Who’s Who in the DC Universe Update ’93 #2

46 responses to “Who’s Who in the DC Universe Update ’93 #2”

1. 1) That entire preamble sounded like a dude struggling with the concept of no-fault divorce while being served papers. It was an entry covering The Nile, except it ain’t about a river in Egypt. Twelve years ago, you guys were not remotely confident that there was an audience to support coverage of Who’s Who comics, and I knew that you had grossly misjudged your (soon-to-expand) listenership. A dozen years on, although certainly a good half-decade too long, you guys have dragged your feet and pretended like !mpact wouldn’t be the last Who’s Who covered. There’s lies, damned dirty lies, and tentative podcast schedules. This is the final edition of Who’s Who in a DC Universe. I luckily have a few years to burnish my limited familiarity with Archie super-heroes (specifically Ecto-Cooler Age variety) before the first episode of After Who: The !mpact Palace Reborn Just Like That drops. It will be a Who’s Who, but not the Who’s Who. So I’ll keep promising but not delivering on continuing The Marvel Handbook Podcast, and you’ll keep focusing on a single entry for a deeper dive like happened in literally no published Who’s Who thing ever, but I’m afraid the jig is up. The goose is cooked. The Who will Who no more for the DCU. Call me if you need a co-host for the DC Secret Files Podcast.

   A) I liked the redesign of Arion for not great reasons. While somewhat intrigued by his DC Sampler appearances and house ads, he came across as “soft” and “feminine” in a space where I wasn’t welcoming. I liked violent, hyper-masculine sword & sorcery fare in the ’80s, but stuff like Dragonslayer or the Anne McCaffrey books my half-sister’s babymama devoured held no allure. Swapping passive blue for aggressive red and popping a Namor head on the action figure butched him up. Also, transplanting him to the present day and tying him into Aquaman fed into my fanboy inclinations. I’ve read a few issues of the mini-series as a result, and, well, I just said I only read a few issues of a five or six issue story without finishing. I think they were trying to bridge the DC and Vertigo audiences in a way similar to Ostrander & Mandrake’s Spectre, which is an embarrassing comparison to make considering its utter lack of creative or commercial success. Burdened by forgotten Pre-Crisis, pre-historical continuity, a never likable character, and a lesser Bronze Age artist both out of his depths and past his shelf life, it offered none of the edge promised by those Randy DuBurke covers.

   B) Atomic Skull is another testament to the creative mediocrity that was the triangle-era Superman titles. How do you take the inherent appeal of a character that combines atomic power and a human skull and still end up with a lesser Captain Planet foil dressed like a faith-based giveaway comic hero? Looks like DC bought him at a Mexican flea market. Didn’t inspire good work from Bog, either.

   C) Battalion is Marv Wolfman & DC’s first or second Cable analogue (after the X-Force stand-ins Deathstroke single-handedly demolished in a single issue/fit of pique.) Basically, Rob Liefeld was in talks to launch a Titans spin-off title starring Speedy/Arsenal, they couldn’t make the numbers work, then Liefeld revitalized the New Mutants and launched Youngblood. The bleed in their ideas likely led to elements/characters from Titans Hunt and Team Titans, and I guess Marv felt entitled to lift Cable. The years-blocked writer was very dependent on the creative contributions of his editor, Jonathan Peterson, who suddenly quit the line and ran off with series artist Kevin Maguire to look for Image money just as the bust was beginning. Strikeback ended up doing nothing at Bravura, while Wolfman had a Ginger Cable he didn’t know what to do with, and had pawned the title off inside Team Titans’ first year of publication. He got wiped from existence during Zero Hour. Seeing him the same as Rob, I used Battalion art to represent my grimdark take on Big Bear for Siskoid’s Who’s Editing (which is also not an actual Who’s Who podcast.)

   D) I have fallen down on the job, because despite returning to weekly coverage of Bloodwynd for Black History Month, I’m still short of covering the Death of Superman and revelations proceeding from that point. Bloodwynd has a swell design that owes at least a small debt to Space Ghost, and I agree that this is a good font-based logo, as far as those go. I played with putting Martian Manhunter into variations on this costume, but I could never make it work without compromising both the look and their mutual concepts. I figure it could be adapted into a better suit for Dr. Mist, currently a poor man’s Brother Voodoo (if that’s possible), because Bloodwynd’s name and origin are pretty much unsalvageable. In that interview, Dan Jurgens seemed cagey in his answers, and I’m not entirely sure he didn’t just borrow from Candyman in a bid to retain participation dollars in a concept that most think of as an inexplicable Martian Manhunter disguise. The short version of the oft-misunderstood circumstance is that Bloodwynd and/or a demonic entity named Rott was/were (alternately?) using J’Onn J’Onzz’s body as a meat puppet in a poorly explained and illogical bid to access power on the material plane through association with the League. The explanation seems to indicate that it was Rott the entire time, but his actions as Bloodwynd/Manhunter don’t bear that out. Anyway, the Blood Gem was created by African Slaves through blood sacrifice voodoo stuff and Rott was the reincarnation of a particularly evil slave master and Bloodwynd is the latest harnesser of the gem’s mystical properties, yadda yadda. It was icky in the ’90s and a land mine today. Later white creators (mostly Dan Vado) tended to play Bloodwynd as a treacherous, unreliable presence in the League who hung out with guys like Vandal Savage and looked on with foreknowledge as Ice died. It did not endear him to the base, and he was cursed by association with a dire period for the property still universally acknowledged as a candidate for its nadir. Even card-carrying contrarians like myself choose not to defend it. Today, aside from encyclopedic references of African-descendant comics characters and the odd “what was that all about” mention, Bloodwynd fails to stand as anything but among the least memorable or worthy Leaguers in history.

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   1. Creative mediocrity of the triangle era? Wow, that would have to be one of the most ridiculously incorrect things I have ever read on the internet. Have a good hard think about what you wrote.

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   2. I don’t want my late comment to come after Frank’s final comment waaay below, so I’m commenting up here. Also, ditto to what he said in the last paragraph of his last comment down there in the sun-basement. I showed up for this and OHOTMU. The podcasts and especially the people involved (podcasters, guests, and commenters) have been a blessing in my life. I know the main DC serieseses (what’s the plural of that word?) have ended. However, there’s such a wealth of riches on this network — and even associated networks you’ve introduced me to — that I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything. Heck, I’m friends with many of you in the real world now! A thousand thank yous, gentlemen.

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2. 2) You of course must keep The Bad Mamma Jammas theme song, so what I’m picturing is going in, taking out all references to characters not featured in the later editions, and then dubbing in with a flat monotonal Steven Wright voice “Aquaman and Superman, Animal Man and Plastic Man, Firestorm the Nuclear Man, Batman and Hawkman, Tootie-Man and Hourman, Who are all these people man– They’re all part of the DC Secret Files & Origins!” And then you have to add at the end, “Oh man, we forgot Onomatopoeia!”

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3. Atomic Skull – I liked this character when he was created. They didn’t do anything interesting with him beyond that, but the idea of a guy who has a metagene and is caught in STAR Labs when the battle with Monarch happens and he ends up having his gene activated and it is so out there and overwhelming that he believes he’s the hero in the movie serial he loves appeals to me. Curt Swan did the serial flashbacks, which I didn’t care for when I was 15 but I have grown to like as I get older. I never saw him as a Ghost Rider rip off and I was very familiar with him at the time so that was a new idea when y’all mentioned it.

   Doomsday – This entry amuses me to no end. The lack of text is startling and I am curious why they put him in this issue. The death of Superman had just happened, but the success of that story was probably not a thing when they decided to do this entry. It’s just so weird. Nice art, but that is, as y’all pointed out, is obvious.

   Lex Luthor II – Shag mentioned the Superman Lives (or SUPERMAN: DOOMSDAY AND BEYOND as it was known in the UK) audio drama and how the guy playing Lex had an…extreme Australian accent. That guy is none other than WIlliam Hootkins. Yes, the man who played Porkins in Star Wars and one of the Top Men in Radiers and Munson in Flash Gordon and Eckhardt in Batman ’89 and, to a lesser extent, Harry Howler in Superman IV was the Lex in this drama. He had actually been playing the audio Lex for years. The audio drama in question was written and directed by Dirk Maggs and he had been doing Superman audio dramas since 1988, when he did the Superman on Trial special to celebrate Superman’s 50th anniversary. Then there was the Adventures of Supeman audio series from 1990 and then the Death, which was being worked on as the story was coming out. Hootkins is the Rosetta Stone of geek culture.

   Anything else I would have said was said by Shag. I loved this whole plotline as it was running through the books. It wasn’t as icky that he was involved with Supergirl, but I came into comics after Kara Zor-El died, so I didn’t have that connection to the character. I totally see why people find this relationship objectionable.

   Linear Men – I never fully warmed to these characters but I didn’t dislike them. Rob is right that they were very busy on a visual level.

   The Ray – Ray actually used that jacket top in a local theater prouction of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that closed in the middle of the first performance. Very sad.

   Great episode, gentlemen. It got me through mowing the lawn in this oppresive heat. Congrats on getting to this issue. I look forward to what y’all have in the future and don’t ever forget how much this show means to the listeners, especially me. I listen to the whole series (including the Legion issues) at least once a year. This is quite the accomplishment.

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4. 1990s Rob L McCarthy LOVED Doomsday!
   1 OH Wow this guy is gonna kill Superman? BUT…
   2. somebody TIED HIS ARMS! IF HE’S STRONG AS SUPERMAN WHO DID THAT?!
   3 Oh my it DOES’NT SAY!
   4. I BETTER PITCH something! (no I DONT REMEMBER WHAT I WROTE was not as good as my follow up to Hunter/prey. In the 90s I PITCHED LIKE a mad dog WHICH of course is why i’m an industry legend

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5. Congratulations on making it through this epic maxi-series. I purchased WHO’s WHO as it was being published & it opened my eyes to the larger DCU.

   This podcast was my way into the Fire & Water network. I was going through a tough time & having trouble sleeping. My mind always seemed to be full of worry & I could not turn my brain off. Well, listening to Rob & Shag pontificate on my favorite era of DC Comics was just the tonic I needed. I could now drift off to discussions of the merits of Prankster vs. Toyman. I soon became addicted to F&W and can’t thank you guys enough for all the years of information & entertainment. I truly appreciate all the work that must go into producing yours numerous episodes. Bravo!

   FYI I see Archie Comics recently published “The Archie Encyclopedia” which is somewhat similar to Who’s Who. I’d love to hear you guys tackle that in an episode. Thanks again!

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   1. I bought the Archie Encylopaedia and quickly gave it to the charity shop, the level of info is nowhere near Who’s Who level. Don’t bother.

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6. 3) “I listen to the whole series (including the Legion issues) at least once a year.”
   After you comment on an episode, why would you need to listen to it again? Does this show not exist solely as a prompt for someone’s comments? I just thought they kept the old episodes up in hopes of more comments, from me specifically?

   4) I had not heard about The Archie Encyclopedia until Chuck mentioned it, and got excited, until I conformed that there would be no super-hero content in it outside Pureheart the Powerful-type stuff. Yet all the Sabrina occult/horror stuff does get represented, and some sci-fi obscurities. Guess I’ll just have to wait for… sigh… !mpact Who’s Who.

   E) Not having finished the first season of Doom Patrol for no good reason besides distraction, I didn’t make it to Candlemaker. One of those entries that I always skip right past. I’d never heard of Congorilla before the ’90s mini-series, and it served as a barrier for my getting into DC Comics. There was a lot of “sure, why not?” stuff by unattractive creatives to maintain worthless trademarks that as a young reader made me question’s DC’s quality control and publishing vision. For some reason, DC didn’t use any Bolland art to promote the mini-series, and I guess when the advance orders came in, they opted out of commissioning any more covers from him after #2. Neil Vokes would not have been to my taste in that period, but I’ve warmed to him since then, particularly his recent return to Fright Night at *sigh* American Mythology, the modern Blackthorne Publishing.

   F) Again, DC’s Direct Currents freeview circular and house ads did a poor job of communicating what the Darkstars were and why they existed. Basically, the Green Lantern Corps had become this vague combination of the Federation of Planets and Knights of the Round Table with a tendency toward Earth-focus. The Darkstars was a chance to lean hard into the largely abandoned “space cops” angle with an emphasis on gritty procedural along the lines of Miami Vice or Hill Street Blues. It was still Earth-set, but our planet was treated more like a backwater, and a lot of the intrigue was extra-terrestrial. Also, they wanted the heat of a new launch with snazzier costumes and a hot Marvel artist fresh off (getting fired from) X-Factor. Larry Stroman abandoned the book for Image with such a swiftness that they’d already hired his replacement, a young Jim Lee clone fresh off GLQuarterly named Travis Charest, to do covers and some promotion. Again, DC failed to sell me on the book, so I didn’t check it out until after months of admiring Charest’s covers. Unfortunately, just as I broke down to buy the title, Charest was also on his way to Image, and I doubt the sales justified another ambitious hire. I did finally become a regular, within its last year of publication, when Mike Deodato Jr. was doing the covers and the series was taken over by newly minted Darkstars Donna Troy and John Stewart. Too bad the insides were boring old Mike Collins, and Michael Jan Friedman’s scripts had been a snooze the entire time. I still see value in the look (sans maser rig) and concept, but it’s an art-driven property that couldn’t keep its artists. Charest’s boxy, constipated, overly stylized people from this area still make my heart race. He’s too much in just the right excess for me. Competencies aside, it’s what if Jim Lee had gone through a Mike Mignola period instead of a Frank Miller one, but also Arthur Adams. Can’t not love it. I can see where you’d think Terry Austin would work over Charest, but he doesn’t, and it can observed that his work was already better than this elsewhere. Yeah, that coloring is an eyesore. Flats were not the way to go here.

   G) Doomsday got an entry because promotion was a part of why Who’s Who existed, and also Who’s Who needed hot new properties to sell itself. Tom Grummett is truly one of the greats, and despite his clear debt to John Byrne, I generally feel like Grummett has held up better. I wish he didn’t turn down my commission request at Terrificon when I had limited reference to offer, and still hope and expect to get something from him eventually. Doomsday has a really cool origin that helps counter his being a Hulk knock-off whose potential was wasted through excessive and poor usage after the reins were taken from Dan Jurgens. Take note, because this is a rare collectible positive credit I’m assigning to Dan Jurgens. Say, you guys kind of pioneered bracing for Snyder Standom backlash, huh? At this point, Doomsday is definitely a top five Superman villain in the public consciousness, probably ranked second or third around Lex Luthor and Darkseid.

   H) I’ll never understand why they thought a dude from Baltimore should suddenly don cowboy boots as part of his action wear. Guy Gardner was definitely my favorite from JLI, and part of why I collected “Breakdowns,” but the prestige format mini-series cost too much and the ongoing that spun out looked janky. I finally gave it a try a few issues into the Warrior rebranding due to a Wonder Woman appearance, and I really appreciated the surprisingly respectful approach to her character. I loved Mitch Byrd’s art and Beau Smith had shifted Guy closer to the Ben Grimm spectrum of uncouth character that still have a core of decency and a coarse personality that isn’t off-putting at solo length. My new fandom burned bright, so I fished the earlier issues out of the quarter bins they’d already been consigned to, and they were if anything worse than I’d imagined. The Chuck Dixon “Year One” arc had begun the pivot toward palatability, but the new creative team sealed the deal. Their brief run was filled with boisterous high adventure and bodacious babes, and it seemed like other creators were enjoying it from some high profile pinch hitters and marketing gimmicks. I also dug the Freddy Kruger wannabe archfoe Dementor, who was used as an occult explanation for Guy’s wild personality shifts and malfeasance, getting JLI off the hook for mocking brain damage. He was Byrd’s last contribution before giving up on the monthly grind for art books and commission work. Once Marc Campos moved over from Extreme Justice to take over the art, and Smith went overboard trying to integrate Guy into the core DCU, it was clearly falling apart. The book was put out of it’s misery in the early 40s, but aside from fridging Arisia, had a decent denouement. Of course, everything got retconned, but for a few months there, DC had it’s own in-universe Rocketeer-style triumph.

   I) I think I know Jacob Whorrsman (Dear Lord!) exclusively from Ryan’s recaps of the Byam/Von Eeden series on Flowers & Fishnets. I do like the entry art. Tony Robbins also turned out to be a creep, and it would have been cooler of Whorrsman (WOW!) had himself been a corrupt motivational speaker. That would have been novel, at least.

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7. That was “Arion: Lord of Atlantis”? I thought it was “Belasco: Kidnapper of Illyana Rasputin”. But the way the series was described “two old and grumpy guys” makes me interested to read some of it.

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8. I’ve said it many times, and even in person to Shag once, but the Who’s Who Podcast was not only my first comic book podcast, but also THE podcast that kept me out of jail. I had super noisy upstairs neighbors at the time, and two work from home days per week (yes, even back in 2015/16). Catching up on and keeping up with the show (on very loud headphones) mitigated my desire to do unwise things during that period of time. So, not only am I always glad to see that the show is back, whenever and however it manifests, but I am overjoyed that it is going to continue. I hardly ever make it over to the website to make comments these days (not sure why), but I want to take this opportunity to thank Rob and Shag for this show, for the Network, and, for eventually (and unknowingly) planting the seed of podcasting into the cobwebbed caverns of my cranium. Who’s Next? We are!

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9. The use of color on the Justice Society of America listing is amazing. There are three basic costume colors here. Hawkman and Hawkwoman have yellow tops. They are flying together in the air. Flash, Green Lantern and Dr. Mid-Nite have red tops. Those three are the primary figures in the center of the image. Wildcat and the Atom have a lot of blue in their costume, so they’re grouped together towards the back. Brilliant work by Mike Parobeck, Terry Austin and Glenn Whitmore.

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10. The final Who’s Who podcast (sort of kind of). How wistful.

    Despite being a hardcore DC addict around the time this issue came out, I know next to nothing about Team Titans. In fact, my primary memory of the concept was that, for some reason, the team lineup included a deaged-to-teenager Ray Palmer Atom. But there’s no mention of that in this listing. Did that come later? Or am I conflating this with a very specific dream I had? (I know I could google it, but it’s more fun to ask here.)

    Shagg, I strongly disagree that the Ray had the best new character design of the ’90s. Not that I have a better candidate off the top of my head, but the marching-band-jacket and dorkily KEWWWLLL!! helmet make him far too doofy-looking to claim the title. But beyond the design, this character really falls short for me. Perhaps I’m looking at it through modern eyes, but Ray Terrill was the same guy we saw in 10,000 comic books before: The handsome, mixed-up white American guy thrust into a life he never bargained for, somehow finding the courage to rise to the occasion and Become a True Hero (TM). I think part of what was so appealing about James Robinson’s Starman a couple years later was how it tweaked this formula just a little bit—Jack Knight was that same guy, but with specific details that made him feel just a little different and just a little more real.

    Shocked that your discussion of the concept behind the Linear Man—an organization dedicated to the monitoring the timestream or whatever (I didn’t read it either)—has hit the big time via Marvel’s Loki TV series.

    I really loved the Justice League in this era, the team that got mixed up in the death of Superman, and as such, I have fond memories of Bloodwynd—this despite the fact that the character has a truly awful name. (I seem to recall my best friend at the time making a joke about how it sounds like he has some truly unfortunate intestinal issues.) The design is interesting; did they ever bring him back?

    Your discussion of acronym silliness in the L.E.G.I.O.N. entry made me think of this, one of my favorite MST3K interstitial jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XnS1BncrYM

    Anyone else find it weird that the JSA entry makes no mention of Johnny Quick, despite him being pictured on both sides, and despite the fact that he was never in the JSA before this series?

    Finally, when you cover the Impact issue, I hope you discuss the whole history of the Archie heroes—including the somewhat-obscure fact that Alan Moore’s initial plan for Watchmen was to use those characters rather than the Charlton ones. (Have I mentioned that in this space before? Perhaps I have; can you blame me when you release one new episode per year?)

    Thanks for hours of fun. You guys truly are my favorite podcasters.

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11. J)stice Society of America offers one of the team’s most dynamic group shots, with lovely Mike Parobeck art. I do wonder how his career might have evolved, had he lived. He wasn’t what “the kids” were into, and he was already pigeonholed as “the cartoon guy,” so I do wonder if he would have pivoted in some fashion or left comics for another field? In a better timeline, he could have been the fill-in artist on JLA in place of guys like Mark Pajarillo or Val Semeiks, or continued Leave It To Chance with James Robinson after PMS flaked out. He could have had a memorable run on Captain America, or imagine how different Astro City would have been under his pen?

    So anyway, I was the target demographic in 1992, and Mike Carlin was right to worry. Once Justice Society of America was already on the stands, the damage was done, and the title should have been allowed to stand or fall on its own merits. But, as the typical geek who had plenty enough money for buying comic books and little else, this was grandpa’s title, not mine. We wanted crosshatching, chains, and sharp objects, not graceful layouts and economy of line. My brother bought several issues of the mini-series, I’d assume because he liked Tom Lyle’s busier art, as he’d gotten issues of !mpact Comet as well. Neither of us touched this seeming throwback. We bought some DC, but they weren’t Marvel, and they really weren’t anything out of the X-titles, so it wasn’t for my g-g-g-generation. That’s why New Titans was my gateway title, in much the way NTT had been DC’s olive branch throughout the ’80s. From a commercial and messaging standpoint, it made no sense to rescue the old timers from Ragnarok this soon. By definition, the JSA were not of this time, and in the Chromium Age, that was an offense punishable by death.

    K) Clearly Rob had put in his notice, and was trying to keep his head down to just peaceably finish out his time on this gig. But then, L.E.G.I.O.N. R.E.C.R.U.I.T.S. had to happen, and it was simply the straw that broke the Aquafan’s fin. And he’s 100% correct in his rant that all this Legion stuff sucked. I talk a lot about how the scheme to reprint year old direct market Baxter format New Teen Titans murdered DC’s top franchise of the early ’80s, but it was just as true for Legion. While never a monster hit, Legion circulation was working its way up near 200K a month, but plummeted to barely above 70K once the reprints kicked in. Tales of the Legion was put out of its misery at the end of 1987, but the Baxter series was still selling comparably to Barreto-period Titans. Sales nearly doubled with the Giffen relaunch, and the dystopian shift tapped into the zeitgeist. The problem was, thanks to a trolling saboteur within the Superman Family of titles, Giffen was jerked around so badly and so often that he doubled-down on the grimdark out of spite. What should have been an extended story arc became the total dissolution of the Legion as a team and viable franchise. A billion unisex suburbanite wypipo with divorced mom haircuts all dressed in monochrome fatigues and ski outfits calling each other by their stupid forgettable fake alien names in aggressively obtuse narratives while standing in the rubble of urban hellscapes made up of stacks on concrete igloos in between static info-dumps of poor man’s “Under The Hood” written in Klingon. We’d just spent seven issues of a devoted iteration of Who’s Who exploring the expansive and vibrant 31st century future, and suddenly that entire universe was Blade Runner. Every world, any time of day, heavy rain and smog. It was stupid, it was boring, it was indulgent, it lasted waaaay too long and got waaaay to bleak, and it broke the Legion forever. Every time a Legion entry comes up in Who’s Who In The DC Universe, it’s like the therapist holding up an inkblot for Rorschach to interpret. One person sees Kent Shakespeare grinning, and another sees the personification of a creator’s insurmountable frustration at his inability to use Clark Kent, because one prima donna on a whole other title can’t help but be a total dick about everything. It’s the comic book equivalent of going through family photos, and hitting the ones after dad started drinking, or everyone is struggling with some other family trauma, and instead of getting to set them aside, somebody keeps putting them in random places around the house to constantly stumble upon while going about your business. You reach for a coffee cup, and in the cupboard is dog with head split open by cleaver with your milk and sugar. Also, L.E.G.I.O.N.P.O.D.Cast was part of JLMay.

    L) Love that the Who’s Who Podcast ends, and it is definitely ending here, with an M. Night Shyamalan twist. Howard Beale shouts “I’m mad at Legion fans, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Most comics fans aren’t into Legion, but whatever. Rob didn’t come back for Titans Hunt? Lots of O.G. fans didn’t. Rob didn’t traffic in Doom Patrol? Me either. Rob hates ’90s EXTREME? Even the people who were into it at the time have mostly turned on it. No big deal. All of this tracks with an average fan. Rob never heard of Lex Luthor II?!? I struggled with that a little bit sometime before or maybe during the Doomsday, but had the whole brain swap thing straight before long. Rob didn’t notice Lex Sr. had red hair in Man of Steel? Rob missed the entire “I’m an Aussie” multi-year scheme that ran parallel to The Death & Return of Superman, and therefore presumably never read it?!? And if so, what are the odds he read Knightfall? Like, Rob is somehow completely ignorant of the biggest selling and most omnipresent elements of ’90s DC Comics? And he never talks about the Peter David run on Aquaman, so did he literally have nothing to do with comics after graduating the Kubert School until sometime before Identity Crisis? I’ve asked so many questions already, and each one just inspires more questions. All this time, I assumed Rob was disdainful of the Chromium Age, but was he in fact totally absent to the point of having no direct familiarity with this decade? Is it any wonder he’s been dragging his feet in these final episodes? I demand an inquest! Impanel a grand jury with all due haste!

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12. It’s hard to believe it’s “over”. Overall, the show felt like an ending, an affirmation, and a promise to continue.

    Hard to believe I’ve been listening to you for almost all the 12 years! I remember being shocked that there was a podcast on the Who’s Who (found it by searching) and was hooked after back-listening a few episodes.

    It was a real celebration of my geekdom, and it’s been painful for me to see the network expand so rapidly and not being able to listen to all of them!

    Cheers and here’s to what’s next!

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    1. If you’ve not listened, Alexander, I thoroughly recommend Ryan Daly’s Secret Origins podcast here on the network. Similar vibe.

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       1. Oh, I have finished listening to Mr. Daly’s Secret Origins podcast (The Whip! SHAZAM!), and thoroughly enjoyed it as well.

          But I do return to it from time to time, along with Who’s Who and other choice podcasts that will help me in running my Supers campaign… and to geek out in general.

          Thank you for the suggestion!

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          1. You’re welcome!

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13. Hey guys! Great show as always. I can’t believe we’ve come this far already! (Although, To be fair, I really just jumped in shortly after you began doing the Loose-Leaf series.)
    All right, now onto cases!

    This iteration of Atomic Skull was spawned almost directly from Armageddon 2001 Aftermath. Now Armageddon was my first big event in DC when I first started diving back into the DCU following BATMAN (‘89) So for me, as a fan who was just starting to get back into the Superman books, I was cool with them re-inventing the character for the post-crisis continuity even if his design needed some tweaking! (It would get better eventually!)

    Bloodwynd was an interesting character to me at first, but I was disappointed that they reduced him to a background character after the big revelation of how/why J’onn took his form in the first place. Interesting note: in an issue of Justice League Quarterly Booster meets a famed future Pop Star of the 20th/21st Century and tries to get her off the streets and go home so she can make her future fame. While they’re at the new JLA Embassy, Bloodwynd is among the heroes hanging around and Booster names him J’onn while rushing through the introductions.

    Doomsday! Great art!

    Guy Gardner was my favorite to win the Loser leaves town fight with Hal! Primarily because I wasn’t a big fan of the central Green Lantern title at the time, but also because I thought it was too predictable for Guy to be the one who lost. (And can you imagine how differently things might have played out if Guy had won and been GL through the Coast City disaster and Emerald Twilight?!?)

    Justice Society of America! I Loved, Loved, LOVED!!! This Series! I had been having a huge upswing in my interest of WWII and the Golden Age in the early 90’s. I was always listening to old-time radio shows . (Particularly the Green Hornet!) So reading about the JSA coming back into action in the modern day was exactly in my line. (It helped that Mike Parobeck’s art was so perfect for capturing the vintage heroes and their modern counterparts side by side) I was really disappointed when it was cancelled and devastated when so many of the JSA were killed in Zero Hour! Later, I was even more annoyed when I read up on the Doctor Fate issues featuring the newly resurrected Kent and Inza Nelson, and realized that they had never been given so much as a cameo in the series!

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14. 5) Not to step on the joke, but the mini-series was called Arion the Immortal.

    M) I’ve taken a few shots at Dan Jurgens and his associates, some barely coded, and I look forward to not stopping now. It seemed like after rotating through huge talents like Byrne, Ordway, Gammill, and Perez, everyone clung to Jurgens for his sort of vague semblance to JLGL, firmly Bronze Age Marvel qualities, and willingness to stick with the Man of Steel long term. As a ’90s reader, I tended to prefer his stuff when inked by Image-style artists like Norm Rapmund, Art Thibert, or Trevor Scott here– giving a little contemporary pizzazz to his journeyman fundamentals. When he actually tried to rip off X-artist design elements though, as with parade dress Cable here, it was “hello fellow kids” cringe. Why would you incorporate asymmetrical design into a group called “The Linear Men” and have such a square make the attempt? The is the proto-Time Variance Authority, which is to say chrono-fascists, and you dress them like an interpretive dance troupe? Are they going to Jazzercise the tangents away? And are they from timeline where integration never happened? These guys only show up when Jurgens is doing time stuff, and if Zero Hour taught me anything, it’s to not show up when Jurgens is doing time stuff.

    N) True story: The one time I got to go to SDCC, I was at a panel on upcoming JLA projects, and my hand involuntarily shot up. I was told that they would only take questions at the end, and was called upon when that happened. All I wanted to know was if someone good was going to ink Val Semeiks on that project, and he thankfully had Prentis Rollins. Semeiks was one of the go-to guys for JLA projects, probably because of his long association with then-editor Dan Raspler dating to The Demon through Lobo. and certainly not at the demand of fans. He was fine on serio-comic material, but on iconic heroes. he made my hands clench. As for The Lurker, my brother bought all of Lobo’s appearances in The Demon, this character’s listed appearance was one of them, I read it, and have no memory of this character. I have checked Comicvine, Mike’s Amazing World, GCD… I can’t find any reference to this concept. So I flipped through the one issue, there he is, but I think that was his only appearance. So this page is just a synopsis of The Demon #21? But no Zook. Cool. Cool. But do read the later Ennis/McCrea run, collected into two trades within the past decade.

    O) New Earth debuted in Legion of Super-Heroes #38 and this entire timeline was erased in #61. I didn’t become a Legion fan until after the reboot, so approached this issue with full awareness that pretty much none of this mattered anymore. The early Jason Pearson is nice enough, but he’s not there yet, and the book’s like half starfields anyway. Mostly remember this for the Death cameo.

    P) While I still had my shop, I visited an extremely obscure, clearly non-rival, sort-of in the same town place that had a decent selection of cheapie comics. I put together the majority of a run of Green Lantern: Mosaic after having tried a few odd (and I do mean odd) issues out of my own quarter bins. I enjoyed what I read quite a bit, but couldn’t resist at least offering the completed package on my own wall. To my mild dismay, it swiftly sold to one of my favorite customers, with a notable interest in Black super-heroes (he has perhaps the most expansive related collection of themed commissions on the internet today.) Good home, is what I’m saying. I’m slowly and lackadaisically putting together a second set now. I liked John Stewart before this, but the writer gave the character so much more nuance and dimension than he’d had previously, really illustrating that he was simply operating and a higher lever than any other Lantern. Most of the run was drawn by Cully Hamner, who made a great fit, but there was also appealing fill-in work by Jim Balent, Mark Beachum, and Mitch Byrd. While surely indebted to a trail Grant Morrison blazed, Mosaic was doing its own thing, and peculiar to criticize it as “weird for weirdness sake” in comparison to, of all people, that calculatingly mad Scotsman. As if guys like David Lynch weren’t also prominently at play in that period. I think the word came down that Mosaic would be cancelled, not on account of sales, but an editorial mandated recalibration of the GL group. The heart seemed to leave the series in the last few issues, not helped by uninspired work from Luke McDonnell. Not only were none of the repercussions of its finale addressed, but they just shoved Stewart into the Darkstars and then a wheelchair for a decade or so. Thanks to the Justice League cartoon, Stewart was shrunk into a Jarhead mold, and now he’s just the hard ass GL that makes assault rifles with his ring. I couldn’t even be bothered to watch his recent animated movie, expecting more of the same.

    Q) Oh Ramona, if there was only something between us… Supporting characters are poorly catalogued on the sort of indexing sites I checked for The Lurker, so I couldn’t gather much evidence, but I do think she made more appearances in the Lobo ongoing series. I think she may have been in the Last Sons audio drama? I’m not going to claim to be some great fan, but she stood at as one of the few recurring bits in Lobo comics. As per usual, Simon Bisley phones in the pin-up, but his style carries it along.

    R) In another fine example of DC Comics shooting itself in the foot, Joe Quesada was barred from the Batman office, and maybe the company overall, because Wizard magazine #24 ran a censored silhouetted AzBats gatefold cover on June 29, 1993, before the full version debuted on Quesada’s Batman #500 from August 17, 1993. In a time when all the hottest artists, including Quesada, were working elsewhere, they decided to no longer employ his services to help move Mike Manley-drawn comics. This was while DC was still selling copies of the trade collection of his sleeper hit mini-series The Ray and Sword of Azrael, during a period where he would have been a Wizard favorite, current artist on X-Factor, best-selling chromium kid from X-O Manowar #0, and soon to launch a competing company in Event Comics with the “hot” new character Ash. I did manage to snag an issue of the Ray’s mini-series out of a discount bin, and yes it looked very nice, but it was hard to get excited knowing that the main draw would never touch the character again. And speaking of cover cock-ups, really smooth not letting Quesada do his own covers until the third issue. Randy DuBurke was totally the same difference, right? By the way, it wasn’t the birthday candles that ignited Ray’s powers, but the flash cube on a disposable camera. It was a cool origin story, but Ray was still played as another everyman Peter Parker type, which curbed my potential enthusiasm. Christopher Priest tried to catch lightning in a bottle again with Howard Porter on the ongoing series, but he was still figuring out his style, with a heavy Jim Lee influence. He didn’t start to come into his own until toward the end of his first year, before jumping ship to Underworld Unleashed and of course JLA. He never caught up with Quesada in popularity, or even confidence, but I still really like his work. Despite not being my kind of property, The Ray’s close ties to the underrated post-0 Justice League Task Force kept me sampling his solo issues, and they were pretty good. Divorced from Priest though, the Ray was just another light guy in an industry where that’s one of the most basic power sets. Trying to play him gay after his dalliance with Black Canary rings false, chasing some pride bandwagon. Making time with Dinah was one of his greatest accomplishments. I do wish using him to build out a Freedom Fighters revival had been a priority in the ’90s instead of an afterthought feeding into Infinite Crisis‘s lust for canon fodder. Was it even the Ray Terrill version in the Gray/Palmiotti stuff? I fall between Rob and Shag on the design. It’s better than Sgt. Pepper cosplay, but nowhere near the best character design on the ’90s. It isn’t even the best DC character created in 1992 with a black, white, and yellow color scheme (The Heckler.) It did translate well to live action for that weird photographic house ad, though. I seriously doubt Quesada has any participation stake in a derivative legacy character who was themself technically in the public domain. The Ray just wasn’t all that popular. Shag, the just said they used him in the Arrowverse. Where’s your head at? In a golden bucket with a fin on top?

    6) Following the comments occurring between my comments, the funereal vibe is for real. Shag is singing “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” advertising a bunch of stuff that won’t be pairing with Rob to cover an entire issue of Who’s Who in one sitting of usually no less than two hours, and all the listeners are harmonizing “although we’ve come– to the end of the road… still I can’t let go…”

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15. Great episode, guys! I am so sad that the show is ending…

    When you covered the entry for Thrust, I kept picturing Stephan from SNL – “New York’s hottest club is THRUST!” That’s an all time great super hero name, though I’m not sure I want him being the one to arrest me….

    I’m glad you talked about the great Mike Parobeck. I am such a fan that I bought every issue of Diablo and The Fly just for his art. That’s almost as shameful as you all talking me into buying The Hacker Files.

    Looking forward to many more episodes to come!

    Sean

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16. This R.E.C.R.U.I.T.S disrespect simply will not stand. You apologise to Bertron Diib immediately. His body may be impervious, but he still has feelings, y’know.

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17. Good to have you chaps back again for a new show.

    I really enjoyed the older, grumpier version of Arion, except for his new, Namor-shaped head. With his new base of a New York deli, he could easily have teamed up with ‘Mazing Man. It was a real treat to see Marvel Team-Up stalwart Ron Wilson at DC. It’s a shame he didn’t get to do the mini-series covers – again, someone knocks themself out to produce a couple of dozen interior pages and then isn’t considered good enough for the prestige spot. Bah. Still, he does a fab job here with Art Nicholls.

    I love the noise Shag made when he came to Atomic Skull, it was classic Cindy Franklin genius. And the noise was appropriate – Bronze Age greatness turned Chromium Age pants.

    That main Darkstar leg is ridiculous. Is he Plastic Man?

    Shag, did you ever see the year 2000 collection of They Saved Luthor’s Brain, with a very 1950s movie poster cover with a logo design by the legendary Todd Klein – truly excellent

    Definitely, you both should read the 1990s Demon series, it was a hoot.

    I also stuck with the Green Lantern Mosaic series until the end, and I really enjoyed it. I was reading Doom Patrol too, but hadn’t actually clicked that perhaps there was some attempt to emulate Grant Morrison here. It’s a shame this series will likely never be reprinted.

    I would argue that the Team Titans five different number one issue gimmick was a stupid idea, strangling the book at birth. How many readers have the money and the inclination to buy five different copies with the only difference being eight different pages in each book? Madness.

    I’m so sorry to hear this podcast is ending after the !mpact coverage.

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18. 12 years and all the Who’s Who covered! Wow, you guys are an inspiration to us all! Talk about a long-term project. Your commitment is admirable. I am more a Marvel guy than a DC guy, but I’ve enjoyed listening to this podcast even if I haven’t had a whole lot to say in the comments.

    Arion- If you want to see updated 1990s Arion taken down a peg, look no further than a recent episode of Siskoid’s OHOTMU or Not? podcast where the panel THOROUGHLY makes fun of Arion’s giant head in this very same picture.

    Bloodwynd- in the Death of Superman, two superheroes are on the scene as Superman lays dying in Lois Lane’s arms. Ice…and Bloodwynd. That’s right. Not Batman, not Green Lantern, not Wonder Woman…Bloodwynd. Anyone who comes to comics late and decides to go back and read this impactful and famous storyline is going to be like, WHO is THAT guy? It’s too bad DC has let him just kind of fade away. He goes to the sidelines during the 1990s Justice League crossover Judgement Day, and then never returns to the team. And I’m pretty sure no one in-story comments on it, either! And to this day, everyone thinks he was just Martian Manhunter in disguise and forgets there was a real Bloodwynd!

    The Ray- Shag, the fourth post-Doomsday Justice League recruit you couldn’t think of was Wonder Woman. She stepped in to lead the team, in fact. That same post-Doomsday Justice League with The Ray, Black Condor, and Agent Liberty didn’t last beyond Jurgens leaving the title. The next writer dropped Condor and Agent Liberty with zero explanation. This new League lineup was introduced to all sorts of fanfare and DC let…that happen. I haven’t seen a more brutal and abrupt dismantling of a new superhero team lineup since Marvel thoroughly smashed the Alan Davis Excalibur to more fully integrate the title into the X-line of books. Anyway, the Ray himself…I remember grabbing the first issue of his miniseries right off the shelf at my LCS despite not knowing anything about the character (More a Marvel guy than a DC guy so I’d never heard of the golden age Ray or the other Quality characters), based on the cool name and costume alone. Put me on the list of someone who thinks he looks awesome, powered up and not. Cool jacket, cool helmet. They did push him hard back then, and he had a decent run in JLA, then Justice League Task Force, not to mention his solo series and he’s managed to stick around to some extent, but I think DC only has room for so many characters so the Quality and Charlton heroes tend to not get a lot of page time and are shoved to the sidelines (or used as cannon fodder in “Crisis” mega-crossovers…).

    The JSA- yeah, I love Mike Parobeck’s art. If he’d hit in the 2000s his career would’ve been very different. His work on JSA, El Diablo, and the Elongated Man miniseries are all great. Imagine his work on a Shazam series, he would’ve been perfect. His art was so FUN. RIP.

    Team Titans- Shag, you are absolutely right when you say every comic book character could be a “mort” without good stories that people remember fondly. I maintain there are no bad characters, just bad stories with those characters in them. Comic fans have this weird tendency to act like if a character isn’t popular or is kind of lame, then it’s the character’s fault, like they are real people who should try harder or something. One of my prime examples is the Silver Surfer. Silver Surfer is cool, but when we really think about it, he’s a shiny metal guy flying around outer space…on a surfboard. This concept should be ridiculous, but because he was created by Lee & Kirby and over the years he’s been in lots of good stories and taken seriously overall, no one thinks of him as a mort.

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19. S) I came back to Titans in June of 1991, the same month X-Force #1 was released, and during the transitional period in the X-titles to be referred to as “Mutant Genesis”. No issue of X-Force ever matched by half the excitement I felt reading New Mutants #98-100, and I never took to the post-Claremont X-Men. X-Force ended up being the last of the X-titles that I dropped, just beating out Wolverine, within two years of launch. Uncanny X-Men had been my home base in comics since about 1983, so a decade later, I was feeling adrift. “Titans Hunt” came at a perfect time for me to transfer my intense devotion from Marvel to DC’s equivalent, and so Team Titans were poised to fulfill X-Force‘s promise. They debuted in the second issue of The New Titans that I bought, when I had yet to begin trying to catch up with the arc, which prompted me to buy Annual #7, one of about four Armageddon 2001 books I got new (including only the dire conclusion of the bookend series.) Even though the title meandered after “Hunt,” I still enjoyed these characters so much, at a time when the X-titles were completely alienating me, that I clung tightly. By “Total Chaos,” I was buying the whole Titans slate, including the very brief period when Deathstroke the Terminator was kinda good. Kinda.

    The Team Titans themselves were intriguing, especially the Terminator-biting time travel angle elaborated upon in the Tom Grindberg annual, and art from the likes of Tom Grummett, Kerry Gammill, Adam Hughes, Phil Jimenez, Paris Cullins, Michael Netzer, and now Kevin Maguire, surely helped to put them over. Before Battalion, you had the cool future Nightwing with the shield and ponytail leading the team (remember that we were still evolving from “Disco Elvis” to mullet with armpit wings, so kinky Mad Max was an improvement.) The first major snag was the multiple #1 gimmick. I never full bought into this. I did a “one to rock, one to stock” with X-Force #1, and I got X-Men #1A (to read the story new in its first week) and #1E (the up-scaled glossy edition with all the pin-ups). For Team Titans #1, I may have gotten two, the Mirage and/or Nightrider one(s). Kilowat just seemed like a generic electrical guy to me, and didn’t rate. While Redwing had actual wings, as opposed to Hawkman’s fake ones that put me off that character, I struggled with her dopey overall look, and especially the Wolverine hair. I’d piecemealed “The Judas Contract” out of back issues and cheapie bins by this point, so I had negative feelings about resurrecting/cloning Terra. I’ve been drawn to super-hero/horror hybrids since at least my days picking up “Legion of Monsters” and Tomb of Dracula at flea markets in my earliest collecting days, so “Nightrider” (mostly referred to as Dagon in the actual stories) was a draw. The only one I had, and have, lasting affection for is Mirage. Latin representation is still rarer than it should be, but was near to nonexistent in the ’90s, outside embarrassments like El Aguilar. Mirage played a key role in the immediate post-“Hunt” narrative, and was the de facto team leader in the absence between Nightwing and Battalion. She was funny and smart and sarcastic and naughty and had a cool power that was well deployed. Even her understated costume and negative image eyeballs were neat.

    “Total Chaos” had its moments, but was ultimately more like “Total Mess.” When Maguire and Jon Peterson (so essential to the revival that they named an unseen quasi-team member after him) abandoned the Titans after the third issue, the entire sub-line never recovered. And I mean, to this day, I don’t think any Titans comic project has ever recaptured the magic, not even the Johns/McKone run. A lousy two-issue story with “guy who can hold a pencil” followed, then a Terra spotlight where they let the inker pencil. The writing was bad, and I had a nagging sense of missing things because I never (*never*) went back to read all the origin stories from the #1s. There was a recovery in #7-10, when the Titans books were going through a sort of “Fall of the Mutants” where momentous but disconnected arcs were happening simultaneously in the Titans books. “The Darkening” had Dagon tempted by a vampire cult to turn on his friends, while the Triton-corrupted Raven turned the future Dick Grayson into a homicidal maniac with a nipple ring, redubbed Deathwing. It sounds terrible, but this was Phil Jimenez’s first series work, where he was improving by magnitudes issue by issue, and he was able to completely sell the melodrama. Then there was a lousy two part fill-in, before Jimenez and his writing partner Jeff Jensen took over full creative duties. Not that late period Marv Wolfman was anything to write home about, but the new guys were not at his level, and the book still needed the grimdark Perez art to maintain interest. So of course Jimenez was more or less done with drawing the book after #14. Following some poor fill-ins, a young and still much too green Terry Dodson took over with #17. I suspect that it was a situation where he took on a book already behind schedule and never caught up. Dodson was a bad fit for the material, and the writing seemed to get worse with each issue, especially as they rushed to a conclusion ahead of cancellation at Zero Hour.

    Donna Troy briefly became their den mother before abandoning everyone, including her toddler son, to join the Darkstars. A few years later, John Byrne killed off the kid and the ex-husband for being more trouble than they were worth. The revived Terra remained an albatross until being killed off again. Mirage conceived a child with Deathwing in what today would be considered a sexual assault, and was last seen in semi-retirement from heroing to devote her time to being a single mother. Everyone else was wiped from continuity in Zero Hour. By the end, Team Titans stood as my greatest hate read, the book I couldn’t stand but stuck with to the very bitter end. After two years, most of the characters were still cyphers, and an argument could be made that they were just a big budget version of Eclipse’s New Wave, or the ouroboros of comics about RPG characters based on super-hero comics that was Champions. While I still liked Dagon, he was just a Vampire: The Masquerade character sheet being used in a Villains and Vigilantes campaign. So many resources were allocated to make Team Titans happen, all wasted. These were uninspired NPC designs generated for a cynical spin-off by an absentee co-parent editor and a blocked, washed up ex-fan favorite writer. My abiding affection for Mirage aside, they were never really meant for this world, and have rightly been reclaimed by the abyss of forgotten failures.

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20. I am the antiKelly on these characters and the joke is on me be cause I have letters published in the back of Darkstars, Black Condor, L.E.G.I.O.N. and Team Titans and I can never dispose of those.

    Shag, I will be your sponsor/mentor if you want to read The Demon volume 3. Etrigan and his supporting cast have the purest, most complete story that runs directly from Demon vol 1 > Saga of the Swamp Thing > Demon Vol 2 > Cosmic Odyssey > Detective Comics > Demon Vol 3.

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    1. I read Darkstars as well as Team Titans.

       Incidentally, a few years ago, I met artist William Rosado at a convention. He was the artist on the final issues of New Titans and I had him sign some books. When he saw Donna Troy’s Darkstars costume, he commented on how much of a pain in the ass it was to draw.

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21. A milestone episode. And through there’s more to come, let us walk down memory aisle and relive the good times we’ve had.

    Shagg commenting on how hot a character was, often eliciting a frustrated groan from Rob. Shagg was rarely wrong on the hotnesso’meter. Just in case, someone made two podcast series to workshop the hotness scale!

    Rob could often express his thoughts on a character with several, poignant, silent moments. Artful, meaningful. Chef’s kiss!

    There were a lot more Legion characters than anyone thought existed. Or at least more than non-Legion fans thought existed. Like, seriously, how many Legion characters are there?

    The Forever People.

    Expressing annoyance at a goofy character can have unintended effects. AquaStorm, arise!

    Shagg poking fun at the way Rob says “classic”.

    But the most incredible thing about this podcast is the community it built around it. Our hosts have grown older and wiser, but the real growth in these shows has been the love and time Rob and Shag have given to their listeners. And even though Who’s Who episodes come out at a slower rate than modern Simpsons episodes, it is the highlight of my month when I see a new one come up in my feed. I won’t even listen to it immediately; I’ll bank the episode for the right time to sit down and listen, and savour the knowledge in the meantime that I have a treat coming up.

    So now that they’ve reached the end(ish), clearly I need to go back and listen all the way from the beginning.

    On the comment on my comment: Shagg, I do like Alpha Flight, but their “Canadian-ness” is sometimes gimmicky. I’m still a fan of the characters (I liked Vindicator!), and read through the initial run of the series (my friend collected them, so I got to read for free). But in terms of folklore heroes, Canada just doesn’t have the same “spirit of Canada” types like John Henry.

    The closest thing we had to a Canadian iconic protagonist when I grew up was Anne of Green Gables. And sure, Anne with an E is a good story and a good character, but she’s not someone I expect to show up in tights any day soon. But hey, we’ve already had one quasi gritty reboot of Anne of Green Gables show up on TV, I expect her crime fighting modern ancestor should hit the newsstands sometime soon.

    Or The Littlest Hobo. But everyone loves the Hobo.

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    1. I stan for Canadian rock god Joey Jeremiah. 🙂

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       1. Beachcombers forever!

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22. I think I’ve said my piece about Team Titans time and again, which is that I swear I think I’m the only person who was a serious fan of that book (even got a mention in the final issue’s lettercolumn). Yes, there’s so much that isn’t so great about it, but I loved it at the time and it still holds some sentimental value. Years ago, I covered this on the Pop Culture Affidavit blog, and while the Wolfman-written issues were middling for me, I found the Jeff Jensen/Phil Jimenez part of the run better than I remembered even if it fell short of being “great.” In fact, I remember both of them responding to me on Twitter that the book was a huge lesson for them as far as working in comics/as professional writers was concerned. They seemed to have an appreciation for the mistakes that they made. Considering that Jensen went on to be a writer and editor for Entertainment Weekly (and wrote a graphic novel about the Green River Killer) and Phil Jimenez is … well, Phil Jimenez, I can see how they might look back on it with thoughts of how “green” they were.

    I will defend the five different versions of Team Titans #1, btw. At least they had the different origin stories, a couple of which were actually pretty good. Terra’s has art by Phil Jimenez (inks by Al Vey and George Perez), and Redwing’s has some outstanding interior art by Adam Hughes. I liked what Jensen and Jimenez wanted to do with the characters, especially the girls, but Zero Hour just wrecked all of it. Mirage did eventually get a “happy ending”, but they went from having Terra be an intelligent character who was possibly an Earth elemental (and had the writers been able to follow through, gay) to a clone of the original who followed Gar Logan around like a puppy dog.

    Of course, I also have to mention that while the mysterious leader of the Team Titans wound up being Monarch, the original idea was for him to be Danny Chase. Jon Peterson figured that there had to be a way for the Cousin Oliver of the DCU to be cool for at least a moment.

    Vigilante III … loved this character as well, and I freaking LOVE this entry. Jerome K. Moore is such a great artist and it’s a pity he didn’t do more work for DC. I always loved his Star Trek covers, and he penciled the Nightwing/Deathstroke fight in New Titans #86. I would have totally read a Vigilante miniseries with his artwork. In fact, I’m surprised they didn’t try to give her a miniseries at some point. It seemed that between the storyline where she was introduced (“City of Assassins”, guest-starring Batman) and the few issues after it, they were setting her up for at least mini.

    Shag’s right (*shudders*) about the Deathstroke book. While the post-Zero Hour stuff stumbled quite a bit, much of the book was really good, and Vigilante made for a great supporting character. Incidentally, during the post-Zero hour “Deathstroke The Hunted” storyline, she was helping Slade escape and stay on the run, then Slade’s wife Adeline put on the Vigilante costume and went after him. I think her getting an emergency blood transfusion from him drove her mad or something. Anyway, Pat Trayce wound up taking over Addie’s “Searchers, Inc.” organization and renamed it Vigilance. It became a search-and-rescue organization that again was an interesting concept that nobody followed up on. In fact, she made a few appearances in Wonder Woman during the Jimenez run as well as in the “Our Worlds at War” crossover and hasn’t been seen since. I can’t imagine that they plan on bringing her back anytime soon.

    As always, though, a spectacular job. Congratulations on TWELVE YEARS of doing this thing and finally getting to this point.

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    1. Tom, I agree with you that Jerome K. Moore is an amazing artist, and I have gushed on these pages about his work on military hardware specifically, but I have to say, I can’t positively identify that helicopter. It is not a Blackhawk, as Shag suggested. Overall shape and rotor count lead me to say it’s closest to an HH-3, the original and legendary Jolly Green Giant used to rescue so many in Southeast Asia. But the shape isn’t quite right, and it looks like it has some Apache or Soviet Hind DNA in the front glass. Maybe he was going for something I missed, or maybe it was a design of his own. It doesn’t make this entry any less impressive.

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23. 6) No, I definitely haven’t been stalling all week with numerous comment posts involving the reading and replying to other people as a way of avoiding the finality of saying goodbye to this show. After all, I still get to talk about the MLJ characters in all historical contexts for !mpact, since narrowing focus on that single incarnation would just be saying variations on “I barely remember reading this” or “the design sucks” a few dozen times in a single sparse comment post.

    T) A year ago, Trust would have been a void to me, a cavity in my comics knowledge. However, we did a two-part Spawnometer podcast covering the Image Comics work of Jerry Ordway, including WildStar, and by extension writer/co-creator Al Gordon. He’d cut his teeth as a plotter, then scripter on 5YL Legion, earning the spin-off mini-series Timber Wolf. Having seen little return or likely way forward at DC in exploiting the concepts generated from that work, Gordon basically pulled a Jim Starlin and just continued the story he’d begun with thinly disguised analogues. Celeste McCauley from “The Quiet Darkness” (and the Legion group entry in Who’s Who in the DC Universe #9) became SkyLark, the demi-goddess responsible for the inciting events in WildStar: Sky Zero. I finally read more than the one issue of Timber Wolf I pulled from a cheapie bin in the ’90s, and sure enough, the Elvis Presley look-alike leading a paramilitary super team called Point Force appears without alteration in both DC and Image Comics. I didn’t exactly enjoy either mini-series, though I saw potential in the Image property, where the DC one was a creative cul-de-sac. The Point Force branding carried over, the metahumans like Thrust didn’t, and they were the Legion equivalent of Team Titans by being a spin-off from a parallel future that ceased to exist after Zero Hour. Thrust struck me as a swaggering Lobo wannabe, or maybe Slobo, given his bike shorts and tendency to be manhandled by Brin.

    7) Can we be absolutely certain that Monarch wasn’t Danny Chase? I have yet to read the Kirby Demon material. Guy Gardner being the Lantern who becomes a homicidal maniac during “Emerald Twilight” would have made so much more sense. He could have killed Hal (like Hal killed Kilowog) and gone on to battle rookie Kyle Rayner as a proper threat instead of a fanbaby cryfest.

    U) More BTS talk. Like all of the major Charlton characters, copyrights were never correctly applied during original publication, so the “Action Heroes” are technically in the public domain. This is why companies like PS Artbooks can still produce replica editions of old Charlton and Fawcett comics without any authorization from DC. However, moonlighting cop P.A.M. had some sort of handshake deal to retain the rights to Peter Cannon with Dick Giordano, which DC eventually honored, once the ’90s series was cancelled due to low sales. I assume DC surrendered the Thunderbolt trademark, but while there’s no real demand, we’ve never seen any of the stories published by DC reprinted (though Pete Morisi’s unused Secret Origins story finally surfaced during the initial Dynamite mini-series. We never successfully convinced Ryan Daly to cover that one, did we?) Anyway, the DC Thunderbolt has turned up occasionally, including the 2010 mini-series DC Universe: Legacies, without acknowledgement to the rights of the Pete Morisi estate. Without checking for certain, I’m pretty sure that I have collected a complete run of every Thunderbolt series, though I’ve barely read more than an issue or two of any given run, based on nostalgia from early exposure to the character and my fondness for the art of P.A.M. Also, the Mike Collins series seemed super boring from what I did read. Finally getting to the point, Tabu was in the Charlton stories, and is therefore not (exclusively) owned by DC. To my knowledge, the other three characters from the Supporting Cast entry were generated at DC, and I assume they retain those rights, unless someone who read the Dynamite series (which as I understand it also contain the other PD Charlton Action Heroes) can say otherwise. Thus ends my attempt to make something interesting of this entry.

    8) I’m getting the impression Who’s WhOTMU: The Definitive Podcast of the Marvel Universe is forthcoming. Maybe paranoia would light a fire under my butt to get back to sorting through all those hours of recordings I have been seating the aforementioned butt upon since before the pandemic. And speaking of asses, you guys have picked up a bit of pottymouth in the home stretch. You know, Xum’s Who and the (vastly inferior) Who’s Who in Martian Manhunter made it out into the world. Can we perhaps manifest a crowdsourced Who’s Who in the DC Universe Update ’94? Or we could all get together for another DC Sampler style journey into the heart of darkness through the DC Comics Editorial Presentations of the early ’90s?

    V) Jerome K. Moore was a beast, and deserved so much better from this industry than 91 DC Star Trek covers and 17 Green Arrow back-ups in Detective Comics. I think his last substantial work in comics was inking some Joe Mad knock-off on a 2008 Wildstorm World of Warcraft series. It’s a travesty. Moore drew entries in four issues of OG Who’s Who, one Update ’87, and one other looseleaf. That’s less often in total than we saw Sandy Plunkett’s work in the Deluxe Edition of OHOTMU alone (I’m not checking for duplicate entries.) With output that makes Brian Bolland look prolific by comparison, sure, let’s waste his talents on the Patricia Trayce incarnation of Vigilante. Never a great character, but the Adrian Chase version made a big impression on me in his first appearance. It was mostly down to the costume, largely a light-absorbing black silhouette with only modest highlights like cold reflective goggles. Despite his posturing, Frank Castle is still a human being in an intimidating uniform with a lot of visible anger and sadness. What I dug about the Vigilante was the coldness of a near-inhuman killing machine, anticipating the T-800 in this regard. The simplicity of the look spoke to his barely resembling a human being, which is ruined when the “V” on the chest is contouring boobies, with a second V right about the lady’s vajayjay. Unmasked with blonde hair blowing in the wind, encumbered by all this gear to indicate need… Vigilante’s a girl now, so she needs more toys to do half the job Adrian Chase used to, because she’s just Slade Wilson’s occasional reoccurring sidekick and bed partner. It’s gross. But yeah, this image is the best thing associated with Vigilante III, and I especially appreciate the doll-sized, literally diminutive representation of Deathstroke barely visible at her feet (but also, between her legs?) I do think it’s telling that in all the back page images, Trayce is in Chase’s superior costume, not her own wack gendered variant. Yes I said “wack.” Update ’93– word to your mother, yo.

    9) You see Rob, you just express gratitude at the beginning, when someone takes the time to craft a lengthy response and provides copious material to be repurposed for podcast material. Not making allusions to the Unibomber or whatever that throat noise was when you got to my closing comments.

    Willoughby Kipling, starting with the last letter I will ever type in a comment on a DC Who’s Who Podcast comment, is Goodwill Constanteen. My initial strong interest in the excellent early Doom Patrol episodes was indefinitely rerouted by a side quest, but I was around long enough for appearances by that guy from Supernatural. Not the angel one who dressed like Hellblazer, but the devil guy who was now clearly playing a John Constantine-alike that I assumed was created for the TV show. My bad, but also, their bad. Stan Woch is usually a good artist, so I guess somebody told him to draw bad like Richard Case to better match all his crappy entries. What a loser to go out on.

    10) All kidding and/or passive/open aggression aside, I became a regular podcast listener with Fire & Water, and the urge to finally commit to podcasting myself originated in my still largely unmet desire to see OHOTMU covered in the exhaustive way you guys did Who’s Who. Listening to and commenting on your own commentary on the DC Universe of this period has been one of my great joys over the past dozen years. While I remain notoriously anti-social, I still value the friendships and acquaintanceships developed around this podcast, and I don’t think anyone will ever replicate the community or chemistry Rob & Shag developed over the course of what is surely and rightly one of their proudest accomplishments in life. I love you guys, and will miss this time together.

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24. Shag, the podcast that covers L.E.G.I.O.N. Is the L.E.G.I.O.N. P.O.D. Cast from the awesome Legion of Substitute Podcasters at http://paulfrench.ca/losp/
    In my humble opinion, the BEST LOSH podcast out there. Maybe Rob should take a listen and see what the greatest team of the future is all about.
    Long Live The Legion!!!

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25. The team entries stole the show this time. Parobeck on JSA and Maguire on Team Titans were both fantastic! Very different pieces and styles. The original and newest teams. Oldest and youngest. Oddly poetic for both to be in this issue, and such wonderful art to go with each. Love them.

    So, not to make Thrust even more 90s than he already is, but I don’t remember if his heritage was discussed. In the Timber Wolf mini-series, we learn his mother is a Durlan which gives him a degree of shapeshifting. Also, it’s heavily hinted in the dialog but never outright stated that his father is Lobo. Check out the markings around his right eye for a visual link to the main man. It’s a little difficult to see on the entry, but it’s easier to tell in the TW comics. So very 90s.

    Ah Vigilante, I liked this character, and Jerome K Moore does a beautiful job. (And the tiny Deathstroke in the piece past V’s left foot cracks me up.) I just came across Jerome’s Green Arrow/Black Canary backup stories in Detective Comics from the 80s, and for any fans of Canary’s jazzercise outfit, oh my!
    But shouldn’t this be Vigilante 5? See there was the Earth-2 Vigilante who appeared in the golden age and was in the Seven Soldiers of Victory, like shown in JLA #100-102. However, an Earth-1 Vigilante debuted in JLA #78-79! So that’s two Vigilantes, like the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman of Earths 1 and 2. Meaning Adrian Chase is Vigilante 3, and whats-his-name the bailiff who wore Adrian’s costume for maybe a year(?) would be 4, making Pat number 5. And why do I think of these things??!!

    Thanks for another great episode, and I’m ready to see the next phase of this show!

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    1. Thank you for pointing out the thing I’m most annoyed by for this issue and the thing I’m a bit surprised neither Rob and Shag picked up on. This is definitely Vigilante V, as after the Golden Age hero, three different people wore the costume in the pages of the 50 issue run. (If you count the Earth-1 Vigilante as a separate character it would actually be six, but since this is post-Crisis, I’ll consider it one.) While Adrian Chase wore the costume at the start and end of his 50-issue series, Alan Welles and Dave Winston both also wore the costume in that series, marking them as Vigilante III and Vigilante IV.

       Perhaps even crazier is the fact that we’ve had four more Vigilantes since Patricia. Adeline Kane took the identity for a short time, followed by three new characters all of which starred in short-lived series: Justin Powell, Dorian Chase (who at least was written by Marv Wolfman), and Donald Fairchild.

       I will take a moment to recommend Paul Kupperberg’s Vigilante here by the way. It’s kind of ignored these days, but he wrote some truly amazing comics during his 30-plus issue run on the book.

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       1. I’m not sure if I should reply “you’re welcome” or “I’m sorry.” Vig-pendantics, unite!

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26. I’ve told the story on my blog, which I’m sure all of you read religiously 😀 , but Who’s Who is a big reason I started reading Power Girl. And thanks to that I’ve read some amazing comics that I would never have ever thought about, for almost five years as it happens, so I have to thank you for that! So cheers Rob!

    Talking of I was going to make a disparaging comment about Arion never looking up his granddaughter, Pee Gee obs, but I looked up the series and Kara makes a couple of appearances with her paying a major part of the final issue (#6). Which I should have expected really as Paul Kupperberg has already written for Power Girl (her ’88 mini-series). It is suitably vertigo like and I look forward to covering it up in the future. Also, it might be me but his whole look with the widow’s peak and square face reminds me of another character, especially his cloak wrapped around him pose, though I’m buggered if I can place just who that could be.

    The JSA is a group that I’ve grown to love over the last few years, and whilst obviously feel they’re missing someone v. important it’s nice to see them back (for this era), even irascible Wildcat! It obviously changes after this issue was written, but it does seem to have the same problem as the original version of the JSA with Hawkwoman being the token woman on the team.

    I would have been worried about saying too much, but I can see someone has already dropped a good chunk of their thesis already! I look forward to the tl;dr on the “surprise” Impact finale!

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27. So, in the same year this came out, we also got Phil Foglio’s Stanley and his Monster miniseries, and in that series Phil needed a street level magician type character, but not only did DC not let him use John Constantine, they also nixed using Willoughby Kipling. So we wound up with a third character of this sort, Ambrose Bierce.

    I wonder if that drama didn’t inform the choice to give W.K. an entry, to ‘prove’ that he was a serious business character.

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28. Wow. What an awesome ride! I can’t believe I’ve been listening to this amazing show since 2017 (I found the show just before you started on the loose leaf volume, and binged the first part in a matter of weeks). Thank you for the hours and hours of entertainment so far. I can’t wait to see what is next!

    Now a few comments about the issue itself. I have opinions.

    Arion – I didn’t like the look of this version of the character. I preferred when Busiek & Pacheco (RIP) used the classic long hair look in the Camelot Falls story in Superman.

    Bloodwynd – He has popped up relatively recently as a background player in Grant Morrison’s Muiltiversity. He had no lines, and was inexplicably partnered with an early version of Gypsy.

    Congorilla – While I have no opinion about this era of him, the whole idea of Congo Bill had to go, as the Great White Savior of Africa trope was really all he was created to be in the Golden Age. When he merged with the Golden Gorilla, it was at least a step in the right direction to give him more super-heroey powers, though the stories still read as Great White Savior of Africa. His powerset changed a bit when he was introduced in James Robinson’s version of the Justice League (just before New 52). He was still roaming the jungles of Africa during the 30’s. Eventually, after he merged with the supernatural Golden Ape for decades, his human body died (with the poor ape’s mind in it) and he was then stuck in the Gorilla’s body. He was now immortal and could change size as needed. I don’t think he has been seen in the New 52 or Rebirth eras (minus appearing in the better-forgotten-about Convergence).

    The Darkstars – I have never been a fan of the Jim Lee/Image style of art. Even when I was a teen in the 90s and everyone else was fawning over Spawn and Youngblood, I recognized the anatomy and storytelling were bad, just with lots of lines added to hide things. So I was turned off of Darkstars, even though the whole space cop plot was right up my alley. I did pick up issues from time to time, but it never grabbed me like the Green Lantern Corps did. The Darkstars were whittled away in numbers by a bastard son of Darkseid (are there any other kinds?), Grayven, until there were only four left. Eventually even they met their fates in the Adam Strange miniseries that was a prelude to Infinite Crisis.

    Doomsday – Big sigh. Just, no with this character. He brings out the worst in Superman, making him act stupidly for the sake of stories (why wouldn’t Superman use tactics and long-range attacks like heat vision? Why would he not use his super-smart brain? Why would he only fight in close quarters combat?). Since then, and he is used as a Worf character: Showing how awesome and strong the hero character is by taking down Doomsday.

    Guy Gardner – I liked this era of Guy, costume notwithstanding (I agree with Frank about a guy from Baltimore wearing cowboy boots). He was loosing his attitude for attitude’s sake, and was starting to become a more well-rounded character. I always hoped they would someday revisit him controlling Sinestro’s gold ring when they created the Sinestro Corps. If he was able to wield it then, why didn’t one seek him out when their recruiting campaign went into overdrive?

    Justice Society of America – HELL YEAH!!!!! Man, I LOVED this book, and the majority of that was Parobeck’s art. It was so crisp and clean. The anatomy and storytelling were strong. He just go it. To me, he was the antidote to the Image-ization of comics at the time. Sadly, we lost him way too soon. I look at artists who came after him: Darwyn Cooke, Frank Cho, Dave Bullock… His styles and storytelling would have fit right in as comics finally got away from the over-rendering of the ’90s.

    Lex Luthor II – Look, this wasn’t Lex Luthor II, no matter what the in-story cover was. This was Lex Luthor. His relationship with Supergirl was icky, but not unsurprising given past beats of the character (remember, in the World of Metropolis mini by John Byrne, Luthor had a teenaged Lois Lane strip searched while he had cameras capturing the whole thing. And then he “contented himself” while watching it). He was always about subjugating women and asserting dominance. So of course when a naïve young superhero came along that he could control, he took the opportunity. He was “eww factor” long before he had any grievances against Superman. The new body just gave him more cover to be that way since he was now “younger.”

    The Linear Men – The third Linear Man on the right of Liri Lee is, in fact, Rip Hunter. He was just Nineties-fied. It turns out this was just a cover for Rip to keep an eye on the Linear Men, and he broke away from them in The Kingdom miniseries by Mark Waid. In that series we see that Rip has been caretaking not just time, but Hypertime, thus revealing that the Linear Men weren’t the real guardians of time, because they were too rigid in what they believed time should be.

    New Earth – Although I had been reading back issues of Legion from the ’70s & ’80s, Legionnaires was my first real foray into the world of the Legion. And. I. Loved. It. Sadly, this iteration of the team would only last 18 issues before Zero Hour rebooted the 30th century. Bendis brought back New Earth in the latest version of the Legion, but it has a dynamically different look.

    The Ray – Another favorite hero from this era. Of course looking back, he is just another white male superhero (this time in Philadelphia!), but I really dug him. I liked the look and I liked his power set. I was happy when he joined the Justice League, and puzzled when he joined Young Justice (he was too old for that team). They introduced a totally new Ray during the New 52 (Lucien Gates), who hasn’t been seen since his initial miniseries, which is a shame because we could use more Korean American representation in comics. Still, I am happy they brought Ray Terrill back and what they have done with him in the Rebirth era, though he has disappeared recently. Hopefully he will get some page time soon.

    Team Titans – Oh, man. Not much to say that hasn’t been said already. I thought Killowat and Nightrider were Morts. For some reason, I really liked Redwing (minus the awful hair). Maybe it was the wings. Maybe it was the origin story by Adam Hughes (that was probably it). I was bummed that she was one of the characters that was wiped out by Zero Hour.

    Vigilante III (or, correctly V, as pointed out by Tim Price) – Liked the character, hated the tactical vest. She looked so much better in the Adrian Chase costume. She basically became a background character. The last notable appearance of her I remember is in JSA: Our Worlds at War. She denied she was a legacy hero of Greg Saunders, and that she was a bounty hunter. That was her only contribution to the issue.

    Willoughby Kipling – I only knew this character from the Who’s Who entry, since I didn’t read Doom Patrol at that time. I had no idea how prominent he was in the series. But I was fascinated by his character showing up on the TV series.

    Well, those are my thoughts, good and bad. Once again, thank you Rob and Shagg for taking us back to the glory days of ’80s & ’90s DC comics. I can’t wait to see what The Who’s Who Podcast transforms into now that the main mission is done. I plan to be along for the ride!

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29. Really, really late to the party. Started listening to Who’s Who a few years ago, then got distracted by life and stopped. I started up again and am currently up to your 2020 episodes. I haven’t gotten to the Robert Greenberger episode yet so I don’t know if you have already addressed this. A good way to end the show would be to cover characters that Who’s Who never covered.

    There are at least half a dozen Western series I heard of. Long running adventurers of the Golden Age; some from the Silver. For a series whose mission statement was supposed to be a celebration of their history a lot of their history was left uncovered.

    Besides, where else am I gonna get a chance to talk about my beloved Green Glob.

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30. Yes, you are right, Shag … … you can learn more about Guy Gardner if you listen to the JLI podcast.

    You can learn MORE about Guy at the wonderful “Just One of the Guys” podcast done by the late, great Shawn Engel.

    https://twotruefreaks.com/podcast/qt-series/just-one-of-the-guys/page/23/

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    1. Absolutely. Thanks for mentioning Shawn’s wonderful podcast! Miss him!!

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31. R.O.B. (Robotic Organism Billionaire) hates the acronyms, eh?

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32. Some time ago Shag was doing commentary on a character who was receiving martial arts training from a man called Richard. He was confused as to why DC simply didn’t say it was Richard Dragon. There may have been legal reasons for that.
    I was considering compiling a list of characters that DC left out of the first series, including major supporting characters. Lord, there were a lot. That series was by no way “definitive”. A strange thing happened when I got to the character of Barny Ling from Kung Fu Master. While his first comic book appearance was in Richard Dragon Kung Fu Master that was not his first appearance.
    The characters of Richard Dragon, Barny Ling, O-Sensi and several supporting characters and villains in the early run of the series actually appeared in the novel Dragon’s Fists by Jim Dennis. Dennis was actually a pen name for Denny Oneil and Jim Berry. Oneil simply adapted much of his novel to the comics. DC may not have owned the rights to the character’s name at that time.
    I believe they brought a new version of Richard Dragon back in the New 52 so that issue may have been resolved.

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33. With how this show keeps coming back sporadically, you two are becoming the real life installment of the Forever People (“The Who’s Who podcast again?! Are you F#*&in’ kidding me?!?!”). Kidding aside, I’m so excited for another episode!

    Atomic Skull – I love the original so much, mostly because how goofy, I mean awesome, the costume is. This ’90’s version just breaks my exxxtreme to the maxxx heart.

    Bloodwynd – This is also around the same time I gave up on the JLA, Rob. In fact it was around this time I was giving up on comics entirely. Stupid ’90’s.

    Justice Society of America – Love this listing!

    Vigilante III – I know I shouldn’t like this, but hawt dawg she’s hot!

    It’s great to hear there’s more episodes to come, but it’s a little bitter sweet.

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