“I’m never (expletive deleted) reading this (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted) again!  It’s (expletive deleted)!  I mean, (really filthy expletive deleted), man!  (expletive deleted) this!”

That is the familiar script of a comics reader who is taking his toys and going home.  You see it all the time.  Sometimes it’s sincere, but more often it’s just a temporary rage brought on by a few bad comics.

Is there anything that would make you swear off a book?  A writer?  A company?  Comics in general?

And, if so, what is it?

I was recently going over David’s post about DKSA, and his point about how it exorcised some of the grimness and misery that DKR introduced into superhero comics.  While I think that he makes a good point, and one echoed by Miller himself, when he described that in DKSA he was comparing superheroes to the pantheon of Greek gods – with their failings, their enthusiasms, and their various eccentricities.

However, I have to disagree with David.  Not because I don’t think he has correctly interpreted the way DKSA changes the tropes set up in DKR, but because my difficulties with Miller’s Batman aren’t really about his grimness.

David concludes his essay with this:

Where we’ve had paranoid and grim Batman for the past fifteen years, Miller gives us one who’s faking grim but skipping like a schoolboy on the inside. Where we’ve had an utterly miserable Batman who figures out ways to trap his friends, Miller delivers a Batman who believes in the strength of others and trusts his fellow warriors.

DKSA is an exorcism. It takes all of the grim and gritty from DKR and the ensuing years and turns it on its head. It’s a push toward day-glo superheroics and away from miserable heroes. The moral of DKSA is “Superheroes are cool!”

My problem with Miller’s legacy isn’t, primarily, the grimness and misery.  That may sound strange, considering I’ve written essay after essay about my love for the lighter side of comics, and my desire for more comics to embrace fun and imagination over dark storylines.  However, it’s not the misery itself I object to, but the balance between light and dark.  I enjoy some angsty melodrama and some brutal violence as much as the next gal, I just feel like modern comics is stuffing me full of pretzels and not offering me any water, if you know what I mean.  I few more light-hearted stories, comics, or comic lines would be refreshing.

However, it’s not Batman being a miserable and paranoid that bothers me when I’m reading DKR.  It’s Batman being, how shall I put this?  A double-barrelled bastard.  Yes.  I believe that’s the technical term.  Read the rest of this entry �

In this interview, Matt Brady asks Dan Didio about, among other things, Jason Todd’s recent killing spree.  Didio responds with this:

Let’s take this one from the very beginning. When a story is going to be told where we feel that a character crosses a moral line, we just don’t put that in arbitrarily. We think through how that affects everyone around him, and what the long-term ramifications of that action will be.

The perfect example of that was when Wonder Woman killed Max Lord. We thought that all the way through – we saw how that affected the relationship between Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. We saw what happens when that relationship breaks down, and how that affected the entire DC Universe, as well as how it was ultimately resolved. We saw those causes and effects all the way through. Or another case – Identity Crisis – we saw those events, the effects of those events, and how they played through the DC Universe. Every time that we try to do a major story where we feel a moral line has been crossed, there are always ramifications because of it. Things that you’re mentioning with Jason – of seeing him kill – are all potential stories for the future. Unless he doesn’t make it out of Battle for the Cowl, these are all story beats that we’d like to see play out throughout the DCU, and they’re all fodder for future storytelling.

Although I can see the point that he is trying to make, and although I recently wrote about this very issue as it pertains to Jason Todd, Didio’s response rings false to me.

In the first place, can’t any development become a set up for future stories?  If Jason Todd were to unexpectedly come into his own and become the hero of Gotham City, wouldn’t that be a good set-up for future stories?  It could be a call-back to the earliest version of Batman, a man who carried a gun and who regularly killed criminals while still being a respected hero.  If Jason Todd were, instead, to be captured, it would also be a set-up for future stories.  The Batfamily would have to band together to get him out.  If Jason Todd were turned into a frog, it would be a set-up for future stories.  (Best.  Zatanna story.  Ever.)  Since this justification can be given for any story at all, it becomes meaningless.  It doesn’t matter that an action can cause interesting events in the future if there is no reason for that action happening now.

Secondly, Gotham has been rather heavy on set-up lately, while being light on story.  Remember War Games?  It was a multi-title, multi-month event that set up Black Mask as the ruler of the city.  Then he didn’t do much.  Then he was killed.  Now he’s back.  And he’ll have, I suppose, a lot of competition for supremacy, since Face The Face was a long story that set up White Shark as the crime boss of Gotham City.  Where has he been lately?  Maybe he was bumped off by whoever it was who came out on top in Gotham Underground.  The name escapes me, since I’m pretty sure there have been no stories told about them, either.  Or maybe he’ll fight the Al Ghul family, headed by Ras, Nissa, Talia, Ras, Talia?  It’s not that DC hasn’t published some great ongoing stories.  It’s just that I’ve been hearing a lot about a set-up for future stories and comparatively little about the stories themselves.

Finally, there is Didio’s line, “Unless he doesn’t make it out of Battle for the Cowl, these are all story beats that we’d like to see play out throughout the DCU.”  Didio has a tongue-in-cheek interview style that doesn’t always come through in writing, so perhaps he’s making a joke.  If he isn’t, the entire paragraph falls down.

I don’t want to descend into angry fanism, but I’m growing a bit tired of hearing that no decision is arbitrary, that there haven’t been any mistakes in characterization, that there will be a justification for a certain character’s actions in a year, another book, an unannounced-and-unplanned-yet-possible storyline.  There should be a reason why a character acts a certain way.  That reason should have something to do with the character’s actions, attitudes, or immediate wants.  “We can write about it later,” is not that reason.

I got back in town today, after a short trip down south, and I picked up my comics, including Green Arrow and Black Canary in which our heroes are having marital trouble (more on that, later), Oracle: The Cure on the cover of which Barbara Gordon legally changes her name to Boobara Gordon (more on that, later), reviewed the posts for the last few days, including David’s entry about Frank Miller and his grim n’ gritty image (more on that, later) and read the latest Newsarama Interview with Dan Didio in which he explains Jason Todd’s latest killing spree (boy, have I got a lot to do), and then I read Superman/Batman.

In Nanopolis,Superman has been shrunk by the Prankster, and Batman shrinks himself to go after him.  As they navigate through a shrunken world, mysteriously able to breath, despite being small enough to not be able to inhale oxygen, both are picked up as the saviors of different groups of beings.  Batman is picked up by a nomadic tribe of micro-organisms who have been enslaved by nanites, which the Prankster scattered around his lab.  Superman is abducted by the nanites themselves, who wish to use his energy to grow larger and take over the world.

Meanwhile Robin and Steel stay in the lab, trying to maintain contact with Batman and Superman, while the Prankster keeps up a running commentary while tied to a chair.

That story is a giant loon, fed on nothing by nuts and crammed into a whack-a-mole machine.  I dare you to read that without feeling better about life in general and comics in particular.

It’s not that I don’t like Ollie and Dinah’s ongoing soapy drama, or the fact that Jason Todd is back and conflicted.  It’s just that this story, and this series, is the distilled essence of comics.  Imaginative, convoluted, ridiculous, and fun, it manages to take its readers to other worlds.  It’s equally generous to its characters dealing out very little death and limited angst while still giving them a wider range of emotions than they’re allowed to display in just about any other comic.

It warms my heart to know that any loonball story I might think up, and I’ve thought up a few, could be matched or topped by whatever the next story of Superman/Batman is.

(Also, two different birthday parties are mentioned in this particular arc.  If this story ends with cake in the next issue, I am seriously going to do a little dance in the comics shop.)

Yesterday I posted about how some characters zig-zag between their strengths and their flaws, and how that was surprisingly representative of real life.  We all struggle with certain things all our lives, and the way characters have to re-visit the same issues over and over is often quite realistic.

Then someone brought up Cassandra Cain in the comments. 

I haven’t made a secret of my dislike of her recent character change, and I think she represents a good example of the problem with this zig-zag method of character development.  I always felt that they got Cassandra Cain completely wrong since her series ended.  Suddenly she could read, write, and speak several languages instead of being able to barely sound out a few words.  For the entirety of her series she was shown as having a horror of killing anyone, after a traumatic incident in her childhood.  In One Year Later and in her mini-series she seriously considered killing her father.  It was just, in my view, all wrong.  All terribly, terribly wrong.  I considered her a completely new character who happened to have the same name as a previous character.

Continuity, however, doesn’t make the same exceptions I do.  According to comics, Cassandra Cain can be said to have the same back-and-forth relationship with casual murder that Jason Todd does.  Anyone writing her from now on can make a case for any story in which she considers killing someone, based on her time in Robin, Teen Titans, and the Batgirl mini-series.  Sure, if someone who feels the way I do about Cassandra Cain writes her in future, she’ll be a sweet kid with no social skills, the best fighter in the world, and an unbending morality.  But if the next writer goes by her mini-series, she’ll be a cranky teen fighter who is always one outrage away from beating someone to death.  And their work will make this new characterization more ingrained and defensible, and the cycle will continue.

This, I think, is why continuity and character geeks shout ‘out-of-character’ so loudly and so angrily.  Once upon a time Batman was a guy who snapped criminals necks and had a fiancee.  A little later he was an eccentric father figure who fought crime and goofed around with Robin and Superman in roughly equal proportion.  Then he was a detective.  Then an ultra-reclusive obsessive.  It only takes one really out-of-character story to change a character for the forseeable future.

I have no doubt the massive fan rampage begun by Stephanie Brown’s death was the thing that eventually brought her back.  Perhaps if a group of fans had yelled and screamed and written angry letter to DC comics, Cassandra Cain would still be a character I recognize.  Although I’ve grown out of the phase of fanhood in which I blame everything I hate on arrogant and heartless editors who labor all day to enrage and disappoint fans, I can see the use in kicking up a fuss every now and again in defense of a character you love.

And so it appears in the preview of Battle For The Cowl #2. . . oooops, spoilers already . . .

Read the rest of this entry �

Along with my regular copy of Superman/Batman, which was worth the three dollars I paid for it the moment I hit the page in which Superman, shrunken down to nanite-size, starts a journal about how alone he is but how he won’t give up hope, and completely subverts his own epic by spelling ‘diary’ as ‘dairy’, I picked up The Flash: Rebirth, on a whim.  After some very close reading of the lengthy exposition speech bubbles, I still have a few questions.

Flash fans, this is your chance to shine.

Read the rest of this entry �

I think most of the people reading this have heard of Dollhouse.  It’s a series about a super-secret underground organization that rents out ‘Dolls’ out to the rich and powerful.  Dolls are men and women who have had their memories wiped, and have been mentally implanted with memories that allow them to complete a specific task asked for by the client.

A good enough premise, but a few things keep hitting me while watching.

Read the rest of this entry �

Sometimes I wonder about the backstories of the characters, and how they relate to their skills.  Batman has his parents murdered in front of his eyes.  He becomes the best martial artist, the best detective, the best strategist, the best escape-artist, etc.  True, he did have a long time to train, but what are the odds of him actually being the best, no matter how hard he worked?

Frank Castle had his entire family murdered in front of him.  No lifetime of training for him.  He went straight to ultimate badass after that.

Superman tops them both with his entire planet blowing up.  He becomes, arguably, the most powerful being on earth.

It’s not that I can’t understand the reasons for this.  In the story, a traumatic event explains the character’s drive and focus, which in turn explains their skill.  Also, practically speaking, few people want to read a superhero comic about a superhero who feels fine and isn’t very good at what they do.

At the same time, I wonder about ways to break from the mold.  An evil part of me wants to make up a superhero character who has that traumatic past, but whose past hasn’t conferred upon them the skill that other heroes have.  It’s tragic to be the hollow-eyed, traumatized heavyweight who saves other people’s lives because you couldn’t save your own.  How much sadder would it be to be the hollow-eyed, traumatized screw-up who can’t run fast enough to save people’s lives, can’t fight well enough to save people’s lives, and is just too damn dumb to figure out the situation, anyway?

And now for something completely different.

DC has just announced a new weekly.  It’ll be oversized, sixteen pages, and feature one-page stories about all kinds of different DCU characters.  There will be the typical characters like Batman and Superman but Wednesday Comics, the title of the weekly, will also bring all of DC’s obscure characters into the limelight.

The thing about me is I hate and fear change.  I’m also not a fan of disorder, and I know these things won’t fit in my long-boxes.  And yet, I cannot resist this.  Standalone stories.  Random characters.  I’m there.

You?