2018.030 DC Meets Looney Tunes

DC Meets Looney Tunes
Written by: Frank J Barbiere, Tony Bedard, Sam Humphries, Tom King, Steve Orlando, Jimmy Palmiotti, Bill Morrison, Jim Fanning, Bill Matheny, Juan Manuel Ortiz
Illustrated by: John Floyd, Tom Grummett, Scott Hanna, Kelley Jones, Barry Kitson, Aaron Lopresti, Jerome Moore, Mark Texeira, Lee Weeks, Dave Alvarez, Ben Caldwell, John Loter, Bill Morrison, Juan Manuel Ortiz, Byron Vaughns
DC Comics

140 Deadman By Kelley Jones: The Complete Collection

I'm sure I've mentioned on the blog my love of Deadman.  He's a character who always always always appeals to me.  And this collection is a great one.  It collects together three separate series drawn by Kelley Jones.  And this is why when I think the name Kelley Jones, the first thing that springs to my mind of Deadman.  His stylized version of the character is amazing.

What we have here is an 8 part story that originally ran in Action Comics Weekly.  It involves zombies and possession and all that good ol' New Orleans voodoo nonsense.  Mike Baron wrote the tale, as he did the other stories in this book.  It's followed up by the two part mini series Love After Death.  Deadman meets, well, for lack of a better term, Deadwoman and instantly falls in love.  It's a great tale of the supernatural, love and betrayal.  And finally, the mini series Exorcism, which follows up both of the previous stories in this volume.  Deadman is distraught after the events of the Love After Death series and his basically lost his mind.  Madame Waxahachie, a character first introduced in the Action Comics Weekly series is brought in to help fix what's happened.  It's a great, but disturbing tale (and it also features the Phantom Stranger, another of my favorites!)

If you're a Deadman fan, this book is for you.  It's such a great read, cover to cover

Deadman By Kelley Jones: The Complete Collection

Writer: Mike Baron

Artist: Kelley Jones, Tony DeZuniga, Pablo Marcos, Vince Giarrano

DC Comics

013 DC Elseworlds: Batman Vol 1

I'm a sucker for a good compilation book.  Something like this.  The first volume of Batman Elseworlds stories.  The book clocks in at about 500+ pages.  There's a lot of cool stuff in here as well as some mediocre stuff.  I love the concept of the Elseworlds stories.  Basically, take your characters, put them in any time, any locale, any situation and build a story around them.  Some succeed, some fail.

The book starts off with Alan Brennert's Holy Terror.  I just recently read this story for the first time in years in the Alan Brennert Batman collection that came out last year.  He only wrote a handful of Batman tales, but they were all great.  This was no exception.  I think I enjoyed it more this time than when I read it a few months ago.

There's a Batman in the old west drawn beautifully by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez.

Robin 3000 was a two issue mini-series that I have no recollection of but enjoyed the hell out of.  It felt so much like a 1950s pulp.  I kind of wish there was more than just the two issues.

Batman/Dark Joker: The Wild.  Nice tale, but probably my least favorite of them all.

Batman/Houdini was a lot of fun.

My favorite story, however, was probably the Frankenstein tale told with Batman characters.  It was great.  It wasn't just sticking the characters we know into a different setting.  The characters were molded to fit the roles they needed to fill.  It worked so well.

I've got a second volume sitting in my backlog pile to get to yet.  I can't wait.

DC Elseworlds: Batman Vol 1
Writer: Alan Brennert, Elliot S. Maggin, Alan Weiss, Byron Preiss, Steven Ringgenberg, Doug Moench, Howard Chaykin, John Francis Moore, Jack C. Harris, Mike, W. Barr
Artist: Norm Breyfogle, Alan Weiss, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, P. Craig Russell, Kelley Jones, John Beatty, Mark Chiarello, Bo Hampton, Terry Bingham, Howard Chaykin
DC Comics