BIOGRAPHY

Jack of Fire first showed his craggily face in SHADOWPACT No. 1, functioning as the right-hand man to a villainous sorceress known as Strega. Well...technically he didn't actually show his face, as half of it has covered with a black cloth, but...shut up! You get my point.

At the time, Jack of Fire and Strega had partied up with a group of supernatural characters—Bagman, Sister Shadow, White Rabbit, and Karnevil (the last of whom isn't ostensibly supernatural, I suppose, but is pretty freaky nonetheless)—and taken the name "The Pentacle" to represent their association. Strega's goal was to open a mystical doorway for her dark lord, using residents from the town of Riverrock, Wyoming as sacrificial fuel for her blood-soaked conjurings.

In this scheme, Jack of Fire appears to be little more than a hired mercenary working for Strega. He considered Strega's summoning, whatever the eventual enormity of it, to be, "Not our concern."

Jack's association with the Pentacle in this endeavor serendipitously brought him into conflict with [Daniel Cassidy], the Blue Devil, who at this time had banded together with other mystical heroes to form a new incarnation of the Shadowpact. During this encounter, Jack claimed to be Dan's older brother, an unintended side-effect of Dan's bargain with Neron (see [UNDERWORLD UNLEASHED]). According to Jack, Dan was so eager to benefit himself that, essentially, he neglected to read the fine print on the agreement, which cursed his entire family, including his younger sister Mary Frances, and even his deceased parents, who were "snatched out of paradise and are even now burning in the lowest pit of hell." ([SHADOWPACT No. 2])

Prior to this, there had never been mention of Dan having an older brother, though his sister was a semi-reoccuring character in the BLUE DEVIL series. Dan failed to remember having any siblings.

Regarding this initial conflict between mystical groups, owing to a slight change of White Rabbit's heart, Shadowpact managed to contain the villains, break Strega's necromantic spell, and free the town of Riverrock. Only Strega escaped, though she was later slain by the villain Doctor Gotham.

Jack of Fire, himself, found himself forcibly shuffled off the mortal coil by a blast from Blue Devil's Trident of Lucifer ([SHADOWPACT No. 5]). He subsequently effected an off-panel escape from the lower pits, and when next we hear his name invoked, Blue Devil is beating it out of a Private in Hell's Army by the name of Rath, aided in this hard-knocks escapade by his old sidekick [Eddie Bloomberg], otherwise known as Kid Devil ([TEEN TITANS No. 42]).

Somewhat later, Blue Devil found that he had become part of the landed gentry in Hell (see [SHADOWPACT No. 10]). Vexed by this condition, he nevertheless took advantage of his station to retrieve the souls of his parents to his Hell-situated estate. His parents confirmed the prior existence of an older brother named Jack, a known-hooligan even in his parents' estimation.

Concurrently, Blue Devil was in the midst of waging a legal battle against Hell for breach of contract: in a gamble to reclaim his soul, he claimed that his contract specified that he was to become a Hollywood star in exchange for his soul, an eventuality that never came to pass. His lawyer, however, was unable to persuade the panel of demonic judges when it became known that Jack had, himself, sold his soul and the souls of his family to Hell in a Faustian act prior to Blue Devil's. ([SHADOWPACT No. 16])

Jack of Fire is still at large.

SYNOPSIS

It's throw-down time at the Oblivion Bar and Grill. Oh...no grill? Well, just bar then. Zauriel vs. [Blue Devil], mano a mano, the thrill to implement God's Will. You get the point.

Carrying out his heaven-sent mandate from [SHADOWPACT No. 13], Zauriel brings his beef to Shadowpact's favorite haunt looking for the demon that has done so much good work making Hellish bargains seem the "with it" thing to do: your hero and mine, Dan Cassidy, the Blue Devil. The brawl for it all lasts about one second before Oblivion's friendly barkeep locks a Darth Vader-style telepathic death grip on Z and B's esophagi, so the fight is taken outside.

But Zauriel's heart isn't really in it, and once Blue Devil hears the charges against him, he realizes that he hasn't got a leg to stand on and submits meekly to his demise. But given a reprieve by the archangel, he does what any good spokesperson would do: he holds a press conference. To be sure, he sullenly gives himself a thorough lambasting for his decisions in life, and concludes that you can't do good by doing evil. Confession out of the way, a lawyer in attendance wants to make a legal case out of Hell's failure to honor the terms of Daniel Cassidy's Faustian contract.

Zauriel and Blue Devil retire to the Oblivion Bar where the latter announces to his Shadowpact cronies that the only acceptable option for him is to quit the team until he can clean up his mess, if he can ever clean it up. None to happy about it, the other members of Shadowpact concede to his desire but draft Zauriel as a temporary replacement.

Back on Earth, Doctor Gotham shrinks down to thumbnail size to chat up his buddy the Sun King, who is still calling that candle flame his crib. The little fire dude, worried that Shadowpact might screw up his plans for the "New Sunrise", orders the Doctor to call them out, which Gotham does by taking a space hop from his HQ at the Breed Building in Gotham to Chicago where he finds a bus full of school kids to hold hostage.

For more on this issue and others, visit the site.

SYNOPSIS

It's One Year Later™ and Shadowpact are cleaning up their mess in Riverrock, Wyoming, where they've just defeated the Pentacle. [Jack of Fire] gets a one-way trip back to Hell courtesy of the once-again-functional Trident of Lucifer, while his teammates earn a term of incarceration at Joshua Coldrake's Dark Tower in the Dark Tower dimension. Coldrake is a master of anti-magic, bound to the tower for a millenia or so, and he takes care of the mystically dampened inmates, including the Warlock's Daughter (Johnny Warlock that is), Laura Fell.

Shadowpact dropped Fell off here about a year ago promising to come back for her, but they're a little late for the rendezvous owing to having just lost a year. Unfortunately, she's SOL for now, because Shadowpact haven't made arrangements to bring her back yet. They promise to return.

Returning to their own dimension, Shadowpact (with Rex the Wonder Dog in tow) discover that they've been memorialized in their absence (presumed death). More than that, [Blue Devil's] apartment has been rented, Ragman's shop has been foreclosed upon, Nightshade's mom...well, she's still dead, and Nightmaster's Oblivion Bar and Inn is under new management by telekinetic flipper-boy Eddie Deacon.

To make matters worse, unbeknownst to the team, Strega, leader of the Pentacle, has woken her master, who has been sleeping beneath Gotham for forty millenia and now calls himself Doctor Gotham. He senses that this incarnation of Shadowpact was probably created to stop him from bringing the Sun King over, so he orders Strega to throw every available asset at them.

The first assassination attempt is made upon Ragman, but he's got it covered. Unable to add her to his rag suit, he just brute forces her through a brick wall. That's the Gotham way!

SYNOPSIS

Zombies!

Yes, when in doubt, throw in some zombies. The book opens upon Shadowpact members Nightmaster, Enchantress, Zauriel, Ragman, and Nightshade mid-huddle with a mob of zombies closing in for midnight snackies. Enchantress offs the houngan (Voodoo priest) controlling them, but the wild magic in the world means that the rules have been tossed out the window, and the zombies are unaffected, leaving Laura Fell, Warlock's Daughter, to haul their collective fat out of the fire with a dangerous spell.

Back at the Breed Building in Gotham, Doctor Gotham, still licking his wounds over [last issue's] trouncing and crying to the Sun King about it, asks the little fire guy for a loyal protégé. The Sun King gets all Minerva on him and pops a child out of Doc Gotham's brain, aging him to adulthood in a matter of seconds. The kid starts calling himself Devon and proceeds to haunt the Gotham night spots, scouring the city for women with magical potential on whom he can work his manly wiles, then feed to the Sun King.

Meanwhile, Nightmaster orders Enchantress to train Warlock's Daughter, though Enchantress isn't too crazy about the idea, so she kicks Laura's magical little tush and makes her cry in order to teach her a valuable lesson about believing in herself. Tough love, people. Tough love. This probably could have all been avoided had June Moon's mother simply breastfed her as a baby.

Concurrently, Nightmaster, Nightshade, and Ragman attempt a shadow jump through the Nightshade dimension, but instead find themselves trapped inside, with some zombie-looking mofos about to teach them a lesson. They look bad, but for all I know, maybe they're just Nightshade dimension Jehova's Witnesses or something.

And as the [Blue Devil] (remember him?) takes up a page to fight an army of Homo Magi, Laura Fell is sulking in the Oblivion Bar where Devon finds her. Dum dum dummmmm!

SYNOPSIS

Guess who's even crazier than the last time you saw her? Jean Loring—that's who!¹ Locked up tight in a dingy cell at Arkham Asylum, she is haunted by a voice in her head urging her to merge with the essence of the villain Eclipso, which resides in a black diamond in her room.² Naturally, she does, so she's outtie. End of prologue.

[Ragman's] in action, adding another patch/murderer to his suit of rags, when the rag costume teleports him off to the Forest of Mist—sort of a regular meeting-ground for mystic types. At said location, he hauls a flattened [Enchantress] out of some wreckage while a big mystic dude named Blackbriar Thorn dukes it out with a giant-ass Spectre—Godzilla-style! Because they can't rightly hang out there, the two heroes split for the Oblivion Bar, though it seems a lot of other mystics had the same idea, because the place is packed.

The Spectre is on a tear since losing Hal Jordan as a host, killing everybody who has anything to do with magic. Nobody knows why, but the Enchantress has had it up to here with that yutz, so she makes a motion to form a hunting party. Unfortunately, nobody's really picking up what she's putting down, since they're all banking on the high muckamucks like the Phantom Stranger and Doctor Fate to just deal with it like they always do.

Only problem is that the [Detective Chimp], soaking himself with alcohol over in a booth seat, knows that the Phantom Stranger has been transmogrified into a little black mouse, and he assumes that the other bigwigs probably aren't faring much better.

As the Oblivion Barflies form their impromptu hunting party, one of said bigwigs, the Wizard Shazam, prepares to face the Spectre.

COMMENTS

I didn't care particularly for this mini-series the first time I read it. There were a few factors at work negatively affecting my enjoyment here.

Firstly, by the time I got around to reading this, [SHADOWPACT No. 1] had already hit the stands, and frankly, I didn't get it. Bill Willingham, for all the good things I would come to later think about his run on that series, just hadn't bothered to explain himself in the first issue of SHADOWPACT, and I was baffled. I was all like, "Who are all of these weirdos and what do they have in common?" Dedication to that title allowed the team to cohere for me, but embarking upon DAY OF VENGEANCE, I already felt disgruntled, because it seemed like a prerequisite, and I really didn't want to have to get involved in the whole INFINITE CRISIS mega-event.

So there was that. And there was also this. I had just finished reading through IDENTITY CRISIS, a limited series that—though it had its moments—had left a bad taste in my mouth. Your mileage may vary, and that's cool. I can see both sides, though at this point in time, I would have been fine totally distancing myself from anything that came out of that series. Unfortunately, the whole bit with Jean Loring opens up this book and the character is integral to the story.

Then, on top of that, the Blue Devil seemed to me to have become a pretty dark character, and Willingham gave little indication in DAY OF VENGEANCE No. 1 that he would be going any lighter with him, so as a fan of the character, I was annoyed about that. To be sure, I don't think Willingham found his voice until later on, a little bit into the SHADOWPACT series.

So as you can see, DAY OF VENGEANCE wasn't driving me wild with excitement upon first read. It has been over a year since I read this, and coming back to it now for a second pass...well, I actually kind of dig it. I've got a better relationship with the Enchantress and Ragman now, so I'm actually happy to see them getting some good scenes now, as opposed to on the first pass, when I pretty much knew nothing about them and had no emotional investment in them, whatsoever, prior to this story.

Also, I just really like Justiniano's artwork. It's clean and bold, and his Ragman is one of the slickest renditions I've seen. Chris Chuckry's coloring and Walden Wong's inks are the perfect complement. It's attractive work, but appropriately moody.

SYNOPSIS

The Spectre is on a tear across the world punishing everybody who ever had an impure thought. Without a human host, the Spirit of Vengeance is no longer anchored to reality and reason, leaving it ripe to be influenced by the Jean Loring Eclipso, who is sort of like some kind of creepy child molester who plays upon the Spectre's childlike naiveté and puerile craving for approval. She plants the seed in the Spirit's¹ ghostly noggin that magic, itself, is at the heart of all evil. Which makes the first order of business, then, taking out the big guns: the Phantom Stranger, Doctor Fate, and Madame Xanadu, at which point it moves on to destroying mystical meeting grounds and various fonts of refined magic.

Cut to a backroom at the Oblivion Bar where [the Enchantress] is channeling the mind of Eclipso to uncover her sinister plan. Jimmy Rook, the Nightmaster and proprietor of the bar, has taken command of an ad hoc group consisting of himself, [Blue Devil], Enchantress, [Ragman], [Detective Chimp], and [Nightshade]. Rook closes down the bar and tells the gathered mystics to scatter on the wind, while his team takes a trip to the Mist Woods, where Echantress almost bought the farm in [DAY OF VENGEANCE No. 1].

Enchantress picks up the Spectre's mystical scent and the group breaks into two, with Detective Chimp and Nightshade following up on a Plan "B", while the rest pursue Plan "A", which entails attacking Eclipso head-on, hoping to destroy her and talk some sense into the off-the-reservation Spectre. Upon arrival, they find the Spectre in mortal (immortal?) combat with Captain Marvel, and Eclipso reveling in the violence.

MEMORABLE QUOTES

Enchantress: Do you know what Ragman did, over there? He kissed me! He actually thought we shared a moment!
Blue Devil: Burned!
Ragman: I said I was sorry. Now let it drop. I'm certain I'm not the only man in history to ever misread a situation.

COMMENTS

I think this is where the premise went off the rails for me the first time around. The Spectre falling victim to the influence of Eclipso (about whom, I admit that I know very little) and turning so quickly and easily to her cause was—and still is—a difficult pill for me to swallow. Even without a host, I felt that the Spectre should have a bit more backbone than that. I understand that the character is essentially a plot motivator for this mini-series—a means to an end—and it makes sense that if you needed a character powerful enough to take out all magic, you would use the Spectre, but even still, the motivation didn't ring true for me.

There is enough here to recommend it, but conceptually, the genesis of the story's chain of events is troublesome. I don't mind the Spectre fulfilling this role, really—I just wish that it could have been pulled off more organically, somehow.

That being said, this comic featured a scene that actually made me laugh out loud, with Ragman's ill-conceived smooching of Enchantress, and apart from my quibbles with the Spectre, features otherwise good characterization, and more strong artwork from Justiniano (the inking difference between Walden Wong and Livesay is hardly noticeable, except that the later might have brought a somewhat thicker approach, but in any case, a quality job).

Detective Chimp is probably the break-out star of this book. Bill Willingham seems to be having a lot of fun putting words into his mouth, and you never really question what a chimp detective is doing in the company of the rest of these mystic combatants, so Willingham is successful in that, as well.

I'm not crazy about Walt Simonson's cover to this one. The Spectre torturing a generic orange guy isn't really an enticement for me. I'd have preferred to see the stars of the series brought front and center. A misstep for Walt. Usually he's bomb.

BIOGRAPHY

According to [the Trickster], Bolt is "the Muhammed Ali of masked assassins." Once he hits you, you go down for the count. Of course, Bolt rarely resorts to hitting people in the conventional sense. Bolt's gimmick is the ability to electrocute his opponents through the act of shooting currents of energy at them—like a lightning bolt, you know? This is not an inherent skill. He has power generators within his costume--which also enhance his strength and agility--to accomplish the task. Those power generators can also be used to teleport himself within a certain, unspecified range of distance. Don't ask me how. Of course, since Bolt's power is not inherent, he must periodically charge up which thus limits the time during which he can effectively fight someone.

Bolt's initial appearance in the comic book was as a hired assassin getting paid by a cadre of megalomaniacal doctors to whack James Jesse, a.k.a. the Trickster. They wanted Tricky's shoes so that they might put into effect a plan to separate part of California from the rest of the state. I'm not even going to attempt to go into that right now. Read the [Professor Neemish] section if you want to know about it.

It was through Bolt's consistent pursuing that James Jesse came to call on his old pal [Dan Cassidy] for a little body guard work. The two teamed up at this point, but were ultimately unable to bring the assassin to justice. His work completed, and in a particularly sour mood over his duping by Professor Neemish, Bolt escaped from his first encounter with Blue Devil by teleporting to location unknown.

Bolt would eventually show up again during the Blue Devil's drive cross-country with [Wayne Tarrant]. The encounter was entirely coincidental. Bolt was blackmailing a group of East Coast-based villains so that he could participate in a caper to make off with a twenty-five million dollar Cray supercomputer from a Pittsburg trade show. Dan was at the time driving through town in order to pay a visit to his old pal Larry Bolatinsky at Carnegie-Mellon, but quickly found himself embroiled in Firestorm's battle against the five villains. Through Mindboggler's manipulation of Firestorm's vision, and with the help of Bolt's remote control to the mechanics of the Blue Devil costume, the two heroes were tricked into brawling with each other. Wayne dashed off in the [Devilmobile] to get Bolatinsky's aid in retaking control of the Blue Devil costume, only to discover a Dexter-style laboratory at his house and blueprints for the Bolt technology.

Wayne relayed the information to Blue Devil. Through accident, Bolt dropped his remote control allowing Blue Devil to reclaim the workings of the costume and take the fight to the electric assassin, who used up the remainder of his stored energy for a personal teleport back to his lab. Firestorm and Wayne were waiting for him, and the nuclear man put the kibosh on any further criminal plans. Bolt was taken into custody and delivered to the police.

This was the last to be heard from Bolt over the course of the Blue Devil series. [End of 1998 write-up.]

There's a gap here in my knowledge about the character, though I do know that he turned up like a bad penny very sporadically during the 1990s. Though—as second-rate villains are wont to do—he found himself in the hoosegow at the time that Sergeant Rock (or somebody pretending to be Sgt. Rock) took operational command of Amanda Waller's Suicide Squad. Per standard bargain, in exchange for leniency at his next parole hearing, Bolatinsky briefly became part of a team comprised of convicts tasked with suppressing a dangerously intelligent and aggressive breed of genetically modified soldier ants—an out-of-control project of LexCorp's bio-weapons division.

This mission didn't work out too well for the Boltmeister. An explosion, funnelled through an elevator shaft, caught him straight-up in the face, and Bolt was deep fried. I mean, facial reconstructive surgery just isn't going to do it here. Well...at least he wasn't denuded of his flesh by man-eating army ants. I'm a silver-lining kind of guy.

Contrary to all logic and continuity, however, this wasn't quite the end for Bolatinsky, though I'm sure it was no thanks to Killer Frost, cold-hearted chick that she is. (SUICIDE SQUAD (vol. 2) No. 3)

How did he survive? You'll have to ask the editors over at DC about that. Probably, when Brad Meltzer wrote him into an issue of IDENTITY CRISIS, the conversation in DC editorial went something like this:

Assistant Editor Valerie D'Orazio: Hmmm...wasn't this Bolt guy toasted and looking all corpsified back in Keith Giffen's SUICIDE SQUAD?

Editor Mike Carlin: Huh? You mean John Ostrander's SUICIDE SQUAD?

D'Orazio: Uhhhh...no? Keith Giffen did a SUICIDE SQUAD volume just a few years ago.

Carlin: Get out! Well, what if he did? I didn't read it. Did you?

D'Orazio: Actually, no. Didn't Sergeant Rock come back to life in that or something, and then it turned out it wasn't really him. Did anybody ever follow that up?

Carlin: ...

D'Orazio: Never mind—dumb question.

Carlin: Exactly. The only schmuck likely to know or care anyway is that weirdo who runs that Blue Devil website. Let's not mention any of this to Meltzer, okay? We don't want to make him mad at us. He's scary. He's sort of like Batman, if Batman were a bespectacled, balding novelist with a last name that sounds like a sandwich at Wendy's. No, seriously—when I asked him if he was going to tie up that plot thread about the Luthor battle armor, he literally made me piss myself. I'm not proud of it, but I did.

Something like that. DC editorial strikes again! Wait, what am I complaining about? Bolt's alive! That's awesome! And given the rather off-hand manner of his death in a little-read blood-fest of a series, it's a bit difficult to hold it against Meltzer for wanting to bring him back as a hard-luck jobber.

Wait—what?

Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! (Relax. He's okay.)

Anyway, Larry Bolatinsky turned up again as a down-on-his-luck super-thug looking to score a big deal on some Lex Luthor battle armor from a couple of run-of-the-mill skinheads. By this time, Larry had traded in his rootin', tootin' faux-dialect and the full supervillain garb for a fresh new Punisher-inspired look and attitude, kookishly complimented by Jim Carey's haircut from Dumb and Dumber. Yeah, thanks for that Rags Morales, if in fact that is your real name. It wasn't enough you drew Elongated Man as a cross between David Caruso and Ryan Stiles?¹

Damn you, Rags Morales! Damn you to hell!

Whoah. I have no idea where that came from.

In a spectacularly bizarre move, Bolt welched on his payment to the skinheads who then gunned him down like a chump. One was kind enough to stay behind and call an ambulance. Apparently, he felt bad about it.

Bolt showed up in the background very shortly thereafter in an installment of VILLAINS UNITED, so I'm beginning to wonder if there's not something going on here. Healing factor? Twin brother? Sentient robot created to preserve the knowledge and memories of a dying civilization? I want answers, DC!

RANDOM FACTS

• When masquerading as Bolt, Larry Bolatinsky adopts a mid-western drawl which he perfected by watching Yosemite Sam cartoons.
• He helped Dan build the Blue Devil costume and is the only person who knows the technology as well as Dan himself.
• Bolatinsky has an account in Latvia. Pin code? Bluedevil.

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING

• SUICIDE SQUAD (vol. 2) No. 3 - Keith Giffen and Paco Medina, the mission on which Bolt met his maker. It's a bit difficult to really recommend this series, despite my fondness for Keith Giffen. His dialoguing in this series is like some kind of secret code. It's so snarky and "realistic", with all its meaningless digressions, verbal ticks, and such, that it's something of a tough row to hoe. Still, check it out.

This page last updated 8 November 2007.

SYNOPSIS

For those of you concerned for the safety of Warlock's Daughter at the end of the previous issue, you've been given a momentary reprieve. The [Enchantress] shows up just in time to cock block this Protégé character, leaving "Devon" to find another snack for his buddy the Sun King.

Over in the Nightshade Dimension, [Nightmaster], [Ragman], and [Nightshade] get into a little spat with a few walking corpses who insist that the three heroes partake of the "Unbound"...whatever that is.

Meanwhile, the Gotham cops have requested the assistance of [the Detective Chimp] and Enchantress in making a connection between a mysterious murder (remember ol' Corkscrew Eyeball from last issue?) and a series of disappearances of minor witch wannabes. The corpse has a mystic stink to it, so the game is afoot.

At the same time, Protégé has returned to the Oblivion Bar to pick up Warlock's Daughter and take her home to his swingin' bachelor pad, which he has been running sort of like the Playboy Mansion if Hugh Heffner were in league with unclean, demonic forces. Oh wait...he is! Zing! Also, Devon has taken to walking around looking like [Danzig] from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.¹ Doc Gotham shows up to totally ruin everything, however, and Protégé gets this clever idea to use Warlock's Daughter—totally mesmerized now—to recruit Shadowpact to the cause of offing his pops.

COMMENTS

Wow. Doug Braithwaite is out already? I figured he'd stay for a couple of issues at least. Well...Tom Derenick is a perfectly serviceable artist. That, and—as I believe I mentioned in the comments on issue 17—I've kinda gotten used to the big lug over the course of the series, so I've no significant objection here. It also provides a nice continuity for bridging Bill Willingham's run and Matthew Sturges's, though if it was going to shake out this way, I'd just as soon have seen Derenick pencil the previous issue, as well, so that the flip in artistic style wouldn't have been there to jar things up right at the start.

I haven't yet quite formulated an opinion on this installment. Splitting up the members of Shadowpact has forced Sturges to send his narrative bouncing frantically back and forth between parallel plot threads, and it can all seem like a bit too much at times...but then again, it coheres well, narratively. For the moment, however, I cannot claim to be invested in the predicament of the three Shadowpact members stuck in the Nightshade dimension. I want to know where this is headed, but it isn't quite developing with the urgency I would like. Then again, this plotline offers up the sole action sequence in this installment, and it does feature a severed head and a senses-shattering kick to the face by Ragman.²

All that being said, this issue suffers from at least one insurmountable problem: no friggin' Blue Devil! Sturges! I'm coming for you, Sturges! Lock your doors, man!