I just read one of the weirdest series I've read in a long time, namely the 18 issue run of The Comet from the early 90's Impact imprint. The Impact line was DC comics using the Archie/Red Circle heroes, which DC had licensed from Archie.

So, the first 14 issues or so of the series are standard, and pretty uninspired, superheroics. Really, nothing very interesting about any of it unless you're a Red Circle fan like I am, in which case it's kind of interesting to see DC's take on the Red Circle universe and how they develop and grow it. Otherwise, though, really run of the mill, cookie cutter stuff.

And then, holy crap.

So, the entire Impact line ended kind of abruptly after The Comet #18 - all the other titles were also cancelled the same month I believe, and a follow-up mini-series that was supposed to relaunch the Impact universe ended up just being an epilogue for it instead.

I'm speculating here, but with the writing on the wall and a line-wide reboot in the works, writer Mark Waid apparently decided to just say the hell with it and wrote one of the craziest, whiplash-incuding endings to a series I've seen.

Basically, The Comet - who is a young dude named Rob - has been trying to find out what happened to his parents, who went missing in issue #1. The Comet himself had a weird memory lapse at the same time - weeks if not months have apparently passed that he has no memory of, and now he has super powers.

Suddenly, at the end of the series, The Comet discovers that he and his parents were kidnapped by aliens. One of the aliens accidentally mind-switched with Rob. So Rob is actually a human mind in an alien body, and his super powers are alien abilities.




But that's just the start. See, the aliens didn't randomly pick Rob. Actually, the whole thing was orchestrated by Rob's girlfriend! Now, for the entire series, Rob's girlfriend Victoria has basically been Lois Lane; she's a TV reporter, and while she and Rob have had some fights over his role as The Comet, she's mostly been supportive of him, though in recent issues their relationship has wavered, potentially driving her into the arms of a police detective named Ben who has also been a supporting character since #1.

But forget all that! Actually, she's a ruthless harridan who set up Rob and his parents after cutting a deal with the aliens to get them human specimens to experiment on! And she's been faking her love for Rob all along just to get all the scoops about The Comet's activities! Now she unmasks him as an alien on live TV! But wait, there's more - see, Ben, her new love interest, is actually one of the other aliens!

Seriously, this just totally comes out of nowhere, upending everything the series has been setting up for over a year. It's crazy.

So, anyway, there's an alien trapped in Rob's real body. Except, one of The COmet's villains figures out Comet's secret identity and murders the alien! There goes Rob's human form. Now he's stuck as a giant green monstrosity with one eye. Huntd by pretty much all humanity, The Comet ends up tracking down and killing the other aliens - two of which are impersonating his parents - and in an effort to save his parents, who are in a deep freeze, he fights Ben. Except, after they get off of Earth and into space, the spaceship explodes, killing all of them!

THE END!!

What the hell just happened?!

There's tying up loose ends, and then there's nuking loose ends into oblivion.

Sounds like a late 1990s Spider-Man storyline.


I had the first issue of this series as a kid. Never would have guessed it went there!

Yeah. Like I said, if you go in looking for McGregor,you're going to be disappointed. You really have to already be a fan of 7OS Kirby to get it.

I am (a fan of 70s Kirby) and I love that Black Panther run, especially the earlier issues. I like the McGregor run, but like most of the things I have read by him, he gets too impressed with his own authorial voice and thinks he's more clever than he is, and it makes parts of the run a real slog to read through. McGregor is someone I feel needed a stronger editorial hand in pulling back his self indulgent tendencies which often ranged into the excessive range. He's good, he has great plots and themes, but his pacing and prose lose me at times. Same thing happened with Killraven and Sabre when I read them, I just had to put it down, walk away and read something else for a while before I could come back and finish it.

-M

(and yes, Kirby could be self-indulgent as well, but the strength of the visuals and the pacing of the books kept that self-indulgence from slogging down the books).

Ewww. You just lumped Panther' Rage and Killraven into the same category

Exactly why I've avoided it.

I tried to read the three issue Blackhawk mini-series from Howard Chaykin. It was very well received at the time (1987) but I found it to be a dense, nearly incomprehensible mess. I gave up after one issue.

I also read the entirety of Y: the Last Man. It's interesting, despite being more or less written for the trade, I suspect the series actually had a much greater impact reading it month to month. There's a passage of time that is important to the characters but that didn't fully come across reading them all in one go; four+ years pass over the course of the story, but I just didn't feel that as much as I think I would have if I had been reading it monthly. Overall I thought it was really good, though it fell just a little short of great for me.