#I know i know i smooshed DC and Marvel together don’t think about it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thebibliomancer · 7 years

Text

100 Days of Comics! 045/100: Legends of the Dark Claw #1 (1996)

So today’s pull from the box of mystery brings us... Amalgam.

Oh dear.

Okay so once upon a time, Marvel and DC had a crossover and then the universes were poorly jammed together. No, I’m not talking about JLA/Avengers.

So a bunch of Marvel and DC properties were smooshed together into a new Amalgam Universe. I’ve heard that the majority of the Amalgam titles were Not Very Good and kind of half-assed. I’m not expecting much. Maybe some yuks.

Then again, Dark Claw is what you get if you squish together Wolverine and Batman which seems... like not the natural two choices for characters to be squished together. They mostly only have three things in common: a tendency to mentor the youth (although Bruce usually mentors boys and Wolverine girls), saying they are the best there is at whatever they do, and being incredibly popular.

So yeah. That third point is why they were probably jammed together.

So who else has been jammed together? We have Dark Claw’s young ward Sparrow - Jubilee dressed as Robin. Unclear whether she has her firework powers still.

There’s Huntress - Carol Danvers dressed up as Huntress. Since she lost her powers in the deal, its not really worth it. And I can’t figure out what exactly Carol Danvers contributed to this mix aside from the name.

The Hyena - Joker plus Sabretooth WHICH SEEMS LIKE A TERRIBLE IDEA.

So with all of that established, what kind of plot do you get by mashing up Wolverine and Batman?

Mostly a batman plot with references to mutant healing factors, adamantium, and two of Wolverine’s supporting cast dressed as Batman’s supporting cast.

We start off with Dark Claw attacking Hyena at the Gotham Gazette printing plant, having deciphered his fiendish riddle of “black and white and red all over.”

... Is Hyena part shitty Riddler in addition to Joker Sabretooth?

Anyway, they tussle for a while and Dark Claw threatens to slit Hyena’s throat but Hyena’s gang shows up and uses bullets until Dark Claw has to run away to his Claw Copter. As piloted by Sparrow. Who remarks that she would have preferred to be called Death Urge Overdrive instead. Which leads me to believe that Sparrow is Robin + Jubilee + Negasonic Teenage Warhead DESPITE THE DATES NOT MAKING ANY SENSE FOR THAT.

Also, Hyena throws Frolic Frags at Dark Claw but they just make normal grenade noises. That is a missed opportunity. They should have made laugh splode noises like the Green Goblin’s pumpkin bombs in Spectacular Spider-Man.

But I digress and digress and digress.

“Meanwhile, in the artsy-trendy section of Gotham” Huntress Carol Danvers in name only breaks into the swank penthouse of one Logan “techno-wizard, painter, sportsman and walking enigma.”

Yup. Instead of using the guise of an idle playboy, Logan does... a bunch of stuff sounds like. But he’s most famous for his distinctive art style “said by some critics to ‘possess the fury of feral slashes.’“

LOGAN YOU ARE BAD AT SECRET IDENTITY.

Honestly, most of the paintings we see look like he just paints slashes on top of amorphous blobs.

Huntress finds a bunch of photos that don’t jive with Logan’s public records - including a picture of him in the RCAF with Creed H. Quinn, alias Hyena.

And then she opens his closet and finds a bunch of Dark Claw outfits. YOU ARE BAD AT SECRET IDENTITY LOGAN.

There is no reason for them to be in this closet. Its revealed in just a couple pages that there’s a pneumatic tube down to the claw cave (actually called the Barrow, meh) behind a secret panel in the closet so why not have your costumes down there instead?

Well, so because Huntress can discover his identity.

Dark Claw pops out of the secret panel and demands to know what she’s up to. She explains she wasn’t after Dark Claw. She was investigating Logan’s ties to Hyena.

So Dark Claw decides to explain his whole backstory. And since he’s Batman + Wolverine, its twice as tragic. When he was five, his parents were killed in front of him by an armed robber. He was sent to live with his mountie uncle in Alberta who was then killed by some poachers. Then he was sent to an orphanage. And then as soon as he was old enough he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. That’s where he met Creed.

Him, Creed, and four others were chosen for a secret Canadian project to create remorseless killing machines devoid of all human compassion. Because Amalgam Canada is still a terrifying hellhole.

The project succeeded too well with Creed. Because the researchers forgot that the best thing about unliving weapons is that they are usually inert weapons that don’t get up and start doing harm by themselves.

Logan was a failure. BECAUSE HE HAD A CONSCIENCE.

Geez, Dark Claw has swung a huge 180 from saying he couldn’t let Carol walk out knowing what she knows to telling her everything she didn’t already know.

I’m also kind of confused what Dark Claw’s motivation is. Batman, of course, is motivated by MY PARENTS ARE DEEEEEEEEEEEEEAD. I guess he leans more towards Wolverine’s motivation. Or he just really hates Creed.

Anyway, Sparrow is outraged that Dark Claw let Huntress into the Claw Cave.

Sparrow: “This is totally uncool and unacceptable!! We can’t let her walk out of here knowing about all this--!!”

Dark Claw: “What do you want me to do, Sparrow--? Take her out in the woods and lose her?”

Sparrow: “Well--YEAH!!”

Heh.

And then Sparrow completely forgets about murdering Huntress when Dark Claw praises her for hacking into the typesetting computer at the Gotham Gazette and gives her an affectionate and painful looking punch in the arm. She seems thrilled.

They discover that shitty Riddler Hyena changed the morning’s headline to “AF1+NaCN=”

THE HYENA IS GOING TO POISON AIR FORCE ONE WITH SODIUM CYANIDE!

They take the Claw Copter and reach Air Force 1 just as its about to take off and Sparrow tells “the slut” to take her shot with the sniper crossbow grapple.

Because one of Jubilee’s prevailing traits at the time was a hatred for all other women, I guess? She definitely did not like Psylocke. Both out of ‘she tried to ninja murder us’ and ‘she has a much better butt than I do’ sort of thing.

Speaking of the portrayal of women in this comic, I don’t think we see either of the two female characters ever standing flat on their feet. They are always tippie toe. I hate 90s art with all of my hate.

Anyway, I digress and digress and digress, Dark Claw swings over to Air Force 1 and climbs into the wheel well. He SCHRIIP!s his way into the cockpit with his adamantium claws and tries to warn them about Hyena.

Hey, how do you think the secret service would react if an unidentified aircraft buzzed Air Force 1 as it tried to take off and then a man armed with very long claws that somehow retract into his arms seriously how do they do that ripped his way into the cockpit?

Did you guess 'they’d shoot him a lot’ in the less than one second you had between reading the end of that paragraph and starting this one? Because if so, you win the prize!

Meanwhile, Agent Sanderson is checking the potty for other interlopers and gets shot a lot by Hyena who tells the dead agent “This is no way to get a head, lad! This would probably put your career in the toilet -- that is, if you weren’t already dead!!”

Because the last thing someone wants to hear before dying of being shot a lot is shitty puns.

BADUM PISH!

Hyena sets off the shaped-like-a-masked-dog-head gas grenade filling the plane with sodium cyanide but Dark Claw adamantiums the hull open.

The explosive decompression blows them both out but also vents the gas. PRESIDENT CLINTON IS SAVED!

Because that’s totally Clinton.

Hyena has a parachute and gracefully parachutes to safety but luckily Sparrow is hanging nearby in the Claw Copter and manages to catch Dark Claw.

He thanks Sparrow and tells her to circle back so he can get another crack at the Hyena! Except the next issue box implies next issue we find who Huntress is really working for.

Although I think this was just a one-shot masquerading as the first issue for an ongoing series. Kudos to them for sticking with the illusion. They even have a bunch of fake letters in the letter section alluding to previous comics that don’t actually exist.

Implying that Amalgam didn’t only merge the main DC and Marvel continuities but their respective metatextual Earth Prime counterparts where the comics are published? Although in Marvel, that is in the main Marvel continuity. Marvel comics were even used as evidence in trials in the Marvel universe. Man, She-Hulk is great.

Geez, one of these fake letters even complains about the collector boom and big events and crossovers and metallic covers with die-cuts and holograms and thanks the creative staff for this book for writing a story for people who actually read it.

One goof though. If this is the first issue of the Legends of the Dark Claw book, where did these letters come from? Usually new books don’t get letters until the third or so issue, I think. Although I guess they were letters that were written to Sleuth Comics where Dark Claw got his start.

Amalgam! It put more effort into looking like a real ongoing than it did with the actual content sometimes!

#100 Days of Comics!#Amalgam Comics #Legends of the Dark Claw #Dark Claw #most of this was eh but i did like Robin Jubilee #i think jubilee as robin has better chemistry with wolverine as batman than robins usually do have with batman #i dunno #her not liking dark claw letting someone else in on their secrets is valid #but the way she reacts makes it seem like she's mostly upset that dark claw has another woman in his life #which in fairness comes from marvel jubilee #but what a waste of a carol danvers

2 notes · View notes