I literally bought this comic because I had heard that there was an issue of Eclipso that was a complete bloodbath with a bunch of heroes being killed off in an assault on Eclipso’s base/temple in the Amazon.

It wasn’t.

I will say that I’ve heard good things about this series, which spun out of Eclipso: The Darkness Within, the 1992 annual crossover (something DC latched onto for a few years after the success of Armageddon 2001).  It was a bit of an odd turn for DC because they didn’t often give villains their own series.  And by villains, I mean villains, not anti-heroes, because Eclipso clearly is the antagonist in this book.  It was a failed experiment, though, because #18 is the last issue, so like the JLE annual I just wrote about, this is mostly setup.

The plot is basically that Bruce Gordon is in the jungle to gather as many heroes as he can to take on his arch-nemesis, who has serious power at this point.  Eclipso, meanwhile, is talking to the Phantom Stranger, who has shown up to talk like he always does.  The art is very much of its time, this being ’90s DC and the original Eclipso artist having been Bart Sears, so it ranges from halfway decent to laughably bad.

Still … the book is only 18 issues long and ties into the Will Payton Starman series that I’ve been collecting (well, at least Eclipso: The Darkness Within does).  I’m probably going to find the bookends of that crossover just to have them for completion’s sake and then will consider getting the rest of this if it comes on the very cheap.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Keep (for now, anyway).