Shaggyman echoes a sentiment shared by all humanity during the holiday season.

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In New York it is legal for women to go topless in public.  In 1992, a court ruled that if men were legally allowed to expose their chests, women should be able to do the same. 

The ruling makes sense.  Men and women have the same biological structures; mammary glands, fatty tissue, and nipples.  The structures even work the same way.  Under the right hormonal or physical conditions, men can lactate and even breastfeed.  The fact that, traditionally, men’s and women’s chests come in different configurations doesn’t make a difference.

Of course, after eighteen years of legality in one of the most liberal cities in the world, so few women go topless that even many police officers are unaware of the law, so clearly it makes a social difference.

However, I think it’s time that comics take the biological view, rather than the social one.

Why?

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I try not to read internet rumors.  Most of the time they just get me riled about something dreamed up by someone on a message board.  Unfortunately, this means that sometimes I get bad news in public places.  That can be unpleasant.  A few weeks ago in a comics shop, some friends told me that Birds of Prey was getting cancelled.  I won’t get into details, but there was loud wailing involved.  Loud, sustained wailing.

I’ve written about how the Wonder Woman mythos doesn’t do much for me.  Birds of Prey was my version of Amazon Island.  Up until Canary left, it was a long-preserved team.  It was all-girl, all bad-ass, all the time.  Since it was not one of the hottest-selling books it was a sheltered island, out of the way of the major continuity events, where some of the lesser known female characters could thrive.

Yes, I know that there is going to be an Oracle mini-series, and while Barbara Gordon is one of my top five characters of all time, I’m going to miss the rest of the Birds.  Canary was at her best with a team that she could have fun with, not fight with or mother.  Huntress was an awkward fit everywhere else in the DCU, too independent to be one of the bats, too bat-oriented to get away from them.  In Birds of Prey she got a chance to shine, and take control.  And of course there’s Zinda, who is one of the most fun characters in the DCU.  There’s Manhunter, who had her own book cancelled recently.  Even Misfit was growing on me.

When a favorite character of mine loses a book, I always wonder if I’ll see them again.  Being too unpopular for a book, but just popular enough to be noticed, is often a recipe for death when big events come up.  I feel like Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans.  “Stay alive, no matter what occurs!  I will find you!”

I also mourned the end of The Blue Beetle, but at least I know that Jaime will be preserved in Teen Titans.  Also, I think that, as stages of grief go, I am still firmly routed in ‘denial.’  Jaime will come back.  I know this.  He must.

Birds of Prey has catapulted me into ‘bargaining.’  What would it take to get the Birds back.  How would it be possible to drive up readership?  Let me rephrase that.  How would it be possible to drive up readership besides having a Babs, Dinah, and Helena three-way in each book?  (Yeah, I’ve seen that fanart.)

As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  What I have is a steadfast love of comics that are light, fun, and just a little nutzo.  My ideal Birds book would be a cross between the early Indiana Jones movies and Bruce Lee on pixie stix.  Three-to-five issue arcs, each one being a separate adventure.  Fast, fun, and ass-kicking.  I’d like constant wisecracks, mild indignity, ninja stuff, at least two issues in which people run to get out of the way of giant boulders, and Misfit as Short Round.  That’s Short Round, not Mutt.  Sorry, Shia.

I think the book was doing best with its four core characters; Babs, Helena, Dinah, and Zinda.  As said before, Misfit could be Short Round.  And, of course, since Indy got a new girl every movie, there could be a rotating spot for the last member to keep things fresh.

But hell, I’d favor an eighteen-person team in a somber, noirish book comprised of thirty-issue all-event storyarcs if I thought I’d be getting my Birds back.

What would you hope for in a Birds book?

Tonight marks the release of the first Green Arrow since 2001 that has not had Judd Winick as an ongoing writer. So naturally, I was curious to see what direction the series would take.

It was interesting. I was hoping that Green Arrow and Black Canary would turn a little lighter and happier. The Arrows seem like the JSA to the Batclan’s JLA; based on the same concept, but allowed to be goofy. It doesn’t look like they will be using that goofiness in the upcoming story, but the writer, Andrew Kreisberg, seems to have a good sense of the characters and fits their natural humor into the story.

The one thing that bothered me about the issue was the massive seven-page flashback of all of Olliver Queen’s continuity. It is narrated well, sustaining the theme of the storyline; ‘A second can change your life.’ I can see why it was put in. The cover of the issue features the phrase: “A New Era Begins”. The author is essentially acting as if this is the first issue that the reader had picked up.

The trouble is, it isn’t the first issue that any reader has picked up. If you are flipping through Green Arrow and Black Canary #15, the odds are vanishingly small that you are unfamiliar with the characters. Not only that, but the flashbacks have been coming hard and heavy in this series. Green Arrow: Year One wasn’t that long ago. Then there were the flashbacks in the Black Canary mini-series, the flashbacks in and around the wedding, the flashbacks when Ollie was missing, Ollie’s re-hashing of his relationship with Connor when Connor was in a coma. There was even a thorough discussion of the history of Black Canary and Green Arrow in Birds of Prey.

So taking seven pages out of a story to recap it all again feels like being next to a drunk guy at a party who’s telling a fantastic story about a wild night he had with a friend. Trouble is, he’s so drunk that he forgot that you’re the friend. You kind of want to shake him a little and say, “Dude. I know. I was there.”

Despite this, it’s worth picking up for the sting at the end, and the fun family meeting in the middle. We’ll see how it develops next month.

Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the Eighth Grade, is sweet, funny and almost egregiously cute.

The heroine, heavy on moxie and light on foresight, falls to earth in a rocket and displays the boundless good cheer we expect of the Super family. It seems she’s stuck, and in true Super tradition, Clark decides that the best way to deal with this is to slap a pair of glasses on her, give her an alliterative name, and send her to school.

There things go as well for her as you’d expect them to go for someone with no understanding of any culture on earth. You’d think her question about when machines will rebel would at least get her a Terminator fan or two as a friend.

Although there was only one cosmic adventures and lots of eighth grade, I really liked this comic. I liked that the Superfamily came together across several dimensions to help Supergirl out. I liked the art. And I loved the fantastic Silver Age monologues:

“I bet I just need to calculate the relative orbits of Argo and Earth. Then, if I can fly high enough to make it into orbit, I can probably use the gravitational forces of this planet to slingshot me back into quasi-space! It’s foolproof! . . . . AIIEE! I have no powers under my native red sun! Why was I so foolish?! Now I crash to the ground!”

Worth checking out for adults. Worth buying for kids.

First of all, I apologize for the title of this entry.

I’m not particularly well-versed in Green Lantern lore, but I’ve noticed a few trends in how people respond to Hal versus how they respond to Guy.

Even discounting the Kyle fans, Hal seems to be the less popular of the two. Among fans, an appearance by Guy gets cheers, while Hal is viewed as business as usual. There are a lot of reasons for that. Hal is business as usual for Green Lantern fans. When a character has been appearing pretty regularly since 1959, it’s a lot harder to keep up his appeal compared to the guy who, despite a shortlived series of his own, gets added in for spice every now and again. Guy is the more extreme character, and extreme characters tend to be interesting.

But Guy has his own deficiencies. Deficiency. Okay. He’s a jerk. A biggun. However, that deficiency is also his strength, as a character. Why? Because every character and every writer makes it clear that they know he’s a jerk. Once that happens, once the text makes it clear that the story is about a jerk who also happens to do good things, it’s possible to relish the outrageousness of the character the same way we can relish the violence and the spandex costumes.

Hal, on the other hand, is a Hero. He is shown as not only the first Green Lantern, but the best Green Lantern. The sense I’m getting from diehard Green Lantern fans is that the outrage is not just about the mistakes Hal makes, but the fact that he is being sold as the One True Lantern. Because of that, all of his flaws, from his odd courtship with Carol Ferris to that little tantrum during which he almost ended the Universe, are being excused or ignored. And so Guy, with his rudeness, sexism, arrogance, and sometimes outright meanness is popular, and Hal is reviled.

Maybe a little accountability goes a long way?

I’ve never been a fan of character death. The impact of a character’s death on any particular story seems a poor trade for all the stories that they could be in. The latest trend of characters coming back to life seems to be unpopular with most people, but I love it. That said, I would kill off the Joker in a heartbeat. He’s mean.

So. What character would you gladly see the last of? And what would be the best death for them?

The day after the last issue of Batman RIP, I’ve been thinking it over, and you know who would make a great writing team? Judd Winick and Grant Morrison.

No! Wait! Don’t go!

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You said it, Batman.

I think I’m spoiling things under here, so don’t read this unless you’ve already read the issue.
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