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.

Months back, a picture was released of the upcoming animated series Batman: The Brave and The Bold. The image showed Batman in a more 1950’s style, appearing in front of a clean-shaven Green Arrow and the current version of Blue Beetle. While I wasn’t exactly ecstatic about it, it at least interested me more than The Batman. Even disregarding the “fuck the fanboys” interview that preceded that series, I just couldn’t get into it.

But Brave and the Bold already had two things going for it. One, it had a good concept. One of the things that made Justice League Unlimited so cool was the idea of a random superhero you may have never heard of showing up in an episode alongside someone you have heard of. Hell, that’s how I was ultimately introduced to Booster Gold. Here, it’s simplified with the original JL roster being replaced with just Batman, holding the series together in a looser continuity, while teaming up with a different guy in each episode. It’s not so much a Batman cartoon as it’s another DC Universe cartoon. That’s cool. I can get into that.

The other thing that it has going for it is Blue Beetle. I’m not just saying this as a fan of Jaime Reyes. There are two things I ultimately felt were missing from Justice League Unlimited: Plastic Man and Blue Beetle. For some reason they didn’t have the broadcasting rights to either character over the course of the show and the most we got was Elongated Man bitching about Plastic Man without us ever seeing him. Granted, it isn’t Ted Kord in this series, but I’ll take what I can get.

Say, I just noticed that Ted Kord is sort of Spider-Man-like while his successor Jaime is Venom-like. Huh.

I forgot about this series, until the recent release of the trailer. Gentlemen! Behold!

That’s… pretty awesome. Plastic Man’s there too! There’s another thing going for it! Yeah! I wonder if Tom Kenny will be voicing him again. For those out of the loop, he played Plas in a failed cartoon pilot a year or so ago.

According to Wiki, Booster Gold and Skeets will get their own episode too. This thing just keeps getting better and better. Not to mention Green Lantern Corps and Red Tornado. And on the villain side, not only do they have Gentleman Ghost, but they have Black Manta in there… and they’re allowed to call him Black Manta this time!

Consider me stoked. I’m in the mood for a lighter Batman right about now.

BLADE

Tomb of Dracula #10 (1973)

“They call me… Blade! Blade the Black Agent X!”

Times change, don’t they? The story that introduces Blade doesn’t so much go into his background, other than his hobby of offing vampires. He takes care of some of Dracula’s henchmen early on and then fights the big bad on a cruise ship. When Dracula has things won, one of his mind-controlled lady victims comes to jump his bones. This distracts Dracula enough that Blade can get back up. Dracula makes the decision to leave, though the boat will explode in moments. Blade tosses everyone off the boat and makes it to safety himself, knowing that he and Dracula will fight again one day.

BLINK

Uncanny X-Men #317 (1994)

Before Blink was well-known for her role in Age of Apocalypse and Exiles, she showed up in regular 616 continuity as part of the Phalanx Covenant. Along with members of Generation X, she finds herself captured by the Phalanx.

When attacked by a being named Harvest, Blink uses her power to teleport him away while tearing him apart. Other than that, she follows the others as they attempt to escape, knowing that the Phalanx was unable to find a way to dampen their powers.

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Sorry, just a bit of sarcasm there. Seriously guys, I know you love Hawkeye/Beetle/Spoiler/The Aquarian/New Warriors/JLI, but no one actually has a vendetta against these characters. Do you know why companies kill them? They kill them because you love them. They know that every character, from Skin to Ronnie Raymond to Doug Ramsey to Bill Foster, is someone’s favorite, except Wyatt Wingfoot, of course. This is especially true on the internet. Killing a character, or hinting that you will kill one, is a surefire sales and word-of-mouth bump. That’s why they do it. They’ll get a rise out of you each and every time.

It’s okay to be upset, but not to the point that you’re throwing out ad hominems and death threats at writers.

Just… be real about it. It’s just comics, dog, it’s not that serious. It sucks, yeah, but that’s life, right? It’s cool to come up with scenarios to bring them back to life or critique why they died, just have some perspective.

Anyway, Blue Beetle.

Like a lot of the DCU, I first encountered Ted Kord in the pages of the Death of Superman. He, along with Booster Gold, were part of the JL(A?) that went up against Doomsday before Superman. I had no idea that those two were the jokey-jokesters that they apparently were in JLI. I thought that they were just two heroes with cool costumes, but that’s possibly because I’ve always thought of goggles as being kind of cool. (Don’t tell anyone I told you that.) Plus, geez, they went up against the guy who killed Superman!

I thought that Blue Beetle was pretty cool, and then promptly forgot about him and the rest of that Justice League until probably about the time that Formerly Known as the Justice League hit. That was good stuff, so I became a mild fan. Countdown hit after a while and bam, Beetle was dead.

And the internet knew the sound of a billion angry keyboards, epithets and incensed forum posts a-typing.

I thought that the Beetle parts of Countdown, save for the bits where Bats and J’onn were jerks to him, did a good job of showing that he was a hero. I particularly liked the bit where Beetle realized that he had a choice between doing wrong and living or remaining a hero and dying.

“My name is Ted Kord. I am the second man to call himself the Blue Beetle. I tell myself there will be a third. And I hope whoever he or she may be, they do better at it than I have.”

He realizes that he can’t stop what’s happening, not even remotely. Lord’s plan is going to take effect, and it’s “Join me or die time.” Beetle’s response?

“Rot in Hell, Max.”

That, lads and ladies, is a true hero. Defiant to the end and ready to spit in a villain’s face.

He was right about there being a new Beetle, too.

The new Beetle is Jaime Reyes. (It’s not Jay-me, by the way. It’s pronounced more like High-may. Sorry, I’m a stickler for Spanish.) He’s the brainchild of Keith Giffen, John Rogers, and Cully Hamner. He’s from El Paso, Texas, and got the Scarab that gave Dan Garret, the first Beetle, his powers.

I really, really like Jaime. He’s quite a believable teenager, thanks in no small part to some smart dialogue from the writers. Jaime was missing for a year thanks to the events of Infinite Crisis, unbeknownst to him. While he was gone, his family came apart. His father was shot, but not killed, and his mother turned into a wreck. When he got back, the very first thing he did was reveal his powers to his understandably freaked-out family.

Yes. That is excellent and it was so nice to see. Jaime is still a teenager, still in high school. He isn’t super smart, or agile, or whatever. Shoot, he doesn’t even know how to fight. But, he understands that family is one of the most important things in a person’s life. He trusts them enough to give them his secret. His best friends, too.

After that, Jaime is almost a traditional Marvel hero. He’s inexperienced, flawed, and honestly, he doesn’t even want to be a hero. He didn’t ask for this, and he definitely didn’t ask for the JLA to take him into space and leave him there. He’s been dealt a raw deal, but he’s going to deal with it as best he can.

I like Jaime. I think that he’s a worthy successor and his book is a lot of fun. It sucks that Ted had to die to make way for him, but that’s comics. You can either embrace the illusion of change and hold onto your favorite characters until they stagnate, or you can embrace actual change and watch your favorite characters grow old, die, retire, or whatever, only to be replaced by new and improved versions or, heaven forbid, actually new characters!

It’s just comics, baby. Love them or leave them. Bad stories are a given in any medium. Whether it’s War Games or Onslaught, something out there is going to rub you the wrong way. Enjoy the good stories, ignore the rest. Just don’t be afraid to try something new.

You can find the list, plus covers, over at Newsarama.

My commentary on the interesting books lies after the jump, and I’ve included the solicit text for them, too!
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