Every Wednesday morning, I make a blind pull from Siri's (randomized) choice of one of the 20 alphabetically-organized shortboxes that constitute my comics collection, (re-) read it, write about it, and publish the resultant review/memory/whatever. Earlier installments live here.

(Box05): oh god you did it again (inauspicious box-selecting debut, Siri) but what an opening line: "WE DON'T KNOW WHERE THEY'RE FROM OR WHAT THEY WANT -- OTHER THAN OUR SPINAL FLUID."

How very, very 1993: Super-mullet! AzBats! (for whom I still have an odd affection – perhaps because he was so exemplary (by design) of the 90s aesthetic, as if it vomited all over an institution) Bloodwynd! (Martian Manhunter, IIRC – even though he's behind Pres. Clinton one page and Bloodwynd is on the next as part of a group getting chewed out by Amanda Waller nevermind that later he and MM are fighting the same creature on the same page; J’onn was a busy bee in the ‘90s) heavily-armored male characters interspersed with barely-clothed female characters spouting cheesy expository dialogue!

IIRC, this was the bookend to a series of annuals, back when each of DC's annuals had an overarching theme: one year was Elseworlds, another Year One, another ECLIPSO: THE DARKNESS WITHIN. Didn't this one, BLOODLINES, spawn a whole bunch of new, EXTREME, takes on DC characters (the ones who survived their spinal fluid being consumed)? Fate, Manhunter... there were a few others that escape me. Was this the one that Robinson's STARMAN series spun out of? If so, not all bad. (Note: need to pick up that omnibus...)

As for the content: mostly a bunch of fighting and hitting things with aforementioned cheesy, expository dialogue. See photo excerpt above and you get the picture.

What I've come to recognize about the 90s in comics was that it wasn’t entirely devoid of good ideas but rather that most of them were ruined by the EXTREME stylistic excesses of the day: look to the Graham / Roy 2012-16 redux of Liefeld's PROPHET or several of the WILDC.A.T.S. revivals to see this stuff work in the hands of less baroque hands. All that being said, I'm not sure there's much to salvage with BLOODLINES / BLOODBATH – though I suppose it could be argued that the CW's FLASH merged this (minus the spinal-fluid-sucking creatures) with FLASHPOINT to create that whole "new metahuman" storyline in season three.

Someday, randomness, you'll remind me of the good in my early comics collecting days. Someday – but not today.