Click Moments
August 25th, 2009 by Esther Inglis-Arkell | Tags: Batman, booster gold, cassandra cain, DC comics, stephanie brown, ted kordI have said that I don’t warm up to new characters easily, and it’s true. If anything, I find myself hostile to new characters. Here’s a new person, taking up panels that could easily be devoted to characters that I already like.
Lately I’ve been examining what exactly causes a new character I hate to become someone I like. It helps when they’re shown to be someone I can understand, but I understand plenty of people I don’t like.
What it comes down to are ‘click’ moments, moment when the character is so fantastic that I’m lifted out of my knee-jerk misanthropy and become a fan. I haven’t found any particular common thread to these moments, but I’d like to share some with you.
Sasha Bordeaux: She becomes Batman’s sidekick for a little while. While sidekicking she meets up with Huntress during a crisis. Huntress saves her, and snarkily says, “You can thank me later.” Sasha replies, “Why wait? Thanks!” That’s when I began to like her, to cheer her on, and to follow her. She’s a decent person. Not a weak person. Not a soft person. A strong person with a level enough head not to answer rudeness with rudeness. She exemplified the strategy of turning the other cheek. In Gotham. That takes some doing.
Cheshire: In the Villains United miniseries, Mockingbird threatens to kill her child in order to keep her on the team. Her strategy? Immediately betray the team. Oh, and sleep with a man to get pregnant so she can ‘replace’ her child. When the other members rightly point out that his is sociopathic on a level never seen before, she says something like, ‘We were caught and only I managed to cut myself free. Because I dared.’ Damn. Just damn. It’s horrible and it’s fantastic.
Booster Gold: When he tried to save Ted Kord despite knowing the world would suck because of it. That’s just self-explanatory. What? I’m not made of stone!
Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown: These two entirely won me over when they spar until both of them vomit and then decide to do it again the next day. Their friendship is literally my lead-in to both characters. It features everything I like, people being kind to each other, being loyal, helping each other out, and a broken jaw every now and then. Really, it’s a chick flick waiting to happen.
Share your own ‘click’ moments, if you have them, below.
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Machine Man: First in Ms. Marvel when he was introduced. I thought “who is this cheesey guy.” Then he’s making wise-cracks. Pulling all kinds of awesome looking guns out of his robot body, and insulting his superiors. Marvel Zombies 3 just completely sold the character for me after that.
I hear you on Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown. Makes me wish they just could’ve had a Batgirl/Spoiler series instead of making Steph Batgirl. With Birds of Prey gone we need a female buddy book or something that’s not Gotham City Sirens.
I realized that Cass is the best Batgirl ever, and probably the best Bat-character next to Riddler, when she dodged bullets in that warehouse in those early, early issues.
Click moment: I don’t know why, but when those zombie nurses tried to eat Deadpool’s flesh in one of the issues of the current Deadpool series, and then spat it out again because he tasted so terrible, I realized that I loved Deadpool with all my heart. lol.
Squirrel Girl – when I read her first appearance (written and drawn by Steve Ditko, no less), my jaw dropped because she seemed such a terrible character and concept. However, when she appeared in the G. L. A. miniseries and started doing meta-humor, I fell in love with her and her optimistic can-do attitude. Bet she could defeat Mephisto and get him to reinstate the Spider-Marriage!
Damian, son of Talia and Bruce. At first I wasn’t impressed by him, nor did I hate him on sight, even with his obnoxious behavior. I was mostly disappointed and uninterested. But his click moment for me came when he was written by Fabian Nicieza in the Nightwing “Ras Al Ghul Resurrection” tie-in. The whole issue was hillarious, with much banter between Nightwing, Tim and Damian. However, that probably was the first time we see Damian realizing his own short comings. At one point Nightwing picks up Damian by the waist to take them to a higher ground and Damian whines back at him, “Let go of me! You’re embarrassing me!” and Nightwing responds with, “No, you do that well on your own.” Later when Damian does come up short in a jump and is captured by ninja, and has a sword held under his throat he blinks and says, “Maybe I do embarrass myself…”
Then Tim yells that he’ll save him as he struggles to fight thru the pack of ninjas and Damian looks over and calmly responds with, “And I will be forced to thank you for trying.” LOL, that was my click moment for Damian. Since then I love the little sunspot. XD Kid’s got a inferiority complex and covers it up with supreme arrogance…ie. He tries a little TOOO hard. Not all writers do a good job on him, but most of the time he’s amusing at the least. XD
Quicksilver in I-can’t-remember-which-issue of David’s original X-Factor run. He’d been played as a snarky unlikeable jerk for a while until the team were made to sit down with a therapist. He likened his entire life to the frustration we get when we’re stuck behind someone who doesn’t know how to work an ATM.
@Paul: That was the X-aminations issue (X-factor #87).
Back then, I didn’t know what made Tim Robin, but reading Joker’s Wild (Robin’s second mini-series), Tim clicked with me. He’s a geek!
Wasn’t a Flash or GL fan until I read Fast Friends? (GL v3 #66-67) There, both Kyle and Wally showed that they were adorkable.