I read Infinite Crisis #2 today, and everything—including DC’s turn toward the dark over the past few years—is starting to make sense. Infinite Crisis isn’t just following up on plotlines from Crisis on Infinite Earths, it’s actually making a statement about the past 20 years of comics.
Potential spoilers ahead! Continue reading
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.
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? 😉
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
Over the past few months, DC Comics has attempted to straighten out the origins of two female characters who were left with screwed-up origins after Crisis on Infinite Earths: Donna Troy and Power Girl. The two origins, however, took opposite approaches. Continue reading
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.
