No Sad Songs for a Scarlet Speedster

Those kids don't know where to look.

The rumor is that DC Editor and midwife of the Silver Age Julius Schwartz had a rule for selling comics; put a gorilla on the cover, and it would sell. Additionally, the rule expanded to include fire, motorcycles, the color purple (as in the actual color purple and not, you know, The Color Purple, although look for Dynamite to launch their Purple Powers line next year with original covers by Alex Ross and special deluxe bonus covers by a photo negative of Alex Ross) and interrogatives (Why is Batman Ironing the Joker’s Shirts?? I know I’d like to find out).

What would also help sell a comic by gracing its covers would be big tits, wet ass, and well hung dudes sticking it in big open beavers, but then maybe I’m pitching to a different market. I’d have been a millionaire in the 1950s. Also, imagine a switcheroo world where there were tits on comic book covers but Julius Schwartz was running Maxim and every cover had a gorilla riding a purple motorcycle out of an inferno. Hey, as an aside, how do you check for a gas leak in your home office?

Also a part of the passel of tried-and-true comic book cover sales-boosters was flat-out blubbering like a stinking, fat, stupid baby. Tears sold comic books – no doubt it was part of the recipe for success enjoyed by the romance books, but the trend passed handily into super-hero adventure stories. Superman wept over many a man seemingly murdered by a misuse of the Man of Steel’s mighty super-powers, Batman bawled over the occasional cadaver of the Boy Wonder, and Green Lantern was snuffling through his own snot after he woke up in that hotel room with that dead hooker and a suitcase of Peruvian flake in his bed. “Why is Green Lantern Stuffing This Rolled-Up Carpet In The Trunk Of The Used Car He Bought For Cash At A Needles Dealership? Why Is He Buying So Much Lighter Fluid??” (PS Also purple and a gorilla.)

Still among the crying cadres over at DC in the swinging Sixties, the weepingest of the all was – by my estimation - the fastest man alive, Barry “Flash” Allen. I count at least a half-dozen covers where the Flash loses his shit and hucks back salt tears like an emotional deficient, not the least of which is the spectacularly treacly, awkward and plain unusual Flash #198…

I think maybe she's trying not to laugh, champ.

The story – amazingly titled “No Sad Songs for a Scarlet Speedster” – is the handiwork of well-respected writer and editor Bob Kanigher, whom youmight recall as being the inspired hand behind many of DC’s best war stories and the utterly berserk hand behind the story of how one time Wonder Girl fought a jive-talking splooge fountain. Basically, he was never at home writing the super-hero stuff.

Also ill at ease, by his own reports, with the super-hero stuff was penciller Gil Kane, who nonetheless never failed to put a single line down to paper which didn’t punch you out in front of your girlfriend and steal your wallet. Kane was always amazing, even in this … unusual … story. “The worst thing Gil Kane ever drew” is like “The worst thousand dollars a guy gave you for no reason to spend however you want.” The worst Gil Kane is also inked by Vince Colleta, but I digress …

The premise of the story is that The Flash is an imbecile. More specifically, he’s rendered an imbecile while trying to show off for three recalcitrant, angry youths he’d been asked to entertain at what I suspect was an Orphanage for Ungrateful Children. Probably most of these kids had parents, they were just such dicks about it they had to go to the orphanage.

Ahhh-ahhhh, he'll touch every one of us! 

The three callow youths – I didn’t bother to remember their names, they’re just that same group of three kids who always appeared somewhere in the Sixties and Seventies when someone wanted to show ‘a diverse group of youngsters’, one black guy and a coupla white kids, one of ‘em’s a girl. Infinite Junior Mod Squads, as far as the eye can see – sneer and turn their back on Flash, who just wants to spin on a single finger like a top for their amusement (This is, legit, what the Flash does to entertain kids. It’s even mentioned in an earlier issue as the stunt Flash likes to pull for kiddie bashes. I can’t front, I’d like to see that, possibly at that B-Boy competition Red Bull holds every year in Bavaria or wherever).

To get on their good side, the Flash tries to build a clubhouse for the kids, only to end up having to haul bricks and defend the kids from gunfire when a group of baddies show up and take affront at the casual abandon of zoning permit application procedures happening on their turf. The Flash takes a ricochet to the part of the brain which manages “self-respect” and promptly adopts the mental and emotional level of a five year old or something.

The kids take the Flash to a cave, as you usually do for victims who have suffered traumatic head injuries, and then hunker down to endure a siege by the aforementioned baddies, revved up for more of the o’ bang-a-bang. While the seemingly powerless Flash hangs out in the cave, communing with animals (I kid you not. He nurses an injured pigeon named Petey back to health while hiding out in the cave), the kids find their stones and civic responsibility, and defend the Flash long enough for him to get a second swat on the noggin and come back to normal.

Mind you, not before this scene happens:

Thanks to my Super DC 1976 calendar, this is an image
I will forever associate with Thanksgiving.

This is THE weirdest thing I think I may have ever seen in a comic book, and I’ve seen … almost everything else that’s ever happened in a comic book since forever.

Flash recovers thanks to cerebral hemorrhaging and the grace of the Almighty, and the kids learn something I forget what, leaving our hero to drag his tear-soaked cheeks and snot-bedewed upper lip back home and to a much deserved rest …

Hey lady, that guy probably has a major concussion, you shouldn't let him fall asleep!

A short'un: DIE CUT!

He looks like he's wearing the Epcot Center.

There is no end to the list of possible contenders for the title of the Nineties-est character ever – certainly Rob Liefeld’s Cable might just be the pouched and shoulder-padded patron saint of the breed, with the only possible also-rans being every single other character Rob Liefeld created since then including up to now. For my money, though, no one character had more potential – wasted potential, mind you, but it was the Nineties so almost no comic lived up to its potential – to hit the heights than Marvel UK’s Die-Cut.

He is the picture perfect Man of Tomorrow for the Mylar Age – he’s got a cybernetic eyepatch, a solid-gold shoulder-pad the size of an Ikea Billy bookshelf, wires and knives and blades bigger than baby deer and guns that appear to be metal cylinders with no trigger or chamber, plus somehow his feet were always off-panel. Always. Even his name was a combination of two things which you wouldn’t want to have happen to you, just like “Deathstroke” (As an aside, when I was a kid I’d never heard the word ‘deathstroke’ before … in fact, I still haven’t, it’s usually ‘killing stroke’ … so I didn’t understand that they meant ‘killing stroke’ when they called the guy Deathstroke, and I just assumed … you know … because one of his eyes didn’t work and half his mask was blacked out, I assumed he’d … like, had a stroke. I thought that he was the super-assassin guy who’d had a stroke, and they called him Deathstroke because maybe he could still kill you even though he’d had a stroke? I was a complicated kid, and maybe not too smart. I read comics, after all).

Even though he was a product of the often-impish chaps at Marvel UK, a character as unambitiously over-the-top and egregious as Die-Cut amazingly was not handled tongue-in-cheek. Nowhere was there the charm of Death’s Head or Dragon’s Claws, which is a shame because this guy was freaking asking for it.

As a matter of fact, Die Cut was a product of the general dumbing/Americaning-down of the Marvel UK line, some promotion called “Pumping Iron” which I’m assuming is a Britishism for “Shooting Heroin” or “Shrooming Balls” because it was all a muddy, psychohorrific series of bellowing and castration-paranoia. Die Cut specifically even emerged from the ruins of the aforementioned charmer, Death’s Head, as a former backup schizophrenic personality of the lame-as-hell sequel Death’s Head II who subsequently - for reasons I ern’t gonna bother with here - manages to get himself his own vat-grown body and add another bland, screaming face to the line-up of how boring the Marvel UK imprint had become.

Special Cover Enhancement by Mrs.Mulligan's
Second Grade Class, Daybridge Elementary,
Akron OH. Go Jaguars!

Worst of all, for a guy who is actually NAMED “Die Cut” at a time when comics were apeshit about die-cutting things and you would imagine would lend himself to some amazing die-cut cover opportunities, his debut die-cut cover … sucks so incredibly bad.

I was originally going to mention Die Cut only as part of a larger series on the worst gimmick covers of the 90s (which is yet to come, stay tuned), but in the end he was such an impassable mass of fucking awful combined with a shit-bucket of terrible that he has to receive some stand-out attention. His first issue cover, more than anything else, is just mindboggling. I’m sure, with very little effort, anyone reading this could come up with a half-dozen at-least-halfway decent ideas about how to make a die-cut cover for a character named Die Cut work. A cut-out logo, a silhouette, the iconic shape of his signature weapon (look below), a body of cybernetic wires and gears, the international sign for “urinal” … lots to be done!

What they did instead was wildly hack at the cover so it looked … jagged. Not even like Die Cut had cut it, but like a guy had shown up in the comic shop before anyone else got there and cut up the thing with safety scissors. He didn’t even do a good job, some of the jagged edges are going the wrong way and you end up with a triangular piece that rips right off if you’re not careful with it – luckily, who wouldn’t be careful with a mint condition copy of Die Cut #1, right folks?

It’s even really hard to know where to start – or stop – with Die Cut. Here’s one for you – his name is Czorn Yson. Actually, now I want to stop.

Guys, I want to give you one more thing about Die-Cut – he was so-named because he had a big dumb enormous sword spot-soldered to the gauntlet on his left arm (and presumably you would die if it cut you). This thing was one of those phony-baloney super-weapons from the Image era which was so poorly defined as to effectively make it all-powerful, because this sword could cut through not just every known material, but also energy (I guess that answers the particle vs wave debate) and through dimensions and also could surgically excise memories. Buh-fuh-what? But wait, bear with me, best of all – it was called his “Pscythe”. I am not shitting you. Can you envision a word which looks more like you smashed “piss” and “shite” together? It’s a summary weapon. Brilliant.

Aaa-aaah, he'll save every one of us!

The Many Foes of Luke Cage, Power Man (Part 5)

You know what the secret to comedy is? Timing. And with that in mind, here’s the final part of The Many Foes of Power Man …

Yeah, shut up Cage, I'm trying to do a thing here.

He actually sounds like a really avoidable Milton-Bradley game Mister Fish has been a general source of internet chuckles forever and a day, but in all of the coverage of his appearance – his ridiculously slack-jawed Mister Limpet likeness, his frilly ear pieces, his scandalous Satsuma-colored silky one-piece ensemble, his demands for respect –no one thought to mention to me that he had a sass-talking dwarf sidekick. GUYS I AM ALL ABOUT THE SASS TALKING DWARF SIDEKICKS.

Mister Fish began his crime career as a petty criminal who stumbles across a truckload of radioactive isotopes. As one does in comic books, he promptly opened the protective casings so he could get a damn good sniff of them, then fell backwards into the East River and emerged as a fish-man. With super-strength. And he translated the accident into a full-fledged high-level Maggia franchise, so … he’s a real “when life gives you lemons” kind of guy, I guess.

Mister Fish buys the farm at the end of his debut story, but he makes appearances elsewhere in the Marvel Universe later. These are explained away as being the original Mister Fish’s brother, who took pains to accurately recreate the circumstances of his brother’s mutation, and when I say “explained” I mean “That actually requires a lot more explanation, on a lot of levels.”

Weirdest thing to me about Mister Fish is why not give him a cool fish name instead of something as ridiculous as Mister Fish? Why not call him The Goblin Shark or The Chimaera or – oh, hey, why not Piranha? Marvel doesn’t have a villain named Piranha yet, right?

Piranha

Oh.

Now let us "rap" and talk about "what's going down". 

…Go together like a horse and carriage.
In a weird-super-villain-intensive story arc, Cage fell afoul of and then later was hired by and then fell afoul again of a supervillainous mastermind named Big Brother. I am shocked it took them this long to get to that name. Someone was nappin’.

Big Brother basically looked like he shopped exclusively in a store which specialized in life-size recreations of totally unfun action figure accessories, and spoke like a highly articulate drunk, basically. He hired a bunch of other super-villains to hassle Cage and then convinced Cage to go fight another super-villain named The Baron and then Cage came back and slugged Big Brother instead. That’s what we call “miles walked, not much ground covered.”

BB was assisted by a selectively invisible informant named The Cheshire Cat, and again I’m shocked it took them so long to get around to that name, too. Dressed like a pimp Hamburglar, Cheshire Cat’s big trick was to literally turn invisible – in fits and starts. His body would vanish, leaving behind the stripes on his suit, then the rest of him until only the smile remained. Where do they get their ideas?

Save it for your drive-time radio show, blowhard.

Another one’a these guys
Wildfire was a one-off character and yet another bad guy who couldn’t stop making mention of just how impolite it was for Luke Cage to be black in this day and age. I’m not going to front, it was a pretty good story for the ouvre – Cage and Wildfire tussle in a mostly white neighborhood, both stating their case for the prominent racial issues of the day (“You portray us as beer-belching Archie Bunkers!” says Wildfire, “You make us out to be the bad guys!” as he torches an innocent man’s home and tries to murder the guy who protected him) and while Wildfire is decidedly an evil straw man (and that’s dangerous with so much fire around, gosh!) he nonetheless finds supporters in the crowd in a pretty dramatic scene.

Counter-point: It’s about the fiftieth Cage villain who’s got a thesaurus of race-hate handy in lieu of dialogue. You know, it wears on you after a while …

By the Goldberg?

Who dressed this guy?
I feel like I need copious explanations of GoldBug, who is a brilliant inventor and gold thief who also uses gold as a weapon and probably wouldn’t need to steal as much gold if he wasn’t going around caking people in it. Yes, he had a gun that caked you in gold dust. He is a gold thief who leaves gold lying around on the people who are trying to recover the gold he stole. Hm.

But mostly it’s this costume, he looks like a tragic condiment accident at a hot dog stand. The cap, of all things. It’s a bike helmet, right? He has to wear that so he doesn’t hurt himself, right? It’s the only answer that makes sense, that he’s a ward of the state.

I’ll be upfront, there are a lot of truly ugly comic book costumes I love – the original Captain Britain, Daredevil’s old yellow outfit, Luke frickin’ Cage - but this is beyond the pale … yellow and desaturated orange.

Guy's probably got his secret supervillain
headquarters under a false floor on the Bang Bus.

One of these kids is exactly like the others
Bushmaster makes the third snake-themed super-villain whom Luke Cage battles in the course of his solo book, but at least unlike Diamond-Back and Cottonmouth, Bushmaster isn’t the head of a criminal organization. Oh, he is? Well, at least his power isn’t just super-strength like Cottonmouth. Oh, it is? Well, at least his name sounds like a title of a series of pornos. There, we found a positive.

Bushmaster is the last villain Cage faces in his solo series, after which he teams up for possibly the best-remember team book of the Seventies with Iron Fist. Naturally, this starts with him battling Iron Fist for two issues before they team up to clock Bushmaster, and also this is the story where Colleen Wing refers to Cage as a “buck”, so who’s the real bad guy here, right?





But Cage’s most persistent, most implacable foe?
I'm gonna say "The soda machine in the lobby of his building."

And that's it for Luke Cage, goodnight folks!

Not So Much Fallen As Hobbled and Limping...

"Jeffrey!"

Fallen Angels (Marvel, 1987)
I imagine this may come as a shock to you little shavers and young whippersnappers and all you other folks who grew up in an atmosphere where super-powered mutants on the new comic rack are as common as nitrogen in the atmosphere, but there was a time – believe it or not - when you could count all the X-Men miniseries and spin-offs on the adamantium claws of two hands.

I mean, obviously Stan and Jack didn’t launch X-Men #1 in September of 1963 and then follow up in November with fourteen tie-ins, a new origin for Cable and a foil-cover edition special where they bring back Banshee just to off him again. The series had to start somewhere, and for that matter it started off as one of Marvel’s least-popular ongoing series. Even when it finally started making it big in the market share, it took forever to create its first spin-off – and despite what was to come, it didn’t have the common courtesy to slap an “X-“ in front of its name.

The first miniseries and one-shot both come out in 1982 – the definitive Claremont/Miller “Wolverine” and the equally landmark Claremont/Anderson graphic novel “God Loves, Man Kills” – and through the subsequent decade there were hardly a dozen more – although the quality may have started to slip. The very next year you get what Your Humble Editor considers to be a highly underrated series, Magik, but you also get Obnoxio the Clown vs The X-Men, suggesting Marvel wasn’t yet quite sure who their franchise player was going to turn out to be.

Among the lesser luminaries like the uncertain “Iceman” and the criminally befuddled “Kitty Pryde and Wolverine” was Fallen Angels, spinning out of the X-Men farm team’s book, The New Mutants.

Aw, he's fine.

A creation of Jo Duffy and Kerry Gammill (with Joe Staton stepping in for a couple of issues), the premise of Fallen Angels centers around hot-headed New Mutant Bobby DaCosta, who is Brazilian (and that’s weird, because most of the New Mutants are in their teens but this guy is a whole brazilian!) Known as the superhero-in-training Sunspot, on account of how all the good names were already taken, Bobby is capable of adapting sunlight into ferocious, raw strength – a power he uses by having a soccer-based hissy fit and stubbing a whole tree into teammate Sam “Want you cuckoo Cannonball” Guthrie’s frontal lobe, rendering him terminally Southern.

Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can Sunspot find rest but in a meandering eight-issue limited series accompanied by titanic gibbering nitwit and the toppled ink bottle which was the leading suspect in a thousand cases of carpal tunnel among the Marvel Bullpen up through 1992, alien shapeshifting novelty keychain Warlock?

Sunspot and Warlock leave the comfort of the Charles Xavier Academy of Not Having All That Many Students Really So You Think You’d Notice Two Of Them Leaving in Westchester and head to nearby seedy New York City, trailed by ancillary X-Men types Jamie “Multiple Man” Madrox and Theresa “Siryn” Cassidy – who, as an aside, have set up for them in this series basically everything Peter David has ever done with them in the pages of X-Factor. There, I just gave you a reason for Fallen Angels to exist.

"...with my enormous
man-hands?"

While in New York, Bobby and Warlock manage to walk into street thugs mugging someone every ten minutes – New York, am I right? – and in doing so meet up with the young she’ll-turn-out-to-be-a-mutant-even-thought-she-doesn’t-think-she-is-sorry-spoiler-warning Chance and her pals, The Fallen Angels. Led by former X-Villian The Vanisher – now dressed like Community’s Dean Pelton wearing Bea Arthur’s nightdress as a jacket – and a slightly elongated alien named Ariel who can teleport herself and others through any doorway and who sort of looks like Geena Davis crossed with a televangelist dressed for aerobics class.

I hate to find myself saying “Well, to make a long story short” so early into this, but I don’t really have a choice – Fallen Angels is LONG, despite coming in at no more than eight issues, and it’s mostly exposition and sudden introductions to character after character. Multiple Man and Siryn ultimately catch up with the Angels, a mildly telekinetic cyborg named Gomi and his cybernetic mutant lobster friends Don and Bill are introduced, they pick up Boom-Boom from X-Factor headquarters and take a trip through time and alternate dimensions to come back with Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy. And having finally introduced all the players, I guess we can finally start the story … around the closing pages of issue six.

Yup! On paper, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Fallen Angels. Jo Duffy is a fine writer, Kerry Gammill is nowhere near my favorite artist but he’s a completely competent and likable draughtsman, and while the weird mix of characters was a little too blatantly youth-oriented and the designs were dated before the cash register was finished ringing on the first copy ever purchased, it was actually a pretty appealing title.

Oh god, I want to die.

So why is it a fizzle in the firmament of X-Books? Well, among other problems, I was not kidding when I say that the plot did not start until the end of issue six. It’s at this point that we have it underlined for us that anorexic fashion calamity Ariel was not just your ordinary everyday spandex-addict who could step through doorways to any point in space and exercise small amounts of mind control, she was also an alien! An alien from a planet called The Coconut … called The Coconut Grove. I’m sorry, I nervously hiccupped in the middle of saying that, I may have had a small stroke.

But yes, Ariel comes from a planet called The Coconut Grove and which is decked out like the sets in the dance numbers from Xanadu AND everyone looks like a goblin Liberace. Seriously, if Charles Nelson Reilly’s cravats were ever possessed by poltergeists, it’d look like these guys. “Seriously”, that’s the word I used to describe that scenario…

Anyway, it turns out the Coconut Grove peeps sent Ariel to Earth to abduct mutants, on account of the Coconut Grove peeps have hit an evolutionary dead-end and want to dissect mutants to identify their mutant-ness so that the Coconut Grove peeps can give themselves those qualities and continue to evolve. I’m sorry to keep saying “Coconut Grove peeps”, but the only likely name I could think of for them was “Coconut Grovers”, which sounds like a sex act, a Girl Scout cookie or a sex act involving a Girl Scout cookie.

Naturally, after she’s handed all her Earth friends to her overlords to dissect and mess around with, we discover that Ariel herself is some sort of mutant and is going to be dissected herself, so she rebels. Hey, do you remember a moment ago when I said that the Coconut Grovers were studying mutants because, as a people, they had hit an evolutionary dead-end and didn’t mutate anymore and also how I mentioned that Ariel is a Coconut Grover and also a mutant so obviously that first premise is wrong and therefore this plot – which we waited six issues to start – doesn’t make any sense any longer? Mm.

There was never again any mention of them anywhere forever.

Besides the belated start time and the auto-correcting plot point, I’m going to lay part of the blame for the fact that we’re not checking out X-Men Origins: Fallen Angels in theaters this Christmas at the feet of the other new characters in the book. I am being sincere when I say that there is no end of very good character concept and development going on in this book, at least as far as some characters like Madrox and Siryn go. Both the telekinetic Gomi and tough-as-nails street-wise kid Chance end up taking up prime real estate for their personal story arcs, Gomi even eating up space at the table for an origin story that doesn’t do particularly much for the character and definitely nothing for the plot.

The gimmick of Chance being a secret-mutant is telegraphed brazenly through the series, and generally in lieu of giving her anything of use to do. Whenever other mutants are around Chance, their powers either double or disappear completely, and also they feel compelled to mention it while Chance is hanging around in the immediate vicinity, and also what you might laughably call a ‘portable’ Cerebro unit keeps identifying a mutant that no one seems to know who in the room it is AND ALSO Chance keeps saying she’s not a mutant … Consider the hints picked up.

Oh, and one of the lobsters is a mutant, too. You’re welcome.

In the end, Fallen Angels is a decent book with the one exception that you can’t really explain why it happened. After eight issues, the X-World returned to its status quo without much as a ripple. Sunspot and Warlock go back to the New Mutants to help feed oatmeal to Sam through a tube, all of the other pre-established characters disappear for half a decade or so before they get picked up for new purposes, and the new characters just drop off the face off the Earth - except I looked up Ariel on Wikipedia and she apparently popped up in X-Men recently and then was slugged to death by someone. Possibly me.

I guess our one takeaway is that we got to see Devil Dinosaur pulling off headscarf bandana look a la Travolta in Staying Alive …

Haha, Bill's saying "boobs".

The Sword of Superman

Phallic object upon phallic object, the basis of all mythology. 

Among the workhorses on the writing staff of the Pre-Crisis Superman, Elliot S(!) Maggin was your go-to guy for bird’s-eye view myth building. He wasn’t down in the trenches or generally coloring within the lines, pulling familiar Phantom Zone villains into the dirt like Cary Bates and Marty Pasko (Which I say with Res. Pect. The tattoos on my eyelids read “Bates” and “Pasko”).

Maggin’s cup of tea was invention: It’s from Maggin that we get Miracle Monday, Thirsty Thursday, 29th Century Superwoman Kristin Wells, Albert Einstein wrapped up in Superman’s origin, that obnoxious intergalactic rhyming bard that pops up in a couple of stories, Lex Luthor saying cuss words … you know, the high end stuff that no other writer in his right mind ever touched again.

Don’t get me wrong - I love Maggin like I love all the pre-Crisis Superman writers. Summarizing his contributions to the character, though, I’d suggest he specialized in the outlying territories. He loved adding new planks to the fence, some of which worked and some of which – well, some of which are the Sword of Superman.

"Ma, what did you mean
when you said I was
growing up into a very
handsome young hilt?"

The story in question – “The Day the Cheering Stopped” - ran in Superman Annual #10 in 1984. The DC Annuals had just been revived and revamped to behave as a transitional state between normal comics and longer, proto-graphic novel books – two issues earlier, the Annuals had been your typical reprint collection, two issues later you’d get “For The Man Who Has Everything”. True to the new format, Maggin wrote a big story – he revisited his familiar theme of “the totally made up and sort of indistinctly defined legend” – the problem with it being that it was too big.

Not so much answering a question no one thought to ask, Maggin invented a question no one in their right mind would ask because the answer was already so simple, obvious and commonsense: Why does everyone in the universe know Superman, revere him and call him by his name, “Superman”?

Your obvious answer is “He went there, was memorable, and that’s his name.” I have never asked why the clerk at my credit union knows my name – she’s seen me before, for crying out loud. Same goes for my parole officer, the checkout guy at the liquor store and the fellow who power-washes the vomit out of the alley beside the OTB. Bros, every one.

Mind you, this isn’t even taking into consideration the more obvious answer of “Actually, they probably don’t all call him the same thing on different planets, I mean, they call him a bunch of different things in different languages here on Earth, alone!” BUT since they call him “Superman” on every intergalactic backwater slum, we’ve apparently got to have an intergalactic backwater reason.

Now, before I share with you the apparently really real and bugnuts as hell reason – and trust me, it’s not a good reason at all – lemme explain why this is a bad idea.

He's saying "Sometimes you're a real
condescending ass, pal."

One of the reasons why Superman even works as a character at all is because, at the end of the day and no matter how unlikely or unrealistic he may be, you only need to suspend your disbelief with him once. You only have to accept the idea “He is a super-powered alien from a highly advanced civilization”, and everything else follows. How can he fly, why does he have super-breath? He’s a super-powered alien from a highly advanced civilization. How come no one recognizes him when he wears glasses? He’s a super-powered alien from a high advanced civilization. Why the red pants? He’s got a super-powered dog? How does Lois Lane still have a pelvis? Super-powered etcetera from etcetera etcetera … it’s the do-all, be-all answer, you can harvest from it any answer you realistically need.

When you add something to the character, you have to make sure it’s covered by that one suspension of disbelief, because if it requires a second suspension of disbelief – if it requires another coincidence or far-fetched explanation or willful indulgence of ignorance – then the whole story starts to sag under the burden.

Okay? Okay, so here’s Maggin’s reason for why everyone in the universe recognizes Superman and says his name the same way: At the Big Bang, a big chunk of roughly sword-shaped primordial matter coalesced, and after time it was polished by space-rays into being not just a sword and not only not just a sword but also a sword that basically looks like the kind of sword you could get from 14th century Europe even though this is billions of years before the Earth even existed AND also on the hilt it has Superman’s S-insignia on it and it is apparently magical and also sentient and used mind-rays to give Jonathan Kent the idea of the stylized “S” on Superboy’s uniform and it floated around eluding capture by space-faring races who eventually called it “The Sword of Superman” even though those are English words from 20th century Earth that, again, didn’t even exist back then and also it was Excalibur (!) but mostly it floats around in space waiting to help Superman fight a pretty middle-weight super-villain and then to piss the fuck off back to space or something.

Ta-daa! Say, does anyone else feel like they have a head injury?

"This story! I don't want it in canon!"

The rest of the story is a pleasant boilerplate pre-Crisis tale, and there’s a lot to love about Maggin’s writing – he’s not afraid to have the characters be flippant or casual with their dialogue, he’s willing to let the plot coast for clever character moments, and he’s charmingly unashamed to have a villain named Oswald Mandias floating around.

I’ve always wondered about the world which comic book people inhabit – are they, as a general population completely ignorant of classical literature and wordplay, or are they far too aware of it? If your last name is Mandias (and trust me, I’ve tried putting the stress all over that word, it never doesn’t sound ridiculous), is it just accepted that you’ll name your kid Oscar Mandias or Osbourne Mandias, it’s just a given you’ll be introducing “This is our little Ozzy, say hi to everyone Ozzy”? If your last name is Hood, does heavy cultural weight determine you’ll name your kid “Robert N. Hood?” “Meet my youngest, Stephen Hakes Spear…” Does Edward Nigma only fly under the radar because it’s among the least dumb pun names these people have ever heard?

Man, this was frustrating.

Anyway, Mandias smuggles himself aboard the space shuttle, gets taken over by a Maggin baddie named King Kosmos who hypnotizes everyone on Earth into loving him and perceiving Superman as a horrible monster that they’re scared of and it shakes Superman’s confirdence, at which point the sword shows up and takes Superman to a library where it shows him a book and is all “I am all hell of Excalibur, baby” and then unrelatedly Superman hypnotizes himself into thinking that all the people who are scared of him are actually cheering him and he uses that self-confidence boost to punch King Kosmos in the pecker real hard a bunch of times.

The sword goes on to do something indeterminate to tip the tide of battle in Superman’s favor, and then flips out like a crazy maniac and tries to give Superman all the power in the universe, which Superman refuses, whereupon the blade disintegrates and Superman hucks the hilt into outer space and then we get a very Elliot S.Maggin-ey epilogue where a space-vagrant recounts the dumb story we just heard as “a legend”.

I’m sorry, like I say, I like the guy and everything but at one point he has Superman look at the sword with his microscopic vision and say “If I’m right – and that is nearly impossible in this case - this is made of the original material of the universe!” Of COURSE it’s made of the original material of the universe, the only thing we’ve got in this universe is the original material of the universe. We haven’t been spooning in brand-new Helium or anything*.

(* I await corrections, science nerds)

Still – hey, you know how Maggin’s Superwoman stories always implied that she would go down in history as the greatest hero of the twentieth century, but he never actually got around to explaining why? I’d pay him fourteen dollars to hear the real answer, although I got a theory of my own that I’d bet seven bucks at two-to-one odds is better. I’d also bet at two-to-one odds that half the comments for this article are going to be people chiding me for not liking Elliot S!Maggin even though I said like five times I totally love Elliot S!Maggin. Nobody reads all the way to the end on these things, anyway. 

Bust on this story all I might, this panel is fuckin' perfection. 

DC FIFTY-TOO IS LIVE!

This blog remains on hiatus for a little longer as DC FIFTY-TOO officially launches today! Don't miss out!

DC FIFTY-TOO

Your Humble Editor has been busy these last few weeks organizing what I hope will be a fun independent project to coincide with the relaunch of the DC Comics line of books: DC FIFTY-TOO. Fifty-two (and then some) very different and very talented artists have created their own first issue covers for DC Comics they'd like to see.

Swing on over to the blog to learn more, and stay tuned for August 15th when the first four covers will be revealed!

Crisis On Infinite Earths in the Front, Party in the Back!

DC Comics is taking a lot of criticism for its announced washbucket full of upcoming redesigns* - and rightly so. The redesigns so far range from the downright stupid (I'm looking at you, Harley Quinn. Seriously, I can't stop looking, I don't know when the trainwreck will end) to the plainly underwhelming (Hi Firestorm!) to the merely unnecessary with one or two decent ones thrown in just to keep us on our toes.

*...from, for instance, the fine folks at Project:Rooftop (including Your Humble Editor his own damn self). Watch me say mean things about Deadshot and a turtle!

You would think - given all the high-hattin' haberdashery hubbub and sneering sartorial sideswipes - that DC Comics had never undertaken some unpopular redesigns of their characters before, BUT OH HOW WRONG YOU'D BE! It wasn't so long ago - you know, a couple of decades really, but in the geological terms taking into account the overall age of the Earth, more like "mere seconds" - that DC updated its characters for the tumultuous Nineties. Strap down your mullets, let's take a quick look at Who's Horribly Dressed in the DC Universe...


BLACK LIGHTNING

I'm not even sure where this costume appeared, if it appeared anywhere, but thank goodness they got rid of Black Lightning's ridiculous afro ... in favor of a hightop fade. "Whew", you suspect the editorial team was saying to themselves, "At least THIS hairstyle won't seem catastrophically out of date in a few years!" And then to make it extra-relevant to the youngsters, they've got Lightning throwing the horns. "OZZZZYYY! *bzzzzt!*"




THE CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN

I don't know anything about Tim Sale as a person or whether he's a decent guy or gives blood to orphans (sometimes they come collecting it door-to-door, all in mason jars stacked in a little red wagon), but I do really want to sit down with some fans of his some day and ask what the heck the big deal's supposed to be? This guy keeps getting big, fancy graphic novels and high-profile color-themed prestige format series (and THAT'S not getting old!), and ... why? It looks like he inks with a sausage. Did you see that cover he drew for the debut issue of the otherwise excellent Solo series? Pencils got erasers, Tim. 

Anyway, the Challengers were given a new look to get themselves into the updated, edgy and more serious Nineties, and I think we're all on the same page these days that when we say a comic is "more serious", we mean it's "exceptionally more ridiculous than it's ever been before." Big guns, a sort of haunted "produces porn movies in the basement" look for Prof, a buzzcut and at least one character started off the series dead. Maybe. I recall about zero percent of this, so let's pretend they all opened an ice cream stand and this is a joke card they sent out for Christmas...


ELEMENT WOMAN (Girl, whatever)

Element Woman gets her own giant-sized Who's Who page and THIS is the image they choose? Poor girl, this must have been like getting your senior yearbook photo on the first day of your period and also you had a pube between your front teeth.

Allegedly, the Element Woman story from Sandman was written because several other DC authors had "misused" Neil Gaiman's character Death in some of their comics. Rather than considering the possibility that he had opened himself to misinterpretation by neglecting to craft any coherent sense of the character's motivation, her personality (beyond "babbling nitwit") and the scope of her powers and authority, Gaiman decided to pen this single issue vignette to set the record straight - and then used Death in a vague throwaway which didn't answer any questions at all and trod less ground than they'd trod with the character earlier.

Besides, Neil Gaiman had used Element Woman as the focus of the story only because it was a character he could off without anyone's panties getting in a bunch. Somehow, when other authors line up Z-List cannon fodder, they get pilloried. When Gaiman does it? Oh the magic of storytelling and the stories of dreams and dreams are the greatest stories ... blech. I liked her better when she was up on Metamorpho's jock, because Bob Haney is GOLDEN.




FIRESTORM, THE NUKULAR MAN

Honestly, when considering the unsightly carnival of spilled condiments and a grease fire which constituted Firestorm's original costume, this is hardly worse. However, the part of Firestorm's costume that everyone hates on ... okay, excepting the puffy sleeves ... is the fiery head. How does the fiery head work? Where's his brain? Does it crackle and pop while it burns? Why is it dumb? Who is the dumb guy who made it? So many questions.

So Firestorm 2.0 not only gets a BIGGER fiery head ... like, the Jim Henson Studio and a fly-gang of sixteen and every spandexed metal band of the Eighties amount of fiery head ... but he also gets colorful little accents on his wrists and his feet. Just above his TOES on his feet. And a collar. His wallet is probably on fire too, and his car keys. I bet he comes home and the DVD player and his family photo albums are all made of fire. This guy cannot get ENOUGH of the FIRE!

THE WANDERERS (They wander 'round 'round 'round 'round ...)

The Wanderers were some sort of ancillary super-team which operated in the 30th century alongside the Legion of Super-Heroes, and were given a makeover because before this they were all just wearing clothes and we all know how stupid wearing clothes is. It doesn't help that they've posed them like an intergalactic frat party, but then again I'm not sure what would help. Maybe amnesia, so I don't have to remember having ever seen these outfits.


FIRE

Okay, look past the Adam Hughes art for a moment - I know it's difficult, inasmuch as there as two pretty significant impediments in your path - but look at this and answer a question for me: From what country does Beatriz "Fire" DaCosta originate? That's right: Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation. She's the Secretary of the Interior, as a matter of fact!

Probably what sticks out for me most in this costume (think clean thoughts, chums) is that belt. I had three girlfriends in high school who wore that belt, and one who had that hair. None of them burst into flames, but I could nominate at least two of them I'd like to see that happen to oh ho, ho ho ...


 ORION

AH HOLY JESUS WHAT JUST HAPPENED?




MY CHANGELING, MY CHANGELING, WON'T YOU PLAY WITH MY CHANGELING?

Nice animullet, champ.




BRAINIAC ON THE FLOOR

In the late Eighties, they went out of their way to revamp Superman and all of his Rogues Gallery, backstory, etc etc and so on. I think they even changed the combination on his bike lock.

One of the things they did with Superman was to address the issue of his power level - deciding that a Superman who could juggle mountains, eat fire and shit ice from the git-go* was a turn-off for new, modern-day readers (and then deciding a couple years later that new, modern-day readers would prefer it if Superman could smash planets flat between his toes), they dropped Superman's power level down to an admirable near-nil.

Then, for some reason, they also dropped his enemies' power levels down to near nil. And made them fat. And balding. Also Luthor had cancer. And I suspect Brainiac never had anything approaching a formal education, and he dressed in what appears to be the kind of pajamas they give out in the terminal ward of a childrens hospital.

IF YOU'RE GOING TO WEAKEN SUPERMAN, WHY WEAKEN HIS ENEMIES TOO? I'm pretty sure I could have taken out Brainiac with a box full of donuts and patience enough for high cholesterol to claim his life.

Possibly the funniest part of Brainiac's new costume is how it has the silhouette of a skinnier man on it. Way to rub it in, comics guys!


*I will send you a copy of Youngblood #1 if you can place this reference as it applies to Superman. Hell, I'll draw the cast of Youngblood for you on the inside cover ...


POWER GIRL

It's hard to argue that DC - and superhero comics in general - don't have some real anger issues towards women, but usually the argument focuses on how Power Girl's costume is too revealing and reduces the character to a sex object and not about how DC's 90's-era answer to this criticism was to put Power Girl in a gathered turtleneck and give her a pet cat. Next up: Power Girl starts a blog about her knitting projects and gets real defensive whenever anyone in her comments section claims that it's dumb to be thirty and still a virgin. And she has to wax her mustache. (Notice that it still accentuates her tits, though - no dummies, the comic book guys!)




THORN TO BE WILD

The 1970's (Rose and ) Thorn wasn't winning any fashion awards with her original costume, which included a miniskirt trimmed with green briars, but then she comes back in the modern Nineties tricked out like a hooker and shoving poison needles into dudes' faces. Hey, do you know what turn of phrase I end up using a lot when talking about character design in the Nineties? "Turned out like a hooker." Now guess why.

NIGHTWING

It's amazing to imagine that Spider-Dick here was an improvement on an existing costume, but you know what?

It was.

Bonus G&F: ...And don't let the big gold door hit you where the good Rao split you.

It’s been about twenty-five years since DC Comics’ first conscious effort to revamp, reboot and relaunch their universe, The Crisis on Infinite Earths. For better or worse, it was an exceptional moment of change as DC took what was then fifty years of a publishing history and wiped the slate clean, inviting readers to step into a new - and optimistically - streamlined universe where such disparate characters as Captain Marvel and Captain Atom stood beside Dr.Fate and the Blue Beetle, where the panoply of multiple earths had never existed, and where Superman and Batman had yet to meet and Wonder Woman had yet to set foot in Man’s World.

Considering the depth and breadth of his continuity – both personal and among his extended family – no one required a cleaner slate more than the Man of Steel. Every hero had their supporting cast and in-canon errata, but none so much as Superman, who boasted a bottle city, a quartet of super-pets, a parade of robot duplicates, identical uncles, cousins, emergency squadroneers, a planet of imperfect duplicates, a nightmare dimension of villains, one of the vastest rogues galleries in comics history, an entirely distinct teenage continuity and roughly half a dozen super-teams which counted him among their members – if not founder and inspiration. And that’s just scratching the surface.

Naturally, DC wanted to honor their flagship hero of half-a-century and to say farewell to his many incarnations and spin-offs. Here’s how they did it:

The original Superman of 1938 – with his beloved wife Lois Lane – walks into a luminous, heavenly paradise, arm-in-arm with the rescued Superboy of a vanished universe and the legacy of Luthor, reconciled at last.

Meanwhile, the Superboy of the Legion of Super-Heroes sacrifices his life to ensure that the future which his legacy inspired survives.

In no less a tangible sacrifice, Supergirl buys the heroes of five worlds all-too-precious time, at a great personal cost. She is mourned universally.

Lastly, the Silver Age Superman mythos is put to bed amidst the tears and tragedy with a smile, a wink and a happy ending.

Now let’s look at how modern-day DC is putting the Superman legacy to bed in anticipation of their September relaunch:

Superboy is a mass-murdering madman dressed like a sky-blue Ford Fairlane with gold piping.

The Superman of 1938 is an emotion-manipulating zombie who rips out the hearts of the living (as does his wife, by the way).

And would somebody just rape Supergirl already??

COMICS. They never needed a Dan Didio.