Week Twenty-Five

 

Pencils by: Joe Bennett, Dale Eaglesham, Phil Jimenez and Patrick Olliffe

 

Starring: Bruno “Ugly” Mannheim, The Black Marvel Family, Ralph Dibny and Dr. Will Magnus

 

Guest-starring: SABBAC, Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, Infinity Inc., Felix Faust, the Icicle, the Tigress, Professor T.O. Morrow, Alan Scott and Michael Holt

 

Cameo-ing: Mirage, Mockingbird, Kite-Man, Scarface and the Ventriloquist, Etrigan, Klarion the Witchboy and Neron

 

Introducing: Chang Tzu, Matrix

 

52-word Review: The Black Marvel Family beats the old (white?) Marvel Family to the punch against SABBAC, while Ralph hears of other devils. Egg Fu gets a makeover; Alan Scott gets an advisor. It’s a very busy, very fun issue. Best line? Osiris’ “Happy Halloween, Judeo-Christians!” With a book this good, it certainly is.

 

Look closely at: The meeting of the Gotham crimelords on page three. There’s a large bald man smoking a cigar and wearing a white blazer who bears a passing resemblance to Marvel’s Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime. In the seat next to him is a red-haired man wearing dark glasses (the sort a blind man might wear) and a suit coat (the kind a lawyer might wear), who bears a passing resemblance to the Kingpin’s archenemy Daredevil’s secret identity. Sticking out of his back is a bloody knife. The Kingpin finally killed Daredevil! At least in this universe…

 

Mistakes and Nitpicks: At the end of the sequence set in “Elsewhere” (read: Hell), Faust’s soul is seen crumbling to dust and blowing away over the course of four panels. In the first, a village of some sort is clearly visible in the background, but it disappears for one panel before reappearing again.

In the Icicle and Tigress versus Infinity Inc. battle, the Icicle's face is repeatedly mis-colored; appearing the color of nomral flesh rather than icy white. 

Back-up Feature: The origin of Nightwing, as drawn by George Perez.  Considering Dick Grayson’s long history in the DCU, this is one of the origins that is more interesting for what it doesn’t say than what it does. The first four of the seven panels is devoted to the murder of Dick’s parents and Batman deciding to step in and raise him as his partner. Only one panel is devoted to him becoming Nightwing, and nothing is said of where he got the name (Superman), nor is anything said of his time spent with any of the Titans incarnations, his relationship with Starfire or his time in Bludhaven.

 

The last panel is a strange one, showing the giant face of a monitor staring down at Nightwing, as the narration mentions, “Grave celestial forces beyond our ken have informed him that his survival in the multiverse’s recent Crisis was neither expected nor foretold…and that his ultimate fate is yet to be determined.” Sounds like ‘Wing will be chatting with a Monitor in Wednesday’s Nightwing #126, and that the multiverse is, indeed, back. Interesting.