Noteworthy Issues: DC Challenge #2 (December, 1985)

Ah, here I am.  Back with the utter weirdness that was DC Challenge, the round-robin mini-series where each creative team came up with another weird scenario where the rules were things like end on a cliffhanger and a title, and any DC character was free to use except whichever ones the creative team was currently working on.  The first issue had dead celebrities, weird demons, and Batman about to get nuked along with half of Gotham City.  Can the second issue get any crazier?

Oh hell yeah.

Issue:  DC Challenge #2, December 1985

Writer:  Len Wein

Artists:  Chuck Patton and Mike DeCarlo

The Plot:  The plot, it thickens.

Commentary:  How crazy is the second issue of DC Challenge?  It opens with the creative team recounting the plot for two pages before jumping into the story they were handed.  Remember, one of the criteria was the creative teams would have no contact with each other.  That means Wein, Patton, and DeCarlo were coming into this with no more knowledge on what the first issue’s creative team was planning than anyone else.

Such an approach makes reviewing the issue difficult.  Is it fun?  Oh yeah.  I think it might even be a step up from the first issue.  Likewise, this is some sort of quintessential Silver Age DC sort of storytelling (even if it came out in 1985).  That means it’s more creative in what happens than, say, something approaching the way real people believe.

What I am left with is a couple things where Wein and Co. take up some of the plot points from the first issue such as showing who ambushed Superman on the moon (Mongul) and how Batman defused a bomb from across town (it was running off the city’s power grid and he was in the powerplant).  But then the crazy starts.  Jonah Hex gets transported to the present.  B’Wanna Beast and Congorilla join forces to fight another alien demon thing.  And Aquaman is lost in the desert.

Why is Aquaman in the desert?  I am not even sure.  But this is the era where he’d die if he wasn’t exposed to some kind of water once an hour.

Will the crazy continue?  Well, the cliffhanger has Hex in the backseat of a car without a driver headed towards a nun and a bunch of kids crossing the street.  Someone has to figure a way out of that one.

Grade:  B+