Eclipso: The Darkness Within: Batman Annual #16 (August 1992)

I've got to believe The Joker is less dangerous Eclipsed.

Eclipso: The Darkness Within: Batman Annual #16 (August 1992)
By Alan Grant, John Wagner, Vince Giarrano, Clem Robins, and Adrienne Roy
Cover by Sam Keith
Edited by Scott Peterson and Dennis O'Neil

• Sixteen annuals! That's fucking crazy! That means that by 1992, the Batman series had been going since 1976! Incredible!¹

• During the Detective Comics Annual, The Joker escaped Arkham with the help of The Ventriloquist and Scarface. He then escaped Batman with the help of Commissioner Gordon and Eclipso. So now he's on the loose and Batman's trying to track him down. That's probably why Robin couldn't get in touch with him during the Eclipso Dinosaur Rampage in Robin's annual.

See?! Every orifice.²

• While Batman fishes a bunch of people out of a bus that crashed off of a bridge³, The Joker sits on a tall, teetering throne of money questioning a corrupt Gotham cop about the Black Diamond.

• Visually, this issue is really impressive. But I'm a Lit Major. Visually doesn't do it for me. I need, um, pathers? Pathros? Whatever that thing that the movie Pig had way, way, WAY too much of!

• I rarely look up artists to see what else they've done because I rarely one into one that fits both of these categories: I'm super impressed by their work, and I'm not already familiar with their work. Vince Giarrano did the art for "The Human Flea" story in Batman: Shadow of the Bat but his stuff didn't really strike me in those two issues. I was probably too stunned by Alan Grant using a flea circus as a plot device in the waning decade of the 20th Century to even notice the art.

• Anyway, I checked out Vince's current site and, um, wow. I'm envious of every woman he paints!

Oh to be able to pull off this outfit! I mean, sure, I'd look great in the boots. Not sure I could do a midriff exposing shirt and short skirt though!

• What impressed me most about Giarrano's work so far in this annual are his panel compositions, layouts, and "camera" angles. It feels like Alan Grant gave him a lot of room to explore the pacing of the story in this annual as it has so many extra pages to fill. The scene I skipped over completely where Batman rescues people in the sinking bus just has some wonderful shots.

• Oh! And the panel with the Joker on the teetering throne of money? DC should have made it a poster.

This could have been hanging on my wall under the bagged WaRP Elfquest issues displayed backwards to show the characters, my LPs of out-of-print⁴ Alice Cooper LPs like Zipper Catches Skin and Flush the Fashion, my massive Christina Applegate poster, and the ads for the It television mini-series cut out of the TV Guide.

• I should probably scan the sequence that impressed me enough to think, "Wait, this is really fucking good!", and caused me to go back to the beginning of the book to really look at the art.

Okay. That's enough about the art. I'm beginning to chap my lips on Vince's butthole.

• The Joker's henchmen display why Gotham's major villains can never get away with any crime in Gotham. First a couple of his guys throw the body of the now dead and rictus-mouthed cop on top of a passing train where it's easily spotted by Batrope swinging Batman. Second, a couple of his other guys steal the Black Diamond from the police evidence room only to run into a guy who used to work for them who's got Batman on his ass about the Joker's possible locations. I realize most of this is bad luck and coincidence but when Batman patrols your city, you've got to take every precaution you can to mitigate those factors while doing your henching!

• Here's a handy acronym for Gotham Henchman: ABNBO. Always Be Never Being Outside!

• Manzoni, one of the Joker's ex-henchman who Batman's been leaning heavily on, chases Joker's current henchmen who have the diamond. He's not doing it because he's afraid of Batman though; he's doing it because The Joker is, quite literally, sitting on 25 million dollars which Manzoni helped him steal and never got a cut of.

• To get Manzoni off of their tail, one of the henchmen grabs up one of the Black Diamonds and thinks about how angry he is at Manzoni. Pretty soon, orifice smoke!

• A dragon manifests from the henchman's anger and goes after the convertible with Manzoni in it. It picks them up and drops them to their death. Batman witnesses it and shrugs even though he doesn't know exactly how innocent the men in the car are.

Batman's come to terms with his superhero impotency. He saves whomever he can and doesn't lose any sleep over the others, I guess.

• It's disturbing to see Batman so cavalier about the death of a couple of Gothamites when you know, if they were innocent or important to the plot, Batman would figure out how to save them in the blink of an eye. But since the reader knows they're basically criminals who were just trying to shoot some other criminals, it's somehow okay that Batman can't save them, knows he can't save them, and just watches them die.

• Batman does check on the victims of the dragon, at least. Manzoni has somehow survived⁵ and he tells Batman that they were on the tail of some of The Joker's henchmen when the dragon appeared. Batman knows the body of the cop was dumped on top of a train by The Joker so he just follows the train back to a likely place where the body could have been dropped on it. Plus earlier, he and the cops found some pink wax under the dead cop's nails!

• Batman solves the easiest case of his life when he locates an overpass above the train and sees a Wax Museum nearby. "Let's see Superman solve this shit!" he cackles as he climbs the building to check if it has a skylight to drop through.

• I just made up the entirety of that last bullet point to save time and then I read the comic book and, um, it's exactly what happened. Sure, most if it was already telegraphed and obvious. But, um, that bit about the skylight? That was just me being cheeky.

Cheeky but correct.

• Does every building in Gotham have a skylight? Is a local ordnance that mandates skylights? Did Bruce Wayne lobby that contracting law onto the books?

• Batman crashes down, disarming The Joker and stealing his bag of Black Diamonds. Too bad The Joker already had one in his grubby mitts!

• Batman defeats The Joker's henchmen while The Joker tries to muster up an Eclipso.

Is this where we learn The Joker loves Batman so much that he can't even pretend to be angry at him?

• I wonder if there are 1000 Pink Diamonds that cause a person to be possessed by Aphrodite?

• The Joker does manifest into Eclipso (because he's aggressive!). Batman, knowing he can't match Eclipso, does the only thing he can: turn into Eclipso himself. Now Eclipso once again has to kill himself before he can properly manipulate whoever wins.

• The battle rages for several pages and it's both entertaining and hot. And then it suddenly becomes genius⁶.

I wasn't expecting this to become a critique of the comic book medium and how characters are trapped in an endless middle story.

• Batman and Joker, being evenly matched as Eclipsos, battle until the sun comes up. Eclipso is banished and then, I mean, you know who wins that fight. Batman takes Joker out in one punch and hauls his ass back to Arkham.

The Ranking!
What's going on? I generally hate Annuals and I'm often disappointed by these massive crossovers. But here I am enjoying annual after annual! I even liked the Robin annual! I must have done permanent damage to my brain when I took a hammer to my head. Should I re-read Scott Lobdell's New 52 Teen Titans?! Do you think I'd like it now?! What about New 52 Superboy?! Maybe I'll finally understand Ann Nocenti's writing! It's a new dawn for my love of comic books! I'm so fucking excited!


__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ This bullet point is so facetious that it shouldn't even garner it's own footnote but I am posting it on the Internet which means it's necessary to point this out: that was a dumb joke, stupid.
² See Footnote 4 in Robin Annual #1
³ Don't worry. Nobody was hurt by the bus plummeting into the water from a great height even though busses don't have seat belts or harnesses. Even the baby was perfectly fine!
⁴ At least at the time. I'm not sure when Alice's albums between '80 and '83 were eventually re-released on CD.
⁵ But not for long!
⁶ Or amateurish if you'd rather your stories didn't explicitly point out the smart stuff. I, for one, love how Grant worked it here. He gives you several pages for what he's doing to dawn on the reader before going, "Well, this is the point. Did you get it? I bet you got it! But I know some of you didn't. So here ya go!"

Eclipso: The Darkness Within: Wonder Woman Annual #3 (August 1992)

Eclipso: The Darkness Within: Wonder Woman Annual #3 (August 1992)
By William Messner-Loebs, John Dennis, Dave Johnson, Ande Parks, Clem Robins, and Matt Hollingsworth
Cover by Joe Quesada and Kevin Nowlan
Edited by Frank Pittarese and Dan Thorsland

• Let's get back to bullet points, shall we? This is like The Matrix but for nerds. Hmm. There's something wrong with that statement but I just can't identify quite what it is.

• Eclipso currently sits on his bone throne in a crater in the moon. Do you think the creators of this series meant for that to be so sexual? Did I invent that his throne was made of bone just to create the image of a penis in a moon hole? It's hard to say when about 66% of every thought I have is a delusion created by my brain to make the world more entertaining for myself.

• According to my blog's tags, this is the first comic book I've reviewed by William Messner-Loebs.

• The cover of this comic book turned my pants into a bone throne. In a mere matter of seconds, it will also look like a triple wax carwash down there. I think I have a thing for feral women.

• This issue begins by firing all circuits on my male gaze just to have my horned-up levels' legs kicked out from under it by reading the caption.

Too bad I'm not into necrofellatio. Is it weird that I began that sentence with "too bad"?

• The person making that terrible assumption about Wonder Woman is, surprisingly¹, an on-the-scene local news reporter. The reporter is a woman so she's apparently never heard of the Girl Code. I also have never heard any of the Girl Code because when I ask about it, they usually just say, "Ewww!" But I think there's something there about hyping each other up and not assuming that they've died and then broadcasting their humiliating failure to the entire world².

• As she broadcasts, Cassie continues to pull down her knickers and shit all over the Girl Code.

"Being that Wonder Woman can't fly, she had to walk instead of fly, which she can't do, fly, I mean. She sucks at flying. Just the worst. Probably dead because she can't fly."

• Some guy named The White Magician shows up and, well, even in 1992, I'd maybe have thought twice about that name. He wears white and has white hair but he also has what is colloquially thought of as "white" skin so, you know, maybe that name is saying more than you actually want it to say? Because "white", especially in 1992, was the society accepted neutral position³ which meant if the person's "race"⁴ wasn't mentioned, one would assume "white". If you have to go above and beyond to express your "whiteness" or your "Defender of Western Civilization" status⁵, you're probably making a bigger statement than just the color of your costume and hair.

The White Magician's power is literally making people choke on their own shit.

• The White Magician spends a full page or more invoking all sorts of DC magics that I've never heard of before. Zatanna could have saved the day with a couple of backwards words. Madame Xanadu could have wrapped this shit up by manipulating a bunch of actual heroes in no time at all. But this guy is doing the equivalent of a Great White guitar solo in a small club.

Love bites! Love bleeds! Oh fuck! Oh shit! Why's my dick burning?!

• While White Magician fucks around with the dark arts for the benefit of the news crew, Wonder Woman climbs up a building and tries to hug the terrorist into surrender. You know how she does. She's all, "Look, you're being a toxic male. Maybe get therapy?" And he's all, "I'd rather turn on a machine that removes the friction between air molecules, murder the HR rep of the job that fired me, take a woman and her small child hostage, and blame everybody who doesn't have a metagene for my failures!" And Wonder Woman is all, "Okay, but maybe don't do that?" And his gun is all, "Bratratrat!"

• Wonder Woman takes a few shots to the wrist bracelets and everybody around her is all, "He's a lone gunman! Being a white man, he's the only one responsible for his actions! He doesn't represent his entire race in the same way society demands anybody of a minority group represents the entire group!" Except it couldn't be that explicit, right? Because this is 1992 and according to Comics Gaters, comics only went woke in this millennium. Right?

I guess white supremacists in 1992 could easily overlook a blatant allegory simply by saying, "Well, I don't have a metagene so this guy obviously doesn't represent my idiotic way of thinking!"

• The main problem with this guy is that his metagene has yet to be activated. So he's just a mediocre white dude. But he knows he's better than other people because he's white. I mean because he has a metagene!

• I had to check the cover of this issue again because I got the odd feeling that I was reading a Bloodlines annual and not an Eclipso annual. I guess this is just foreshadowing for next year's big annual crossover event. Maybe this guy becomes Gunfire or Dildosniffer. Were those Bloodlines characters? If they were, I know one of them was written by Warren Ellis.

• The White Magician's spell of bowel-cleansing fear takes place just as Wonder Woman's de-escalating the situation. It affects everybody on top of the skyscraper: the killer, Wonder Woman, and the two hostages. Wonder Woman's big fear is disappointing her mother and the Gods. I would have guessed it would have been Batman.

• The killer, Roger or Robert or whatever, dies from choking on his own shit while Wonder Woman and the hostages just get a little collateral shit swallowing. But I have to think part of the reason Wonder Woman failed was because she was calling him by the wrong name while trying to calm him down.

Whoops!

• Even though The White Magician fucked everything up and his costume isn't anywhere as spectacular as The White Rabbit's, Wonder Woman still accepts an invitation to his mansion for dinner. As a way to apologize to her for completely fucking up the rescue, of course. Not as a way to get into her biker shorts. Not that she's currently wearing biker shorts. But she does go to the dinner in her star-spangled onesie.

• The White Magician's dinner conversation makes me think that perhaps my earlier discussion around his name was way more astute than even I would have guessed.

First he starts the edgelord shit with all the "Oh, I imagine you'll be offended by just about everything, no?"


And then he, um, just gets right to the KKK point.

• The hostage from earlier was a Black woman. Diana was insistent she was the real hero because she threw off the fear spell to save Diana from falling off the building while Diana hung by her foot holding the young girl who first fell off the building. The White Magician wouldn't even acknowledge this fact and now we see why. Obviously a Black woman couldn't be the hero! The look Diana gives this guy says it all.

• Wonder Woman, while pointing out how seriously pathetic white supremacists are, pulls the old Don Draper in the elevator meme exactly two decades before Don Draper does it.

Although Don Draper is lying in that scene and I've got a feeling Wonder Woman seriously means it.

• 24 pages in and not a whiff of Eclipso.

Speaking of whiffs . . . yes please!

• It turns out the local reporter Cassie and the White Magician are fucking. It also turns out Wonder Woman likes watching them fuck.

• Okay, so maybe they don't actually fuck on panel while Wonder Woman watches. But you don't think this is the reaction of somebody who loves the cuck chair?

Messner-Loebs staying true to Wonder Woman's origins as a horny little Amazon.

• Ultimately, I have no fucking clue why Wonder Woman went to dinner at the White Magician's home. I mean, the only conclusion I can make is that she was horny after her close call with death and he was offering. Perhaps when she was blasted by his Spell of Terror and she inundated with feelings of self-loathing, she needed a good fuck to get her confidence back. And the White Magician, while racist, is good looking enough. Also he has a penis⁶.

• The reason Cassie was calling Wonder Woman politically correct is that Wonder Woman admitted that justice, in the parlance of Titus Pullo, makes her wetter than October.

• The White Magician gives Diana a circlet with a Black Diamond on it. She demures but quickly accepts because she's super fucking horny and I can't believe I don't remember this comic book! How did I not start reading Wonder Woman after this?! I should have assumed half of each issue was just Diana trying to get laid.

• Wonder Woman slips into some kind of hypnotic fantasy after donning the Black Diamond. She believes that she has taken the White Magician to Paradise Island and he's brought in developers and horny men. When she confronts him, he goes all Twitter Incel on her.

If that doesn't get her to Eclipse, I don't want to think how far he'll have to go.

• The White Magician isn't working with Eclipso. He just wants Wonder Woman possessed with Eclipso's power so that he can bind her and drain her of the power. Wonder Woman winds up bound by tentacles in the garden with resting Eclipso face.

• Oh, also? It doesn't take. Eclipsed Wonder Woman escapes to either kill the White Magician or eagerly sit in the cuck chair.

• PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BE CUCK CHAIR!

Okay. Close enough!

• I don't want people to think I'm into women in hardly any clothes choking other women in even less clothes. I mean, I guess I am because that panel was hot. But I'm not so into it that I actively look for it! What kind of sicko porn search terms do you think I like?! If one of your guesses was "Penguin Costume With Butt Access", congratulations. I guess?

• Wonder Woman lets Cassie go and then fails to kill the White Magician as he slips into another dimension just as she goes for the kill shot. Eclipso, now in total control, decides he got his revenge by trashing the White Magician's house because Wonder Woman is free to fly off to the moon at the end.

• Fly? I thought she couldn't fly? I guess she's more Eclipso than Diana now.

The Ranking
Goddamn! This issue was actually kind of fun. And confusing. I think maybe it contained a lot of actual lore and characters from the 1992 regular series. Or maybe it didn't and this was just a short little story about a horny woman, a racist illusionist, and the God of Vengeance? It's weird because I hate annuals but, I mean, this one was enjoyable! I bet it was because I went back to using bullet points! Yeah, I probably enjoyed it because of the thing I did and not because of the art the artists did! Whew. I feel better now! Go me! __________________________________________________________________________________
¹ Not actually surprising.
² At least the part of the world that receives broadcasts from WTBN.
³ I'm not saying it was correct. I was just media-biased shorthand accepted by a white supremacist society
⁴ In quotes because "white" and "black" are not exactly the most scientific way to determine a person's race. Unless you're a Nazi scientist or somebody's Republican uncle.
⁵ Looking at you, high school friend Soy Rakelson, who disappeared from Social Media in 2016 after Trump won the election because you knew your "Defenses of Western Civilization" were no longer sustainable with your "morality". I mean in your eyes. Everybody else already knew they weren't sustainable and wondered why you kept insisting on debating obviously (to everybody but you, apparently) racist shit. Especially when your closing argument for every debate was, "Where's your faith?" Oh? Sorry I argued facts and logic while you were gummed up in religious dogma while concentrating on attempting to trap us with pre-approved C.S. Lewis logic traps.
⁶ I'm assuming.