Category: Comics

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A recent post on What Were They Thinking? reminded me of a panel from the original Teen Titans series. In it, Robin and Wonder Girl have just been gassed and tossed out of an airplane, waking up in mid-air.

Where are we--? Holy Ozone!

Yes, Robin once uttered the words, “Holy ozone!” And, like the “holey rusted metal,” the words proved accurate in an entirely different way. This was Teen Titans #7 (1967), the issue which introduced the Mad Mod. (Think of him as Austin Powers as a villain.)

Who knew comics could be so prophetic? 😉

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I was thinking about a discussion on last month’s Flash #226 and got to thinking about the way religion figures into mainstream comic books. Not the way religious characters are portrayed, but the way the fictional world works. I’m not familiar enough with Marvel (though I can make some guesses based on the presence of Thor), but DC seems to have an “anything goes” cosmology: current scientific theory coexists with the Christian God, Heaven and Hell, with gods and other supernatural beings from various mythologies—some of them made up, like the Lords of Order and Chaos—occupying their own corners of the universe.

That’s probably what you want for a long-term, open-ended shared universe, because it gives you the most opportunities for stories. Want to write about an alien race that lived billions of years ago, or evolved from cats? Check. Have a fallen angel join the Justice League? Check. Tie Wonder Woman’s origin directly to the Greek gods? Check. Use made-up alien gods to explain the Greco-Roman split? Check. Power up half your villains and a handful of heroes as they sell their souls to a devil? Check. Pit the spirit of God’s wrath against a 50,000-year-old immortal ex-caveman? Check. Send some characters to Heaven or Hell, but have others destined to be reincarnated over and over again? Check. Observe the hand of God at the moment of the big bang? Check.

There are a couple of limits. DC seems to avoid ascribing a particular religion or denomination to any of their A-list characters, probably so that readers can just assume it’s their own (kind of like setting a story in “Anytown, USA”). And they avoid direct portrayals of God or Jesus, probably for the same reason. Continue reading →

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The webcomic Real Life has a strange way of looking at the world. Sometimes I share it. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve seen one of these signs and deliberately misread it as a demand rather than a description. I can just imagine a group of people marching in front of some construction site, carrying orange protest signs lifted from the side of some road.

Of course, sometimes the signs don’t need to be misread to be funny.

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Well, all four miniseries leading into Infinite Crisis are out. I’ve also read The Return of Donna Troy and the JSA Classified arc settling Power Girl’s origin.

Verdict:

  • Villains United: Fun adventure book with bad guys. Last-issue revelation was interesting. Cheshire is genuinely insane—I can believe this is the woman who nuked a small country just to prove she wasn’t bluffing.
  • Day of Vengeance: 3-issue story stretched out to 6. Some nice character moments, but overall have to wonder what the point was.
  • OMAC Project: Suspension of disbelief hung by neck until dead. And the worst part? The most important thing to happen in the series didn’t actually happen in the series.
  • Rann/Thanagar War: Total mish-mash. Even knowing who most of the alien races were didn’t help me keep up with what side anyone was on. Someone remarked that this was like a 12-issue epic condensed (badly) into 6 issues, and that sounds about right.
  • Donna Troy: I wanted to like this book. I really did. Donna Troy, George Perez/Phil Jimenez art, a direct sequel to a classic Titans story, and they all-but ignored John Byrne’s Dark Angel retcon-fest. But all the characterizations seemed off from the first page on. Even the art didn’t grab me. (The coloring didn’t help.) And while it’s interesting to take the idea that all her origins are true, the ending—particularly how Donna dealt with the Titans of Myth—really disturbed me. (While we’re at it, Donna doesn’t need her own moon for a headquarters.)
  • Power Girl: Believe it or not, I didn’t read it for the cheesecake. Like Day of Vengeance there were some great character moments (PG and Jimmy Olsen sitting on top of the Daily Planet building while Jimmy ate lunch and tried not to stare, for instance). But I had a hard time believing this was the same Power Girl I’d read in Justice League Europe during the 1990s. (Yes, JLE was populated by caricatures of the leads—anyone who read that book and Flash should know that—but it became more serious near the end of the run.) And again, I thought that the story could have been told in half the space—even keeping the character moments. And even though I’d guessed PG’s true origin early on—or perhaps because of it—the finale felt like a let-down instead of a “Hell, yeah!” Maybe if they’d let her say “So that’s who I am!” instead of slinking back to her apartment as confused as ever, only to run into a “To be continued…” sign, it might have felt less like an Infinite Crisis setup piece and more like an origin story.

Verdict: One hit, two sorta OK, three turkeys.

On a related note, Warren Ellis’ arc on JLA Classified, which started strongly, is rapidly going downhill. The plot’s holding up, but the dialogue has gone from “Clever!” to “Okaaaay…” to “You have got to be kidding me.” J’onn’s rant last month about how we insist on calling his home planet “Mars” was one of those moments. (You know, I don’t normally refer to Japan as “Nihon,” or the capital of Russia as “Moskva,” but that doesn’t mean I’m calling them by the wrong name.) And I think Wally used the words “speed force” more times in 5 pages than he has in the last 5 years of his own book.

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I was idly wondering about the way super-heroes and villains are named—not the code names, but the actual names like Clark Kent, Matt Murdock, etc. Was Hunter Zolomon destined to become Zoom? Was Roy G. Bivolo doomed to become the Rainbow Raider the moment his parents named him? And why do so many people with the initials L.L. gravitate toward Superman?

Infinite Crisis Taveren“Obviously, he’s a ta’veren!” Katie said. I laughed for a second, but then remembered an interview I’d read about Infinite Crisis. It actually fits.

Ta’veren is a term from Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time that refers to a person who forms a focal point for history (or, from another perspective, destiny). Threads of probability bend around them, and the unlikely becomes likely. Babylon 5 referred to the concept as a nexus. “You turn one way, and the whole world has a tendency to go the same way.” Continue reading →

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The synopsis for JLA #124 (due in January) includes the phrase, “he loses focus on stopping The Key and saving Dawn, and turns his energies on an even deadlier foe.”

Now, I know these are separate DC characters, but my first thought was “But Dawn is the Key!”

Once you start down the Buffy path…