "Murciélago Hombre"... or just, you know "Batman"!
from The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #97 (script by Bob Haney, art by Bob Brown & Nick Cardy)

I was able to embrace the goofiness in "May the Best Man Win Die!" In this, Wildcat does an exhibition boxing match at a Gotham prison... only the guy he fights is a potential witness against the Joker, and the Joker uses the opportunity to infect Wildcat's opponent with a rare tropical illness, and soon the whole prison is in danger. A biologist brings a dog in whose blood he's incubated antibodies to Gotham, but the dog is stolen by the Joker, then it escapes from the Joker, and so Batman, Wildcat, and the Joker are all searching Gotham for a dog who has the key to hundreds of lives. So wacky you've got to love it! I even didn't mind the obligatory Batman/Wildcat slugfest, because it's really just an opportunity for the Joker to infect them with the disease too.

Like, a page later, Batman admits that he has no idea if this is true or not.
from The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #118 (script by Bob Haney, art by Jim Aparo)

Bob Haney is certainly a wacky writer. In "May the Best Man Die!", Batman goes to the Gotham pound to pick up the dog, but is told someone claiming to be the dog's owner already picked it up... a weird guy with green hair! Like, how could you live in Gotham and see a guy with green hair and not think, "Hmmm... is that the Joker!?" In "Dead Man's Quadrangle," Batman travels to the Caribbean via a commercial flight... in costume! There he is just chilling in first class; the guy seated next to him just casually chatting him up. In the 1970s was airport security so lax? Or does Batman get an exemption? And is a Batsuit really comfortable clothing for a long flight?

Batman has the same annoyances on a flight as us regular folks.
from The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #127 (script by Bob Haney, art by Jim Aparo)

Some continuity notes: When these stories came out they were evidently controversial, because they feature the "regular" Batman of DC, i.e., the Earth-One Batman, but Wildcat is from Earth-Two! The explanation (given in letter columns, I guess, because it never appears in the stories themselves) was that this was the Wildcat of Earth-One, a character who only appeared in these five issues of The Brave and the Bold and one issue of Super-Team Family. Thus, we are left to infer most of his history: an older superhero, seemingly not active anymore... but in this world there was no JSA. Post-Crisis, I think we can just imagine that these events did happen (approximately) as depicted here, with the new post-Crisis Batman and the new post-Crisis Wildcat. By publication sequence these would go in the period after the JSA kind of came out of retirement for its JLA team-ups, before the JSA was revived full-time in the 1970s issues of All Star Comics, and I think this depiction of Wildcat fits well with that.

Lastly, there's a weird bit in "Dead Man's Quadrangle," where Ted thinks that on his second comeback tour he accidentally killed a man ("Kid O'Hare") in the ring, and thus gave up throwing punches ever again. He gets over it, of course, but this was never mentioned before and thus must have happened in the year since his previous Brave and the Bold appearance yet is just kind of tossed in as if we already know about it! As far as I know, it never comes up again either.

This post is forty-third in an ever-expanding series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers volume 3 of Justice Society of America. Previous installments are listed below:

Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman #589: Return to Krypton

Return to Krypton: "Fathers" / "Sliding Home" / "Second Honeymoon" / "The Most Dangerous Kryptonian Game" / "Escape from Krypton"

The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #589 (Apr. 2001)
Superman: Return to Krypton (2004), reprinting Action Comics vol. 1 #776, Superman vol. 2 #166-67, Superman: The Man of Steel #111 (Mar.-Apr. 2001) 

Story: Jeph Loeb, Joe Casey, Mark Schultz, and Joe Kelly
Pencils: Ed McGuinness, Duncan Rouleau, Doug Mahnke, and Kano
Inkers: Cam Smith, Jaime Mendoza, Marlo Alquiza, and Tom Nguyen
Colors: Tanya & Richard Horie and Rob Schwager
Lettering: Richard Starkings, Chris Eliopoulos, and Ken Lopez
Assistant Editor: Tom Palmer, Jr.
Editor: Eddie Berganza 

Joe Casey's second solo issue on Adventures of Superman isn't really a solo issue at all, because Adventures is promptly plunged into a crossover between the four ongoing Super titles, Return to Krypton, and Adventures #589 is thus part two of a four-part story. (The Return to Krypton trade also collects a one-issue prologue, Superman #166.) In this story, the sterile Krypton of John Byrne's Man of Steel reboot is revealed to be an illusion, and the "true" Krypton is something closer to the Krypton that we saw in the comics of the Silver Age; Jor-El created fake data about Krypton for Kal-El so that he wouldn't miss his home. It's a little convoluted-- retconning a retcon always is, I suppose-- and probably doesn't really track with the details of Man of Steel, which I remember really liking, though it's been over a decade since I've read it. In that story, people on Krypton no longer bore children, so baby Kal-El was sent to Earth in a "birthing matrix," and thus literally born in Kansas. Return to Krypton makes it clear that Lara bore Kal-El in her body, and then he was placed in the birthing matrix to be sent to Earth, so the story maintains some details of Man of Steel while ignoring its spirit.

from Superman vol. 2 #167
(script by Jeph Loeb, art by Ed McGuinness & Cam Smith)

Superman learns much of this from a message Jor-El left in his rocket in a crystal. Then, with the help of Professor Hamilton and John Henry Irons, he is able to use thought projection to make an image of Krypton in the Phantom Zone, into which he and Lois travel to see what the planet was "really" like before it was destroyed; the story is ambiguous about whether Clark and Lois actually traveled to Krypton of the past, or if only to a recreation of it. Clark is able to hang out with his parents briefly, but soon events get crazy: he helps Jor-El adjust Krypton's orbit so it won't be destroyed, but this drains his powers so Lara has to rescue him in a rocket, but space travel is against the law, so General Zod comes to arrest Jor-El and Lara, but they all go on the run, and Zod gets angry and deposes the Kryptonian leadership because he blames their complacency for the crisis, and then all of a sudden Jor-El has been made president in a counter-revolution. Whoa.

It's action-packed (particularly part three, Man of Steel #111), which is the big weakness of it all: I feel like this story should have had more emotional weight. This is momentous! But most of the story is spent 1) massaging the continuity to the preferred form of the 2000s writers, and 2) making things explode again and again. The human story gets lost in the middle of it all. I know this is a superhero comic, but I feel like there must have been a way to balance them better than they were.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #589
(script by Joe Casey, art by Duncan Rouleau
and Jaime Mendoza & Marlo Alquiza)

One thing I do like about these comics is their emphasis on narration. Three of the five issues use narration: the prologue is Pa Kent, while parts one and three are narrated by Lois. This keeps some emphasis on character, and I particularly liked the focus on Lois, who I think could otherwise have very easily gotten lost in the shuffle.

As for the retcons... I dunno. The Steve Mollmann criterion for judging retcons is that The new thing must be at least as interesting, if not more interesting, as the old thing being replaced. I did like Byrne's Man of Steel, especially its vision of Krypton, but I'm open to stories about other forms of Krypton being told. But based on this tale, this new old version of Krypton doesn't have more to offer, but I also believe it could. Weirdly, the story indicates Superman might actually have changed Kryptonian history (wouldn't that have wiped him from existence) and kind of hints that the Man of Steel Krypton still exists. I guess I'll see if either of these ideas are picked up in Adventures going forward.

(Incidentally, the method of the retcon here would itself be retconned! In Superman: Infinite Crisis we're told that Kal-El's backstory changed because of Superboy-Prime punching at the edge of reality, and thus not because Jor-El had been lying about the truth.)

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