Welcome, freaks and freakettes, to our inaugural coverage of Al Ewing and Steve Lieber’s Metamorpho: The Element Man. We’re picking up with last week’s issue #3, in which Simon Stagg’s caveman consigliere Java embarks on a globetrotting espionage mission with the shape-shifting Urania Blackwell, aka Element Girl. Will Metamorpho, the Freak of 1,001 Changes, take this unsanctioned team-up lying down? Will billionaire malcontents Simon and Sapphire Stagg find ways to amuse themselves with the rest of the cast out and about? And what’s on the menu for Vandal Savage and the Mad Mod? Read on and out with ComicsXF’s own tried-and-true technicians of transmutation, Margot Waldman and Holly Raymond!
Margot: So since this is the first review of Metamorpho (Metamorpho!) on the site, I figured we could start by giving a brief review of the run so far. Here it is: I love it. There’s something so joyful about Ewing and Lieber’s take on the characters — it feels like a title that we really need right now, a title that’s just unapologetically, well, comic.
Holly: It kicks so much ass. I was sort of nervous about the pastiche-y-ness of it all, but it doesn’t feel sneering or kitsch at all. Pastiche can be a very fraught thing, but I feel like Ewing is just very simply saying “[Original creators Bob] Haney and [Ramona] Fradon knew what they were doing, and a superhero sitcom can still work.”
It reminds me a little of Rainbow Rowell’s run on She-Hulk, where a lot of it was looking at the ‘60s romance books and earnestly asking, “Well, why did we stop doing these? They were great.”
Margot: They were great! We’ve talked a good bit, the two of us, about what we love about the Silver Age — I’ve written about it — and a lot of it is that earnestness. They have a premise, and they commit to it! It’s still early days, but that’s what I see from Ewing here. He’s a very gifted comedy writer — and at the bottom of it, this is, like you say, a sitcom. Plot isn’t really all that important in this book, necessarily — and frankly it’s still such early days that if Ewing does have a unified theory of the Ra-Realm and the Egyptian gods as they apply to the Element Man, we just sort of don’t know yet. I admit I doubt it — I think this series is going for a pretty light touch — a series about comedy and about art.
Which brings us, uh, back to the issue! To me, the star of #3 is truly Lieber’s art. That maze spread is astounding — it reminds me of the very best of someone like Matt Wagner, who absolutely adores playing with layouts.
Holly: For sure; I think Lieber is ideal here. He sells a sense of sharp, clean shapes and brisk optimism, but he’s not just doing Fradon pastiche.
Margot: Yeah, he’s a very different artist. They’re clean and sharp but in very different ways. I mean, Fradon has this very sort of UPA style — somewhere between the classic newspaper cartoonists (I think she said she was very deeply influenced by Milt Caniff, right?) and Gerald McBoingBoing. I mean, she was an artist’s artist, and Lieber is an artist’s artist too, just in a very different era for what kind of art the industry prefers, and for what the industry wants superheroes to be.
Holly: They both have a lot of Alex Toth in them. But the maze spread is as impressive as it is because it’s not just gorgeous, it’s a vehicle for like eight gags, and all of them are smart.
Margot: I was a little worried about the Vandal Savagery and the timeline stuff when I heard about it from people, but I think Ewing did it with a light enough touch that it didn’t feel off-putting, even to someone like me who is not really a month-to-month DC reader. I don’t know if Ewing is either, really? He made an early splash in comics with a parody of 52, and then he very reasonably got cold feet in 2011. So I guess I’ve been thinking of this more as an Al Ewing comic than a DC one? I mean, this is a writer who (rightfully) has made quite a lot of fun of the changing canon of DC comics, and here he is engaging with deep DC. There’s an ongoing plot about Prince Ra-Man, of all people, from the same Al Ewing as the one who wrote this:
Holly: I think Savage is an interesting pull if you’re looking for someone a caveman can have for an antagonist. And obviously it doesn’t require a lot of investment in the stuff Savage is doing in the Batman books (or was doing? I forget if he’s been ousted).
Margot: I have no clue.
Holly: It’s a good project for Ewing, I think! I remember seeing him issue a statement after #2 came out about how he wasn’t writing this as a parody or a travesty of that Bob Haney style, but as sort of a sincere celebration of that kind of diction, that sort of letting the narration glide over and across the story. Which I think is a decent mission statement for this book — it’s not riffing, per se. It’s very earnestly making use of a set of tools that have been looked at as ridiculous for decades. “Irony is poison and sincerity is the most fabulous groove of all” — and this book is such an articulation of the joy and formal playfulness that is all over that swinging Checkerboard era of DC comics.
Margot: The thing about Haney, who is kind of the definitive writer of Checkerboard DC to me, is he is just a really fun writer to read. He has fun writing, and if people haven’t read his comics, they absolutely should. Brave and the Bold, for instance, is madness and I adore it. And in an era where DC has accepted that continuity pruning is just more trouble than it’s worth, why not bring back groovy DC, while also not being blinded by nostalgia?
I quite like the bit in #2 about superhero soap opera prevailing over neoreactionary garbage. That feels like a mission statement, too. It’s just that in a book like this, that mission statement is also a parody of Grant Morrison’s tragic Trojan horse heroine Tomorrow Woman — and because it’s Ewing, Mad Mod has become a bit of a riff on J.M. DeMatteis’ Turner D. Century (with Ewing, you’re never too far from 1980s Defenders).
Holly: Right. It reminds me of those New Narrative manifestoes out of California in the 70s — why are we conceding that icy, cerebral formalism is more interesting than saying what we want? I think Ewing sees something real in that soap opera immediacy of emotion.
Margot: It’s very Legion!
Holly: I think Ewing would kill on a Legion of Super-Heroes book, but he’s tapping into Haney’s fantasy, which was always a little different [from the Legion’s]. It’s about being an adult, freewheeling, having access to time and mobility. But the soap stuff comes from still having that sense of indecision or ambivalence about like, well, who am I? What do I do? The emotions are big and translate into melodramatic, sensational action, but he’s never morose. Which I guess is a good enough segue — Ewing’s Urania is such a breath of fresh air as someone who met her as a weeping, self-loathing Gaiman Woman.
Margot: Oh, I adore Rainie. She is to me as pure a breath of fresh air as I’ve ever seen in comics. I mean Stagg and Sapphire and Rex are not, maybe, the deepest characters, right? I think that’s on purpose — they’re intentionally written as though they’re Tezuka-style actors playing parts (they even have Haney-style opening credits). But Element Gal, Swinging Agent of SHADE, is such a revelation. She’s just voicing joy in this book. She shows us that these powers are ludicrous and ludic — that you can play with them. El Sandifer didn’t write much about the Element Girl story in Sandman in her astounding piece about Neil Gaiman, but it is so far from what makes this great. It is so dreary, so sad and overserious — so ashamed of itself. This is not that at all.
Holly: I haven’t made it all the way through the Sandifer thing, because it’s both very long and extremely harrowing, but I agree completely. Everyone who is reading a review of Al Ewing’s Metamorpho by two trans women can be assumed to have read that Sandman issue [if you somehow haven’t, it’s #20, “Facade”]. Gaiman sees Urania’s suffering as the most interesting thing about her and the signal characteristic of her sense of difference. For Ewing, difference is her ticket to being unencumbered from the sorts of really kind of insecure emotional wanglings that Rex and Sapphire are bound up in.
It’s her way out of plots she doesn’t want to take part in, which we see her take full advantage of as she stridently rejects slotting in as Rex’s backup girl as he dramatically parts ways with the Staggs.
Margot: I know you wanted to talk about the Mad Mod (And I do too. The skiffle joke in the last issue made me laugh so hard I died; I’m actually a ghost now, typing this) but I feel like Urania as Ewing interprets her is basically Jump City incarnate — just as Batman sort of is the fallen Gothic grandeur of the ruling classes, Element Gal is grooviness incarnate. She’s been given so much wonderful freedom as a character.
Even today, female characters in comics are so rarely allowed to be free like that. The sadly departed Rachel Pollack and Trina Robbins once made the point that the super-powered women of the ’60s showed a lot about what their creators thought of women — Sue Storm’s power is to be demurely out of sight, after all. Even in my beloved Legion, Dream Girl’s main power is sleeping in negligee. But Urania is freedom itself — she can swing. I love her.
Holly: Yes! She makes her own coolness– she asserts her own dignity. One of the thrilling signatures of Metamorpho as a character is that owning of what being a “freak” is, and this is what Ewing’s Urania is all about.
I’m thinking of that sort of vexed quote from Diane Arbus (albeit one I think about all the time as someone who teaches courses on queer history in, well, 2025): “Most people go through life dreading they’ll go through a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
Urania is precisely that sort of outsider-aristocrat (and I know “outsider” is loaded in the context of Metamorpho & pals), and I think it makes her presence in this book — her sort of sovereignty on the margins of this story — really exciting.
I do want to get to the Mad Mod, who I think is positioned really sharply as an envoy of genre as ossification or limitation, but I think to get there it is crucial to linger on Urania first, her ability to think and exist outside of taxonomy. This whole issue is positioned by Java and Rex as a tug-of-war between two mutually exclusive sorts of narrative — the spy caper and the superhero dust-up. There’s a very funny moment where Java gets a little pouty that he was teed up to use a bunch of hypothetical James Bond gadgets that never get deployed, and I think it’s illustrative:
They’re fun, endearing characters, but they can’t think in hybridity the way Urania can. And in a book about being a freak — a patchwork person, a man out of time — that’s a really magnetic asset.
Margot: I’m fascinated by how frequently Ewing plays Java — not wrongly at all — as a very tragic character. Even in this issue, he’s mourning the lost language of his people from a world he can barely remember because of how Simon Stagg “helped” him. Is he a freak? I don’t think so. The freaks here, if anyone, are Sapphire and Stagg right? Demented social media star and freakishly acquisitive billionaire — that’s monstrosity.
Holly: Well, yes and no. I think you’ll find on page one that Rex is the freak of 1,001 changes. Java is of course merely the hunk of 1,001 millennia.
Margot: That’s a really great point. I stand corrected.
Holly: But I agree with what you’re getting at. I need to brush up on the finer points of the Haney run — pick up the DC Finest Collection of it this June, True Believers! — but the Staggs are astonishingly, bracingly wretched in this series. They’re like Claremont Institute McDucks, and Rex’s friction with them is an exciting throughline.
But, they do have a narrative gravity. Like you note, Java is literally bound to the Staggs through a life-debt (one he can’t break out of because Rex keeps preempting him in saving the day), and Rex himself is bound to them through horniness and, I guess, material need. Ewing plays this nicely — the Staggs are both fun awful (the final splash of the page, showing Stagg HQ lumbering around like a deranged Kirby Gundam, is a delight), but we still get the crisp sense of them holding these glorious oddballs back.
This is what the villainous Mad Mod — and as we see in issue #2’s algorithmic android popstar Sugar Sweet — is legible as the inverse of. Giving the reader precisely what they think they want, boiling art down to a bullet list of beats and moments and then asking the computer to fill in the connective tissue.
He’s the face of culture-as-commodity, of art as something streamlined, compliant and eminently digestible. Ewing is clearly having a ball writing this guy — a foppish, Savile Row scoundrel who offers a rare opportunity for Lonnie Donegan jokes in a 21st century cape comic — but he’s unnerving in a way Simon Stagg’s billionaire fecklessness and Vandal Savage’s B-movie theatrics aren’t. He’s the face of a tendency in cultural production that we’re all dealing with in 2025, and if, as Ewing avows, “neo-reactionaryism is out — and fab-freakiness is in,” I think it’s still exciting to see him stage that tension in as fresh and funny a comic as this.
Margot: One of the Ewing issues I think most about is the Immortal Hulk story with Xemnu, the weaponizer of nostalgia, a monster who makes “remember when?” what it really can be, a violation of the people that an imagined past doesn’t allow to be possible. It’s no accident that Charlene McGowan, a trans woman, notices what Xemnu’s done. He’s created a nightmare nostalgia world where she is going to be proscribed out of existence. Nostalgia for her is essentially being forcibly detransitioned. That’s terrifying. In this book, the Mad Mod is that same terror, only as comedy.
Ewing is a comic writer, and this series is a comedy. But DC’s tendency toward weaponized, malignant nostalgia — the constant marginalization of newer, more diverse characters for the sake of white guys with square jaws created in 1941 on behalf of fans scared of change — that’s not comedy at all. That’s scary.
But sometimes from that you can find a Fab Freak or two, and they can be funny as hell.
What do you think, Holly?
Holly: I concur completely, and I think Xemnu is a fantastic reference point here. Compare him, for example, to something like Ewing’s Kirby-isms in his Defenders stuff. Nostalgia as this abscessed drag back to a weaponized past is corrosive, but making use of all of the tools of a medium, reveling in the fresh possibilities of older modes of comics, doesn’t have to be that. It can be a way of revitalizing form and style in the present, it can be a way of pointing forward, as we see with the aforementioned Charlene, who is both one of the best examples of trans representation in Big Two comics as well as functionally just a Silver Age horror anthology protagonist down to her lab coat and Joe Maneely hair.
Because ultimately Ewing is sort of a creature of continuity. He has that archive fever that feeds into a generativity, a genuinely impassioned hunger for rummaging through archives. You don’t reference Doc Dread in 2025 unless you really like this shit — the pleasure of thumbing through dog-eared, yellowing back-issues with some kid’s doodles in the margins. But like you say, this is never in pursuit of idealizing a cleaner, simpler, “purer” past. It’s about dusting off and holding up the weirdness and celebrating it. He’s right — fab-freakiness is in, and it’ll perennially be in, and that recognition of the ludic freedom of the strange and uncategorizable is a huge part of what makes this one of the most interesting and satisfying monthly books on the stands right now.
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Margot Waldman
Margot Waldman is a Mega City Two-based scholar, researcher and writer. Her great loves are old comics, Shakespearean theater and radical social justice – in no particular order. One day, she hopes to visit the 30th century.
Holly Raymond
Holly Raymond is a writer and professor who lives in Vermont with her wife and her dog, King Francis.
