Just when I decided I was fine with not going to this year’s Comic-Con, what with the crowds, and no place to stay, and five days of eight-dollar hot dogs eaten while crouched in the corner of a convention center, Geoff Johns tweets that The Blue Beetle will be a live-action TV show.

Let me say that again:  the 24 issue run that I have pimped time and time again, and that I consider one of the best books in comics.  Ever.  Is going to be a live-action TV series, with previews at Comic-Con.

Damn you, Cruel Fate.

That being said – for all the Blue Beetle fans out there: it is time to start dancing.  Dance!  DANCE RIGHT THERE IN YOUR CHAIR!

This is so fantastic.  Here are five things I hope will happen.

1.  John Rogers and Keith Giffen are involved in this series.

2.  They keep The Family Reyes.  That is one of the best, sweetest, wisest, and yet imperfect groups of people I’ve ever seen in any form of media.

3.  They also keep La Dama.  I loved her as a villain.  She was one of the few villains in comics who was motivated by specific and understandable goals: family, security, and money.  So many villains are just motivated by an abstract desire to be evil.

4.  The Lonar Excursion, complete with tiny little fuzzy aliens whose language translates to hilarious lines.  My favorite one part?  Where they just tried to drink Brenda’s blood, and got beat up by Brenda and Lonar, and then came back all, “eep eep eep” and the translation was:  “We’re cool, you’re cool. Let’s all just be cool.”  You said it, ewok rip-offs!

5.  Oh god you can’t have a Jaime Blue Beetle series without Guy Gardner!  Please, please, please, please.

6.  The Ultrahumanite, too.

7.  This is just to say that The Blue Beetle also had the storyline with the best title. Ever.  Seriously, read comics all your life, you will never beat this one.  It’s one in which Eclipso wants to rip the heart out of a super-powered baby to – something.  That doesn’t matter.  What matters is that the issue was called ‘Total Eclipso: The Heart.”  My god.  It’s full of stars.

8.  I know this is a long shot, but I’d love for Ted to be in there.  It’s canon that he wanted to retire and be an inventor, and that the scarab didn’t work for him.  Don’t get me wrong, I like The Peacemaker, but Ted is just so sweet and goofy and smart and ridiculous.  I miss the guy.

That turned into eight things and every one of them is essential.

Hunh.

With this little information, I can’t say much, except that I hope it will be more Young Justice and less Justice League.  I loved the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited series. 

I just really don’t want to see The Justice League, Only They’re Teenagers.  Young Justicehad its own feel and its own cast  (the fact that Arrowette is on the show is a good sign).  I hope that they’re not going to shove adult heroes into teenage roles.

Okay, enough about what I hope it’s not.  Here’s what I hope it is.  I hope that they have the dorky-as-hell Superboy.  He was fun and shallow, but also very sweet, with a poignant back story.  I hope that they include both Cassie and Cissie, and that they’re friends all the way through.

And I hope that they have the adult superheroes in the show, just as they were in the comic; stepping in and annoying all the kids.  Young Justice wasn’t just a series about a team of kids.  It was a series about a team of kids who were rebelling, and challenging, and clinging to, and thinking about, and testing the grown-ups in their lives.  That was part of what made it fun and poignant.  If it’s just a bunch of kids fighting monsters, it would just be like Teen Titans Go!

Oh, and I hope they have the supercycle.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that I like my comics to be more variety show than epic tale.  Although there are a few long stories I adore, most of which I’ve gone on about already, there is nothing I like better than an eclectic bunch of simple stories.  Gotham Knights, Superman/Batman, Legends of the Dark Knight, Batman Confidential, Tiny Titans, all of these are the kinds of things I like.

This love of the well-told episode extends to other forms of media.  I prefer The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings.  I hate when they artificially extend a storyline by making the season finale end on a cliffhanger.  And I generally like one-off stories better than overall arcs.  The episode of the Justice League Unlimited in which Wonder Woman got turned into a pig, or the time that Buffy had to take on a mind-control creature that came out of the eggs that students had to carry around for sex-ed.

So it’s strange to me that Dollhouse entirely flips my preferences.  I don’t care what assignment that Echo has this week or how well she completes it.  I want to see more of the sub-plots, the foreshadowing, and the ongoing undercurrents that color every episode.  I want to see the grander story.

I’m not sure what it is that is different about the series.  I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Echo/Caroline, but while I don’t find her a particularly interesting character, she carries the stories along and makes me believe she can be both creatively clever while being clueless to larger implications.

Maybe it’s because the Dollhouse itself is evil.  When the show is about heroes, I don’t like to see them hit trouble.  When it’s about villains, I welcome a chance to make them miserable.

But I think there’s a larger reason.  So many shows give us meaningless plot-twists and clever set-ups that reveal themselves to be just that – clever set-ups, with payoffs to be filled in by the writers if its necessary.  Dollhouse is planned, from first to last.   There aren’t any dropped story lines or hollow explanations or rushed justifications.  I know that if I see something strange, it was because I was meant to, and I’ll get a satisfying pay-off if I wonder about it.

Take note, Lost.  Oh wait.  That show actually did well.

Please watch Dollhouse, you guys.  If the show gets cancelled because the world ends I will go freaking crazy on someone and I can’t be sure it won’t be myself.  So.

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