Bizarro Back Issues

Around Halloween, there is nothing I like more than a comic where horror elements start to creep in when they clearly have no business being there. I mean, I'll gladly read eighty issues of Tomb of Dracula and I love plenty of comics that are just Hellboy grumping at werewolves, but if you give me a comic where all the spookums and haints show up out of nowhere and start hassling Spider-Man or somebody, I am delighted. That's why I was pretty interested when pal and occasional ComicsAlliance contributor Kevin Church suggested that I add Star Trek #4 to my annual scareathon, mostly because he sold me on it by telling me it was the comic where the starship Enterprise found a haunted house. In space. He wasn't kidding: This is a Star Trek comic where the Enterprise finds a haunted house in space. And that's after Dracula shows up.

Of all the spooky characters that I throw the spotlight on at Halloween, there's one that I've never really written too much about: Vampirella. That seems like a pretty big oversight, too. I mean, I once wrote about the Tomb of Dracula anime for Halloween, you'd think I could muster up a few words for one of the most recognizable horror characters of the '70s, right? Well, the fact is, Vampirella's not actually that scary. I mean, despite her name, she's not actually a vampire. She's an alien from planet Drakulon, a planet where water has the same composition as blood. Or at least, I think that's how it worked, until 1997, when it was revealed that Drakulon was the product of memory implants and she was actually the daughter of Lilith, mother of all vampires, who sent her to destroy a 2,000 year-old conspiracy organized like a vampire Catholic Church (complete with a Vampire Pope) with the help of a time-traveling nun. Hoo boy. This is going to get complicated.

Here's a weird thing about this career that I've found myself in: A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a few disparaging remarks about one Andrew Bennett, the weepy star of DC's I... Vampire, and the next day I got an email from one of my childhood heroes asking, jokingly, what I thought of the Andrew Bennett story that he'd done in the pages of Brave and the Bold. The writer was Batman: Year Two's own Mike W. Barr, and the issue in question was BATB #195, where he and artist Jim Aparo sent Bennett on a team-up with the Caped Crusader to deal with a sudden wave of vampire crime in Gotham City. To be honest, it's really one of those perfect superhero comics for Halloween. It's fun, it's exciting, and as you may have guessed, it's more than a little weird. Largely because it takes the World's Greatest Detective to figure out that all this vampire crime might have something to do with Gotham's newest business, Club Dracula.

Ever since I wrote that Ask Chris a few weeks back about how I'd rebuild the Legion of Super-Heoroes, I've been seized with the desire to go back and re-read some of the classic Legion stories from the Silver Age, but when I sat down to do just that, I was really surprised. Not because the stories are weird, mind you -- I knew they were pretty bonkers from the first time I read them, and they certainly haven't gotten any less weird since -- but because they threw the light on one of the most grievous oversights of my writing career. See, as happy as I was with the lineup I came up with for that column, I left out the character who is unquestionably the most powerful member, the actual, official "King of the Legion." I speak, of course, of Bouncing Boy.

This week sees the start of DC Comics' big The Multiversity event series, and if the related books on sale over at ComiXology -- ostensibly to get everyone up to speed -- are anything to go by, then that thing's going to be chock full of weirdos. Seriously, I already knew they were going to be throwing Captain Carrot in there, and for some reason people can't get enough of that one story where Batman becomes a Dracula, but there are some deep cuts in there, like that one Chuck Dixon comic where the Justice League are all cowboys, and this weird thing from the '90s called Kingdom Come, where Superman fights Cable. And then there's Kamandi. But should Kamandi start crossing over into the main DC Universe, it won't be the first time. For that, you have to go back to Bob Haney and Jim Aparo's Brave and the Bold #157, for a story where Kamandi was sent back in time, and ended up being brainwashed, made invulnerable, poisoned with snake venom, joining up with the mob and punching Batman in the face. It... It's a weird one.

If you were a child in 1990, then you wanted to be a ninja. I actually suspect that this is true for literally every child of every era who has known what a ninja was, but I can really only speak from my own experience, and that experience had a lot to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There were other ninjas of course, but while Snake-Eyes never really did much on TV and Sho Kusugi required a trip to the video store, the TMNT were swinging katanas and nunchuks around everywhere you looked. They were everything my eight year-old self wanted to be, and since growing a shell proved difficult, ninja training was obviously the next step. Sadly, I never had a copy of 1986's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Authorized Martial Arts Training Manual, or else I probably would've grown up into a life of silent assassination and smoke-bomb escapes, rather than just sitting in my office making jokes about comic books. But with a new theatrical movie and ninja interest returning to an all-time high, it's worth looking back now, to see if we can't find out a few ninja tricks to apply to our day-to-day lives. Spoiler warning: Unless your day-to-day life involves the proper handling of a sai, we will not.

We're only a few weeks away from the debut of a brand-new Sailor Moon Crystal animated series, and folks, I could not be more excited. I love Sailor Moon, ever since I saw the original anime during its run on Cartoon Network when I was a kid, and I've been looking forward to the debut of Crystal from the moment it was announced. In fact, in order to prepare for the debut, I've even gone back and started reading through the manga. The thing is, while I've read a lot of Sailor Moon, there's one piece of the franchise that I've never been all that familair with: Naoko Takeuchi's Codename: Sailor V, which I only picked up recently. And it is fantastic, if only for the story where Sailor Venus beats the living crap out of some MRA gamer dork at the local arcade.

Last weekend I moved to a new apartment, and since I am in fact the World's Foremost Batmanologist, there was a moment where I genuinely considered buying myself a giant penny and putting it in my new office to mark the occasion. I didn't end up doing it, largely because giant pennies cost an awful lot of money even before you factor in what you'd need to spend to get a robot Tyrannosaurus, a giant Joker card and a glass case with a friend's clothes hanging in it, but what really sealed it was going back and looking at the time that Batman himself moved and noticing that even he didn't bother to bring his giant penny. Heck, he didn't even bother to bring the last three letters of Alfred's name. And if the Caped Crusader himself is going to pack light for a move to a new place, who am I to say I know better?

If you were watching WrestleMania XXX this weekend, then you saw one of the most shocking moments in the history of the King of Sports when Brock Lesnar defeated the Undertaker, bringing a 23-year winning streak at WrestleMania to an end and leaving so many fans with burning questions. Questions like "is it really a winning streak if it's only in effect one night of the year and other losses

If you've been reading ComicsAlliance for a while, then you've probably noticed that when it comes to back issues, I tend to gravitate towards the ones where really weird stuff happens. Power Man and Iron Fist battling the Daleks, Godzilla traveling through time to battle dinosaurs, an entire robot Smallville being constructed specifically to fool aliens into nuking the wrong city -- that's all st