52 Pickup

Week 105 or so: One Year Later (and then some)

2008-05-13T21:23:00.001-07:00

In the unlikely event that anyone's still got this site in their RSS feeds: I should note that I'm writing about periodical comics and occasionally other stuff over at The Savage Critic(s), and recently did a one-year-after-52 post there.

Also, for those of you interested in DC mega-events, I've started a new blog for Final Crisis annotations. Come on over and say hi!

Week 52: Outside Time Without Extension

2007-05-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

Or: Mr. Mind Eating Continuity is the New Superboy Punching the Universe.* Also in this week's post! An important message to you from the editor--about the NEW Pickup!

Before I get to 52.52 itself, though, as a few people have suggested, I'm going to take this last opportunity to hype my book a little. It's called Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, it's being published by Da Capo Press at the beginning of July, I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I encourage you to pre-order a copy here. 52 is mentioned only in passing, but there's a 30-page chapter on Grant Morrison (and Seven Soldiers and The Invisibles in particular), as well as essays about Question creator Steve Ditko, Mogo co-creator Alan Moore, and Mystery In Space writer/artist Jim Starlin. It's also got chapters on David B., Chester Brown, Carla Speed McNeil, Dave Sim, Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel, Tomb of Dracula, superheroes, superreaders, bad comics, good comics, art comics, and much more. I suspect that people who've enjoyed 52 Pickup will get a charge out of it, or at least find stuff to argue with. You can also befriend it on MySpace--I'll probably be announcing tour dates and such there.

Okay, plug over; thanks for your patience. So: we've got the multiple earths back, and this time they're not infinite but as finite as a deck of cards. The point of Crisis on Infinite Earths was slate-clearing: getting rid of the profusion of alternate realities that was supposedly confusing superhero-comics readers, and clearing the way for one true continuity. In retrospect, that was a mistake, and not just because continuity glitches started piling up within months, especially with the Superman reboot--not only were parallel earths a great springboard for stories, but I don't know that eliminating them made the DCU all that much clearer or more interesting a fictional setting. Since there wasn't the "hard reboot" that Marv Wolfman originally suggested, every fix has led to more fixes, and now it's a history that's permanently in flux, the elves of Superboy's universe-punching and Mr. Mind's continuity-eating going back and rewriting the archives of the Daily Planet again and again. And 20 years after COIE, virtually the only people still reading DCU comics are the people who care about the parallel earths, and would've been happier if they'd stuck around. (Infinite Crisis's payoff was a big old tease for what actually happens this issue.)

I'm one of the people who's delighted to see the parallel-earths concept back, not just because it's tied to so many stories I love, but because there's something intrinsically beautiful about it that extends beyond the content of superhero comics to their form. It gets to the heart of cartooning--the way that an artist can draw a world that's like the one its readers experience, but altered through perception and interpretation. The idea is that "default reality" is not the way things have to be; that not only might everything have turned out differently, but somewhere they did; and that we can approach that place through the bright metaphors of superheroes and their continuity, and the subtler metaphors by which hand-drawn ink lines stand in for what our eyes perceive in the world.

We'd been promised that 52 was a story with an actual resolution, and so it is--up to a point, although it was also intended from the outset as an incubator for new projects starring its former C-list characters. I think it's built up a couple of them successfully, but I don't know how many 52 spinoffs I'd want to read. This, I figure, is a good moment to take a long view of 52's more-or-less-surviving main characters:

ADAM STRANGE:
What Have We Learned?: He's awfully good at flying and shooting, even when he's blind. That's it; no other character development here.
Do I Want to Read More?: No. Like I've said before, the hook of the early Adam Strange stories was that they were basically romance stories--they were about what he had to do to overcome the distance between himself and his beloved--with some space opera thrown in for flavor. (Even that great Alan Moore two-parter in Swamp Thing was about the cultural distance between them.) Aside from the two-panel reunion with Alanna last week, this incarnation of Adam totally ignored that angle, and I have no evidence that any future Adam Strange stuff would be able to make the romance work.

ANIMAL MAN:
What Have We Learned?: The universe does indeed like him; he's still the one significant DC character with access to the world beyond the fourth wall.
Do I Want to Read More?: No more than I want to read The Further Adventures of Odysseus after The Odyssey is over. He's got his happy ending, and he deserves it; can we just leave him with that?

BATWOMAN:
What Have We Learned?: She kicks ass and kisses girls, and her family's got money and a menorah. That is, I believe, literally all we know about her.
Do I Want to Read More?: Now that I've spent a year wondering if there might be any more to her than ass-kicking and girl-kissing, I suspect there might not be anything that would make stories about her different from Generic Bat-Eared Action Hero stories.

BLACK ADAM:
What Have We Learned?: His sense of entitlement knows no bounds; he likes to dismember people even more than we thought he did.
Do I Want to Read More?: Oh Jesus no. Leaving Week 50 as the last appearance of Black Adam ever--undone by his pride, having shamed his country, wandering without his power, trying to recall a magic word that will never come back to him--would've been as good a ending to his story as I could've hoped for under the circumstances. But it's pretty clear that DC's decided to make him a major player for future projects too, and I can't think of any more one-dimensional character to deem "major."

BOOSTER GOLD:
What Have We Learned?: Even though he used to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, he can come through in the clutch; he's somehow key to the omni-multi time-travel megaverse setup we're going to be seeing a bunch more of.
Do I Want To Read More?: Well, I'm curious about the time-travel stuff, and Booster seems to be the character who's attached to that now. I also like the new angle Geoff Johns suggests here--that he's a hero who can never let on that he's doing the right thing. And the title of that first story arc is strangely appealing.

THE ELONGATED MAN:
What Have We Learned?: He's a detective, people; he now knows the Ways of Magic, or at least the fictitious version that Faust fed him (since nobody's done much with the "new rules for the Tenth Age" that Michael Moorcock apparently drafted); he got his wish to be with Sue again, the hard way.
Do I Want to Read More?: I'd be perfectly happy to let his story stop here, and as much mileage as The Thin Man and Topper both have in them as premises for ongoing storytelling, I think they lose a lot when you combine them. I somehow imagine it being a bit more like "The Dead Detective."

RENÉE MONTOYA:
What Have We Learned?: Her impulses--generally impulses to do good--keep leading her into damaging places; she doesn't understand herself, and is now making a career out of it.
Do I Want to Read More?: Yeah, actually; I think a superhero comic about introspection and self-discovery could be a mighty interesting thing if someone (Rucka!) could come up with a way to make it work. (The two closest approaches to that I can think of are Whisper and The Sentry, which are not exactly similar comics.)

STARFIRE:
What Have We Learned?: Nothing. Kory has been a device for moving the plot and basically nothing else in 52.
Do I Want to Read More?: Not until somebody thinks of something interesting to do with her.

STEEL:
What Have We Learned?: He's self-reliant. Really. He's all about self-reliance. That's his thing. Self-reliance. Yup. Admittedly, giving him powers that he neither chose nor earned could've led to an interesting angle on the character, but it didn't, and when they went away again, the effect was rather zero-sum.
Do I Want to Read More?: No. I still think the only writer who's written really good stories about Steel was Priest, and that was actually sort of sleight-of-hand--making his series about the relationship between him and Natasha.

As I feared, though, even though the character arcs are complete--and some of them in really satisfying ways!--there's a lot of the plot side of 52 that remains unresolved. Going back to that list of dangling plot threads I posted a couple of months ago, these are the big ones that still seem to be open:

1) Why was Intergang trying to do with their "invasion" of Gotham City/attempt to turn it into an Apokoliptic fire pit? Why did they need a beachhead in Kahndaq? Where are they getting their Kirbytech and beast-man tech?

2) What happened with Adam Strange and Alan Scott's eyes? (What's the one Alan has that's "not even his own"?)

3) What exactly did Adam, Buddy and Kory see in outer space (with the "giant hands" and all that--it seems to have been something other than the creation of parallel Earths, especially since they were nowhere near Earth), and how did they end up wherever they were thereafter?

4) What's the meaning of most of the stuff written all over Rip's lab--and why, for instance, did he write "52 is all his fault" a zillion times in a dirty corner if he's now cheerfully going on about how the existence of parallel whatevers is "the way things should be," and was caused by New Earth replicating itself "in a cosmic act of self-preservation"?

5) Why did Lady Styx want to capture and/or kill the space travelers, and if she sent the assassins that Starfire dispatched last week, shouldn't Buddy and his family be worried about future attacks?

6) What are the "two score and twelve walls of heaven" attached to the 52 realities, and what's beyond them?

7) How did Kate get to be Batwoman?

8) Where did Booster's future corpse come from?

9) Who gave Ralph "some help pulling himself together," and does it have anything to do with the unexpected intra-JLA hookup that the Wizard preview of 52 teased?

10) Did the Super-Chief business have any connection at all with the rest of the story? (It was supposed to tie in somewhere, right?)

11) Waverider appearing in Sivana's lab and saying "I know why": what was he doing there, and what did he mean by that?

12) Once again, most of the "between seconds" scene in Week 27 still needs some serious unpacking, although now we know what "the golden metal" is.

13) Why did the Chinese government commission the Four Horsemen?

14) What happened to the Plutonium Man that Dr. Magnus reconstructed?

15) Do all the multiple earths exist at different vibrational whosywhatsises in the same surrounding universe, or was the thing that was replicated 52 times actually the entire universe?

*I just noticed that Paul I beat me to this joke in the comments on last week's post. Oh well.

More notes:

Pg. 4: I love the idea that people in the DCU are constantly having strange adventures. And Mr. Mind ate the logo right off Conner Kent's shirt!

Pg. 5: But wouldn't it have been more fun if the Mr. Mind butterfly were still wearing his specs? The "vibrational plane" routine, incidentally, dates back as far as the DCU "parallel earths" concept.

Pg. 8: So the 52 seconds (which 52 seconds?) that Dr. Tyme stole somehow ended up as a loop in the possession of Rip Hunter? Then what was with the countdown Rip started the last time we saw him? And does this connect to the prophecy that "a few seconds will make all the difference", which was apparently not realized in IC?

Pp. 9-10: There are actually two different Earth-17s in DC continuity. One of them is the one that first appeared in this Morrison-written issue; the other one, as Michael Nicolai pointed out a few weeks ago, was the home of the rather Earth-1-like universe where all pre-Crisis New Gods stories that weren't actually written and drawn by Jack Kirby took place (it was named by Mark Evanier in a text piece here). I'm guessing this is the latter--and, with the retroactive disappearance of the Justice League, Detective Chimp, and various events I can't place (which all appear as comics panels, printed on paper and bent by the wind!), the atomic war that led to the existence of the original Atomic Knights seems to have happened.

Pg. 11: It appears that Earth-3--the Crime Syndicate's earth, in classical continuity, rather than the one they belong to in JLA: Earth 2--is the one that Talon from Week 32 came from.

Pg. 12: Mr. Mind's doing a pretty good job of reconstructing pre-Crisis Earths. Earth-10 is of course the former Earth-X, where the Nazis won World War II and the Quality characters/Freedom Fighters have finally made their appearance; Earth-5 is typographically close to its evident source Earth-S, where the Fawcett characters won World War II (and look! there's Tawky Tawny and Uncle Dudley!). And Earth-50--Man! Grant Morrison working on a comic that the WildCats appear in? Lightning does strike twice!

Pg. 13: Earth-22 is the Kingdom Come world, where Alex Ross's paintbox won World War II. Earth-2 is the circa-1979 version--Huntress even looks a bit like she's drawn by Joe Staton!--that Paul Levitz wrote in Adventure Comics and elsewhere. (And that's the world in which the Gotham Gazette is about Superman Superman rather than Batman, and has editors who can't spell "innocence" on front-page headlines. Superman's missing because he ended up in the Crises; Power Girl, I'm guessing, is the one who ended up on New Earth.) Earth-4 is the Lillian Charlton Home for Problem Children, where the Vic Sage Question is still alive and still an Objectivist.

Pg. 14: So the "garden" is just a figure of speech; somehow it seemed to signify more when it was mentioned earlier.

Pg. 16: Not sure how Booster's going to have "glory years" given the premise of the forthcoming series, but it's a nice thought, anyhow. And what's the difference between a multiverse and a megaverse?

Pg. 17: Is it just me, or does it seem like there should be some piece of exposition somewhere about what Booster's doing here, or what exactly the power source is? Is the thing he's holding on the next page the scarab? In any case, this last Blue and Gold moment (with a final bwahaha!) feels like a little bit of dramatic closure for the whole business that started with Countdown to Infinite Crisis. Too bad we don't get a Week Negative-Whatever dateline, though, but it's understandable that nobody wants to get too specific about how much time elapsed between COIE and IC. And was COIE really the "first crisis," or would that have been one of the several earlier crises?

Pg. 18: Can someone who knows Blue Beetle's history better than I do explain the "right under my nose" bit?

Pg. 19: One awkward bit of storytelling: we don't actually see the suspendium in this scene!

Pg. 25: The "Pulitzer"/"Howitzer" gag is a pretty cute callback to Week 1. But if the big cannon is what Rip's got in mind to fire Skeets off with, what was Booster swiping Steel's device for during WWIII?

Pg. 26: It's the 52 clip show! (Although my favorite variation on this business is still the one in this Waid-written issue.)

Pp. 28-30: I've read this sequence over and over, and I totally fail to understand what's happening. As far as I understand, Butterfly-Mind is attracted to the suspendium, and then physically trapped inside of Skeets' dying robot husk, which is reinforced with more suspendium. (Maybe we could just start calling it Plotdeviceum?) Then Booster hands off Skeets to Supernova, who throws the robot-with-butterfly-inside; it lands in an explosion I don't think we've seen before in Week 1, Day 1, where Sivana just happens to stumble upon Mr. Mind, who is now in caterpillar form again, and puts him in his lab in a jar, where he's exposed to more Plotdeviceum, and somehow ends up in Dr. Magnus's lab at the beginning of week 2 (because all mad scientists actually share the same lab), where he crawls into Skeets, and proceeds to repeat the entire sequence in an infinite loop, getting older each time. That cannot be right. Can someone explain what I'm missing?

Pg. 34: Who's that reaching for the amulet? It'll be interesting to see why we haven't heard of this task force in the OYL continuity...

Pg. 35: I wonder if this is just a generic fire-pit or a smaller version of the Gotham City/Apokolips fire-pits.

Pg. 36: One last use of a teddy bear as a symbol of innocence! Drink!

Pg. 37: From the pill bottles in the wastebasket in panel 4, it looks like Magnus is back on his meds in a big way. Is he in Haven, or some other gated subdivision? And both he andRip Hunter backed up Skeets? Clever of them--especially clever of Magnus to figure out how to convert Skeets's 25th-century consciousness to a DVD-R.

Pg. 38: Closure again--a callback to my favorite scene in the first issue. But, actually, it occurs to me now that Rucka also wrote the pre-OYL story in which the Bat-Signal is removed from the roof of Gotham Central and accidentally smashed in the process. Oh well. Chalk it up to Mr. Mind, as I'm sure we'll be doing so often in the near future.

***

Oh, that special message about the new Pickup? There isn't going to be one, I'm afraid--with the book coming out in two months, I can't really consecrate one workday a week to an unpaid gig any more. When I started doing 52 Pickup, it was meant as an act of fannish devotion, inspired by how excited everybody involved with 52 seemed to be, and I think after a year I've discharged the duty I had in mind. I'm still going to be doing a lot of comics reviews all over the place, though--there's one (on Free Comic Book Day) running in the next day or two at Salon, some stuff coming up in various print magazines and newspapers, and of course reviews and articles in PW Comics Week, which I encourage all of you to subscribe to--especially since it's free. I'm hoping to turn up in some form on as many comics blogs as possible the week the book comes out (want me to do something with your blog? drop me a line: blogtour [at-sign] douglaswolk [period] com). And I'll probably be doing semi-regular, very casual reviews of various periodical comics at my relatively-dormant-lately personal blog Lacunae.

There will, most likely, eventually be one or two more posts here as various 52-related things turn up. Meanwhile, Andrew Hickey's excellent new blog seems to have taken on the challenge of doing lengthy, discursive, analytical posts about Countdown; I'll be reading it.

Thanks so much to all the readers and commenters, both regulars and one-time-only chimer-inners, who made this blog such a joy to do, week after week--I've loved hearing what everybody has to say, and your observations and perspectives have made reading 52 a lot more fun for me. Special thanks to Ragnell for her fill-in in Week 17, and to the people who FedExed a copy of that week's issue to my camp at Burning Man, despite having an address not much clearer than "so there's this tent in the middle of the desert?"

And thanks most of all to Messrs. Giffen, Johns, Jones, Morrison, Rucka and Waid for the amazing ride, and to everyone else who helped make it possible. You've given me a year I won't forget.

Week 51: Ithaca

2007-04-26T00:36:00.000-07:00

Since everything's going "back to where it all started" this week--the calendar, the reprise of the "everyone gathering around the big golden statues" scene from the first issue, the return of the Bennett/Jadson art team, the preview of next issue's cover--and since I imagine next week's final post will have a lot of stuff from the issue at hand to chew on, this might be a good time to recapitulate a few points I've covered before, in convenient list format.

That list would be Stuff I Want, As a Reader, From Future Weekly/Event Comics, and How It Relates to 52:

1) 52 has singlehandedly used up the novelty of "the weekly comic." From here on out, if they're going to capture my interest, "event" projects need to be about something--both in terms of their plot and in terms of their theme. Pop quiz: in a sentence, what's 52 about? What's the elevator pitch? "A year without Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman" doesn't actually tell us anything much that's relevant to the story. Is it about the return of the parallel earths? Well, the ending seems to be--but most of the story isn't about that, or even building up to that. Is it about the reintroduction of 30-to-35-year-old Jack Kirby material into the main narrative current of the DCU? That's an effect, not a premise, and a setup for future stories, not a story itself. Civil War was a hair-tearing-out affair in a lot of ways, but it had a specific plot and some larger ideas behind that plot. 52? Not so much, as entertaining as its high points have been.

(Incidentally, I'd like to note for the record that I called the return of the parallel earths half a year ago... although, as I noted, I wasn't the first. And between this week's cover, DiDio's spoiler a while back, and the dialogue in this week's Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes--Booster Gold stealing a "tachyon disrupter rifle" because he's got "fifty-two worlds to save"--it's now obvious that's what's going on. I mean, I might yet eat crow next week. But I don't think I will.)

2) Here's a way 52 has set both a good and a bad example: artistic consistency. J.G. Jones' covers? Amazing, week after week. The trade dress--the cover design, and the ticker on the cover? Also a very nice touch. Giffen's layouts? They served as a unifying and clarifying element. The rest of the interior art? Joltingly inconsistent. There's been no real look and feel for 52, no way in which its appearance and style are its own. If the whole thing had looked like, say, Joe Bennett's issues, that'd have given it more of a flow; if the whole thing had looked more like Giffen's drawings, it could have been a lot more fun to look at.

3) Future weeklies/events need to be much more tightly plotted, start to finish, before the first issue starts rolling. 52, from what I gather, seems to have drifted off in some unexpected directions and then not gotten around to some potentially cool stuff it was going to include (and nine major characters was way too many). The pacing of its second act, in particular, was pretty slack. (Admittedly, the "one week per issue" gimmick kneecapped its capacity for cliffhangers.) Paul Dini has supposedly written a 100-page-plus "bible" for how Countdown and the DCU around it will operate for the next year; that's a good sign.

4) An event comic is effectively one more damn thing to buy, so if it's going to lead continuity, it has to feel like a flagship--which also means it has to be easier to jump onto, at least at the beginning, than any ordinary superhero comic. That's something that Waid's The Brave and the Bold is doing really well right now (the new one made me more interested in the current Blue Beetle than any of the handful of issues of Blue Beetle itself I've read), and that 52 was shaky about at best. It's not something I could hand to friends who read Ultimate Spider-Man or Bone or DMZ or All-Star Superman and say "here, this will all make sense to you by about ten pages in." If you don't know who Mister Mind is, for instance, the big reveal at the end of the penultimate issue of the series makes absolutely no sense.

This seems to be a recurring issue at DC. This week, I read Amazons Attack #1, which I couldn't make head or tail of despite having an M.A. in DC continuity (I hear I should've read Wonder Woman #8 first, but I'm not going back to the store to fill in the blanks of an issue numbered #1)--and whose title (at least), I remembered, was originally going to be one of the pre-Infinite Crisis minis. Memo to the Powers That Be: Just because you've got a piece of intellectual property lying around doesn't mean you have to use it.

5) Similarly, a thing 52 did really well at first, and a related thing it could've done better: the "old vs. new" problem. There are almost 70 years' worth of DC continuity to play with, and one of the most fun things about at least the first half of 52 was its sense of navigating through a huge and wonderful world full of characters and places that have rich, exciting stories behind them. But there's also a tragedy and farce involved in making history repeat itself over and over--recycling and updating franchises until they've worn to transparency. I don't want to see another '80s series revived, even the ones I liked. No Arak, Son of Thunder, no Vigilante, no Nathaniel Dusk, no Cinder and Ashe, no... oh, jeez, virtually every other example I was thinking of has actually already been given its own new series in the last couple of years. I mean, I'd be happy for any of them to appear in passing, but I'd also love event comics to introduce useful characters and concepts to the canon. Toys 52 has introduced (rather than reconfigured) that are still around for other people to use as of One Year Later: Lady Styx (was she a 52 invention or a Starlin invention?), Everyman, Oolong Island, and... can that really be it?

6) Bonuses. I really liked the two-page origin stories--they were a great little lagniappe for the issues they appeared in--and it's useful to have something to get curious readers up to speed on the tricky continuity of stuff like 52. (Actually, as much as I've enjoyed annotating the obscuro references in this series, I've thought a couple of times that it'd have been great to have issues end with a one- or two-page explanatory text feature, pointing toward particular issues or collections referenced by the story, in lieu of the old Silver Age "editor's notes"...)

7) It has to come out on time, because the point for readers is enjoyment rather than frustration. Full points and an extra high five to 52 for this one.

8) Above all this, "event" comics need to not just fulfill their continuity function but be totally fun and exciting in their own right--every time I get burned, it makes me less interested in picking up the next big crossover. One thing I neglected to mention in so many words last week about the World War III specials was that they were so crummy and joyless they actively annoyed me. What I'm getting, and what I think other people are getting too, isn't "event fatigue" so much as a longing for the hype to pay off in pleasure rather than in tiresome metaplot machinations, and a feeling of being bait-and-switched too often. The thing that drew me to 52 in the first place (and made me even contemplate the insane idea of doing this blog) was the writers' enthusiasm for the energy of their collaboration, and as inconsistent as it's been, there have been parts where they're obviously really getting into it. That pleasure in creation and play is infectious, it's what I liked best about the series, and it's what I want from the projects it's paved the way for.

Giffen Layout Watch: It's like there's a little 3/4-size edition of the Red Tornado, going "39! 39! 39!"

More notes:

Pg. 3: A much milder version of the return of Odysseus--he doesn't have to slaughter the suitors, just comment on Roger's toupée.

Pg. 5: The young boy, of course, isn't going to get named here. And wouldn't be great if Donna didn't immediately assume Diana's hairstyle and body type once she put on the costume?

Pg. 7: John Stewart sighting #1.

Pg. 9: The S******y statue in panel 2 sure looks like it was flown in from a few pages earlier--pixelated, even. But that's a great explanation of Tim's new costume.

Pg. 10: John Stewart sighting #2. The guy moves fast. (Can somebody tell me where Hal Jordan's been through all of this?) So did Mogo actually fly Alan home, as panel 4 suggests? Doesn't he have a gravitational field? (Isn't that exactly the problem Rann was dealing with in The Rann-Thanagar War?) Also: was Adam's blindness for the rest of this storyline something that was supposed to have greater resonance than it did?

Pg. 11: I don't recognize the flame creatures--although they sure seem like the kind of thing that would have menaced Rann back in the Mystery in Space days, and other flame creatures appeared in Diana's series in 1964, and again in the unnameable series in 1968. But the most notable flame creatures in DC history appear briefly in this issue's backup: the fire giants of Appellax, who first appeared in the original origin of the Justice League. (Barry Allen uses the technique Adam suggests to deal with his giant.) And can anybody ID the other Green Lantern?

Pg. 14: I was wrong: two pages was exactly the amount of space it took to wrap this plot thread up satisfactorily.

Pg. 15: Those aliens look like a cross between this guy and this guy, with a little Apokoliptic squiggle on their shirts, to boot. Might as well have just been wearing T-shirts that said "Kirby Is Coming!"

Pg. 19: Some kind of atavistic comics-reader species-memory makes me think that this X-Treem '90s version of Mr. Mind must be a visual riff on the revelation of the big bad Mr. Mind as the bespectacled worm in the original "Monster Society of Evil" serial back in the '40s. (And, like Sobek, he's hungry--the return of the devouring meme I mentioned a while ago.) But I have no idea--that stuff hasn't been in print in sixty years. Kind of a problem for a source of allusions, when you think about it.

Pg. 20: Interesting that Rip says "lose" rather than "die"--there's some larger cause they're working for.

The Origin of the Justice League of America: Those are some big, toothy smiles. Retconned to be part of the origin: Black Canary, which is only fair, since she was removed from the redrawn cover of JLA #21 a few weeks ago. Re-retconned to be part of the origin again: Wonder Woman!

If there's something you'd like to see me talk about here next week, get your requests in now, and I'll see what I can do--!

Week 50: As Safe as Safe Can Be

2007-04-18T22:26:00.000-07:00

Everybody's talking 'bout World War III, I see. But really: doesn't this look more exciting? Or this? Or this?

On reflection, it doesn't even make sense why Black Adam is doing what he's doing for the better part of this issue. Having destroyed Bialya while the rest of the world twiddled their thumbs, he finds out that the Horsemen were built on Oolong Island under orders from the Chinese government. (This leaves open the question of why the Chinese government would want to piss him off.) So, of course... he smashes up Sydney, Pisa, Paris and Cairo before he gets around to heading toward China. This from the guy who lectures Father Time about having not violated the borders of the U.S. (immediately before ripping his face off). Then the Chinese government not only refuses aid from the international superhero community, but threatens to launch nukes at the home countries of anyone who provides assistance. Not even Pyongyang is that crazy.

Finally, the heroes come in over the Great Wall, and as nice as it is to see three of Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers--the Manhattan Guardian? For that matter, Green Arrow and Arsenal? Not that they're not good in a fight, but... not this kind of fight. Back at the Rock of Eternity, we find out that the Egyptian gods are dicks, and that Zatara, despite having had a statue dropped on him on day 5 and requiring "urgent medical attention," is hanging out with other magic types, looking just fine.

At least you can sort of hear the "1812 Overture" in the background of this issue--there's a dramatic arc to it. The WWIII specials, on the other hand, feel thoroughly superfluous, and obviously tacked onto 52 after the fact--as far as I can tell, the Aquaman plot in particular makes no pretense of being attached to the Black Adam storyline at all, it just kind of happens over the course of a few pages, and the J'onn J'onzz material (he sits around and angsts; then his head changes shape) totally fails to proceed from his appearance in Week 24.

For those who didn't read the WWIII specials, here's the stuff with bearing on 52: Firestorm and Cyborg got un-merged because Prof. Stein used a JLA transporter to separate them; the Spectre's sitting this one out; and Amanda Waller's plan to send a lot of Very Bad People to fight Adam seems to have gone by the wayside as she's recruiting the likes of the Bronze Tiger, who of course killed the previous Batwoman and AH CRAP MY HEAD HURTS AGAIN. Casualties of the war include Terra and Young Frankenstein. That's it. Plus a lot of unnamed bystanders, of course. The fourth issue ends as I suspect a lot of DC stories that don't have a dramatically satisfying ending are going to for the next year or so: with the Monitors standing around looking very serious.

The fundamental problem with the specials is that WWIII, outside of 52, isn't really a story. It ties into part of the climactic action of 52, but it doesn't even resolve very much that has to do with the mother series: add four more issues of Adam dismembering people and smashing famous architecture between pages 1 and 22, or delete everything from the Bialya massacre until Billy uses the wisdom of Solomon to come up with his "admin password override" routine, and it would have exactly the same effect. (The big fight doesn't seem to relate at all to the other threads of 52, the Booster/Steel/Natasha cameo aside.) The WWIII specials are palpably desperate to get their One Year Later exposition out of the way. And I believe it's already been strongly hinted that nobody but the heroes even remembers the war, which kind of lessens its dramatic impact as a setup for future stories.

In the IC-to-OYL timeline department: this week's Nightwing Annual, besides having more dick jokes than that infamous Joker-boner story, implies that there's at least a month, and I'd guess significantly more, between the final fight in Infinite Crisis and the scene where Bruce, Dick and Tim head off on their ocean trip. And neither that issue nor the WWIII specials make it clear whether the Nightwing we've seen in 52 is Dick or Jason; perhaps the next Batman will clear things up a little.

Giffen Layout Watch: Holding steady at Week 39.

More notes:

Pg. 1: Well, good riddance to the Great Pyramid--I hear Vandal Savage ordered that thing to be built anyway.

Pg. 3: You can tell Adam's not in his right mind, because he's got no eyeballs.

Pg. 4: The Leaning Tower of Pisa gave Superman trouble here and again here, it's also prominent in the aforementioned Joker-boner story, and there must be half a dozen Mort Weisinger-era covers that feature it, but I can't call any to mind.

Pg. 5: I appreciate Thundermind paraphrasing the Shadow, but to paraphrase Kevitch, karma isn't fruit-bearing, is it?

Pg. 8: The Shaolin Robot's talking in hexagrams, as in the I Ching, which is a nice touch; the lines are usually horizontal, though. Reading right-to-left as top-to-bottom, I get, respectively, hexagram 38, "Opposition/Mirroring"; hexagram 6, "Conflict"; and hexagram 23, "Splitting Apart," all of which are formally appropriate here. And apparently the Great Ten are behind the yeti medallion shenanigans we saw back in Week 32, although if a powerless Ralph can take the yeti down, it's hard to imagine what good August General, Director of G.R.E.A.T.T.E.N., thinks it's going to do against Adam.

Pg. 9: Viz.

Pg. 14: Hooray for expository dialogue!

Pg. 20: And he's been caught by the hand of... somebody with giant hands. Again with the giant hands!

Pg. 22: Best scene this issue... and it'd be a lot more powerful if the same idea hadn't already been done here and a couple of months ago here.

Pg. 23: I see Prof. Morrow was able to take delivery on his auction purchase in spite of everything.

Week 49: Of Course You Realize

2007-04-11T21:24:00.000-07:00

Ah, if only this issue were as good as its cover. "Eve of Destruction" has the right hint of not-there-yet-folks anticipation--although "Dawn of Correction" might be more like it. Despite the goofy Magnus action, this is really a week of moving pieces into place: Adam in a general snit, the Plutonium Man in play, the remaining members (I hadn't thought there were any, but there you go) of Infinity Inc. II cheerfully lining up for their inevitable slaughter next week.

Adam's out for revenge on the people who "orchestrated the murder" of his wife and brother-in-law; that might be the Chinese government, or it might just be Chang Tzu, or, if you go up a level or two, it might be Intergang (whose boss already took one in the back last week) or Darkseid et al. So why he's going after whoever it is he's going after is unclear. Or, rather, it's perfectly clear: there has to be a big fight with everybody against Adam, after he's had six days or so to regroup. But has it occurred to anyone to consider why "they" might want a war?

Also: Glad to see the prophecy of "dead by Lead" fulfilled, but that's one dangling plot thread down and... quite a few to go. 82 pages left to wrap it all up! (As others have noted, the cover of Checkmate #15 suggests that he's been de-Humpty Dumptified, too.) Really, even beyond all the little danglers, there are some elements of this series that desperately require dramatic closure--the Booster/Rip Hunter/Daniel Carter plot, the Adam/Kory plot and the Buddy/yellow aliens plot, most notably, each of which seems to demand a solid issue worth of exploration--and given that next week is Kaboom Unlimited, it's starting to feel like any kind of wrap-up those stories get is going to be compressed into two or three pages of exposition, tops. I'd also like to see some kind of extended coda for the Ralph plot and another one for the Montoya/Question plot, but at this point I'm suspecting that a Darick Robertson issue apiece was all we're going to get.

Not much else to say this week, and I'm sure there'll be a lot to talk about next week, so I'll keep it short. Also, I've got Death Note vol. 11 sitting here waiting for me to finish this post, and I know I've talked about it before, but the OMIGOD I NEED TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT factor of that series is off the charts. Light Yagami's got a little in common with Black Adam, come to think of it: he's scary as hell, very few people oppose him and live, and he believes himself to be not only inarguably in the right but personally in charge of creating a better world. He's a lot smarter than Adam, though.

Giffen Layout Watch: will we ever move past Week 39?

More notes:

The caption on the cover: "Mini-Metal Men Missiles" is a reference to this issue, cleverly enough. And, in fact, DC's first (and, I believe, only) James Bond comic was this one--published one month earlier! "But you haven't another moment"--you just don't see diction like that on comic book covers any more.

Pg. 1: I'm not sure we've seen "hypno-goggles" before at DC, other than in ads in the '60s. They seem like more a Marvel thing. (Q. Why not X-ray specs? A. It's Power Girl; what's left to the imagination?) (Q. for real: do we know who this guy is?)

Pg. 4: I hate to say it, but Chang Tzu is right: it is easy to see why Magnus's colleagues thought his ideas were atrocious. You know, if you have lead present in your body, it's not going to represent a "stubborn refusal to quit." What he's describing here is actually fairly close to the "pathetic fallacy" (not the one in here).

Pg. 5: And the monitors would certainly have shown e.g. the little Metal Men who've been hanging around the lab.

Pg. 7: Nice touch of science, but it'd have to be a pretty high room temperature for cesium, francium, gallium and rubidium to melt--the lowest melting point among them is francium's 300 degrees Kelvin, which is 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other hand, Oolong Island is pretty tropical.

Pg. 9: I thought there was something funky about the numbering of the Ten. Let's see. Accomplished Perfect Physician, August General in Iron, Celestial Archer, Ghost Fox Killer, Immortal ~~Bald-Man-in-Armor~~ Man in Darkness, Mother of Champions, ~~Raekwon the Chef~~, Seven Deadly Brothers, Socialist Red Guardsman, Thundermind. And the Shaolin Robots seem to be their enemies, although it was clever to include a sketch of them with the original Nine.

Pg. 10: A "particle wave pistol" isn't something that generally exists outside of a few games, but it's a cute concept, playing on the old wave/particle duality routine in physics--especially the "I have no idea what it might do to you" bit a few pages later. Also: Omnibot. The only other reference to something of that name at DC I can find was actually a few months ago in this issue, which involved Booster Gold and an unusual metal...

Pg. 12: Thoughtful of Sivana to put Adam's boot back on after doing his work with the "thunder pliers."

Pg. 13: Alan's eyes shining green through the eyepatch?

Pg. 20: I guess World's Finest really struck it rich with those "artistic nudes,", since they now seem to be a hardcover periodical--not many of those around other than Acme Novelty Library these days.

The Origin of the Justice Society of America: Just as promised, Don Kramer gets to wow us in 52! Technically. Interesting that this seems to tease what happens next issue--although we already knew that from the new JSA #1. But Wildcat grabbing Adam's arm? Has he gotten bored of his limbs? The big image on page 1 is, of course, homaging this cover, with Jay taking the place of the perpetually continuity-indeterminate Black Canary. I'm amused that, in the final image, Alan Scott and Jay Garrick seem to be going by "Alan Scott" and "Jay Garrick," though.

And one detail that makes me very happy from the thumbnail of next week's cover: could that be Ystin?

Week 48: Unspoiled Monsters

2007-04-05T00:29:00.000-07:00

I guess this issue's cover is the closest we're going to get to Anarky after all (and by proxy as close as we're going to get to the Haunted Tank). Too bad. But this really is one of the best covers of the series, maybe the best--although, when the solicitation came out, I imagined the Question starting some kind of grand cultural movement, or maybe even becoming a widespread meme.

What's actually happening here seems to be exactly the reverse: Montoya running up against the crime cult's menagerie, and putting on the Question mask for reasons that make thematic sense rather than plot-type sense. (I'm also wondering how Mannheim's obsession with prophecy ties in with his declaration that "the questions have not yet been answered" back in Week 28: do we understand the questions in question?) (And speaking of the lower-case q's, for some reason the title "Asked and Answered" initially made me think of Truman Capote's "literary sasquatch" Answered Prayers--maybe it was the cathedral setting and Kate's high-society background that pointed me in that direction.)

Mannheim was previously (apparently) killed in this issue back in 1992, and seems to be not terribly dead in this One Year Later issue--so perhaps the cult of Cain is the true cult of resurrection. Still, his all-consuming obsession with the Law That Is No Law, and the fact that it leads to his destruction, mirrors something I've been noticing about 52 in general: it's moved from being suffused with the minutiae of old DC continuity to sweeping away those details and references as we approach the end of the series. That might have to do with deadline pressure, but it might also say something about readers' endlessly troublesome relationship to the DC Universe canon.

Time (and perhaps Hypertime) doesn't just determine the comics stories of lasting artistic value--it determines which ones are true (in the sense of their truth value within the fictional universe) and important, which ones are of no consequence, and which are actively apocryphal (Max Lord the cyborg). There are so many damn stories about Darkseid alone--and even glancing at that list I know it omits a couple of significant ones--that it's no longer clear what he wants or how he might accomplish it or what exactly is up with the Anti-Life Equation, and I imagine that stuff is going to have to be made very clear very soon. (Speaking of stories about prophecies going unfulfilled, The Hunger Dogs is a persistent problem, since Kirby's work is by definition in continuity for Fourth World stuff, but...) I fearfully imagine, at an extreme, some kind of continuity synod, going through the old volumes and deciding which ones stay in the canon and which go; that's exactly the kind of thing Hypertime was meant to get around, and the same function is served in a different way by the very soft reboot of Superboy punching the universe (and its Marvel equivalent, the double reboot in House of M).

Also, as much as I enjoy dissecting the intricacies of continuity... well, speaking of Jewish holidays, this week is Passover, and a story about Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg puts it nicely. Somebody asked him: "Is not the liturgical poet who first writes that clay vessels in which leaven was cooked must be broken before Passover, and then states that they may be stored away in wooden sheds, guilty of a contradiction?" And he replied: "It is poetic liberty to state together two contradictory propositions."

Giffen Layout Watch: still stuck at Week 39.

More notes:

Pg. 3: Is hell really where sins are "indulged with abandon"? I thought just the opposite. And have we seen the "infernal device" in the last panel before? The Charlie Brown zig-zag on the back is rather Apokoliptic, but the screw on the front reminds me of the Mole Machine, and even more of the spelunking gizmo Klarion is driving in the final panel of his Seven Soldiers miniseries.

Pg. 5: The return of Suicide Squid! I guess the first panel is supposed to quell the "of course the prophecy's about Cassandra Cain" speculation that various people (including me) have indulged in, although I have to wonder how Batwoman would know the background on the prophecy.

Pg. 8: Is the color on this page (and pp. 16-17) weird in other people's copies too? "The shiv, the gat and the red rock"--the rock is Cain's rock, but "shiv" and "gat" are peculiarly 1920s-ish slang. ("Gat" in particular is derived from "Gatling gun," and those didn't exist until the 1860s; is the Crime Bible supposed to be older than that? I suppose if it namedrops John Wayne Gacy, as we saw last week, it's of fairly recent vintage.)

Pg. 10: Fire pits are a prominent feature of Apokolips, of course. "Baby powder and cardamom": a very good detail.

Pg. 12: Ridge-Ferrick again. Those guys get around. Reminds me a little of how, for a few years, most of the construction projects I saw had signs crediting a company called "Da Costa Demolition." And Montoya is a lapsed Catholic, of course.

Pg. 14: "Anointing the frail with his claret" is the most notable bit of portmanteau diction I've seen in a while. "Claret" meaning blood dates back at least a couple of centuries; while looking it up, I stumbled upon this wildly entertaining 1736 dictionary of "thieving slang." "Frail," meaning woman, appears to have been recorded in 1908. (And while we're at it, "wet work" seems to date from the Cold War.) Would anyone care to add some vowels to "Hrfk! Mngmnklly!" (or the later "Mrrhnn")? The comma after "escape" in the final panel is the only thing I've found in this issue that eluded Rucka's proofread...

Pg. 15: "The vile book" as opposed to the "Good" one!

Pg. 19: I'm not sure if I've got the choreography straight here, but it looks like Kate has killed (or "killed") Mannheim by throwing the knife into his back so hard it's penetrated all the way up to the hilt. Dot iss badass, as the mad scientists say, and I realize that Identity Crisis also asked us to believe that a grossly out-of-shape man who'd just been shot in the chest could hurl a boomerang hard enough to pierce someone else's heart, so it's not totally unprecedented in the DCU, as opposed to the world of familiar biology and physics. But at least that was a boomerang--something with balance that's meant to be thrown. I can't tell how far Batwoman is from Mannheim in this scene, but I'm guessing it's less than ten feet, and she's doing a straight throw. Even so, that ceremonial sacrificial knife looks like it's really not balanced for throwing--it'd probably rotate some--not to mention that she's just pulled it out of her own heart, which would probably affect the force she could get on the throw. (I'd probably object less if the scene were staged such that she just stabbed Mannheim directly, continuing to put force into the knife after it met resistance from his coat and body.) Looking forward to seeing what Polite Dissent has to say about this one.

Pg. 20: And the bat flies up into the smoke. Well, maybe that Batwoman story in the Infinite Hanukkah special happened during the 52 year...

Pg. 21: We get a page 21 this week! (And we get pages 21-40 in Week 52!) Perhaps Sivana got his dental ideas about Adam from looking at Egg Fu's own teeth. Yikes.

The Origin of the Birds of Prey: A solid condensation of about a zillion comics. Maybe it's a retcon that "the Birds of Prey" was the name of Barbara's organization from the get-go (and maybe not), but I was always fond of the idea that "Birds of Prey" was the name of the series, not the name of the team.

Next week: a special late edition of 52 Pickup, most likely! Don't be surprised, anyway.

Week 47: The Celestial Longbox

2007-03-28T23:27:00.000-07:00

One of the keys to this week's issue is, as Filby noticed last week, that Dr. Magnus has built a new version of his Plutonium Man. The Plutonium Man? You might have seen him here, or when that story was reprinted 19 years ago here. But otherwise, unless you have an impressive back-issue collection, a really good local comics shop or a serious eBay habit, there's very little chance you might have stumbled across him before. His appearances in the '70s run of Metal Men aren't quite on the "rocketed as a child..." level of canon that everybody who's read a couple of stories about the Metal Men knows; in order to catch what's going on, you need to have access to something that can refer you to the right story--something like this site, or one of the DCU discussion boards elsewhere--and then you need to have access to a long-out-of-print issue.

Which, of course, you do, if you're reading this on your computer. Oh, you can't get a physical copy of Metal Men #45 without some legwork and some cash, but it's not terribly hard to track the story itself down without paying, thanks to the magic of .cbr files. That would be fine for reading purposes (and actually I bought a physical copy a few months ago), but it makes me scratch my head a little about what the future of comics-as-a-business looks like. There's a solid argument that comics downloading is competing directly with the physical retail sales business; see, for instance, the kajillions of discussions going on this past week about the Dan Slott vs. torrented She-Hulk business. But there's also a good case to be made that, especially for out-of-print material, comics downloads are taking care of a niche that the comics industry simply isn't addressing--and one reliable guideline of the Internet is that whatever or whoever gets to a niche first is very hard to dislodge from it.

If you're expecting a slightly rickety analogy between the comics business and the music business, you're right, and here it comes. Digital music theorists have been using the phrase "celestial jukebox" since at least the early '90s to describe the ideal of making anything ever recorded instantly available with no more effort than it takes to punch in a song on a jukebox; iTunes and eMusic aren't quite that, but they're trying to move toward it, and by the time you get to Soulseek and BitTorrent and such, you have to have pretty damn arcane tastes to look for something you can't find. Still, one enormous mistake that the music business made (among many) was failing to jump on the digital-music-for-sale idea instantly, and not realizing that the long tail was where the money was, before users had already grown accustomed to digital music being something that was always available in exchange for a little bit of effort and no money.

The analogous situation in this medium is where the big comics copyright holders are in something of a bind. I get the sense that they're looking into potential initiatives, but the clock is ticking for people to get in the habit of buying old comics stories via something along the lines of iTunes. I also suspect that what the online market's profit-drivers might be aren't the Dark Knight-type perennials, but the long-tail oddities that can't support print republication and distribution, old stories that get referred to in new ones (like the hail of references that 52 has provided), the "historical documents" of the fictional universe. And customers are going to want to be able to get everything they want in one place, as with iTunes. Call it the celestial longbox.

That's going to require a conceptual shift, or rather a conceptual broadening. The comics economy as we know it is built on physical artifacts. All comic books are collectible--not in the sense that they necessarily appreciate in market value, but in the sense that people like to accumulate and own them. Trade paperbacks and hardcovers look nice and are convenient to have on one's bookshelf. What you're paying for when you're buying digital music, though, isn't an artifact: you can't hold it in your hand, you can't furnish your dwelling with it, you can't sell it if you decide you don't want it any more. You're paying for part of what you get when you pay for a CD--total access to its contents, any time you want--and you're also paying for something else, the convenience of not having to put in time and effort looking for it in the first place.

The same thing applies for digital comics. You can't hold them in your hand; you can't ask the clerk how much they're going to be worth; you can't get whatever "aura" there is to a mass-produced physical artifact that is easily available for a few weeks or months and then increasingly inconvenient to find after that. Those are important things to a lot of people who read comics; they're important to me (well, not the asking-the-clerk one, especially since I used to be that clerk). Without them, part of what I love about the comics-reading experience is missing. But part of it is still there.

At the same time, the standard ethical (rather than legal) argument against unauthorized downloads of copyrighted material--that it deprives copyright owners of reaping the financial rewards of their work--is somewhat less durable when you're talking about material that's not commercially available in any form that benefits its creators or rights-holders, and not likely to be any time soon. (The counter-argument is that unauthorized downloads of out-of-print material affect back-issue sales at retail stores, and that that trickles down to affect what they order of new comics, and therefore to affect the state of the comics publishing business--but I've stacked the deck, since the example at hand is 30 years old.)

To put it a different way: Right now--this specific week--there's an enhanced market to sell some inexpensive, easy-to-find copies of Metal Men #45, and maybe by extension some of the rest of the '70s Simonson run, and possibly also some other Steve Gerber or Walt Simonson or Metal Men comics. That market will be drastically diminished after this week, and nobody's selling that particular issue right now except for a handful of stores that have yellowing print copies in yellowing plastic bags. But I bet a bunch of people are going to be reading it anyway. Which is to say: if Jane Q. Fiftytwofortyseven can have a 30-second, 99-cent transaction to get a digital copy of Metal Men #45, she might well do that. If she wants to but can't, she's much more likely to spend an hour and a half digging around for a torrent of .cbr files of the complete run of Metal Men. And once she's got that already, the likelihood that she's going to want to pay 99 cents for a digital copy of #45 in a year and a half is vanishingly slim.

Where were we? Oh, right, talking about this week's 52. Space B is a sort of celestial longbox of its own: "this, your universe" is of course the DCU, and lucky Buddy has access to Week 51 already. There's some good theorizing on the DC boards that Space B = the Bleed, which has been seen in Ion = the space between panels in comic books, the "outside the collection" negative space that works about the same way as good old Hypertime.

Beautiful cover this week (the dagger popping out of the image and over the logo is a very nice touch), but oh, that episode title--not only does it have the standard mis-citation of "Revelation" that we've talked about before, but it's a curious choice for an issue in which, really, nothing is revealed. Also, we appear to have gotten shorted two pages this week--the lead story's only 18 pages. What, did Montoya get laid again?

More notes:

Pg. 1: I can find no previous documentation of a "Thörgal ordeal," or indeed of a "Thörgal" (this doesn't count). Although if we're talking about top-selling comics involving ritual sacrifices, it's worth mentioning that this volume apparently sold 280,000 copies in France. Isn't it amazing what comics can sell, he asked rhetorically? Yes, I've been obsessing over Comichron this week. Remember: in 1969, even 52's current figures would have paled before eighth-tier hits like Texas Rangers in Action (more comics should have cover copy ending with "Oh yeah!").

Also: The koan the monk offers Tim on this page is a familiar one--familiar enough, in fact, that both that link and whoever wrote this sequence make the error of trying to explain it. (The solution suggests The Invisibles' recurring theme that language makes reality.) I also like the familiar symbolism of the monks rolling the stone to block off the cave...

Pg. 2: Vashnu is a follower of Rama Kushna who first appeared here, created by the sorely missed Arnold Drake.

Pg. 3: As commenter premiani pointed out, Crippen is Dr. Hawley Crippen. Kürten is German serial killer Peter Kürten, "The Vampire of Düsseldorf" (whose one on-panel DC-published appearance was here). Gacey is probably a misspelling of John Wayne Gacy, who... oh, never mind. "See my kingdom rise anew upon the Earth," besides its obvious overtones, may be another tease of the Kingdom Come stuff that DC seems to be hinting at lately.

Pg. 5: You would think that with their ties to the underworld/assassin culture, these cultists would've heard of David Cain and maybe even his twice-named daughter. (Not this David Cain.) Not to mention that her mom has ties to several other members of 52's cast.

Pg. 6: Where'd he get all that plutonium this time, considering he had to smuggle in supplies for e.g. tin? Also, you don't want to be cavalierly throwing around plutonium, given that a thousandth of a gram is lethal.

Pg. 7: I like mini-Tin and mini-Mercury being the angel and devil in Magnus's pockets, especially since they're both offering the same advice.

Pg. 9: Another Invisibles-like sequence--this is a lot like the "initiation" sequences, especially Yellow Alien Dude's assertion that "out here, there are no sides." Doesn't Buddy look a little like Speedball in that top panel? I hope Ellen moving on doesn't make him put on an inside-out porcupine outfit.

Pg. 11: Just, you know, to underscore that Natasha has Learned A Whole Lot since Week 1.

Pg. 12: "A band": good choice of words, especially since that's the self-description that the 52 writers used, at least at the beginning. (And I wonder if there's going to be any kind of reunions once this tour is over: it'd be neat to see a 52 special or two written by the four of them, at least, without the GOTTADOITNOW pressure of a weekly.)

Pg. 13: A deck-clearing scene. Aren't "hard work" and "elbow grease" the same thing?

Pg. 14: If she's ringing the doorbell, wouldn't that mean somebody buzzed her in?... although maybe that was Dick or Jason or whoever's wearing the Nightwing outfit. A building ritzy enough to have a zillionaire living in its penthouse, though, is a lot more likely to have a doorman than buzzers. "Z. Wie Funfzig," plus an umlaut and a bit of rearranging, is German for "52." And "T.O. Twiffy" is T.O. Morrow's anagrammatic cousin.

Pg. 15: Well, at least Kate finally got an actual Hanukkah menorah--just in time for Passover! You'd think the Watchmen-style window damage would've been noticed by more people outside the building, though.

Pg. 16: You know, the last time Diana went all normal-and-mortal, Wonder Woman read even more than ever like a bondage fetishist's dream series. Of course, all that changed with the advent of women's lib and the return of her powers and costume. Oh wait: no it didn't... at least not immediately.

Pg. 18: The solicitation for next month's issue of Batman suggests that that's where we're going to find out what happened here. Curious that it's the cliffhanger in 52, then--! So he comes out of the cave and sees his Bat-shadow and it means we wait four more weeks to find out what happens next?

The Origin of the Teen Titans: Mostly notable for the look of Kerschl's art--somewhere between the standard superhero style of the regular Titans series and the cartoonier, distorted approach of Teen Titans Go!--the blue lines of Raven's costume, in particular, have that animation-cel vibe to them.

Week 46: Bodies With No Surprises

2007-03-22T00:54:00.000-07:00

You know, usually when the cackling villain's got the hero suspended over the acid bath, you wonder how the hero's going to survive. But I can't even imagine how Sivana's going to get out of this one.

That said, this was the most fun issue we've seen in a while, mostly because of all that Oolong Island action. For once, we get to get inside the skulls of the bad guys, and it turns out that they're the pasty, geeky types who cleave to pulp-fiction devices because they want to prove themselves superior to the "Super-Jocks"; they've waited decades for their revenge on somebody who's physically strong. They cling to their grudges; they want to show everyone who's boss.

All except for Veronica Cale, who just wanted "to change the world." (One way that the multiverse stuff might pan out is that she could change which world she belongs to--!) After divine judgment in the form of Black Adam passes over her, she renounces violence and walks away. That might be her exit from the narrative, like Astoria; it might be an actual moment of repentance (having abandoned her past in the symbolic form of her pearls, engaged in one last act of eros and one last act of thanatos, and given herself up to fate). But as long as we're going to be alluding to the Cain story's rock and red rage, I can imagine Dr. Cale in some kind of mark-of-Cain scenario.

The end of Morrison's "Rock of Ages" storyline in JLA suggested how much good Luthor might have done if he'd actually acted in the world's interest (contrast Ra's al Ghul, who has a reasonable claim to make that he is acting in the world's interest). It's worth wondering if any of the Oolong Island crew might be worth rehabilitating; the answer seems to be that as brilliant as they are, they don't care a bit about anything other than their personal gratification. Hence the nonstop party atmosphere on the island--they're not making sacrifices for what anybody can convince them is the greater good, but they're getting quick thrills and revenge, and there's nothing else they can be tempted with. (For another take on the same sort of situation, see this week's debut of Rick Veitch's very funny, very biting Army@Love.) Would they actually fit in on Apokolips? Sivana sure would; the rest of them wouldn't last an hour.

Anybody keeping a canonical list of Signs of Things to Come in the DCU? As various people have noted, the 52 team put in a little appearance in last week's Tales of the Unexpected, the Monitors turned up in Stormwatch: PHD, Everyman's in Manhunter, the Emerald Eye is on the cover of next month's Brave and Bold, and the Bleed made an appearance in Ion last month...

More notes:

Pg. 2: "They already walk among us": Apokolips is already here? Yes, yes, 52 ends conclusively--but it does seem to be teasing a lot of the Fourth World/Darkseid stuff that Countdown is promising.

Pg. 3: From "I'm an atheist" to "he'll save us" in one sentence--beautiful!

Pg. 4: I love that Black Adam's approach to any challenge is to dismember it.

Pg. 6: "The final crisis is coming": prophecy is a funny thing, as they say. (And speaking of funny things, "doesn't that turn you on?" may be the funniest line of this series so far.) I think this may be the first time the term "anti-life" has been used in 52; what Dr. Cale is referring to is the Anti-Life Equation, the slippery formula Darkseid was seeking in Jack Kirby's original Fourth World stuff. (What it means in practice is shown vividly in the Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle mini.) Felix Faust was mixed up with a spell that's also referred to as the "anti-life equation" here, but who knows if that's even canon at this point.

Pg. 7: You'd think Morrow would just use eSnipe if he's so worried about it.

Pg. 8: Dr. Cale appears to have lost her pearls in the heat of passion; you'd think if she were planning to go to her doom she'd want to be wearing them! Unless Dr. Magnus has swiped them to make some kind of pearl Metal Man or something.

Pg. 9: Two great character moments here: Veronica having a "post coitum omne animal triste est" moment, and so intent on her method of suicide that she blithely kills the guy who gets in her way; and Black Adam's reaction to her confession...

Pg. 10: When this page ran on Newsarama last week, I thought it directly followed Pg. 1, and was afraid that Dr. Cale was getting crushed by the door.

Pg. 12: Bad lorem ipsum! Drink! (All over this issue, actually!) Curiously enough, the concept of the tesseract was invented by a gentleman who appeared in a very good comic book a while back. Morrison has also used tesseracts before in his stories--in DC One Million, it's where Earth stores its cities.

Pg. 14: And of course he's got an acid bath waiting upstairs. Next he's going to have to wake Adam up to explain his evil plan before he kills him... there's a beautiful little Alan Moore/Bryan Talbot quickie in this issue about basic mad supervillain training--more than 20 years later, I still remember the punch line: "And remember, the wages of sin are death... but the hours are great and the perks are terrific!" Also, how does Morrow know about "the secrets of the cosmos" being in Reddy's head?

Pp. 15-17: This scene, on the other hand, feels oddly tacked-on--the point is to demonstrate that a) Everyman's still alive, b) Natasha's earned and is now wearing her armor, and c) John Henry's bounced back from being skewered six weeks ago. But there's a lot that doesn't seem right about it: "noted scientist and businessman"? How about "former President of the United States"? Clark's "intuition" doesn't quite add up either. And Everyman being taken out with one punch diminishes his scariness considerably. Although "murdering waste of carbon" does bring to mind Waid's best line of the week, from the excellent Brave and the Bold #2: "Carbons and silicates..."

Pg. 19: Remember how I was complaining about how the JSA's absence of a raison d'être was a problem? I spoke too soon, because here it is, all spelled out: to set a good example for the super-kids. Fair enough. Can anybody point me toward what happened with Damage and Icicle?

The Origin of Batman: Great to see this feature back. (Now I just hope Giffen's layouts return to the 52 site too...) With an origin that's been retold this many times, the exercise is less boiling it down to two pages than coming up with some fresh angle on it, and I think this does it very nicely. I'm curious who the guy with the glasses and moustache in the top panel of page 2 is (if anybody); I'd love to know whose idea the dirigible was. And, having read this story the other day, for once I'm happy not to see a character's (purported) creator credited in one of these backups.

Week 45: The Poys and the Luggage

2007-03-14T18:52:00.000-07:00

Gonna have to be a short one this week, since I'm currently laid up with some kind of bizarre flu.

It occurs to me that readers outside of New York City may not know what a bialy is, or why the name of Bialya was obviously a joke when Giffen et al. were establishing the country in Justice League International 20 years ago--part of the longstanding tradition of fictional postage-stamp countries with unusual laws.

In other words, Bialya is comedy relief, and one of the bedrock rules of entertainment is that you don't have the comedy relief tortured and killed. (Chubby da Choona is the only violation of this I can recall working.) Abruptly introducing bleakness and brutality to something created to be jaunty fun isn't just a sign of "naturalism"--it's a rejection of the idea that it's possible to rely on light entertainment to not suddenly turn on you. This is why, for instance, Jeff Smith's Monster Society of Evil is such a wonderful project, and The Trials of Shazam is so dismal: the engine that the Marvel Family runs on, as I've noted before, is understanding the adult world from a child's playful perspective. I do like the "Seduction of the Innocent" routine with Mary Marvel teased on the inside front cover this time, since what it suggests is the point at which that innocent understanding begins to become a little darker; on the "So Begins the End" image, Phil Jimenez drew her with the expression and body language of a kid who's screwed up and is wondering what's going to come of it.

The cover this week does have a regal grandness to it--a sense of gravity that's all but absent from the story inside. Applying a little bit of logic to this issue, in fact, makes its plot completely fall apart. First off, we're told that Death "fled to Bialya and was given aid and comfort by the government." How would Adam know that? And how does one go about giving aid and comfort to Death, anyway?

Then there's the discussion between the president of Bialya and Mannheim: "Our whole nation embraced your way of crime, your new world order!" We've been over the phrase "new world order" before, but it generally applies to an international balance of power, rather than a philosophy of government. But a nation embracing a "way of crime"? Even the most casual reading of anything having to do with the social contract reveals that just doesn't work. What's a crime? Something that contravenes the rules of the state. A national "way of crime" means a state whose law is to break its law. That's not anarchy (or even Anarky, although I hope we'll be seeing him before too long), it's just incoherent--formally incoherent, even. (Now, Bialya has been established as a "holiday spot for crooks" before, but that's not quite the same thing.)

Then Black Adam bursts in--through the video screen, which should've been a cool visual but doesn't really come through. Inside the room are a) Death, one of the entities that killed Adam's wife and brother-in-law, and b) an unnamed president who seems to know what's up with where the Horsemen came from. So Adam kills the latter while the former is cutting a couple of unidentified dudes in half; then Adam heads out to throw some tanks around, apparently without bothering to deal with Death, who seems to wander out at his leisure while Adam's busy slaughtering everybody in the country.

Now, why would Adam perpetrate the Bialyan genocide? His actions don't obey what just-war theorists refer to as "proportionality and discrimination." Actually, they don't make any sense; even given that he accepted Isis's last-minute change of heart ("save the orphans!" --> "actually I was just kidding, go slaughter everyone, kthxbye!"), once he's crushed, spindled and mutilated the Bialyan faction responsible for harboring Death, what does killing the rest of Bialya's population, most of whom can't even have known about the Horsemen, have to do with getting revenge? And what advantage could it possibly gain him?

By day 5, Adam's rampage has been going on for a full day. Why on earth would other major DCU power players not have caught up with him by this point? Like, at the very least, the rest of the Marvel Family, with whom he was hanging out a couple of days earlier? Some Green Lantern or other? J'onn J'onzz?

Finally, he tracks down Death (and wasn't he scarier when he was still silent, back in the days of... uh... last week?), and presents him with a sort of "death, thou shalt die" scenario. Again, Adam's being terribly inefficient; any interrogation expert can tell you that "you're going to give me the information I'm seeking, and then I will slowly torture you to death" is not a particularly reliable way of getting accurate information. Obviously, the story point that had to be hit this time was Adam Goes Berserk, but one of the big points of 52 so far has been that everything in it is predicated on the peculiar internal rules of the DC universe, and the Adam storyline is throwing those rules (and basic internal logic) out the window for the sake of BIG SMASHING.

In the behind-the-scenes department, two things 52 appears to have given up on (or at least spaced on) that I miss and hope return soon: the backup origins and Keith Giffen's layouts at the 52 site. Also, y'all have read this interview with Greg Rucka, right? Very interesting stuff. (And from a purely selfish perspective as a reader, it's a pity that the final issue will not in fact be 52 pages...)

More notes:

Pg. 2: The title of this week's issue comes from something the Romans used to inscribe on sundials: "vulnerant omnes, ultima necat."

Pg. 5: Peculiar that the lettering in the bottom two panels is smaller than in the rest--was this page reconfigured somehow? And how is Adam holding Montoya up? He doesn't look like he's actually holding her face.

Pg. 7: Why would Mannheim need a double agent at the Oolong complex--that is, what's going on there that's opposed to Intergang's interests, since it appears that Mannheim commissioned the construction of the Horsemen? And who might that agent be? The malapropistic "El Presidento" is a nice touch, though.

Pg. 11: Ayios Nikolaus is better known as Agios Nikolaos. I briefly wondered if ECHELON was some kind of previously established DCU thing, but no, we've got it here on Earth-Prime too. Steve Trevor was the Deputy Secretary of Defense in Rucka's Wonder Woman run; apparently now he's the Secretary proper.

Pg. 12: A curious scene. How can Atom Smasher contact Alan Scott and Checkmate if he's an inmate? And is Amanda Waller putting together the anti-Black Adam Suicide Squad for humanitarian reasons, or what? From the 19 people visible on the board, she seems to be assembling lots of villainous types who are a pretty terrible idea to have on the loose--I mean, Dr. Psycho? Not only do you not want to have that guy on the other side, you don't want him on your side.

Pg. 16: Man, I love these Great Ten sequences--I don't know if I'd want to read a Great Ten series or anything, but they're fabulous supporting characters. I particulary like Thundermind's "inner senses"; the NPC he refers to is the National People's Congress. So the Four Horsemen were built by Beijing, and the idea was to kill Adam, rather than to drive him mad? Does Beijing have ties to Apokolips now? [ETA: Egg Fu, of course! See comments.]

Pg. 20: Using the magic lightning as an offensive weapon, which I assume is what's going on here (the art's unclear), is a peculiar trick--has Adam (or have any of the Marvel Family) used it this way before? [ETA: Many, many, many times. See comments. I don't know what I was thinking.]

Pg. 22: As usual, the Oolong Island scene is pretty badass itself. But you'd think the mad scientists would have imagined when they were building the Horsemen that, you know, somebody might try to get back at them over it, yes? And yet again the word "terrorism" gets lightly deployed for something that's nothing of the kind--for, in fact, the ruler of a sovereign state directly (and personally!) attacking another sovereign state, with no particular political or ideological end that it's intended to coerce anybody into.

Week 44: One Hundred Questions, One Hat

2007-03-07T18:19:00.000-08:00

A very big week for comic books--this wasn't even the best single issue featuring a cover with a red, white and black palette that involves a mythological figure and bloodshed. (Actually, as soon as I typed that sentence, I remembered this cover... but he's real--!) Still, there's also been a lot of talk this week about the future of Superhero Pamphlets As We Know Them--the general feeling of burnout, the event fatigue, the lack of FUN!!!, the sense of franchises being "wheeled along the hallway until they expire" (that's a paraphrase of some blogger this week, and I wish I could remember who) [EDITED TO ADD: it was actually not a blogger but Blue Beetle's John Rogers over at Comicbloc! He put it better, too], the kneecapped momentum of virtually every major non-52 superhero project of the past year, the atmosphere of slowly cooling nostalgia that hovers over the landscape. (Of the ongoing DCU series about solo characters that DC's publishing in March, the most recently introduced character name is Firestorm--who first appeared in 1978. Team book title? Birds of Prey, 1996.)

Someone asked me a few weeks ago what monthly comics I really adore and actively look forward to every month at this point, in an "oh boy this is the week [x] comes out" way--not stuff I'm just sort of following, or that occasionally gives me the buzz I'm hoping for, or like just fine but am happy to wait for the trade for--and my answer was a painfully short list. I do get that feeling about 52 (and that anticipatory feeling about Countdown), but as far as monthlies go: Daredevil and Criminal for sure. The Spirit is getting there. If The Brave and the Bold stays on schedule and as energetic as its first issue, then that. All-Star Superman is like a little blessing from the sky every time it appears, although nobody could call it monthly. Detective when Paul Dini's writing it. And already I'm answering a question other than the one that was asked. (I'm curious to hear what you folks' answers to that question are, too.)

This week's issue of 52, I'm afraid, falls into the part-of-the-problem category. Aside from Azraeuz's silence--so much more effectively scary than the other Horsemen's disquisitions!--the Black Adam sequence is just one long, gory device to hit story beats (Tawky Crawky gets his jaw dislocated; Isis dies of chestnut blight, after telling Adam he was right to dismember bad guys after all). It has plot consequences, but no real emotional or thematic consequences. Having never been given much of a sense of Isis, other than that she handed out flowers and freed orphans and stuff, it's hard for me to feel any particular loss as a reader.

Actually, I'm wondering if there's some kind of subtext to all this on-page krakoomery that I'm missing. This week's Civil War addenda, for instance, make it clear that what that project was about, above the basic plot level, is the idea that the military-industrial complex (Iron Man, the "pro-reg" side) has used tragedy and fear (the New Warriors, the new Thunderbolts) to destroy the spirit of America (Captain America, the "anti-reg" side). Does 52 have significant themes that aren't, as Wikipedia puts it, "in-universe"?

There's an interesting bit here about what part of Osiris was mythologically eaten by a crocodile. Otherwise, there's very little else in this issue to talk about this week (although Montoya finally gets her hat!)--so, especially since one of DC's eight house ads this week (!) makes a point of featuring Rip Hunter's chalkboard, I think it's time for THE CANONICAL LIST OF 52 DANGLING PLOT THREADS. I've left out things that are obviously just inconsistencies (like the "is Sierra the same person as Jade or not" question, or the mess around how Luthor's Everyman Project tech works), and tried to mention only things that are deliberate-looking glitches, if you see what I mean. And yes, it's a nice round number: it just worked out that way.

So here are the plot points whose resolution has been teased but not yet delivered (as far as I can tell; please correct me where I'm wrong):

1. What's the significance of the number 52 itself, and why does it turn up everywhere?
2. What's the significance of the swirling mass of fragments on the first two pages of the first issue?
3. Whoever's talking to Ralph at the beginning of Week 1 talks about the Monster Society (rather than the Secret Society); why? (I could write this one off as a mistake, but I suspect the series' fifth line of dialogue is unlikely to be a mistake, especially in light of the self-identified Monster Society showing up this week.)
4. Does the Booster we see in 52 postdate the Booster who went back home to the future in Infinite Crisis?
5. What happened to the timeline in 52 that makes it different from the one Booster remembers?
6. What went wrong with Skeets, and when?
7. Who sent the would-be suicide bomber to Kahndaq in Week 1? Intergang didn't yet have their grudge against Adam then.
8. Where are Wally and Linda? (This is sort of more an OYL question, but since it's brought up in Week 1...)
9. Why did Charlie pick Montoya for... whatever it is he picked her for? ("That's the question, isn't it?" is not an answer.)
10. What's the significance of "artificial souls"?
11. What exactly happened with the "missing 52 seconds," and what are they protecting?
12. Flight 2824/Flight 2428: what's up with that?
13. How did the Superboy cult get their hands on all that genuine-looking Kryptonian gear? (I'm guessing Felix Faust didn't have access to it, although he appears to have been the one who pointed Ralph toward it.)
14. Who's Devem? Does he have ties to Dev-Em?
15. What was going on with Mr. Mind in his cocoon in Sivana's lab/as a result of being bombarded with suspendium radiation?
16. What got Charlie interested in the 520 Kane case in the first place?
17. What is Intergang up to? Why would they want to "invade" Gotham City, anyhow? Where are they getting their Kirbytech and beast-man tech? What's their connection to Kahndaq?
18. How did Hawkgirl get huge? How did she get back to normal size?
19. How did Cyborg and Firestorm get fused, and how did they get un-fused?
20. What happaned to Adam Strange's eyes?
21. What happened to Alan Scott's eyes (including "the one that isn't his," which as I mentioned when I did this back in week 20 may have been answered here)?
22. What happened to the Red Tornado? How did he end up with one voicebox in Mal Duncan's chest and another one attached to his body in Australia?
23. What's the story with Steel's hand, since he doesn't appear to actually have lost his original left hand to the General?
24. What was the giant "reality-warping wave"?
24. How did Adam, Buddy and Kory end up wherever they were in space?
25. How did Devilance get the word that Lady Styx had put out a contract on them, locate them on Adon, and then get all the way (back!) there in time to start hunting them?
26. What exactly was the "Freedom of Power Treaty" supposed to do?
27. What smashed Rip Hunter's time sphere? (yes, I am going to address each of the Rip's-HQ danglers that are still dangling individually)
28. Why does Rip's HQ have pictures of Rosa Parks, dinosaurs, the Boston Tea Party, etc.?
29. What's the significance of the time all the clocks are set to?
30. What's up with the magnet dangling from a tripod?
31. "World War III - Why? How?" And why is China missing?
32. What's the significance of the picture of the "Snakes on a Plane"/caduceus dagger that turns up again at the beginning of Week 30?
33. What's with the not-quite-52 numbers scattered on the floor?
34. Why all the little circled 52s?
35. "Dead by lead?"
36. "Further time is different"
37. "He won't smell it."
38. "Sonic disruptors-->Time Masters-->Time Servants"
39. "'I'm not kryptonite'"
40. "It hurts to breathe."
41. "2000 years from now" (i.e. 4006, from the cover of Week 19)
42. "Earth"
43. "The Scarab is Eternal?" (The Blue Beetle scarab, or the Black Adam one?)
44. "Where is the Curry Heir?"
45. "The Tornado is in pieces."
46. "Find the last 'El'"
47. "What happened to the son of Superman?"
48. "Don't ask the Question. It lies."
49. "Mortal Savage" (this may be a reference to JSA Classified, but why would that be on the chalkboard?)
50. "The old Gods are DEAD, the new Gods want what's left."
51. "Te versus (Au+Pb)" (element 52, Gold, Lead)
52. "Secret FIVE!"
53. "Someone is monitoring. They see us. They see me." (obv. this has to do with the Monitors, but what's its significance in the story?)
54. "Khimaera Lives Again" (Hawkgirl, yes, but why?)
55. "I'm supposed to be DEAD?"
56. "The Lazarus Pit Rises"
57. "When Am I?"
58. "OTHERS?"
59. "Casey the Cop"
60. "Silverblade"
61. "Find the Sun Devils"
62. "What is spanner's galaxy?"
63. Why did Rip Hunter scrawl "it's all his fault" all over a corner of his HQ?
64. Why did John Henry's blood samples explode?
65. What's "beyond the veil, beyond the two score and twelve walls of heaven"?
66. What's up with the Sivanium robot?
67. How did Kate get to be Batwoman?
68. What was up with the restored face of the damaged Deadly Sin?
69. Why did Doc Magnus's responsometer tech stop working?
70. Why were Intergang or Ridge-Ferrick or whoever planning the bombing at the wedding (cf. the rat poison) before Black Adam had proposed to Isis?
71. Where did Booster's future corpse come from?
72. The suicide bomber at the wedding: what were her (personal or political) ends? (Not just her evident affiliation with the crime cult, but what the point of blowing herself up was.)
73. The "gigantic hands at the center of the universe": what were they?
74. Does Cain of the House of Mystery have a connection to the cult of crime?
75. Who was it who gave Ralph "some help pulling [himself] together"?
76. What are the "new laws, new axioms" of the tenth age of magic?
77. What's the significance of the year 5252?
78. How did Lobo get religion?
79. Why did Wonder Girl think Supernova was Kon-El?
80. What exactly happened to Daniel Carter?
81. What did Ralph find beyond the Mictlan Gate?
82. Super-Chief: WTF?
83. What's the story behind the Crime Bible and attendant cult?
84. Waverider appearing in Sivana's lab and saying "I know why": 'splain please?
85. How did Yurrd/Sobek end up in the Sivana lab three months before being released from the Oolong Island "Project X" lab?
86. The whole scene "between seconds" in Week 27 with the Time Stealers, Waverider, "hypertime," "this year. Like wonderful wet cement," Clock Queen, the question of who Rip Hunter is, "the golden metal that makes [Skeets'] body impervious to the ravages of time portals," etc. needs so much unpacking I can't even tease it out into individual questions.
87. Who's "the twice-named daughter of Cain," if not Batwoman?
88. "The questions have not yet been answered"/the failure of the prophecy?
89. The "Stygian passover" implies that somebody gets spared. Who?
90. Why is Marseille(s) so dad-blamed significant?
91. How did Ralph manage to contact Supernova?
92. Who turned the guy with the amulet into a yeti, and why?
93. What exactly did Ralph learn from Rama Kushna?
94. The various Nightwings we've been seeing in 52: Dick or Jason?
95. How did Skeets eat the Phantom Zone, and why is almost everyone visible inside his visor wearing Mr. Mind glasses?
96. Where or when did Booster and Rip escape to?
97. What did the yellow aliens mean by "and so it begins"?
98. What's up with Captain Marvel's insanity or non-insanity inside the Rock of Eternity?
99. What did the Green Lanterns want with Adam and Kory, and what have they been up to on Mogo for the last few weeks?
100. How did Ralph's ring end up on Sue's gravestone?

Assuming that issue #50 is going to have another 22-page story, and that issue #52 (as rumored) has a 52-page story, that still means there are only 194 pages left to wrap up this series... which means that there's going to have to be more than one revelation every two pages.

Just a few more notes this week:

Pg. 1: Four horsemen, ending her rain. As others have noted, the timeline is wonky here: Osiris died on day 5 of the previous week, but Adam only gets the krakkoooom to let him know it now?

Pg. 5: Note Sivana, or a statue of him, giving the thumbs-up in the first panel. But how did Sobek/Yurrd get sent back in time? Also, Sobek tells Adam that his enemy is Intergang, specifically; that's a pretty narrow target to evolve into World War III, but I guess that's what the next six weeks are for.

Pg. 12: The statues, I think, are of Teth-Adam's first wife Shiruta and his children Gon and Hurut.

Pg. 21: I'm glad to see this scene underscore the idea that Renee's not going to be Vic II; what I'm curious about is how that difference is going to manifest itself. Is selflessness really something that's new to her, or a potential goal for her to achieve, as opposed to something that's already deeply rooted in her character?

Week 43: Captain Maximum Meets Retopistics Uptown

2007-03-01T01:08:00.000-08:00

As a few people have commented, the dramatic tension of the Black Adam storyline that J.G. Jones indicates will be dominating the next three issues is a little undercut by the fact that we know Adam comes out of this story alive and well. Ditto Steel and Adam Strange, since they're all visible in the promo piece for Countdown. (Unless it's one of those fakeouts, like the first draft of the Justice League of America cover!)

Even though I've written a bit about Countdown, I don't know much more about it than anyone out there does at this point; what I do know is that we've been promised that it'll be more action-oriented than 52, since apparently 52 is right up there with "Bruno" on the novelistic talkity-talk side, as comics go.

Now, I love action scenes in comics. Wolverine MacAlistaire running from a bear? One of the most exciting things I've ever read. Clark Kent jumping out a window? As Greg Rucka noted at the DCU panel at New York Comic-Con, that's an incredible moment. Zot zooming through 99 floors of a building like he's in a video game? Great story. The Great Cow Race? Unimpeachable. But the Marvel Family scene in this week's is the kind of action sequence that makes me lose interest in a comic very quickly. They stand around and talk. Then they hit each other for a little while. Then they talk some more. Then they hit each other some more. Then they make up and hug.

Superheroes hitting each other to underscore their philosophical differences--in what would just be a heated discussion in any context that didn't involve spandex--is not, in itself, exciting. It just isn't. A few artists can make superhero fight scenes look genuinely exciting; every time one of Jack Kirby's heroes hit another one, for instance, heaven and earth quaked. Here, though, it just looks static and clichéd, and the gigantic panels devoted to the fight effectively tell us, rather than showing us, that there's something big and loud going on. Between those, the full-page shot of Buddy being reconstructed, and the full-page shot of Sobek's snack, this issue ended up feeling kind of scanty. Besides, as Bully pointed out, isn't Montoya's butt getting cold by now?

J.G. Jones' cover this week is another example of what I love about his work and wish the interior of 52 reflected more often: a sense that cartooning can get across more than the rudiments of what's actually happening in a story's plot--that it can take care with composition, with color as a design element, with the psychological overtones associated with drawing style as well as images. There are a few other cartoonists working in superhero comics right now who clearly think about that stuff a lot; some of them have even met monthly deadlines for full-length comics in the relatively recent past. (What is J.H. Williams III working on these days, anyway? I'd ask the same about Alex Maleev, but this weekend we found out he's drawing Halo.)

Clarity's necessary for this kind of visual storytelling, of course--that's what Giffen's working on 52 for, and he's great at it. (Speaking of which, the layouts on the official site are still at Week 39, as of this writing...) But this issue is all clarity and no flair. When a crocodile has to bite someone in half to generate a little visual excitement, there's a problem. In fact, even beyond the flashback effect of Dan Jurgens' artwork (is this the first comic book crediting separate people with "art breakdowns" and "layouts"?), there's something that feels very twenty-years-ago about this issue.

It took me a while to figure it out, but here's my best guess: it's effectively a pre-Miracleman comic. The bit where the Marvel-family type changes back to his frail human self and promptly gets slaughtered is straight out of Miracleman #15. The dying gasp of the magic word/mentor's name, left incomplete, is Alan Moore's Young Miracleman riff. And then there's the gruesome but weirdly clinical violence, which looks like the kind mid-'80s comics were just starting to experiment with. Even the way the story is paced reminds me of some comics of that era.

What a surprising number of mid-'80s comics had, though, was a look more distinctive than most superhero comics have right now. At the New York Comic-Con, I picked up a few things I hadn't seen in a while from one dealer's four-for-a-buck bin, including DC's best previous attempt at a weekly miniseries: Millennium, a huge crossover that ran for eight weeks in the fall of 1987. Every issue of the core title was drawn by Joe Staton and Ian Gibson--both of them excellent, eccentric stylists--which gave it the kind of unique, consistent visual vibe I wish 52 had (and I hope Countdown at least tries for).

On the subject of style, the "Comic Abstraction" show that's opening later this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is worth a look to get a sense of how much you can take away from cartooning--including representation, which often seems like the unshakeable core of cartooning--and still have some of cartooning's visual grammar left. Sometimes, you can even have some of cartooning's local dialect left. There's a series of pieces by Rivane Neuenschwander in which she's taken a few episodes of "Zé Carioca" (a Brazilian strip from Disney's studios), whited out all the text, and replaced the visual content of every panel with a solid color. What's left of the original is panel outlines and word balloons; fascinatingly, it still immediately scans as a light-entertainment humor comic. Not that I have time to do this, but it'd be interesting to try the same exercise with 52, sampling the dominant color in each panel and using it to replace the entirety of the panel's image. Would it still look 52-ish? Like a circa-2007 superhero comic? Will its visual pulse be easier to "place" twenty years from now?

(My favorite piece in the MoMA show, though, is Julie Mehretu's fantastic, wall-filling "Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation"--an enormous drawing/painting that's non-representational but still obviously an action scene, and includes things that Mehretu apparently thinks of as characters. I actually visited her studio a couple of years ago, and saw some old Jimmy Olsen comics lying around as conceptual source material. Runner-up: Arturo Herrera's "Untitled," another huge painting, consisting of lines and curves sampled from Disney's Snow White--even though there's scarcely a recognizable piece of a character in the whole thing, its source material is so strongly mannered that it looks like Snow White anyway. It's a bit like Richard McGuire's brilliant Random Popeye Generator, actually.)

Both last week's issue and this week's have crucial roles played by keepsake snapshots of loved ones. Happenstance? Coincidence? As you know, if next week Isis is staring longingly at a Polaroid of her brother, that constitutes enemy action.

Apropos of nothing but this week's title: some guy's homemade video for his surprisingly excellent one-man-band cover of Jacob Miller's "Baby I Love You So." I especially like the three-stringed bass.

More notes:

Pg. 1: Sobek's wearing a skintight T-shirt and tight pants (with the inevitable tail-opening in the back). Where does he put his loaf of bread and jar of olives when they're not in his clawlike hands? For that matter, where does he put them after panel 2?

Pg. 2: We've been over this before, but in short: "terrorism" is not an organization, and terrorism requires some kind of agenda it's trying to intimidate somebody into going along with. Why on earth would the DMA think that the Titans would have terrorist ties?

Pg. 3: I guess Billy's sane within the Rock again. Can anybody tell me if this has been explained in The Trials of Shazam? I tried to read that thing, but in a world where Jeff Smith is also writing and drawing a Shazam book, no contest.

Pg. 7: I don't think we've heard of the Rock of Finality before, although I'm hoping it's "finality" in the Kantian sense of noncontingence. (I don't expect my hopes will be fulfilled.)

Pg. 9: Adrianna's fall here, even its pose, recalls the greatest comic book fight scene ever--I refer of course to Scott McCloud's immortal Destroy!!--and the scene in which the commissioner's daughter is struck senseless by a pathetically small piece of flying debris, leading Captain Maximum to declare "Good Lord! She's been struck senseless by that pathetically small piece of flying debris!"

Pg. 10: The "Black Adam has a family now" beat, struck with a large mallet.

Pg. 11: This is practically an end-of-episode gag. I can almost see the freeze-frame.

Pg. 12: Ah, metafiction.

Pg. 13: If Buddy's supersenses "don't reach to the next planet"--which seems rather visible in the background--then how's he going to sample a Sun-Eater? Aren't Sun-Eaters kind of big, if they can eat suns? And their migratory patterns meant they passed by... seven weeks ago. They way they've been treated lately, Sun-Eaters seem almost like harmless grazing ruminants. I always figured they'd be something everyone was terrified of--like a Galactus that can't be communicated with.

Pg. 14: Not that this isn't a "rock"-sign-in-the-air scene anyway.

Pg. 15: It looks like there's a causal link between Buddy manifesting Sun-Eater abilities and zombie-Luribel's difficult labor/the revivification of the Stygian zombies. Is there, or is this a "meanwhile" scenario? I assume that everybody on the space station Buddy's been buried near is dead/zombiefied, but does Lady Styx count as a living creature who'd show up on Buddy's "red radar"?

Pg. 16: Q. Why didn't Lady Styx just go ahead and burst out of Luribel's chest cavity? A. Because then everybody would think this was a ripoff of Alien, as opposed to... uh... okay, it is. Also, she's quoting Hostileman's dialogue, just like Jean in Week 27...

The Origin of Plastic Man: I would not have figured Ethan Van Sciver to be a natural for this one, and in fact his post-Neal Adams/Jim Lee approach for a character usually associated with a broadly cartoony style reminds me a little of the "Shazam!" stories that Don Newton used to draw: It's a formally inappropriate style, but you can also tell how much the artist loves the source material. (The cheek-pulling bit is directly lifted from Jack Cole's first Plastic Man story--speaking of which, wouldn't it have been nice to acknowledge Plas as Cole's creation?) And it turns out this is an actual two-page story: a nice touch! Also good to see Kyle Baker's criminally ignored Plastic Man stories acknowledged among the essential Plas material.

Week 42: Doing Donuts on Free Lunch Drive

2007-02-21T19:28:00.000-08:00

Never underestimate the 52 team. It turns out the business with the Anselmo gun actually is a reference to an old Elongated Man story--one in which the word "Anselmo" doesn't appear, and which appeared in one of the most obscure DC comics ever published, if "published" is the right word. An industry veteran who wishes to remain anonymous forwarded along a .cbr file of it, along with an explanation of how that particular comic came to be. He's asked me not to quote him, but says I can paraphrase his information. So here's the gist of it:

At some point in late 1966, Daisy--the company whose ads for BB guns appeared in decades' worth of comics--decided they wanted to publish a full-on licensed comic book series to promote their products to boys and girls. They approached DC to put together a very odd title, to be called Daisy Comics. The lead feature, "Daisy," would be a sort of Western/humor/romance hybrid about a young woman sharpshooter, a kind of cross between A Date With Judy and Annie Oakley, apparently suggested by the then-popular Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun. (The one story ever produced was drawn in a sort of Leave It to Binky-like style by the late, great Bob Oksner, who passed away last week.) The backup story was intended to be a rotating feature with various DC superhero characters in stories involving guns and firearms--the idea was evidently to cast guns in a more favorable light than usual for comics.

To make a long story short, things didn't go quite as planned. The first issue of Daisy Comics ran seriously late in production, and as it was on its way to the printing plant, DC got legal notification from Disney that they'd heard about the forthcoming comic, and that it had better not share its name with one of their more famous duck characters. There wasn't time to redesign the cover before it went to press, and whoever was tasked with fixing the problem took the shortest route: putting a big white bar over the word "Daisy" on the cover (and blanking out "Daisy" on the indicia for good measure). And so the first and only issue of Comics was printed. As you can imagine, that title makes it a little bit hard to Google.

Naturally, when Daisy saw the printed comic with their company's name removed, they went... well, "ballistic" probably is the right word. When DC brass saw the cover with the ugly white bar, they started to get cold feet too; then somebody read the comic itself. The "Daisy" story is nothing particularly notable--but then there's the Elongated Man story. The 10-page story, "The Secret of the Sorcerous Six-Shooters!," is uncredited--it sure doesn't look or read like a Gardner Fox/Carmine Infantino story, although they were handling Ralph's solo adventures in Detective Comics at the time. The plot's a little on the incoherent side, but it involves Ralph investigating a string of mysterious robberies in Boston committed by a gang run by someone identified only as "Big Tony" (no "Anselmo"--apparently that is a Moonlighting reference after all), who's got a small armory full of guns he claims are enchanted (although we never see any evidence one way or the other, as this issue of 52 suggests). The climax features Ralph playing a round of Russian roulette with Big Tony.

Understandably, DC freaked. Since the sponsor was now out of the picture, the entire print run of Comics #1 was pulped. Only a few of the initial copies that went to the DC and Daisy offices survived, and it's not even listed in Overstreet. But somehow the 52 crew must have gotten hold of a copy...

Actually, no. I just made all of that up. As far as I know, there is no precedent for a "wishing gun" in any Elongated Man story. There is no precedent for a "wishing gun" in the DC canon. There is no precedent for a "wishing gun" in any fiction of which I'm aware. And that's a problem--as emotionally satisfying as the conclusion to Ralph's mystery plot here is (assuming it is the conclusion, since there's obviously some loose ends to be tied up at the very least), it's intellectually unsatisfying.

To explain why, I'm going to have to quote a little bit from vintage detective-fiction theory. This page by Michael Grost is a pretty interesting summing-up of the "realist" and "intuitionist" schools of detective fiction, especially starting about 3/4 of the way down the page. "Realist" fictional detectives solve crimes as police tend to, by methodical, scientific examinations of evidence; "intuitionists" solve them by leaps of perception. (The "intuitionist" label is Grost's own, although the division reminds me a bit of Colson Whitehead's novel The Intuitionist, in which elevator inspectors are divided into "intuitionists" and "empiricists."

A.A. Milne--yes, that one--was also a mystery novelist, and his 1928 introduction to his novel The Red House Mystery created (or made explicit) that particular schism in detective fiction. To quote Grost's essay: "Milne claims that it is almost impossible for a typical reader to anticipate the ideas of a detective who has scientific means at his disposal to solve stories. He feels that such stories are therefore unfair to readers. He prefers stories in which the detective solves the mystery through pure intellect, reasoning upon facts which are known to the reader. Such an emphasis on pure human reason is the core of the intuitionist approach."

As Waid suggested in his origin for the Elongated Man, Ralph is an intuitionist all the way: his specialty is eccentric but brilliant bounds of logic. (Even the bit with dusting the helmet for prints is a great, contrarian bit of intuition: faced with something he knows is in the realm of the uncanny, he thinks about it in purely physical terms.) But the flaw of the Anselmo gun as a mystery-plot device was outlined by both the realists and the "intuitionists." In 1924, R. Austin Freeman (one of the realists) wrote in "The Art of the Detective Story" that "the author should be scrupulously fair in his conduct of the game. Each card as it is played should be set down squarely, face upwards, in full view of the reader... The production of a leading fact near the end of the book is unfair to the reader."

Then, in 1928, the mystery writer S.S. Van Dine (an intuitionist) published his "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories." The first one is that "the reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described." Then there's rule #8: " The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic séances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio."

Slightly later, in 1929, Ronald Knox, one of the founders of the Detection Club, wrote his "Ten Commandments for Detective Novelists", one of which is that "all supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course." (Admittedly, some of the others are not terribly useful, and one is outright terrible: "No Chinaman must figure in the story." So much for the Perfect Physician--!)

All of which is to say that if we see Ralph sticking the barrel of an ordinary-looking pistol in his mouth while crying, it's a fair assumption that he intends to kill himself by firing a bullet through his brain; it's a dodgier but still reasonably fair proposition if the solution to the Anselmo-gun mystery relies on it being, I don't know, some kind of water pistol; it's not particularly fair at all if it turns out to be a wish-granting machine that just happens to be shaped like an ordinary-looking pistol, especially if its context--not just the storyline of 52, but the entire fictional universe in which it's set--has made no previous mention of a pistol-shaped wish-granting device.

Now, the Ralph plot has been running up against the "world of spirits" conundrum from the beginning: it's a detective story that takes place in that very world. But we've also been told that in the Tenth Age, magic has new rules, and that one of them is TANSTAAFL--a "fair play" rule worthy of Mr. Terrific. (Yet somehow the Anselmo gun, from the Ninth Age, still works fine--!) As far as the "mystery" here is "who's behind what's been happening to Ralph," the answer is Faust, and 52 has been playing fair with us--obviously, since even I was able to figure it out. But the Magical Wishing Gun is just ridiculous. Not even the loopiest intuitionist in the audience would have been able to guess that one. (It does make a few earlier bits of Ralph's story make more sense, though. In his scene with Rama Kushna, note that she said "You wished to be with her again"--not "wish" but "wished." Perhaps what she showed him was how to defeat Faust, as he'd predestined by making his bullet-wish back at the Ambassador?)

While we're at it, the Magical Wishing Gun--in contrast even to the Green Lantern ring, which is limited by force of will and the user's specific conception--is a very, very, very dangerous artifact to have lying around as a souvenir in one's house, or even in the Flash Museum. It's potentially as powerful as the Miracle Machine; why wouldn't Ralph have turned it over to, say, Zatanna, or tried using it before to reverse all kinds of bad things that have happened?

Of course, all these objections may well be rendered moot by something we haven't seen yet, since Neron and Faust aren't going to stay put forever. We also know from Justice League of America that Felix Faust is back on Earth, which means that somebody figured out how to bring Ralph back to life and made it worth his while to break the circle. And I do like the traditional device of the circle that can only be broken by the person who drew it--as the Seven Soldiers Zatanna puts it, one of the rules of magic is "don't bring it up if you can't keep it down." Plus there are other yet-unanswered questions about this plot: who was the friend who pulled Ralph through after the wicker-doll thing, and who is the unidentified person that Wizard told us Ralph was going to hook up with at some point? Would one or both of them be Bea?

Like the Red Tornado cover, this issue's cover was done very early on, according to the J.G. Jones blog. Like the Red Tornado cover, it's a lovely piece of work. And like the Red Tornado cover, it's not actually a scene that happens in the story itself--even symbolically, this time. As Jones notes, the random tentacles are the sign of a Cthulhu-like horror, and F. Faust doesn't represent any kind of profound too-much-for-senses-to-bear unknown--he's ultimately just a jerk with a tall hat and (as this issue points out) a thing about fingers. (But speaking of rubbery stretchy things: wouldn't Ralph's finger & chest just stretch instead of being severed/punctured?)

Oh yes: the Montoya plot! Well, we all knew she was going to say "good question" at some point, but this was a crisp little scene anyway. It even connects thematically with the Ralph material, in a way. Montoya and Ralph are the two characters in 52 for which identity is really important: Ralph has been losing himself and falling to pieces (since he defined himself by his relationship with Sue), and Montoya has essentially been blank for a while, as everyone makes sure to keep reminding her (to ask "what would Montoya do?" may be to not get an answer). But I'm intrigued by the idea of her somehow turning her blankness into her strength: does her facelessness make her a Woman Without Qualities? An Unknown Soldier? A Human Target? A Proxy? A Yankee Doodle? As one wag on the DC boards put it: Next Question.

No page-by-page notes this week, since there's really not a lot to point out other than that Ralph drinks with his right hand but shoots with his left, and that Green Arrow looks like he's got his eyes crossed in that last panel. Also: if you're at New York Comic-Con this weekend, I'll be around; I'm moderating the CEO 2007 Outlook panel on Friday morning (during the industry-only part of the Con) and the How To Draw Heartache panel on Saturday morning at 11 AM.

Week 41: Look to the Goblet, Ralph

2007-02-14T22:57:00.000-08:00

From the Helmet of Fate stuff, as well as the Mark Waid interview over at IGN, I think it's fair to assume that the entity that's been hanging out with Ralph is not the actual Dr. Fate helmet. So what might it be? With the understanding that I might well be proven wrong next week, and that other people online have suggested the same theory, I suspect it's Felix Faust.

The key to this particular mystery is the Silver Wheel of Nyorlath, which first appeared here, in the same issue as Faust's first appearance. The Wheel, the Green Bell of Ulthool and the Red Jar of Calythos, are the three objects Faust collects to free the Demons Three: Abnegazar, Rath and Ghast. (In turn, they require some more objects of him: "The wing of a bat, the hide of a cat, a shell from the great sea shore! A mallet and a tusk and a white death's-head! Pomegranate! Goose feather! The skin of a sheep!") That story continues in the next issue of JLA, "One Hour to Doomsday!"--hey, it's a countdown!--which involves the Lord of Time and the years 3786 and 2062.

But back to Faust. The journey the helmet has taken Ralph on might not be a Virgil-and-Dante situation; I'm starting to suspect it's more like Mephisto's dealings with the original Faust (not this Faust, who's considerably more admirable, or this Faust, which is pretty great too), which increasingly corrupt him the way Ralph has been corrupted. They go to see the Seven Deadly Sins (as in the Rock of Eternity); they go to mess with the Pope; they go to see Helen of Troy... and then it's time for Dr. Faustus to go to hell, and he refuses the possibility of salvation. (Hence Ralph's disappearance this issue, and the Anselmo gun in the next-issue box.) If you like experimental film, start here for Jan Svankmajer's version; if you prefer things in easily-digested comic-strip form, see R. Sikoryak's "Mephistofield" in Hotwire Comix & Capers, which reduces Marlowe's version to three pages of "Garfield" dailies.

Next week's cover preview, with tentacle-thingies bursting out of the Fate helmet, echoes the snakes where Count Marisius's head should've been in Ralph's scene in Week 25--the scene in which the helmet shows Ralph a version of Felix Faust's fate that had previously been unknown to us. What Ralph says he's gotten out of the lesson is that "this is what happens to suckers who think they can beat the devil"; Faust's mistake had been to "misrepresent" his side of the deal to Neron, and the suggestion of the story is that if you're going to do magic you'd better stick to the precise letter and spirit of your deal. Curiously, the suggestion of the first Faust story in JLA is that magic is rather loosey-goosey, and that a symbolic gesture is precisely as useful as the real thing. How magic works in the current Age isn't entirely clear yet, but I'm guessing that the same principle applies: Ralph's trade of the wicker ring for the shackle, for instance, is an example of the "more or less the same thing" principle of magic.

Looking at Mogo's first appearance reminded me that those tentacles under Fate's helmet also recall the sort of flower one gets for the man who has everything (another Moore/Gibbons story that recently got refried over in Green Lantern). I don't think they're that, but the idea of experiencing one's heart's desire as a vicious illusion suggested that what Faust (or whoever) may be doing is preying on Ralph's vanity as a detective. He doesn't just want his wife back; he wants to do it himself, to bring his wife back, through his mastery of information and logic.

Great cover this issue--it manages to incorporate five different boxes within a box, as well as the fine bit of business of Montoya's question-mark ponytail, and it still looks simple and eye-catching. That Adam-and-Kory pose, by the way, reminds me of some old Frazetta or Alex Raymond image, but I can't quite tell what. (Here, by the way, is the scene from The Lady from Shanghai that J.G. Jones mentions in his piece about this week's cover.)

"Miracles & Wonders," aside from the nod to Diana's appearance probably isn't a reference to this or this or (despite its references to "a personal journey with cancer") this, and it's definitely not this. But this site is a little closer--the miraculously surviving Isis-rose could fit right next to the name of Allah in an eggplant. Note also that one place references to wonders and miracles turn up is in Revelation 13:13-14, in which the Beast creates deceptive miracles. Then, of course, there's the singular form, as in this song.

As the clock is ticking down, it's worth running down the characters we were told a year ago would appear in 52 who haven't shown up yet. The ones the writing team gave a positive response to: Snapper Carr, Captain Atom, Gentleman Ghost, Anarky (who I'm guessing shows up in or around Week 48 from the @ symbol on the solicited cover's wall), the Haunted Tank, and Vigilante/Linda Danvers. (And let's not forget Most Excellent Super-Bat!) Not that I'm going to feel ripped off if we don't get a Gentleman Ghost appearance or anything; this might be a useful list for thinking about what might be coming up, though.

More notes:

Pg. 1: "Pet-thing": nice! I don't think Molek the Hunter has appeared anywhere before; perhaps he's friends with Devilance the Pursuer. Or the recently-resurfaced Bolphunga the Unrelenting, considering Mogo's presence this time.

Pg. 2: For a blind guy, Adam is remarkably adept at hand-to-hand combat.

Pg. 5: "Cantos of Crippen": anyone have any idea what these would be?

Pg. 6: What Montoya's wearing isn't quite a traditional gi--or, speaking of Dave Gibbons co-creations, a G.I.

Pg. 8: In panel 4, Ralph's nose is twitching; it also looks longer than usual. Maybe there is some gingold in his flask. If he's elastic enough, might he be able to survive a bullet--? And would Mr. Dewhurst really know what teleportation microcircuitry looks like?

Pg. 9: Prof. Milo hasn't appeared all that much before--although his notable appearances include his debut (in which he gave Batman a temporary phobia of bats), this identity-crisis special, this Neal Adams-drawn story (in which he got his terrible bowl haircut), a two-part story that concluded behind this excellent Joe Kubert cover, and a cameo in the Morrison-written Arkham Asylum graphic novel. As far as I can tell, his deal is less dabbling in magic than playing mind games with people; please fill me in on appearances I haven't taken into account. He doesn't appear to have been called a "technomancer" before, either. But that fits in with Ralph being sort of delusional, too.

Pg. 10: If the house-arrest scanners are looking for "stray nanites," they'd have found the teleportation microcircuitry, wouldn't they?

Pg. 12: Nice pickup line, Renee. Who's Diana's friend? Might he be Batman, who's also been hanging out in Nanda Parbat as of the solicitation for #665?

Pg. 14: This has been building since the beginning of the series, and I assume it's going to keep building for another month or two, but what could Montoya's revelation about her identity possibly be? "I'm a superhero. I've always been a superhero..."?

Pg. 16: A "K-type sun" is also known as a "K star."

Pg. 17: It's six days since she got shot and she's still "leaking vital life essence"? Oh dear. "Four light years" is about how far Alpha Centauri, around which Rann used to orbit, is from our solar system. (It now orbits Polaris, which is 431 light years away.) I am not as up on my Adam Strange as I might be, as those of you who saw me getting sonned a few weeks ago know, but I think the first time Alanna came back to Earth with Adam was this issue--"not long after we met" would have to refer to Adam meeting Kory (when was that?), since it's a good long distance into Adam's history. And what's happening to Kory's injured shoulder in the final panel?

Pg. 19: The second time this issue somebody says "strange" to mean "odd" in Adam Strange's presence.

Pg. 20: Have we seen Opto3o9v before? Anyone know? Mogo first appeared in this issue, in a story that... oh, how convenient! somebody's posted the whole thing! It's worth reading if you don't know it already.

The Origin of Starfire: Excellent compression--the facts of Kory's background, along with some neat psychological angles (very sharp observation about her partnership with Dick). I'm glad to see she can still officially absorb languages through touch, as ridiculous as that power is. And that third panel on the second page is, of course, a variation on this image.

Week 40: Man of Steel, Consistency of Kleenex

2007-02-07T22:24:00.000-08:00

The title of this week's issue is a line from the song "John Henry," specifically the line that Alan Lomax called "the Bill of Rights [in] one phrase." If, perhaps, you are not familiar with the original "John Henry," you might acquaint yourself with the amazing Josh White's rendition, Mississippi Fred McDowell's fragment of a version, or Mississippi John Hurt's less conventional one. Or have a look around this comprehensive "John Henry" site.

There. Now, back to the other John Henry. Sadly, aside from its excellent cover, this was probably my least favorite issue so far: a messy, awkwardly drawn, mostly incoherent resolution to the weakest plot thread of the series, with very little of the whirlwind-tour-of-the-DCU stuff that's 52's strong point. And it really does look like a resolution--there's nowhere much left for the Steel/Nat/Luthor plot to go after this. My hope had been that it would eventually dovetail with the overarching plot of 52 (in more than a "Supernova drops by to snarl at Luthor" way), and I could still be surprised, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Overaching plot? Yeah, it's finally starting to come together: the big things 52 seems to be setting up are a) the return of the parallel Earths (most obviously in the Booster/Supernova arc, but there are hints of it in Ralph's story and its theme of life after death, which turns up elsewhere too) and b) some kind of interconnected Darkseid/Fourth World/Intergang/Lady Styx/Crime Bible scenario (the space-castaways thing, Montoya/Question/Batwoman, Black Adam/Isis, Oolong Island).

So how does Steel's story connect to all of this? It doesn't--at least unless something big comes out of it in the next 12 weeks, which doesn't look likely. And the plot has backtracked on every advance it's made. Nat's built a super-powered suit of armor! No, wait, she isn't using it. John Henry's got powers! Wait--not any more. Luthor's scored a PR coup and changed the fabric of American society by making thousands of super-types! But actually, as of One Year Later, we already knew that didn't take, and everybody was back to hating him.

Then there's the matter of Luthor's power-granting technology. It's cancelled by the press of a button, remotely (as with Eliza)! No, actually, it has a built-in expiration date! No, it actually kills people in six months! Except when it doesn't. (As in Nat's case--she got her powers in Week 8, as I recall, and that was more than six months ago.) Oh, actually, it needs a "close-range electrical pulse" to be deactivated (what?). But it can be turned off selectively (otherwise Mercy, last issue, wouldn't have been able to turn off Nat's powers and not Hannibal's, not to mention Lex switching off everyone's powers but InfInc's). Luthor's not eligible for it! No, he became eligible as a result of killing and spinal-tapping Luis Dominero! No, he was eligible in the first place! It takes hours! It takes seconds! It makes not a freaking whit of sense! I don't need everything in comics to be plausible as such--if I did, I'd have given up somewhere around "Rocketed as a child..." But I do need it to be at least sort of internally consistent, or I get yanked straight out of the story the way the Steel arc has been yanking me out almost from the get-go.

No origin this time, either (I have no idea if Waid Writes Everybody's Origin is going to continue in Countdown, but I really hope it does.) Yes, we got 23 pages of story, but the 21-page Steel scene felt dragged out to give it more of the sense of drama that comes with length, and we didn't even get Kala Avasti riding up on a Segway to give John Henry some crucial piece of information. Also, I know it's not cricket to theorize about who writes which parts of 52, but a lot of this issue's dialogue does seem awfully Morrisonian, especially Luthor's "Tt" and "No pain...," and the bit where he's being overwhelmed by his new super-senses' input.

If you haven't looked at last week's discussion, a couple of posters came up with a very good series of observations about Horseman #4: the "boom"/"krakoom" combo of a Boom Tube was previously heard during the thunderstorm in Week 26, when there was also talk of suspendium, and immediately thereafter Sobek made his first appearance in Sivana's lab, right about where Mr. Mind had earlier wrapped himself up in his cocoon.

Incidentally, I hope everyone got to read the other comic this week involving the Marvel Family and a talking crocodile--it's really excellent, even if Jeff Smith repeats his Bone gag of a character whose facial expression never changes.

More notes (not many of 'em this time):

Pg. 1: It took Luthor two days to get in touch with John Henry?

Pg. 5: How nice: Luthor even let Natasha change her clothes since last issue.

Pg. 6: When even the characters in the story mention twice in the course of one page that the people they're fighting are generic "redshirts," there's a problem.

Pg. 7: For a moment, as I turned the page, I thought Wonder Woman/mod-Diana-Rigg-type Diana Prince was going to be involved in this story, and I was excited... but no.

Pg. 10: When did Everyman manage to eat a lobster as big as the Ritz?

Pg. 11: Especially one that can shatter (not crush) all of Steel's armor as if it's a fortune cookie?

Pg. 12: Gar's crack about shapeshifters might make a little more sense if, for instance, he weren't standing right next to Offspring. Too bad about Everyman, if indeed he is dead: the over-the-top evil-cannibal thing was annoying, but "the completely creepy bad guy who can assume anyone's form" is always a useful archetype. (See also Mystique--looking at that series' covers, I get some sense of what the plot involved from exactly two out of 24.)

Pg. 15: Combine a sprinkler system going off and the sprays of lines Batista draws around any nexus of action or surprise, and you get... a whole lot of straight lines. "My laws, my philosophies... make the world a better place": See, this is where the Luthor I was talking about last week comes through: the one who believes he's the best-qualified to be a benevolent philosopher-king. (This is what differentiates him from the Crime Bible's acolytes: they don't care about making the world a better place, they apparently just want to prepare it for their Lovecraftian alien overlords to devour.) "Planet Lexor" is a nod to the pre-Crisis world that named itself after Lex out of gratitude (thanks to a job Superman did and Luthor took credit for in this issue).

Pg. 16: Was it Frank Miller who created the tradition of describing the hero's specific injuries in way too much detail? Again, this got lampooned expertly in the "Sacred Wars" sequence of Cerebus: "Cardiac arrest. Acute uremic failure. Leakage in the left ventricle. Mustn't. Black. Out." Maybe this is one of Lex's auxiliary offices; as J.G. Jones noted back in Week 35, his main desk is a lot more interesting-looking than this one (it's a big hunk of a giant redwood).

Pg. 18: "Luthor proved a close range electrical pulse can disorganize the artificial exo-gene." Wait: when did he do that? And a mystery perhaps one of you readers can clear up: we saw Steel's robotic hand back in week 5, but when exactly did he get it? I'm away from my comics right now, but this review of Week 5 suggests that Steel actually lost his gauntlet, not the whole hand, to the General. Is he being conflated somehow with Sarge Steel, who's had a mechanical left hand for ages, and who worked with Richard Dragon in the CBI?

Pg. 19: "The Everyman treatment is toxic." It is? I'd also be a little more inclined to believe John Henry's "saving lives is what I do" boast if he hadn't, for instance, let Everyman fall to his death a few pages ago.

Pg. 21: With a puncture wound the size of a hammer-handle going all the way through him, he's standing up for a photo-op. He is tough.

Pg. 22: Hunger, war, fevers and death: in order, no less.

Pretty excited about the preview of next week's cover: Tears! Booze! Birdies! Mogo! Lotus position!

Week 39: Like Something That Seeks Its Level

2007-01-31T19:15:00.000-08:00

I'd been looking forward to that Montoya-and-Richard-Dragon encounter, too! "Don't ask (the front cover about) the Question..."

This is not the first time we've seen the Luthor-becomes-Superman gambit, this issue's main story beat. As J.G. Jones notes, the idea was alluded to here, but it was also something of a Silver Age staple, appearing here ("What irony!") and here and here and, although it's not obvious from the cover, here. It's even turned up a bit more recently.

Something I really liked about the Azzarello/Bermejo Lex series, though, was that we got a sense that Lex is fully justified in his own mind--that he's not just jealous that the alien gets the powers and he doesn't, he genuinely believes that Superman is in the wrong and he's in the right, and that anything he does can be justified by his ends. That's more interesting to me, and scarier, than the Luthor motivated by a sense of egocentric unfairness and resentment. I love the stories where we get hints of sympathy for Luthor's perspective--they remind me of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, the best 1500-page-plus prose novel ever written in English, whose bad guy, Lovelace, is so seductively sympathetic that Richardson kept adding sections to it to make him come off as more evil.

The problem of justification, especially justification for violence, is as huge and tricky as problems get; a few years ago, I read an even longer (and even better) book all about it. It can make for great comics, too. My favorite manga series at the moment is Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's Death Note--anybody among the commenters reading it too? feel free to chime in even if you haven't commented before--which is all about a cat-and-mouse game between a serial killer and a detective, each of whom believes, more or less reasonably, that they're in the right and that the other one has to be stopped. (The serial killer is ostensibly the hero of the series, and he actually does have pretty strong justification--at least at first.)

But on the other side, we've got straight-up monsters like Everyman, who isn't just a cannibal for fun, he's got Jake's corpse on a checkered tablecloth with a goblet of wine--a kind of "ooh, look how bad I am" move. (The wine, by the way, seems to be for the 52 drinking game, which should've included dismemberments from the outset. For those of you just joining us, it also includes sports bras, bad lorem ipsum, teddy bears, and Watchmen allusions.) That makes him somehow much less interesting to me--which connects to my whole problem with the Crime Bible: it short-circuits the entire problem of moral justification. Another way of putting it: this song--sung by Catwoman, no less.

Lex's Everyman, incidentally, isn't DC's first; that would be Johnny Everyman, who appeared in a handful of early issues of World's Finest (beginning with this one) and Comic Cavalcade. The first Johnny Everyman story has a caption on its first page noting that it's "prepared in cooperation with the East and West Association, devoted to furthering understanding between peoples." (That page appears opposite the final page of a Boy Commandos story, on which Rip Carter--hey, wonder if there's a connection to Rip Hunter and/or Daniel Carter there?--is seen yelling into a microphone: "The Nazis are not supermen but super-beasts! Beasts with minds to conquer and weapons to kill!") Here's an interesting little history of the character--apparently, the East and West Association was a group headed by Pearl S. Buck, who was also on DC Comics' Editorial Advisory Board at the time!

Oh, and speaking of Rip Hunter: Eight weeks ago we learned that the next clue from Rip's blackboard to be addressed would be "he won't smell it"--have we actually gotten anything on that front?

A few days after I read last week's issue, I thought: hmm, there was something I liked about that, something unusual... Then it hit me, or rather didn't hit anyone: there were no fight scenes, no violence, no obligatory showdown between an ostrich, a chorus girl and a lampshade--the only physical struggle was Montoya dragging Charlie up the mountain. And it was thrilling anyway. Still, the presence of physical conflict in every issue is just one of many unspoken assumptions about how superhero comics are supposed to work in 2006. A couple of things other people have written in the last week or so have reminded me just how much I'd like to see those unwritten laws done away with--or at least made entirely optional--because I think they're at least as harmful as the old unwritten laws they were designed to counteract.

One of the people who's been posting in the last week's Supergirl blogosphere kerfuffle is Dean Trippe, who's also put up his own drawing of Supergirl, which gives me the kind of actual-teenage-girl vibe I've rarely seen in comics since Jenny from Scott McCloud's Zot!. Looking at it, my first reaction was that if there were a Supergirl comic that looked like that, I would totally buy it. In hardcover, even. I got the same kind of reaction to it that I got from the announcement of Morrison & Quitely's All-Star Superman, and there's a reason that's one of DC's best-selling titles, you know? It's committed to pure pleasure on every page, in a way that I don't get nearly enough from most superhero comics, and it doesn't look or read like anything else.

Ditto for Alice Hunt's idea for a Ralph-and-Sue comic set in the '60s with the Question as an occasional guest star. I mean, last night I watched The Thin Man--more or less the model for the historical Ralph/Sue relationship--and thought: I want superhero comics that are like this. It's too late for an actual Elongated Man comic along those lines, of course; I think 52's take on him is probably the best thing that could be done with a post-Identity Crisis Ralph. But I want a comic like that. If nothing else, there has to be some kind of playful and innocent comic series around now for someone else to despoil 40 years from now.

(Speaking of which, a small note on spoilers: anything that's already been published is obviously fair game here, but if you happen to know stuff that's coming up, don't spill the beans, please? Thanks.)

More notes:

Pg. 5: The Spectre literally stepped on Atlantis in Infinite Crisis. As for the "shackles of Arion," I'm not sure what they are, or what the beast they're containing is (although with that headdress it looks a little like an underwater Lockjaw), or what a "warded link" is--the only result for a Google search on that phrase is a triple-X site. There's such a thing as a "warded lock,", but that doesn't make sense in this context.

Pg. 6: And Ralph now has (or had) a wicker ring in place of the old ring he lost? He wasn't wearing it in Week 32. I hadn't realized before now that Ralph and the Fate helmet were playing "find the object," either. Apparently other people have gotten a link before, but then been eaten by the beast, which has subsequently been re-chained? This whole sequence has a weird kind of fabulistic dream-logic or non-logic to it...

Pg. 7: They are, of course, using a Boom Tube, as in Kirbytech--not this kind.

Pg. 8: It's actually spelled "High Chaparral,", and as far as I know it hasn't been revived. Good to see the return of Dr. Tyme's costume! The only microscopic naked Amazons I know of in DC continuity have most likely never heard of Tyme. We've dealt with Suspendium before, but I'm glad to see the Mister Mind thread being picked up again (after more than half a year).

Pg. 9: Veronica Cale is once again not wearing her black pearls--maybe Ralph and Fate picked them up as another of their "special objects."

Pg. 11: Somebody on the Newsarama forums (as noted by Squashua in last week's comments) pointed out that by an A=1, B=2... cipher, S+O+B+E+K = 19+15+2+5+11 = 52. Yow.

Pg. 12: For every BOOOOM there is an equal and opposite KRAAKOOOM. Here come the Horsemen!

Pg. 13: There are some serious chronology problems with this sequence. One: it's Day 5, immediately after a Day 6 sequence. Two: Natasha and Everyman are still wearing the same ripped clothes they had on in the first few pages. Three: the power-implanting process seems, earlier in the series, to take a very long time, and at the beginning of the scene Luthor insists that everything has to be ready to begin in 15 minutes... but three minutes of story time, tops, elapse before we see powered-up Luthor turn up.

Pg. 20: Luthor's shirt is burned away in the shape of Superman's insignia. Although something about it suggests Power Girl's lack-of-insignia. Poor Natasha: since she knows everything now, what are her odds of surviving to Week 40?

The Origin of Mr. Terrific: Appropriate to take a psychological approach to a character who's so much about his personal ideology that he literally wears it on his sleeve. I love that he's the "third-smartest man alive": can anyone tell me who the first two are? are either of them on Oolong Island?

Next week's 52 Pickup might be a day or two late (or might not). I know, I cry wolf about this stuff a lot. (And "late Wednesday evening" counts as "right on time," by my standards.) But I am going to be late one of these days. As opposed to the mighty 52 team: 3/4 of the way done and not a ship date missed yet. Good going.

Week 38: See Also Mary Hopkin

2007-01-24T14:18:00.000-08:00

If somebody told you they were reading a really good comic involving a bunch of scientists on an island creating doomsday creatures, a "pale horse" reference, an unstable, slovenly fallen hero eating cold beans from a can, a touch of psychic nosebleed Zen, and a Ditkovian character ripping off his face-concealing mask as he prepares to die in a snowstorm, what comic would you guess they were reading? Shall we add Watchmen allusions to the 52 drinking game?

Terrific Montoya/Question scenes this issue, even though a couple of them are effectively the same scene (I'm trying to save his life because I need him/how do we get where we're going again?/I knew I should've taken that left turn at Albuquerque). The really ripe-for-discussion business, though, is the introduction of three of the four Horsemen of Apokolips, which of course leads us back to the non-crime Bible and Revelation 6. And before I get into it, I feel compelled to quote the mighty Half Man Half Biscuit:

If you're going to quote from the Book of Revelation
Don't keep calling it the Book of Revelations
There's no "S," it's the Book of Revelation
As revealed to St. John the Divine.

(Relatedly: "Those Were the Days," miscredited.)

So. Revelation 6. The first horse (do the Horsemen other than Azraeuz have horses? what's Azraeuz's horse, anyway?) is white, and ridden by someone who has a bow and a crown, "and he went forth conquering, and to conquer" (in the King James translation). The horseman is traditionally named Pestilence, although he's not actually named in the Bible. This useful page indicates that he's occasionally been interpreted as the Antichrist, as Christ, or as a Parthian archer.

The second horse is red, "and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword." Its rider is traditionally War, and Roggra here rules the Age of War.

The third horse is black, and "he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand"; his rider, usually called Famine, is charging outlandish prices for staple food, although he's still making luxuries available too. "The Age of Fevers"? Doesn't quite fit the template. Yurrd's "Hunger" is more like famine--and the fact that we don't see Yurrd here (and that J.G. Jones notes that he's "already in place") makes me wonder if he's got some kind of connection to Hannibal.

The fourth horse is a color that's usually translated as "pale," as in Red D'eath's band--we see that again with Azraeuz's "pale steed"--but the actual Greek word is "chloros," meaning the pale yellow-green color associated with, say, zombies. "[H]is name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth." The rider, Death, is the only one of the riders actually named. (And "the fourth part of the earth" resonates nicely with "Fourth World," for which see more below.) As for Azraeuz's "black dawn," that phrase has been been used for a couple of previous DC stories.

Various comics have dealt with the Four Horsemen before, like this one and this one and, uh, this one. (This version, which supposedly included some visual design by Simon Bisley, doesn't appear to have seen the light of day, at least in comics form; can anyone tell me more?) My favorite comics reference to them, though, fits the Revelation template even more loosely, and I alluded to it last week: the Four Dark Judges, Death, Fear, Fire and Mortis, who appear in some memorable Judge Dredd stories. That right there is some character design. Speaking of which, the design of Roggra vaguely reminds me of some character from ABC Warriors, maybe a minor one, but I can't for the life of me think of which.

In other news: For those who didn't see it, Mark Waid helpfully explained the "two keys" thing at Newsarama (the other one was the giant key to Superman's Fortress of Solitude--although can someone please point me to a post-Crisis issue where we've seen it before Week 37? Was that the Antarctic Fortress? I love the giant key). And Keith Giffen's "reporter's sketchbook" at the official 52 site hasn't been updated in a couple of weeks, although a few other things have (like changing "succeeds" to "secedes" in a headline); hope it comes back soon.

Can I just say again how much I'm enjoying all the comment discussions? You folks rule.

More notes:

Pg. 1: You'd think she'd have figured out the route to Nanda Parbat before she left. You'd also think that Kate, as rich as she is, could've sprung for a GPS, but that's another thing.

Pg. 3: Prof. Morrow's "war effort" line is a nice cue: Magnus is indeed stockpiling useful metals--although he may not have the ones he thinks he does. Thermometers, for instance, are generally no longer made with mercury--these days, they've got other liquids in them, or they're digital. (The days when kids were encouraged to play with something called SlikSilver are long gone.) And if he thinks eating all those beans is going to get him a significant amount of tin, he's wrong--although the lids might be tin-plated steel, the rest of the can is probably aluminum. The lead shielding, though: that might help. Ditto the gold watch he swiped back in week 29.

Pg. 4: The first Plutonium Man appeared in this issue, which is turning out to be a pretty important reference point...

Pg. 5: I know of no previous references to Yurrd the Unknown, Roggra, Zorrm or Azraeuz, although they all look like Blogger verification words or the names of pre-Fantastic Four Lee/Kirby monsters. "The Terror of Yurrd the Unknown!"

Pg. 6: This may be--and please correct me if it's not--the first time the Kirby-at-DC-associated term "Fourth World" has appeared within a story. (It initially appeared on the covers of the fourth issues of three of his series--and his... seventh issue of Jimmy Olsen. And remember, kids: "alienation turns a happy place into hell.")

Pg. 7: Since when does Dr. Cyclops have two eyes?

Pp. 8-9: "Shoot you in the head... dump your body...": basically what happened to Charlie at the end of the first issue of his 1987 series; the "butterflies" bit, here and later, is (as others have noted) a reference to the second issue, whose title is "Butterfly," and in which Richard Dragon tells the recuperating Charles Victor Szasz the original Chuang Tzu's story of the man who "didn't know if he was a man who had been dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man." That issue also includes a little op-ed by Julia Sabbagh on the inside front cover, which notes that "the titles produced for girls can be counted on one hand" and that "if we want comics to be read by girls we must present girls with the proper visual and imaginative energy they need to grow on." It's followed by a disclaimer: "The views and opinions expressed in this column do not reflect the views, opinions or position of DC Comics Inc." And just over 20 years later, we've got... this week's DC Nation column. Oh dear.

Pg. 12: Is Gabe actually a bot programmed to say nothing but variations on "you have to stop him"? And Brian looks remarkably well-preserved for somebody who got crushed by a beam more than three weeks ago.

Pg. 13: We knew that Natasha was pretty good with tech--she was working on that armor earlier in the series--but building a tiny flying communicator device is awfully impressive. If that is indeed still Natasha and not Everyman.

Pg. 16: You'd think she'd have gotten them both some face protection earlier...

Pg. 17: Scariest image of the whole series so far.

Pg. 20: Now that's a dramatic death scene. But who is that in the background? I mean, I suppose it's the Accomplished Perfect Physician, but it sure looks like the Living Tribunal to me.

The Origin of the Red Tornado: Well, there's an alternate version of this story here, but it's curious that Ulthoon (who first appeared here) is now referred to as being "from a distant star"--it was specifically from Rann! [ETA: No, I'm totally wrong. See comments.] Maybe that suggests a closer tie to the Adam Strange storyline then he's supposed to have for the purposes of 52, though. And Prof. Morrow, by the way, first appeared here.

Week 37: As Though to Protect What It Advertises

2007-01-17T12:41:00.000-08:00

Beautiful portrait-in-a-convex-mirror cover this week. (The poem in the second link came to mind as soon as I saw the finished piece...) I especially love Jones' detail of the additional reflections in Skeets' "legs," which Squashua tweaked so brilliantly last week.

The physical specificity of the cover, though, brings a question to mind, and the correct question is not, as it was posed earlier, "when is Rip Hunter?"--it's "where." The answer is Kandor. But where's Kandor? In the Fortress of Solitude. And where is the "leveled and abandoned" Fortress of Solitude? Um... from page 8, it sure seems to be somewhere icy, with a giant key nearby. (Speaking of icy places: sorry this is so late--Portland is currently totally snowed out, and none of this week's comics have made it here yet. I had to rely on air-mail service from Nanda Parbat to get my copy of this issue.)

A little Fortress of Solitude history (and I'm shaky on this stuff, so if you can correct me, please do--I've changed the commenting system so you don't need a Blogger login to comment): Back in the pre-Crisis day, everybody knew where Superman's Fortress was; it was up near the North Pole, with a huge key disguised as an airline flight-path marker, so heavy that nobody but Superman could lift it. (Grant Morrison riffed on that idea here.) Post-Crisis, John Byrne suggested that Clark Kent was actually Superman's lower-case "fortress of solitude." Then the Eradicator built a Fortress in the Antarctic here; it was pretty badly damaged hereabouts, then rebuilt, then destroyed altogether here.

The next Fortress, constructed with the help of one John Henry Irons, was built in a tesseract, as revealed here, and hidden in an ice field in the Andes. It was destroyed--it self-destructed, actually--in the (baffling) course of the "For Tomorrow" storyline, after Wonder Woman shrugged off its defenses off-panel. At the end of that story, Superman built a new and very public fortress in the Amazon jungle, loosely based on his "mountain retreat" from the very early days. Then Infinite Crisis happened; early on in the IC series proper, Kal-L, Power Girl, Superboy-Prime and Alex Luthor met at a fortress constructed by Alex at some icy spot that was located, Kal-L says, "where my fort was on Earth-Two." And post-52, as of this Johns-written issue, Superman's fortress is back in the Arctic, and its history is just like the one in the Richard Donner movies. Ditto for the Phantom Zone criminals we see inside Skeets' visor.

So where exactly is Kandor stored? I've only read part of this partly Rucka-written arc, but it seems to dodge the question. You wouldn't think that Superman would leave an entire city in a bottle in a self-destructed fortress when there was a perfectly good Amazon-jungle fortress he could move it to, would you? And you especially wouldn't think he'd leave it in the smashed-up Antarctic fortress for years on end, right? That's not exactly good stewardship.

I also have to say that Booster delivering a five-page-long tell-all piece of exposition to the murderous entity he's fighting for his life against, while they're fighting, including a "that's right, buddy" boast that he and Rip have been secretly operating out of the place where the fight is happening, is the sort of thing that routinely got made fun of in the Silver Age. (As I recall, Stan Lee used to defend it on the grounds that Shakespeare's characters flapped their jaws during swordfights, too.) In the context of a showdown in a secret headquarters someplace cold and in "the most remote location on Earth," though, that speech comes off a little "I did it twenty-five minutes ago," doesn't it?

In fact, the whole Booster-as-Supernova revelation opens up more questions than it answers, I suspect. For instance, let's take that scene with Supernova and Ralph in Week 31. Superman being out of the picture was the key to Booster having access to the Phantom Zone projector, but "one of two keys"--is there a joke I'm missing, or does it just have to do with the two buttons on the back of the projector? More to the point, how would Ralph have known how to get in touch with Supernova, if Skeets had nothing more substantial to go on than "a tachyon here, a chronal footprint there"? For that matter, why did Cassie think Supernova was Conner, and get a "respect my personal space" reaction from him?

The real tease of future events this time, I suspect, is Adam Strange's crucial fragment of memory: "giant hands and... something else... I can't remember." Now, the most obvious referent there is the giant Alex Luthor gloves that smashed worlds together in Infinite Crisis, the Story So Big It Didn't Have Room for Most of Its Own Plot. The double-page disaster-in-space flashback in Week 5 has something that looks kind of like a pair of hands vaguely visible near the explosion, too.

But the giant-hand-in-space image from DC's history that made the deepest impression on me is from Green Lantern #40, "The Secret Origin of the Guardians," conveniently reprinted in the hardcover Green Lantern Archives, vol. 6, which just came out this week, and guest-starring the guy who apparently ended up with one of Adam Strange's eyes, Alan Scott. Krona, one of the Oans of ten billion years ago, wants to "probe the beginning of all things" with a device that looks like a sort of gigantic microfiche reader. Eventually he finds an image of "a shadow like a giant hand... with something... a cluster of stars in it--! I must go back further--further--!" All of a sudden, his machine is wrecked by a "cosmic lightning bolt," "but from that moment on, evil was loosed on the universe!" Anyway, Krona's turned into energy and the other Oans become the Guardians of the Universe, but he eventually gets loose and builds another microfiche reader that doesn't look a day more modern. Again, we see "the formless hand-like cloud... the starry nebula..." This time, the Guardians smash the device, and all's well.

There've been a lot of stories that have built on that one over the past few decades; that hand-with-a-nebula image seems to have stuck with a lot of other people, too. (Perhaps the hand even belongs to one of the Seven Unknown Men...) In any case, GL #40 makes the short-list of stories at the core of the DC canon--it's one of the closest things the DCU has to a creation story, and that's within a canon so thoroughly concerned with the importance of secret origins that there have been 13 different series or one-shots with variations on that title.

Which brings me to a question for readers of this site, as a little fantasy-baseball game: if there were going to be a "Roots of 52" volume of Showcase Presents, what would y'all want to see in it? On the strength of this issue, I'd nominate Green Lantern #40 and (for reasons detailed below) Strange Adventures #184, and obviously the backups from the last three issues of All-Star Western would be shoe-ins, but what else?

A good 52-related link, incidentally: Polite Dissent on the medical side of Metropolis's New Year's Eve Catastrophe.

More notes:

Pg. 3: The "clik clik" and atom effect are both, of course, from Ray Palmer's size-changing belt.

Pg. 6: So Skeets is not "really himself," as I suspected when he was going on about Clock Queen in Week 27. And it appears Rip already had a Supernova outfit prepared...

Pg. 7: What were the Atom's belt and gloves doing in "JLA storage"? Last we saw of them was Ray disappearing at the end of Identity Crisis.

Pg. 8: We saw Supernova finding the Kryptonite gauntlet at the beginning of Week 20, although how would Booster know where it was, or how to get into the Batcave to get it? That implies that Booster knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman; had we established that previously? (Or was it a matter of historical record in the 25th century?) For that matter, how'd he get his hands on Hawkgirl's Nth Metal?

Pg. 9: "Unearthly lights and applied teleportation"? First of all: is there a kind of teleportation that isn't "applied"? Second: what about flight? Third: what about the super-strength it takes to catch a falling 200-pound man like Clark Kent? Most importantly: is teleportation really what the Phantom Zone projector does? As far as I can tell, it moves people and things from our dimension to the Zone--it can't transport, say, a crowd of people from point A to point B. (The projector first appeared here, I believe.)

Pg. 12: If Skeets can eat the Phantom Zone, why is he trying to deal with Booster via something as low-tech as firing blasters? What's the current population of the Zone, and why are so many of the people we see in Skeets' visor wearing glasses?

Pg. 15: The "team raison d'être" problem again: what is it exactly that the Birds of Prey do, and why couldn't they simply take some time off instead of bringing in Gypsy? (Note that Gypsy is yet another character who's died and come back to life--in her case, through the intervention of Martian Manhunter's god H'ronmeer.) I suspect the point of this scene is to point out that some of the people Ralph has been interacting with--Cassie and the Shadowpact types--have for some reason not let the more "mainstream" superhero community know they've seen him since Week 13, or haven't been able to. (Although it's not all Ralph's delusion, since Booster mentions Supernova's conversation with him this week.) Also, the old "bouncing off the flagpole" trick--is Dinah actually holding on to anything, or is she about to fall to the cement below? Great kicker to this scene from Ollie, though. The Wizard blog reads it as Ollie not understanding how someone could love someone else "too much to ever, ever let her go." I read it as Ollie watching Dinah bounce away from him and wondering how he could have saved their relationship.

Pg. 17: Last time Lobo mentioned the "golden planets," back in Week 19, there were three of them, not seven. Is Fishy making up the Triple Fish God religion as he goes along? And to refine the question I asked last week: what did the three space travelers see, and when did they see it? By almost all internal evidence, 52 begins a week after the end of Infinite Crisis, which itself occupied just under two weeks, according to this reasonable timeline. (The one piece of 52 evidence that contradicts that is Montoya mentioning early on that three months had gone by since Crispus Allen was killed in Gotham Central #38. Not likely.) The space disaster Alan Scott describes in Week 5 involves a Zeta Beam problem, so it has to have happened before Halo notices the zeta frequency at the beginning of Week 4--probably during Infinite Crisis itself, since Steel asks Alan what happened between his being "there a month ago and here last week." And as I mentioned before, Devilance, under orders from Lady Styx, is already (back) on Adon by the end of Week 5, so word has to have spread pretty quickly about who saw what and where they ended up.

Pg. 20: These are the aliens who gave Buddy his abilities, first seen in this entertaining Gil Kane-drawn story, "The Return of the Man with Animal Powers," in 1966, hence their extremely mod outfits. (It's not in print in any form, but it was reprinted in Adventure Comics #414, cough cough ay eye bee cue cough cough.) Morrison brought them back and revealed their backstory here, and they subsequently turned up all over his Animal Man run. And he doesn't even look all zombified and "believe in her," which is a relief.

The Origin of Firestorm: Just in time for this week's announcement of Firestorm's cancellation, and a good argument for why it got cancelled--there's nothing here that makes the character seem interesting.

And, of course, the DC Nation column: as various people have pointed out, the "secret"--and what a poorly kept secret it's been!--is revealed by looking at the first letter of every third word, starting with the first word. I was briefly going to call this week's posting "Th' Whole Rang-Dang-Doo Multeyeverse," a line from the best parody I've ever seen of massive and extremely important universe-changing crossovers that feature enormous blocks of expository dialogue and still don't manage to explain what's going on.

Can't tell exactly what's on the next cover, but like other commentators, I'm guessing it has to do with the Four Horsemen: Poison, Radiation, Recycling and Molecular Diagrams.

Week 36: In All Their Grandeur and Monstrosity

2007-01-10T14:57:00.000-08:00

Now that's my kind of issue: more Montoya, all the plots we touch on see significant forward motion (aside from Osiris/Tawky Crawky, but hey, that's one page), and we finally see where Rip is and what he's up to. Still, Buddy dies and he doesn't even get the cover (on which we find out that Jones channeling Frazetta looks a whole lot like Simon Bisley)? I'm scratching my chin here.

I'm also wondering about this week's title: anybody have any idea what "How to Win a War In Space" might refer to? It could be that Buddy, Adam and Kory--and maybe even Lobo--might have a secret strategy involving Buddy's apparent death. Buddy does seem to have a plan on page 3: what's supposed to "work"? Consider this, too: how could Buddy's powers save him, since Adam tells him to use his powers on page 11? Well, he can duplicate the abilities of anything nearby. Lobo is nearby. And, as we've seen, Lobo can regenerate his entire body from any fragment of it. There does seem to be quite a lot of Buddy's blood around, too.

Of course, we get one last great tearjerking moment of fourth-wall-breaking from Buddy. That was his greatest value as a character within the confines of DC: not that he was a nice guy and a family man, or even that he was the man with animal powers, but that his awareness of all living things extended beyond the page and into our own world. Grant Morrison already directly extended compassion to him once, and although his "they know how much I love them" seems to refer to his family, it could also mean us: as with the DCU's gods, comic book characters need people to believe in them in order to exist. To paraphrase Alan Moore, the one place superheroes inarguably exist is in our minds.

In other business: Thanks to the vicsage.com folks, we've now gotten a look at J.G. Jones' cover for the 52 novelization. Yes. Novelization. And, of course, it has now been made clear that Jade II and Sierra are two entirely different people. My mistake.

More notes:

Pg. 3: They really do look like clubgoers!

Pg. 5: "The information she needs": so Buddy and Kory actually do know something, which is why there's a bounty on their heads. What do they know that's provoked Lady Styx's "by hook or by crook we will" routine? I have no idea, but maybe we can take a guess based on the corollary to that question: when did they know it? It can't have been after Infinite Crisis, since by the time they ended up on Adon there was already a Styx-commissioned bounty on their heads... and, in fact, Devilance seems to have already been there when they got there. Was the Big Explosion in Space That Did Weird Stuff part of a setup to get them to Adon and Devilance?

Also, where do the shackles go, and for that matter, what's the thing they're putting on Kory's head in panel 5 that makes her say "gzz," and what does it do? She's not wearing it the next time we see her.

Pg. 6: This is where Buddy gets shot, it looks like--and note that a little of his blood has been shot away. Also, either Lady Styx or Fishy is trying to provoke Lobo into action here. Does Fishy speak Styx-ese? And is Lady S. pulling some kind of brier-patch scenario here?

Pg. 7: Lobo did indeed kill Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Even though by then so few people were reading either Lobo or The Authority that the Grand Comic Book Database has no record of it.

Pg. 8: How does Buddy know they're all saying "believe in her," besides the everybody-speaks-English-in-space principle? Maybe from Captain Comet's telepathic transmission; who picked that up, anyway, and how?

Pg. 9: No, not these sun eaters. Or these, although they do look tasty, spider on front page aside. The DCU Sun-Eaters were introduced here, in a story that also involved the Emerald Eye of Ekron and a beloved minor character's death (well, in the next issue). Sun-Eaters also turned up here and in Zero Hour and The Final Night, and in The Return of Donna Troy, a plot point involved a "Sun-Eater factory." (Do things made in a factory migrate...?) And, of course, a small Sun-Eater currently contains this guy's prison, which it doesn't seem to have digested. Do Sun-Eaters eat anything but suns, or are they just solaterians?

Pg. 10: So, as I understand this, Lobo kicks Lady Styx into Ekron's head/ship so hard that they fly into a Sun-Eater? And then the remaining Stygian zombies just kind of hang around and don't pose a problem any more? I'm not sure if this is unclear storytelling or just nonsensical storytelling.

Pg. 13: Charlie's still got a solid command of classic jazz: if "Take Five" is the Dave Brubeck/Paul Desmond piece, "Freddie Freeloader" is probably the Miles Davis piece inspired, I believe, by this Red Skelton routine, and on Kind of Blue along with "Blue in Green." As far as I know, Miles didn't record "How High the Moon," although he used some of its chord changes for "Solar." And the "tell me, butterfly" bit is from The Last Unicorn. Can anybody more versed in the Question than I am tell me if these are references to earlier Question stories too? And while we're at it, what's Charlie doing in a hospital--didn't Renee and Kate decide on hospice care for him a few weeks ago?

Renee, incidentally, is reading an issue of Congo Bill World Travel, which does seem to have a rather National Geographic-like cover design.

Pg. 14: Kate is "Catherine" and lives on a street called Grand Oak, but Gotham City doesn't have a state... and Nanda Parbat may not have any flights or roads going there, but they do seem to have reliable enough mail service that Tot "keeps sending" flowers. And hey--what about that glowing flower that Isis gave Montoya?

Pg. 15: TOOK YA LONG ENOUGH, RENEE.

Pg. 17: Looks like Kahndaq's got a free press--but English, you say? Why would Osiris be reading the English-language edition of the paper? And when did public opinion start reflecting "the truth about what Wonder Woman did" (as Sobek says in a word balloon that looks like it should belong to Osiris)? After she disappeared?

Incidentally, the 52 drinking game now includes bad lorem ipsum, since we haven't seen a sports bra or a teddy bear in a few weeks, and now that we're in the home stretch it's time to start drinking more.

Pg. 18: Ah--here we go. I believe this is the first time we've actually seen Rip Hunter in real-time on panel, and now we know when he is: the present. Rip (and his Chronosphere, also Booster's preferred vehicle for time travel) first appeared here, although the following issue is a little more appropriate to display here, what with its animal/man theme. I love the device of Rip getting distracted and sdrawkcab gniklat, too.

We've dealt with Luthor's Kryptonite gauntlet before. As far as the staffs of the Starmen... well, DC's got a lot of Starmen. There's Ted Knight and his gravity rod/cosmic rod, which first appeared here; there's the staffless Batman-as-Starman from this issue, later retconned; there's the also-staffless Mikaal Tomas, introduced beneath this only slightly less splendid Joe Kubert cover, immediately before the return of the New Gods; there's the Levitz-and-Ditko-created Prince Gavyn, introduced here, although I don't recall whether he rocked a staff much until this swell Starlin-drawn issue; there's Will Payton, who was also staff-free, and apparently died fighting the pre-Jean Eclipso in this issue, guest-starring this week's origin-subject; there are the several younger Knights, w/ staffs, from the '90s series; and then there's the one in this week's issue of Justice Society of America, who was talking about "a star on Thanagar" and "52" in #1. That's not even getting into Stargirl, or the future Starpersons. Wizard has a good overview of the whole dynasty here.

Shadow Thief and his Dimensiometer first appeared beneath this splendid Joe Kubert cover; it is perhaps worth summarizing the completely insane plot of Gardner Fox's story here. After the requisite splash page, we see a two-dimensional shadow robbing a bank and sticking money in its "shadow-bag," then disappearing into a building. Carter and Shiera have heard through their spaceship's "receiviset" that Thanagar's calling them home, but then the police commissioner of Midway City sends them a message via pigeon, and they take off armed with a crossbow and a camera. The Shadow Thief is robbing "the only complete collection of American coins"; Hawkman tries to stop him with tear gas, flames and smoke, but nothing works. Then we see the Shadow Thief return to his trailer, turn off his Dimensiometer, and helpfully recap his origin: a former burglar nabbed when a policeman saw his shadow, Carl Sands became an expert on "shadow facts and legends," then invented a shadow-based color-disc device while in prison--and then one day he was contacted via the color-disc thingie by a creature from "a dimension adjacent to ours" who needed iron filings to power his raygun to free his vessel from a rock, and rewarded his savior with a Dimensiometer (which could shift his body to another dimension) and a pair of gloves that could reach back to his own world. But then the alien told him that "every time you turn on the Dimensiometer, you affect the magnetic lines of Earth! If you use it a few more times, you will cause--another Ice Age!" So Sands smashed the color-disc thingie, since nothing was going to stop him from using the Dimensiometer to steal coins and stuff; back in the present, he announces that "this gimmick and me are going places." But Hawkman and Hawkgirl look at the footage Hawkgirl shot of the Shadow Thief, and identify Carl Sands' profile with the aid of a "mug book." With the aid of the birds they can talk to, the Hawks track him down and haul Sands' trailer into the sky, so he can't escape. He surrenders, figuring he'll get away in shadow form when they set down the trailer, but when he jumps through the door as a shadow, he finds himself falling off a cliff where they've set the trailer; to save himself, he yanks the Dimensiometer off his wrist, breaking it in the process, as Hawkgirl later discovers. "That was close," the other-dimensional creature sighs; if Hawkgirl had turned it on one more time, "she'd have brought on the Ice Age that would have ended all life on earth!"

This, people, was a twelve-page story. You want to know why early-Silver-Age comics are more ripe for reference/callbacks than recent stuff? Very simple: more and weirder plot.

Pg. 20: Now that's a cliffhanger. But I can't believe that the bottle city of Kandor has both a) a miniature red sun and b) a cork. (Kandor, by the way, first appeared here.) Did Rip and Supernova teleport in? Does that mean that they also have access to shrinking technology? Maybe there's something to that Atom theory after all.

The Origin of Power Girl: And speaking of Kandor, Power Girl was born there--or rather the Earth-2 "there." Memo to Adam Hughes: that is not what an infant girl's head looks like. It's probably even more disturbing, though, to see the DC Universe referred to by that name in a story caption. I don't know why. But it is.

Week 35: That Most Dangerous of Animals

2007-01-04T23:39:00.000-08:00

See, here I was, thinking that this was the issue where everything was going to become radically different and the payoff was going to start happening. Instead, we get the "kerplunk" scene we knew we were getting from the end of last issue, Luthor revealing that he's actually kind of a bastard after all, members of Infinity II declaring twice in two pages that it sure is a good thing they still have their powers, and a lost-in-space scene that once again fails to advance that plot. At least Skeets looks to be showing up next issue.

While I'm at it: Does anybody know if the alternate cover for this issue actually exists, and can you point me toward an image? I'm hoping the reporter's sketchbook for week 33 puts in an appearance soon, too.

There's not a lot of thematic forward motion in this issue--but I've been more in James Brown territory than in 52 territory this week as it is. So let's review for a moment what sort of character development we've seen in our nine leads over the course of the first 35 weeks:

Black Adam:
WEEK 1: Very emo; prone to dismemberment.
WEEK 35: Ditto, but also enjoys holding hands, long walks.

Booster Gold:
WEEK 1: Perky, arrogant, avaricious, entirely unlike his Infinite Crisis-era self.
WEEK 35: Crispy, carbonized, offstage.

Ralph Dibny:
WEEK 1: Brittle is the opposite of ductile, isn't it?
WEEK 35: Still stuck at the bargaining phase of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's model of grief--and the helmet of Fate is a heck of a bargaining chip. Come to think of it, Kübler-Ross's own story involves a fake clone, a naked "spirit medium" with a turban, some "afterlife entities" hooking up with the bereaved... wait! it's practically Ralph's story!

Renee Montoya:
WEEK 1: Drinking a lot, irritable.
WEEK 35: Mostly just reacting to everything that's happened to her--she's had very few opportunities to act independently of what the whole business with Charlie has required of her. Her story is still her character-formation arc--"what will she become"--and "why her" really is the question, since it still isn't at all clear why Charlie picked her.

The Question:
WEEK 1: Mysterious.
WEEK 35: Unwell.

Steel:
WEEK 1: Sullen, hardworking, not getting along at all well with Natasha.
WEEK 35: See above.

Adam Strange:
WEEK 5: Blind, gruff, running on fumes, largely devoid of personality.
WEEK 35: Ditto.

Animal Man:
WEEK 5: Homesick family man.
WEEK 35: Homesick family man who's pretty sure somebody out there likes him.

Starfire:
WEEK 5: Personality-free glyph.
WEEK 35: Personality-free glyph--I think her only flash of personality in the series has been her confrontation with Lobo.

More notes:

Pg. 2: The title is a reference to the 1992 storyline--also partly drawn by Jurgens--that introduced John Henry Irons, among other things. As J.G. Jones confirms, it was this issue's working title, too...

Pg. 4: One real-world George Calderon translates Tolstoy. Another was "an impulsive, quick-tempered man with a cocaine habit." In any case, this George Calderon seems to have had a less impressive career as Leviathan than the pre-reboot Gim Allon will have... and even if he'd been able to grow, it wouldn't have done much good, thanks to the "Gwen Stacy problem" explained by Secretary of State Kakalios. Also, Lee is probably not this one. Incidentally, my research turned up this useful page, should you ever be presented with revocable superpowers by a former U.S. President.

Pg. 5: Beautiful bit of business there.

Pg. 6: What's Supernova doing chatting with Luthor while people are still falling from the skies? All of Luthor's dialogue from the beginning of the issue to the end of this scene takes about 25 seconds to read--even assuming that George's failed rescue of the woman who does not so much fly as plummet happens simultaneously with Luthor's scene, that the guy in this page's first panel running toward the exit of what looks rather a lot like the Steelworks with body language that all but announces "this looks like a job for--" is not somebody who subsequently has to change into Supermova and get to where Luthor is, and that Dennis called him five seconds after midnight, by the end of the page the remaining plummeters have already been falling for 30 seconds. Basic physics tells us that they've fallen about 4400 meters; that's very high indeed to be up in the air unprotected.

Feel free to correct my physics, incidentally.

Pg. 7: There is indeed a Fifth Avenue in the New Troy borough of Metropolis; the Lexcorp Towers are at the Eastern tip of the borough. But it doesn't look like the Steelworks is very close to them.

Pg. 9: Ami Soon was last seen in Week 7, and seems to have gotten a lot less Asian-looking since then. And regularguy over on the DC boards points out that we've seen the "teleporting the crowd just outside the Metropolis city limits" gambit before.

Pp. 12-13: The return of Dan Jurgens' curious Geo-Force fixation! And the fourth Dr. Light, Kimiyo Hoshi, is the one who can talk about more than one subject--although this page explains the baffling continuity mess that's accrued around her. (And I have to say I really miss the days when Arthur Light was the kind of character one would expect Ty Templeton to draw. While you're at that site, by the way, do spend some time reading Stig's Inferno...)

Pg. 14: I like the Metamorpho-as-oxygen-mask concept. Plus: the return of Offspring! I know Mark Waid has tried to distance himself from The Kingdom, but any comic with Frank Quitely art is A-OK with me. Speaking of which: that new All-Star Superman is just wonderful...

Pg. 18: Hmm: do you think it might just be possible that this is not in fact Jake but Hannibal? Ah, but what on earth would give anyone that idea? Hey, when was the last time anybody saw Hannibal and Jake in the same place...? I don't think we necessarily saw Everyman in the big action scene...

Pg. 19: How many weeks in a row do we need to read the "oh, man, Lady Styx, she's a toughie, and there are only four of us, how the heck are we going to get through this one?" speech? Also, a "Type 2 civilization" on the Kardashev scale is pretty challenging to mess with, and "virtually immune to extinction." Maybe it's a different scale we're dealing with here.

Pg. 20: So Buddy's using Fishy's abilities to survive in the vacuum, but how is Adam doing it?

Week 34: In Sunshine Or In Shadow

2006-12-28T22:20:00.000-08:00

The consensus is that this week's cliffhanger marks the end of the second act of 52, so it's worth considering what the overall shape of the series is looking like. Anyone want to take a stab at where you think the first act ended? My arbitrary end-point for that phase of the story would probably be week 19 (the introduction and exit of the series' previous "Danny boy"), after which all of the major characters have pretty much been moved into place.

But if I look at all the dangling plot threads I posted back in week 20, there really aren't a lot of them that have gotten resolved or even clarified much. The notes on Rip Hunter's chalkboard are still almost exactly as cryptic as they were in week 6: only "The Tornado is in pieces" and "Where is the Batman?" have had anything like an explanation offered. A few more of the "52 spoilers about 52" have been dealt with, though--and yes, one of the six original leads didn't see the end of the year, and it was Booster, not Charlie! Given that the new Previews notes that Bialya's population abruptly drops by 26,074,906 after week 43, I think we now know what DCU country gets the axe (yes, I was totally wrong about that one). The only still-open questions from that are the "new team of Freedom Fighters" (probably not in 52 any more); some members of the space team not coming home; Ralph hooking up with somebody/two former Justice Leaguers "bumping uglies" (I assume these are the same, although they might not be); and the "Lex Luthor"/"Monster Island" business, which I am guessing has been de-Lexified and Oolongized, unless there's another secret-island plot right around the corner.

So what's the second act of 52 done to develop the bigger themes of the series? Those themes themselves are a little on the fuzzy side, but the main one seems to be something like: what makes a hero? Luthor's Everyman Project has been on panel a lot, in a thread that boils down to "heroes can't be bought and paid for": they don't know what they're doing, and they're cannon fodder for his self-interest. What Charlie's been doing with Montoya is exactly the reverse--he's deliberately sacrificed his own life to make her the kind of hero she might become, and it's still not clear what he's got planned for her or if she's going to go along with it.

The point of the Black Marvel Family thread seems to be that good intentions don't do the trick either, as the Rolling Intestines of the Persuader can attest. (Certainly the Black Marvel Family have been working hardest to improve the world of any of the characters we've seen here--the people dealing with the Intergang issue are trying to plug leaks, and the Black Marvels are reworking the plumbing.) Ralph's story seems to be some kind of monomyth plot or Gilgamesh-in-the-underworld-type scenario. The space trio's story is what heroes do, in action: the "tiny band against impossible odds" story. And... Booster? Well, we haven't seen him in the second act. At least not calling himself that.

Even so, this series has sometimes felt like it's been stuck in a holding pattern over the past 15 issues, thematically speaking, no matter how much action and how many characters the Fab Four throw at us: the Steel/Natasha/Infinity Inc. plot, in particular, hits exactly the same points every time it turns up, and the outer-space and time-travel plots are inching along or standing still. It's interesting that the thread that's attracted the most discussion seems to be Supernova; Michael Siglain's reader questions session over at Newsarama suggests that the true identity of Supernova is somebody we've already seen in 52. So much for Snapper Carr/Orion/all the other Ph.D.-in-continuity theories. (But they were fun, weren't they?) Still, the only interesting thing about Supernova is the mystery of who he is--and the fact that his identity is the one mystery of 52 to which we've overtly been given "all the clues we need." There's a lot of stuff that needs to be tied up in the next 18 weeks, but if they're paced like the last 15, I can't see how this series is going to get to it all.

Given that this week's title is "Suicidal Tendencies" (and oh how I wish I could've linked to the Kiki & Herb version of that song), it's interesting that the first character we see speaking is not just a Suicide Squid reference but in fact used to have them: in the Ostrander-era Squad series, Count Vertigo was pretty firmly established as having a death wish. (The marvelous final scene of the final issue was Deadshot preparing to kill Vertigo, and Vertigo deciding he didn't want to die after all.)

More notes:

Pg. 1 is Week 34, Day 1; Pg. 3 is Week 34, Day 3. Time--or something--is broken. And now we see the "Bomb Squad" in creepy action--although it's still not clear to me how Plastique went bad again and/or ended up in Belle Reve.

Pg. 2: Kid Eternity has always been associated with a character called The Keeper, but unless I missed something, the Keeper's usually his ally--the clerk who was responsible for the mistake in which he died 75 years too early in the '40s-era continuity, more recently a Lord of Chaos in the '90s Vertigo series. Then Kid Eternity was killed here, and came back in this Johns-written issue. (Here is a pretty interesting take on the conceptual links between Kid Eternity and the Marvel Family.)

Pg. 6: It's Greenpeace, one word.

Pg. 8: The return of Captain Guts Jr. As predicted last week, Persuader's the one who doesn't come back from this mission.

Pg. 11: "Graves" is Luthor's bodyguard Mercy Graves, of course; that name makes her sound like a Spirit supporting character...

Pg. 12: How old is Natasha? When Priest started his run on Steel, she was 15 or so, I think. And World's Finest would've had a tough time digging up and then printing the artistic nudes of Sierra last month (November), since she didn't make her first public appearance until Thanksgiving...

Pg. 15: Note that this scene happens on day 5, but a few pages later Lex says to release Clark in a scene previously indicated to be day 7--which leads directly into the new year's scene. Time is very broken. Sodium pentothal, by the way, is a trademark... and sodium thiopental, its generic name, is not all that useful as a truth serum. "Gaeamytal" is an invention of this story, although what makes Wonder Woman's lasso work isn't its atomic structure, it's (Ninth Age) magic.

Pg. 17: The song Charlie is singing is of course "Danny Boy," a song that has quite a story behind it--and oh, how I wish I could link to an MP3 of the Weasels' Merseybeat version. EDITED TO ADD: Chris at the ISB points out where we've seen the Question sing "Danny Boy" before.

Pg. 18: The lyric as written and usually sung is "the summer's gone and all the roses falling"--as in the rose Isis gave Montoya. It's sometimes "all the leaves are falling," which rhymes with "pipes are calling." "Leaves are turnin'" or "turning"? Not in any variant of "Danny Boy" I know.

Pg. 21: Yes, another extra page--guess that's our holiday present. Good move not having Charlie die exactly at the stroke of midnight, which would have been a little too dramatically convenient. When I read the spoilers for this issue on the DC boards (hey, I need my fix every Wednesday!), I imagined that the "next in 52" box would be its usual third of a page, but blank except for normal-size lettering in the middle: "Look! Up in the sky!" Which would've been interestingly scary...

The Origin of Zatanna: John is more often called Giovanni lately. Arion the Atlantean can be seen here with an emerald eye that's probably no relation. Sindella was Zatanna's mom, seen here, in a story that brought in the "Homo Magi" business, later referenced hereabouts.

There's always been some inconsistency as to whether Zatanna speaks individual words or entire phrases backwards; looks like Waid's established the reversals as being on the word level. I will leave it to somebody who knows more about magic-with-a-K than I do to tell me if any of the books in Zatara's library are particularly significant, although Grant Morrison has been linked to the phrase "Chaos Magick."

But beyond all that, the real attraction here is Brian Bolland--I've been reading some of his old Judge Dredd stories lately, and it still amazes me that he's been as terrific a cartoonist as he is for as long as he has. Bolland drew a scene very much like the first one on the second page as the cover of this entertaining volume.

Week 33: Come Light the Wrong Menorah

2006-12-20T23:06:00.000-08:00

A nice breather of an issue--there are enough seasonal touches that it doesn't matter that not much is really happening that we didn't know about already. (Charlie's declining: check. The Suicide Squad's going after Black Adam: check. Luthor's a bastard: check.) And the title "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" is a reminder that we haven't seen Diana yet, outside of the Waid/Hughes origin. But everything slows down around this time of year, really, so I'll just think of this issue as a delivery system for what I fear is the penultimate Montoya/Question scene.

Good cover this time, too--I like the lighting and the ice-rink/tree idea. Still, that Batwoman is running around Gotham beating up monsters while wearing high heels is tough enough to believe, but that she's doing it in the snow, as on the cover, beggars the imagination. At least we never see her feet on the inside of this issue. And Nightwing would be a lot less likely to be falling to his death if, for instance, he were holding some kind of visible Bat-line.

While you're wrapping your holiday presents, why not have a look at vicsage.com, which has put up a fine little Schrödinger's cat of a home page? Or the latest updates to Ralph Dibny's diary?

And speaking of holiday presents: This week's Publishers Weekly Comics Week included PW's poll of comics critics for the best graphic novels of the year, but didn't include our individual lists. (Chris Arrant and Dan Nadel have posted their own lists elsewhere.) Here's mine:

1. Alison Bechdel: Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
2. Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie: Lost Girls (Top Shelf)
3. Kevin Huizenga: Curses (Drawn & Quarterly)
4. Grant Morrison et al.: Seven Soldiers of Victory vol. 1-4 (DC Comics)
5. Jaime Hernandez: Ghost of Hoppers (Fantagraphics)
6. Bryan Lee O'Malley: Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness (Oni Press)
7. Scott McCloud: Making Comics (Harper)
8. Carla Speed McNeil: Finder: Five Crazy Women (Lightspeed Press)
9. Hope Larson: Gray Horses (Oni Press)
10. Eddie Campbell: The Fate of the Artist (First Second)

I mean, the year's not over yet (and there's still an enormous pile of books on my shelf waiting to be read, including the three books from PW's shortlist I haven't gotten to yet), but all ten of these hit it out of the park as far as I'm concerned.

(Hey, commenters--I'd love to see your personal 2006 graphic novel hit parades, if you want to post them!)

So back to notes on the issue at hand:

Pg. 1: Ralph is boozing it up in the Flash Museum, which first appeared here--although they're actually in the rebuilt version, since it got blown up and then rebuilt here.

I can't recall a story involving Ralph, Edgar Allan Poe and Jack the Ripper, although Ralph and Poe appeared in the same story in this excellent comic. (Anybody want to help out?) Edgar Allan Poe also guest-starred in this issue of The Atom and this just slightly pre-Kirby issue of Jimmy Olsen--no Ralph in sight.

The "personal effect" is of course the "Anselmo case" gun I mentioned last week.

"Fella could get accustomed to this sorcery stuff"--what, didn't we establish recently that in the Tenth Age DCU, there's no such thing as a free lunch, sorcery-wise?

Pg. 2: James Pierpont wrote "One Horse Open Sleigh" in 1857.

Pg. 3: We still don't know whether this Nightwing is Dick or Jason, but I lean toward Jason, since 1) he was unabashedly checking out her rack in a rather un-Grayson-like way a few weeks ago, and 2) he's much more likely to be willing to speak for the entire Bat-family than Dick would be, considering how uneasy Dick was about taking over for Batman a few weeks ago.

I do appreciate having the entire lyric to "Joy to the World" running through this scene.

Pg. 4: If it's laser-honed and never loses its edge, do you really want to catch it when it's flying?

Pg. 5: No record of a Luis Dominero anywhere in the literature (cough). But you'd think that with all Luthor's technological savvy, he'd come up with with a way to deal with the blatant bad lorem ipsum that's all over his scenes this time...

Pg. 6: Luthor's "Energy Readings" are precisely the same as Dominero's. Some of the worst figure drawing I've seen in a major-company comic book in a while on this page, by the way.

Pg. 8: For more people complaining about the unfairness of their lives in the wintertime, please see this video (long, but worth watching the whole thing).

Pg. 10: Okay, one major gripe to get out of the way before the good stuff (and I'm not even going to complain about the timeline/what-year-is-this problem). The menorah in panel 1 (and on page 13, panel 7) has seven branches, and it's the one Kate has been using (there's melted wax on it). But that's the kind of menorah that was associated with the old Temple in Judaism--see this page for details. It's not a Hanukkah menorah, which is the kind Kate would use, and has nine branches. That's sort of the point of it, really: the middle candle is the shamash, which lights the other ones, one for each of the eight nights of the holiday.

If you'd like to see what a Hanukkah menorah looks like in a comic book: Colossal Boy and his family use one in the 30th century.

Now to the heart of this issue: Charlie's delusional monologue, which is actually one reference to his past after another. The poem he's reciting at the beginning of the scene is a slight misquotation of a frequently misquoted poem by William Hughes Mearns, the father of "creative writing."

The rest of the scene is mostly lines from the final few issues of the marvelous Dennis O'Neil/Denys Cowan incarnation of The Question, which take place around Christmastime too--several pages appear in this thread. The "leaving Hub City"/"Mommy told me" bit is from a scene in this issue, in which the badly beaten Vic Sage is telling his lover Myra about a dream he had about his mother. Myra doesn't really look the way she's drawn here; she wasn't wearing earrings in any of the relevant scenes, either. Three cheers for reference!

Pg. 11: Jackie was Myra's daughter, who died in this issue--although this Rucka-written issue claimed she was still alive. Anyone want to identify the "son, can you hear me?" panel?

Pg. 12: The "I couldn't say it" business fills in a blank from this issue, the last one of the monthly Question series (followed by the short-lived Question Quarterly). Myra, undressing and getting into bed with the sleeping, recovering Vic, says "We've never said the words, have we? Even in the heat of passion, neither one of us has ever mentioned love. I don't know if that means we're brave and honest people--or cowards. I used to think it didn't matter. Now, I'm not sure. I wonder if saying the words aloud might not make the words true. You're not awake. That's good, because I wouldn't be able to say these things if you were." (She kisses him.) "I wouldn't be able to finally say, 'I love you.' I do say it, Vic. For what it's worth." And he says "Myra?" Cut to the next morning--Christmas morning, actually... and a scene in which he says, among other things, "We're going to play in the snow, Tot," and "after last night, I should hope so."

Incidentally, the last three issues of The Question were $1.50 apiece at my local comic shop. Mile High Comics currently has most of the series very heavily discounted, and if you throw in the half-off THANKYOU code word mentioned in their latest newsletter, you can pick them up for pennies.

Pg. 14: I'm guessing Morrison wrote the scene with Ellen Baker on her front porch, because Americans say "Merry Christmas," not "Happy Christmas." This page is the first we've seen of Bea in a good long while. I like the look of that junkyard dog in the panel with Red Tornado's head. And apparently Guy Gardner doesn't know what a Hanukkah menorah looks like either.

Pg. 15: Selina is looking very pregnant for somebody who's not due until May. I hope the fact that the Steelworks' lights are out is a sign that John Henry's having fun with Kala somewhere--after the end of his series, he deserves a break love-life-wise. Commissioner Gordon's also back a little early, since as of One Year Later, which would have to be May, it's been three months since Gordon's return to the GCPD.

Pg. 16: Rather pointless recap, except for the "crocodile tears" bit.

Pg. 19: As I've noted before, the case for Black Adam as an "international terrorist" is very weak, I think; I still have yet to hear a good argument for it--or any argument at all, actually. Anyone want to make one?

Pg. 20: Atom Smasher's incarnation of the Suicide Squad appears to include the not-yet-reformed Owen Mercer/Captain Boomerang II; Cole Parker/Persuader; Plastique, who actually was a self-described terrorist for a while, then reformed and was pardoned, and hasn't done anything we've seen that would have landed her back in Belle Reve, although she's turned up in Rucka's Checkmate in the Suicide Squad too; the Electrocutioner, who according to Justice League of Meltzer #1 has since teamed up with Plastique as the Bomb Squad; and Suicide Squad stalwart Count Vertigo, who's also been appearing in Checkmate. Which is to say that Persuader is the only one who stands a chance of getting killed on this particular mission.

The Origin of Martian Manhunter: I'm still not sure why he's wearing one of the leftover costumes from Grant Morrison's X-Men, and I've never read Justice League of Englehart #144. But now I know what I want for Hanukkah.

Week 32: Holiday Charm

2006-12-13T18:38:00.000-08:00

The big tease in this week's issue is of course the last page (page 21! hey, a bonus!): Ralph's declaration that he "already knew" that "'the end is already written,'" and that he'd written it himself "back in May, at the end of the Crisis, at the Ambassador Hotel."

So let's review: what did Ralph do at the Ambassador Hotel in May? It was way back in Week 1. On his bedside table, we saw Sue's obituary, the invoice and room-key from the Ambassador, a coffee cup, and two pill bottles. On his pillow, there were some wrappers from a package of mints. He got a voice-mail message from Bea, who we haven't heard from in quite some time; then he got the message from Elysium Mortuary, just as he was preparing to shoot himself, with a gun he acquired in the "Anselmo case" in 1995. (I was hoping that would turn out to be significant, but it's just a Moonlighting reference. Unless any DC-philes can tell me differently.)

One take on this is that, as Wizard's analysis suggests, Ralph would have been reunited with Sue more quickly if he'd just gone ahead and offed himself. Another possibility is that Ralph did in fact kill himself but it didn't take, since there are rather a lot of other people who were supposed to die right around then and didn't (Dick Grayson and Donna Troy among them), and that we're seeing some kind of Sixth Sense scenario. A third is that he killed himself and it did take (perhaps with whatever was in those pill bottles, rather than the gun?), and the whole series is a dying vision of what might have happened over the next year; not likely, but hey. (That might explain why the chronology of Ralph's story is so strange, though--didn't he tell Fate to take him to Nanda Parbat right after their encounter with the Spectre, more than a month ago? so why'd he detour via the U.S. first?) Another is that we're seeing some kind of metafictional "author/writing" gambit, although that's more Morrisonian than Waidian, and we're already seeing hints of that in the outer-space sequence, with Buddy talking about how the universe likes him. Or it might have something to do with Bea, or with the mints, or the coffee, or something; who knows what's a clue and what's not?

The title of this week's issue is a variation on Seven Years in Tibet--it's a book, it's a movie, and it's a song by David Bowie, which he also sang in Mandarin Chinese.

Two other interesting notes: the Snakes on a Plane daggers we saw in Rip Hunter's lab back in Week 6 are being wielded by a couple of the cultists attacking the beginning-of-career Batman on page 1 of Week 30. They look singularly un-useful for stabbing anyone very deeply, but there you go. And if you happen to be in New York and near the Jewish Museum, have a look at the Masters of American Comics exhibition--the "superhero" room curated by Jerry Robinson is hit-and-miss, but it does include Robinson's original design sheet for the Joker, which is precisely the same as the Joker card being held by a gloved hand on the first two pages of Week 1. (And while you're at it, do spend some time lingering over the Will Eisner and Jack Kirby and Chris Ware and Gary Panter etc. originals--it's kind of an amazing show, even if they do have a signed Basil Wolverton piece identified as a Harvey Kurtzman.)

More notes:

Pg. 1: About time we hear Boston Brand mentioned. For those of you just joining the show, he (or rather his spirit) is better known as Deadman, and he can possess and control other people's bodies. A useful sort of ability to have if you're going to be involved with a super-being who isn't just one individual. Not that I think he's necessarily part of Supernova, but it's an interesting thought. (For further Supernova speculation, see the terrific comments for last week's 52 Pickup; I like the idea of Supernova being former series-mates the Atom and Hawkman, but the "nobody knows where Hawkman is" business that was going around a few weeks ago makes me doubt that one.) Most importantly, when Boston Brand visited Nanda Parbat, he took on physical form. Curious. Even more curious: Dr. Fate has definitely encountered Deadman before. While we're at it, how does Ralph know that what he's found is actually a mystical amulet and not just a holiday charm?

Pg. 5: Another variation on the "super-team membership drive" problem. Do the Titans have a charter? Is there something they've got a responsibility to do? Why would they need to hold auditions to scare up more members instead of bringing in people they already know? I mean, within the story, that's Steel's suggestion for some reason, but what would the public understanding of why they'd be holding auditions be?

Again, I refer you to Kalinara's breakdown of the missing-year Titans. On this page, we can see Young Frankenstein, somebody (next to him) who looks like he or she is wearing the armor Natasha was working on, Mas y Menos, Aquagirl, Miss Martian, Talon, Molecule, both Riddler's daughter (who looks like she's wearing a Question outfit) and Joker's daughter, Flamebird (not this Flamebird or this Flamebird or this Flamebird or this Flamebird but, I think, this Flamebird--and you can tell that that cover was originally trying to do this, can't you?--who is a.k.a. Bette Kane, which just go follow the link because my head will explode if I try to explain her relationship to the previous Batwoman) and, speaking of that cover, Kid Devil, as well as a bunch of others... I'm just going from what's on the board of Polaroids. Also, why does Titans Tower have a golden statue of Superboy kicking himself in the groin?

Pg. 6: Talon notes that he's from a different Earth. Interesting--both that there's a parallel Earth and that he's that up-front about it. According to Tony Daniel, he's supposed to "look a bit like Owl-Man from the Crime Syndicate"--who are indeed from a parallel (anti-matter) Earth, post-COIE and pre-IC--and Talon's a good name for an Owlman sidekick.

Pg. 8: A bizarrely awkward scene, although I like Sobek's Tawky Tawny-isms. "Every village in southern Modora" would not be a lot, since this issue established that Modora has a population of 400. (Sonar, incidentally, appeared in Week 10, as part of Black Adam's coalition.)

Pg. 10: Starfire's home world, Tamaran, was destroyed here.

Pg. 11: 9999 stairs!

Pg. 12: So either the monsters we've seen associated with Intergang have to do with this "atavistic trigger gene," or there's a big coincidence going on.

Pg. 13: A tongue click? Wow, it really was a bad idea for Charlie to leave Nanda Parbat.

Pg. 14: The year of the pig doesn't begin until Feb. 18, 2007. (We're currently in the year of the dog; the previous year was the year of the rooster.) "Equanimity" rather than "peace": interesting.

The rest of this issue is fairly self-explanatory, except as mentioned above... EDITED TO ADD: ...and except for the awesome little visual joke on pg. 19, which I didn't notice until several other people pointed it out. See comments.

The Origin of Him with the Big 52 On His Chest: All I can say is I love the word "chittery."

Week 31: Plain Aryan Worms

2006-12-06T22:29:00.000-08:00

The Captain Comet sequences of this issue, creepy and effective as they are, indulge in one of my least favorite science-fiction comics tropes: "alien cultures" that are in no way alien. If you're going to do the story where the commander tells the young soldier in Prussian military finery to save himself, but he doesn't, and then his bereaved fiancée mourns him, and then the soldier comes back as a zombie and turns his fiancée into a zombie too, that's totally okay--but don't make them residents of the planet Vardu and call the soldier Jodd and his fiancée Luribel and their god O-Dell, because transplanting genre-fiction archetypes of any other kind to outer space and changing them not a whit besides giving all the characters weird phoneme combinations for names and non-human skin colors is just about as lazy as SF construction gets. There are ways to make genre-fiction clichés of any kind fresh if you're willing to transplant them into a genuinely different cultural setting and see what happens to them--anybody remember Muktuk Wolfsbreath, Hard-Boiled Shaman? go pick it up from the cheapie bins at your local back-issue store if you don't, because it's ridiculously fun--but the "alien names" thing isn't one of them. At least Xax has a pleasingly weird perspective and dialogue.

Really, though, the Captain Comet plot is transparently meant to do two things: set up Mystery In Space and the larger-scale Jim Starlin cosmic-DC project, and establish Lady Styx as exceptionally bad news. (And no, I never get tired of doing that.) It does fine with both of those, even if the church-plus-annihilation thing makes her come off as a cross between Darkseid and the Magus (from Starlin's mid-'70s Warlock stories). I have mixed feelings about the Big Scary White Cubes, but they do have a certain chilling blankness--speaking of Prisoner allusions, as I was a few weeks ago, they're somewhat Rover-ish. (Love the name "glorifiers," though.) And the idea of them being from "beyond the [52?] gates of spacetime itself" makes them come off as greater-than-three-dimensional incursions into three-dimensional space. (Morrison has played with this idea a lot before; if Barbelith from The Invisibles is its benevolent form and the business with the cubes/dice that turned up in various Seven Soldiers books, especially Zatanna, is its value-neutral form, this sure seems like its malign form.)

There seems to be a bit of a "devouring" theme going on in 52 lately, especially this issue: there was the cannibalistic Crime Bible ritual in Gotham and the turkey-and-chainsaw business on Oolong Island, and now we get the cubes "chewing" their way toward the Vega system, the turkey massacre reprised with Jodd's fate, Hannibal the Cannibal digesting what human relics he can, Ralph gulping his tipple (you know, he used to be satisfied by gingold...), and finally Lady Styx enjoying a crunchy power-ring nosh with her grasshopper pie. Implicit in a lot of these is the very old idea that you can get something's power and knowledge by eating it--the "planarian worms in the maze" theory whose most famous comics application was Alan Moore's early Swamp Thing stories. It's pretty firmly discredited science at this point, but that never stopped anything from being a seductive metaphor.

It's worth noting that the new Geoff Johns-written Justice Society of America #1 seems to have a lot of 52-related teasers: the first page is an image from World War III, as teased by Rip Hunter's blackboard in Week 6 (although not Morrison's earlier World War III or, I suspect, World War III as in the Atomic Knights stories), which happens before the main story proper; anybody want to bet this is where 52 is going for its climax, what with the international tension and promised destruction of a country and all? Can't imagine where else it might fit--unless, perhaps, it was an earlier 52-second-long world war nobody knew about.

JSofA also features references to a fight between Damage and a Reverse-Flash that I don't think we've seen, as well as teasers for the forthcoming year involving a "doctor... with no face," someone with a Legion flight-ring whose fringe implies that she's Dawnstar, and Kal-L emerging from the grave. And there's a bit with the not-so-coherent new Starman saying "There's a star on Thanagar. I dreamt about it. Ha! 52!" Plus, of course, a "Wacker Going Out of Business 52% Off" sign... Incidentally, confidential to Mr. G.J.: Harvard University does not have sororities (or fraternities), and virtually all undergrads live on campus.

More notes:

Pg. 4: There's something about Thormon Tox that looks very Gil Kane-drawing-y, but I don't think we've seen him before. Xax, on the other hand, first appeared here; he was killed off here. A different Xax appeared as a Darkstar here. At least he seemed to be a different Xax.

Pg. 7: The "Stygian passover" implies that there's some place that Lady Styx et al. didn't do this.

Pg. 8: Oh good: John Henry's discovered text-messaging at last. But Jade was Nicki Jones two weeks ago--why is she "Sierra" now?

Pg. 10: "Coles 87" would be the New York Jets' Laveranues Coles.

Pg. 12: Either Ralph's drinking ectoplasmic booze (that leaves a red stain on the hand, or whatever that oddly drawn body part in the final panel is), or something even weirder is happening, since liquid should be coming out of the flask in the first panel and it's not. He's already been to Nanda Parbat and come back, the chronology suggests, although it looks like he's going back there for next issue. Also, as far as I know, there's no DC precedent for the name "Derek Mathers"; anyone know differently?

Pg. 13: Okay, we get that Marseilles is important. But why? Could it have something to do with... Mlle. Marie? Incidentally, a postmark from Marseilles wouldn't say "Marseilles," it'd say "Marseille." Perhaps that's just a screw-up. Perhaps it's a clue.

Pp. 14-15: Here we have a very strong piece of evidence suggesting who Supernova is, along with a small contradiction. Ralph's dialogue suggests that Supernova is the JLA's early non-super pal Snapper Carr--I don't have the time to go into his long and not-entirely-comfortable relationship with the League, but he's basically the DCU equivalent of Rick Jones. Or vice versa. In any case, Snapper was briefly a (gizmo-powered, if I recall correctly) bad guy called the Star-Tsar here and here thanks to the machinations of the Key. One of two Keys. If you want to be cute about it. Later, Snapper had teleportation powers for a little while--activated by his Silver Age character tic of snapping his fingers--until in a typically nasty Tin Age plot twist, he got his hands cut off (and then replaced). And we know he's interested in odd colors of Kryptonite nested in devices having to do with hands (see Week 20). The contradiction here is that he makes a point of not being familiar with Cassie, with whom he is very familiar through his time with Young Justice; he's also very worried about being heard. Any theories about that?

Pg. 18: Curious that the only place Adam seems to have any skin left is his face--otherwise his costume appears to be clinging to his flayed body.

Pg. 19: She's wearing Xax's dismembered corpse as an earring as she eats the ring. Scary!

The Origin of Robin: That's a whole lot of iterations of the Robin costume there... not much else to say about this one, I fear.

Since I'm eager to stir up commenting again, here's a question that I'd like to open up to, particularly, people who haven't commented here before: is there anything you wish I were doing more of in 52 Pickup? I'm not promising anything, just curious.

Week 30: The Panopticon in the Empty Quarter

2006-11-29T21:23:00.000-08:00

Over at the always-enlightening 52 Covers Blog at Wizard, J.G. Jones sets me straight on what's up with the covers and solicitations. (J.G., if you're reading this, thanks for the correction.) This week's cover might be my favorite one of the series so far, actually--I'm glad Jones went back and changed it from the bat-shadow sketch he shows to this fantastically resonant composition. As he notes, it's a riff on St. Michael spearing the devil. Besides the image in the Wizard blog, see this one--it's shown up on the back of coins, in stained-glass windows, you name it. And the eye in the sky is the "all-seeing eye" of God that's usually used in a similarly iconic way; Ichorskeeter over at the Newsarama Forums pointed out this example.

Speaking of the all-seeing eye, let's talk about the Panopticon for a minute. No, not the one that's the Crime Syndicate of America's headquarters here, although it's what that one is named for (and by the way I'm hoping you all read Superman/Batman Annual #1 a couple of weeks ago, since not only does it involve alternate worlds and the Crime Syndicate, it's also the best issue of Deadpool since this one).

The Panopticon, in its more classical sense, is a kind of prison invented by Jeremy Bentham, in which all the prisoners are being watched all the time--or, rather, in which all the prisoners know that they could be being observed all the time, and don't know when they actually are or aren't. Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is partly about how the Panopticon is a useful metaphor for contemporary systems of social organization--pervasive observation and documentation as a way of keeping society in line.

Batman, of course, can think of nothing more suitable than a perfectly orderly, rule-based society: superheroes of all kinds generally fight menaces to the social order, but Batman in particular is much more interested in criminals as such--people who deliberately break formal, documented rules--than in other kinds of social, physical or spiritual disasters. (On reflection, a lot of his more interesting enemies are criminals whose own personal "codes" are very specific rules: Two-Face and his coin-flipping decisions between "good" and "evil," the Riddler and his compulsion to leave clues, the Mad Hatter and his advice column.) The "Crime Bible" plot of 52 mostly seems to tie into the Montoya/Question/Batman-in-absentia thread, which makes sense.

The line from this issue that jumped out at me was Tim's "I don't know why nobody's saying it"--as in Week 27, there are a few crucial names that everyone's dancing around saying this week. The first of them is the all-seeing eye that's closest to Bruce's recent history: OMAC.

The old JLA's "monitor duty," which I was talking about last week, is all about surveillance; the original OMAC's satellite advisor Brother Eye was occasionally rumored to be a reconfigured version of the '70s-era JLA's satellite. The pre-Infinite Crisis Batman has gone from being interested in information (I remember some old Robin story where Dick mentions that Batman trained him to automatically memorize every license plate number he sees; anybody want to identify it?) to obsessed with watching everybody else all the time, hence Brother I and the OMAC project, as well as his reliance (for a while) on Oracle. Which is another great thing about this issue's theme (and cover): now the all-seeing eye is watching him.

The idea of a Ten-Eyed Man isn't new to Batman--I'm betting Grant Morrison ran across him when he was researching the Man-Bat arc in Batman, since the original one only appeared here and then here and again here--in the second and final issue of Man-Bat's original series--and was killed off near the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths, which is kind of funny since he'd already been killed off in his previous appearance.

But I suspect that Bruce's sequence in this issue is best understood as what's going on in his internal landscape, rather than a literal, physical conflict: the "empty quarter" really is empty, no matter what his all-seeing eyes may try to find there. The actual Empty Quarter, besides providing the title for a good book of experimental fiction by Sharon Mesmer, is a huge desert, the Rub' al Khali, covering a gigantic area in the Arabian Peninsula.

So why would Bruce go there for his personal psychodrama? Maybe because that's the region of the world he associates with his "evil self"--the other name that nobody utters this issue. Ra's Al Ghul really was Batman's dark mirror image in a way that even the Joker isn't--a man of reason who honored and respected Bruce's skill; a father-in-law who tried to replace Bruce's absent father (Morrison's been playing with this theme some in his Batman); a man who cheated death instead of avoiding it; a killer who thinks that the ordinary people Bruce wants to protect from "crime" should die for the greater good. Batman used to be uncomfortable with any kind of "greater good" scenario, but the whole OMAC disaster was him finally yielding to that idea. No wonder he wants to purge himself of it.

The question of fathers and sons also opens up the worm-can of whether Bruce thinks of Batman as a dynasty, or maybe even as an office--if he's training them to be heroes or training them to be him, and if Dick wants to "graduate" to being Batman in the first place, which he pretty clearly doesn't. Hence Dick's sotto voce "I can't believe he'd do this to me," and the startling suggestion that as a young Robin he thought of his relationship with Batman as little brother-big brother rather than the son-father relationship Tim has with Bruce.

Not much to annotate as such this week, but a few things to point out:

Pg. 2: I don't know if this was an actual story, but the enormous art supplies are a nifty nod to Bill Finger's fondness for giant props.

Pg. 3: Taking off from the previous page's take on the Robin-Goes-To-College issue and "A Death in the Family," these six panels survey "The Killing Joke," "Knightfall," "No Man's Land," "Hush," Tim's father's improbable death in "Identity Crisis," and what looks like Bruce drawing a bead on Alex Luthor near the end of "Infinite Crisis," except that somebody who looks a little like Eric Idle has been substituted for Alex.

Pg. 5: A quick question on the title: can anyone document any instance of Batman being called a "Dark Knight" before Frank Miller? I know in the '70s he was the "Darknight Detective" in plenty of captions, but I always read that as "Dark Night."

Pg. 7: Guess Charlie's now too sick to travel; I figured they were going back to Nanda Parbat, but it sure looks like that Gotham toe-tag in a couple of weeks belongs to him.

Pg. 9: He approves of her meditating, I see.

Pg. 10: I love how Kirbytech always looks like Kirbytech--it's the zigzag part near the lower right of that panel that really does it. And Cain is the "maker of martyrs"? Is Abel the patron martyr of the Cain-cult? The House of Secrets Abel?

Pg. 18: Dick does indeed have a thing for redheads, and I'm wondering when we're going to find out what happened in the six months between his engagement to Barbara and his attempting to hit on a woman who's in the middle of beating up Wonder Wart-Hog (with that "party with the models in Cannes" somewhere in there).

The Origin of the Metal Men: I really like how lively Rouleau's art is here; if I have one nitpick, it's that the "essential storylines" don't include the mid-'70s Steve Gerber "Doc goes mad" period that 52's been referencing right and left.

Week 29: Nihilist Spasm Superteam

2006-11-22T21:06:00.000-08:00

Look, I'm all for old people doing cool things that they've been doing together for a really long time. But I don't understand why the JSA still exists, or why there should be a new JLA, and this issue underscores why.

The ostensible reason there was a Justice Society in the first place was, you know, networking--a way that members of the then-nascent super-community could keep in touch with each other and compare notes, and maybe call on each other for help with super-type problems that were too big for any of them. Then there was the All-Star Squadron, who were nominallly on a mission to do their stuff on the home front during World War II because the Spear of Destiny blah blah. And after WWII ended, the JSA was once again a superheroes-working-for-their-mutual-benefit organization--and failed completely. Paul Levitz, in fact, wrote this story--well, it's not even pictured on the cover, although a good Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez-drawn Deadman story is--in which the JSA effectively disbanded after HUAC demanded they unmask, in a rather Civil War-like gambit (and by the way um wow click on this, although it's kinda NSFW).

This means, effectively, that the JSA totally failed at its mission to be an information clearinghouse and mutual support organization for super-types. You'd think that they'd have reorganized into something entirely different and more proactive, and that's more or less what the Justice League was for most of its pre-Infinite Crisis existence. The crucial phrase here is "monitor duty": they actively kept an eye out for situations that required multiple-superhero-type intervention, and went out and fixed them. That was at least the concept, although a lot of JLA stories don't suggest much of what the group is actually supposed to do. And its spinoffs have sometimes done even worse on the raison d'être front.

Given the existence of the JLA, there's no mandate for a JSA: they're not competing organizations, it's just that without the League's participation, the Society doesn't really have a point except as a sort of Elks Club for aging superheroes and their extended families. (Which is what it looks like here. Alan and Jay and Ted don't seem to have offered any kind of outreach or mentorship to the new wave of super-kiddies, they're just sitting around moaning and whining about them.) The structure and purpose of the League ultimately failed even more spectacularly: everybody got blindsided by Infinite Crisis and its lead-ins, and Batman was semi-responsible for the OMAC calamity, etc. If you'll forgive the slightly obscure joke, it's as if Joseph Avenol had invaded Finland himself.

When the League of Nations failed to prevent exactly the kind of catastrophe it was meant to prevent, it realized that its name and structure was worthless; it disbanded, and the U.N. formed. Something similar would be more appropriate here that what we're getting, I suspect. It makes sense that the League ceased operations--having its HQ reduced to smithereens by Superboy-Prime was kind of a signal. It makes a weird DCU kind of sense that there should be some kind of new superhero organization to do... well, some kind of coordination between cape-and-cowl types. But it doesn't make sense that it should be called the Justice League, or that it should be organized the same way, because Infinite Crisis demonstrated that that totally doesn't work. And what we've seen of the new JLA series so far--four issues of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman sitting around a table trying to decide who the group is going to be limited to, and working from the premise that e.g. they definitely need an archer--suggests that they're just trying to refine their earlier mistakes, instead of ditching the old, ineffective form of the organization and, ideally, the name along with it.

So the big news that leaked on Monday was that DC's got another weekly comic, called Countdown, that will be starting the week after 52 ends. Paul Dini's writing it, which is very good news--I've been loving his Detective Comics scripts lately, and he's got lots of experience with both the DCU and weekly serials (he's worked on Lost). Also, it'll still have the "real-time" gimmick, which I hope he's got some really clever idea of how to use.

(Am I going to be doing something like 52 Pickup about Countdown? If somebody pays me to!)

But that brings something else to mind. There's been a lot of chatter about whether Marvel's going to do a weekly title too, now that Stephen Wacker's over there; what a lot of people don't seem to have mentioned is that there already is a weekly Marvel series, and its circulation is much higher than even 52's. It's called Spider-Man Collectible Series, it appears in several dozen Sunday newspapers, and it's ending in a couple of weeks. It's not new stories--it's reprints of early Steve Ditko stuff--but the principle is the same.

Imagine, though, if somebody did something that combined the bright ideas of 52 and Spider-Man Collectible Series: a weekly comic book, printed on cheap Parade-type stock and inserted into Sunday newspapers, with a suspenseful, tightly plotted serial as its lead feature (one that allowed jumping on at any point, and in which continuity with old and new direct-market comics was Easter eggs, rather than the central pillar of the plot), plus a little two-page "secret origin" backup feature... how great would that be? Has anyone even tried to do a weekly newspaper-insert comic book of new material in the U.S. since The Spirit?

In a lot of ways, this week's issue looks like it was reconfigured in a hurry: as a few people have noted, the solicitation involved the origin of the Joker by Waid and Bolland, and two pull-quotes, one of which had previously appeared in the solicitation for #25, and the other of which bears no relationship to anything we've seen in the series, and the issue's got a 22-page story that seems a little padded and no backup at all. And then there's the pearl problem, which I'll get to in a minute. Next issue looks fantastic, though, and I've got a lot to say about that cover...

More notes:

Pg. 3: The JLA and JSA have been in the habit of having Thanksgiving together--they've done it here and here. (There's also a reference to Thanksgiving near the end of Identity Crisis.) The image they're looking at in panel 3 is, of course, the cover of All Star Comics #3--that link, by the way, is not the original version, of course...

The Ultra-Humanite is a good one for Wildcat to be referencing here--he was pretty much the first super-villain in superhero comics, it says here, and fought the JSA and All-Star Squadron a few times. Of course, as Johns knows, he's dead too...

Extant's death may be one of the causes of time being broken--it happened here, as the result of Atom-Smasher sending Extant back in time to replace his mother in a Kobra-planned plane crash, thereby altering history, which I thought was one of those things you couldn't do. (Extant, the former Monarch and, before that, Hawk of Hawk and Dove, was yet another time traveler, and if I have to explain him any further I'll have to get into Zero Hour and Armageddon 2001 and nobody wants that. Let's just say he turned up as a zombie in an anachronistic costume early this year, in a Johns-written comic, and leave it at that.) But remember the Fifth Rule of Delicate Comics Foreshadowing: a quarter-page panel devoted to a four-word word balloon indicating that a character is dead is as sure a sign as you could ask for that that character is actually alive.

As for the time going out fighting rather than fading away, that was basically what they were doing as of the Last Days of the Justice Society special in 1986--permanently fighting Ragnarok. Anyone know if they even still remember that?

Pg. 5: Sylvester Pemberton, the original Star-Spangled Kid and originator of the team's name, was killed in the final issue of Infinity, Inc., which I'd link to here if comics.org were functional right now. Sorry. His parents adopted Merry Craemer (...Pemberton King), a.k.a. Merry, Girl of 1000 Gimmicks; Merry's daughter Jacqueline was the Gimmix who disappeared (killed by the Sheeda) in Seven Soldiers #0. But wouldn't Merry control the Pemberton estate, rather than her estranged daughter? Last we saw, she was alive and kicking and part of Old Justice. (In a story that involved the pre-Seven Soldiers version of Klarion, which Hypertime complexity I don't want to think about too much either. Practicing avoidance much this week, Douglas?)

Pg. 8: Yes, Obsidian is gay, but that "does not decrease DC Comics' ability to sell its products." The Milwaukee business happened in JSA #7.

Pg. 12: In the ongoing G.Mo Vs. A.Mo Slaying-The-Father-Stakes: I see Sivana's managed to add another pair of drumsticks to the turkey on the next-to-last page of Watchmen #1. In a scene prominently involving a watch and the Cold War, no less.

Pg. 13: I am totally stumped on Comrade Krabb; anybody have any idea where he's appeared before? Of course, his name might be something totally different, given that nobody in the production line caught "Khrushohev."

Pg. 14: Both "neat" (in the sense of "undiluted") and "washing up liquid" are Britishisms, and as far as I remember, Veronica Cale isn't British. But what's up with her not wearing her trademark black pearl necklace? That's her defining visual characteristic, and missing it is the kind of glitch that seems like it's either a significant story point or a significant screw-up... "I didn't realize they'd kidnapped Freud too": nice!

Pg. 15: What Cale is quoting here sounds like a quote from the Crime Bible to me. (EDITED TO ADD: Duh: it's from the actual Bible. See the comments.) Cf. the blurb-line from the Week 31 solicit: "Superman being out of the picture was the key. One of two keys, if you want to be cute about it." "A star from the sky which had fallen to the earth" sounds like some variety of Kryptonite (or the Starheart that Alan's lantern is made from), and also recalls Supernova's costume and the scene with him in Wayne Manor.

Pg. 16: Back in Week 25, he was Chang Tzu; now he's Chung Zhu; on the next page he's Chung Tzu. Curious. And slightly irritating that this issue seems to have it in for both vegetarians and macrobiotic types, given that I'm getting ready to put the Tofurky in the oven.

Pg. 17: A number that doesn't even have a 52 in it!

Pg. 21: And here I was, hoping that Kala was going to arrive by hovercraft this time. Would Gabe (or anybody outside the superhero community) know that Dr. Cross was Dr. Mid-Nite? At least we're getting one sympathetic cameo by a vegetarian this issue...

Pg. 22: Interesting that the cliffhanger this time is something we already know to be false, since we've seen Luthor turn off powers with the press of a button.

In the Dept. of Unfinished Business: reader "Reverend" Jack Zall sends along a link to an image of Dragon's Fists, the novel in which Richard Dragon first appeared: it's here. Thank you, Jack!

Next week's issue, I'm told, will actually be out Wednesday, but next week's 52 Pickup (and the following week's) are likely to go up very late in the evening or sometime Thursday, thanks to my travel schedule.

Week 28: A Set of Ragged Claws

2006-11-15T19:07:00.000-08:00

Before we get to this week's issue, I'm happy to announce that I've just turned in the manuscript of Reading Comics (see the "About Me" box to the right). You know what that means, don't you? That's right: more time to do unpaid writing about weekly comic books! After this week, anyway. Not that there's a lot to cover in this mildly disappointing issue anyway--after a few weeks where the overall plot was racing along, it's mostly spinning its wheels this time, and there aren't a lot of fun Easter eggs either.

So let's look a bit at what might be coming up. In the latest "5.2 About 52", we see a preview of week 29, with its JSA cover (and no cover blurb for whatever origin is in that issue, oh dear). Notable thing on the bottom-of-cover crawl: "39 Days till the Rain." That would put us in week 35, with the super-bodies falling from the sky past Luthor's office.

The 52 cover image for DC's February solicits--that great shot of John Henry watching as the insignia falls off Luthor's building--appears to be the cover of week 40. "One of the main players in 52 having everything--and everyone--taken away from him": that goes almost too neatly with the "you'll cry for Black Adam" and "a DCU country gets wiped off the map" predictions. Especially since the next sentence mentions Ralph, who'd be my next guess for who it's about.

Also, the cover of week 32 does indeed show Ralph (or the similar-looking Richard Dragon) and the Fate helmet in what we can assume is Nanda Parbat, along with the Accomplished Perfect Physician, who (as I mentioned in last week's comments) "uses sound to promote healing and cure cancer." And speaking of Fate's helmet: never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain, as the saying goes.

One possible red herring: I'd suspected that all the Kirby Konnections popping up in 52 might have been a signal that Apokolips would be the big reveal at the 3/4 mark, since we haven't seen any of the big-name New Gods characters in a while, aside from the climactic riffs of Seven Soldiers. But DC's February solicitations include this issue of Firestorm, featuring Orion, Darkseid and what looks to be the Shilo Norman Mister Miracle on the cover. Hmm.

We get an extra page this issue, which sorta makes up for the one we lost a couple of months ago!

The title of "Beyond the Black Stump" comes from Australian slang meaning "way out in the middle of nowhere," and is also the title of a novel by Nevil Shute. (There's also a comic strip with the same title.) And it turns out there actually is a Black Stump!

More notes:

Pg. 1: This scene would be a lot more effective, but for two earlier scenes I've read. One of them was the bit in "Face the Face" where they turn on the Bat-Signal, which Gotham hasn't seen for a year, and everybody cheers. The other one was in Hitman, somewhere in this storyline, when Tommy Monaghan needs to contact Catwoman, and constructs a "cat-signal" out of... well, I'll just let you read it for yourself. Also, doesn't Kate have e-mail?

Pg. 3: The return of Ridge-Ferrick. You'd think they'd use a different name to leave less of a paper trail.

Pg. 4: Is anybody else enjoying The Irredeemable Ant Fella as much as I am? Also kind of great to see that the Red Tornado runs on PlayStation 2 technology.

Pg. 8: In which Johnny Warrawa, barely introduced, gets hustled off stage. "Mebbe our time here's up. The tornado man's gone walkabout" is a rewritten line from the solicitation, which then read "Maybe our time here is over. Red Tornado's gone walkabout." Was he ever actually identified as the Red Tornado by any of the characters in the Australian scenes? Also, I keep looking at this week's cover and thinking I'm seeing this guy's head.

Pg. 10: And Buddy is explaining this why?

Pg. 11: Man, that lizard-dude's fingernails are a mess.

Pg. 13: Mannheim's fingernails don't look so hot either. Manicures all around! "The red rock and the rage" was "the red rage and the rock" when it appeared before. Maybe "red rock" is a reference to Ayer's Rock--unfortunately we don't actually see Ayer's Rock anywhere in this issue (unless that thing in the background of Pg. 3 counts), or any scene like the cover--which I suspect from that link was the image that led to the rather misbegotten "Red Tornado in Australia with a voicebox that keeps saying 52 despite the fact that his voicebox was earlier seen embedded in Mal Duncan's throat" storyline.

Obviously, Mannheim is really into culinary metaphors. (So are both Montoya and Lobo, both of whom use "bite me" this issue.) But why is he emphasizing the first word of "the Questions"? The only person who can get away with that kind of emphasis on the definite article is John Hollander.

Pg. 15: Dead astronaut (look at the background), enormous space creature's bare skeleton, metal debris in the background--I don't know that it's an "asteroid," as Adam calls it, and I don't think there's a "confined space," as Buddy calls it, but I feel like I should recognize this scene. Are there any old DC science fiction comics that would've resulted in this scenario? Could it be the skeleton of one of these?

Pg. 18: You know, when we saw him last a while back, Ekron was all "I WILL KILL YOU IN 52 WAYS!" and now he seems all peaceable-like and Green Lantern-y. And he also doesn't seem to be weaponless without his other eye.

Pg. 19: Vengar is the home planet of the 30th-century Emerald Empress.

Pg. 20: "One more @$%?!$*& twist!" It's just as I hoped: while we're out in space we're going to encounter the Silver Twist. (Or maybe not. But it always struck me as a useful way to go for a last-minute fill-in issue, along the lines of the Prisoner episode "Living in Harmony.")

The Origin of Catman: Not entirely sure why he's being covered here rather than somebody who could use a bit of explanation for a DC neophyte reading 52 (like Starfire, say), but a nice enough origin. Detective Comics #311 was his first appearance; I liked Gene Colan's version of him too.

Week 27: Midnight in the Garden of Forking Paths

2006-11-08T16:25:00.000-08:00

We're starting to see the time-travel element of 52 paying off more--this issue is the first time we've actually seen something out of the real-time chronology that's not framed as a flashback. I love time travel stories a whole lot, and Rip Hunter's chalkboard is maybe my favorite plot hook of the series so far, but I'm sort of ambivalent about time travel becoming a major focus of this story anyway. I know I've linked to Jorge Luis Borges' stuff here before, but as this story (PDF) points out, in a riddle whose answer is chess, there's one prohibited word; the absent answer to the question 52 poses might be "Darkseid," but in another sense it seems like it might be not a word but, since this is a story whose defining parameter is time, the actual depiction of time travel. (Hence the awkwardness of the date-stamp on Sue's murder when we revisit it this issue.)

52 is an exploration of the spatial aspect of DC Earth (and to some extent other worlds in the DCU); there's that wonderful "Google Earth" metaphor Greg Rucka talked about before the series began. The timescape of the DCU, though, "from the dawn of time to the Great Disaster"--was that how the phrase went? I think I've got it wrong--that's not quite the same. It seems like it'd be an appropriate subject for a different 1000-page weekly epic than 52 as we know it, although that sort of story could very easily intersect with this one. Just think of all the juicy non-present-day settings and characters in DC's history that could show up in a story that wasn't tied to a specific year's worth of timeline... the Aurakles/New Gods stuff Grant Morrison set up in Seven Soldiers alone is enough to set up a pretty amazing story that wouldn't even get us up to the time of Anthro.

And speaking of riddles whose answer isn't mentioned in the way they're phrased, the one major time-related villain who hasn't been directly alluded to in 52 is one Waid's written before--the scariest one of all.

The title of this week's issue is a riff on a familiar phrase whose origins, I believe, are in this speech by occasional DC supporting character Abraham Lincoln. Its implication is of a desperate last-minute save, which brings us to the problem of five inkers this issue--was that the result of extensive late-in-the-day rewriting (I think this is the first issue on which Michael Siglain gets an editorial credit), or a way to distinguish the look of the various sequences? I hope we're not heading for the same kind of everybody-take-a-page pile-on that mucked up the end of Infinite Crisis mk. 1.

More notes:

Pg. 1: The rolled-up-above-the-knee look really doesn't work very well for Ralph. But how did he get the ability to control where he and Fate are going? And what does Ralph have in that backpack of his? His textbooks and homework? This page starts the teacher/student/exposition theme of this issue, anyway.

Pg. 2: The Spectre, and later the Ralph-Spectre, has little death's-heads in his eyes; has he been represented this way before?

Pg. 3: Nice "exposition" gag. 40 million miles from the sun would put Jeanclipso between the orbits of Mercury and Venus; I assume that means her orbit might eventually be eclipsed by Mercury's orbit, although that could take a really, really, really long time. I always have a rough time remembering Eclipso's backstory (Wikipedia has a solid rundown, and notes that the Spectre's got it in for Eclipso in particular), but will never forget the most unrackable cover gimmick ever.

Pg. 4: The "fitting punishment" was the Spectre's stock-in-trade for ages and ages. But why is Jean talking like Jules Feiffer's Hostileman (or, if you prefer, the Moon Roach--or his soundalike in Birds of Prey)? (Hilariously dead-on association, and image, via Lady, That's My Skull.)

Pg. 6: A time-stamp, but not a place... have we seen the clock store It's About Time before? (There's a real one in Minneapolis. Too bad the DCU doesn't have a "Mipple City." I don't know if these are the missing 52 seconds, as the cover suggests, since they were stolen the previous year, right? I'd suspected they might have had something to do with Sue's murder, but in fact we learn later in the issue that it was more than a year and a half from Sue's death to the end of Infinite Crisis. (I'd have guessed it was far less--events zoom along between then and the death of Ted Kord, and after that it doesn't seem like more than a couple of months to the Crisis.)

Pg. 7: The important word on this page (teased by Geoff Johns in Action Comics), which we'd been told we'd never see again: Hypertime! YAY! (Better explanation at Wikipedia. And if you didn't click on this link (PDF) and read it above, I'm encouraging you to do so again; it's an even better explanation.) I am not quite as happy about that as I am about, say, the Democrats taking the house, but in my geeky DC-fan way, I'm close.

Otherwise: I don't think we've heard "time stealers" used before at DC, although stuff like this is close when I'm on deadline. (That reminds me: you know what I'd love? A $17 black-and-white Showcase Presents: The Silver-Age Roots of 52, or something along those lines.) The Time Commander first appeared here; Buddy and Ralph encountered him in this Morrison-written story. Waid used him here and here. And, notably, this issue includes him in a Zero Hour crossover that also involves the Calendar Man, Clock King, the Lord of Time and Chronos.

That's the first Chronos, by the way, who I think we can assume is the one he's talking about, not the second one. Given the next page, though, I'm not entirely sure about that.

Pg. 8: "By Wells"? I guess Rebecca West's onetime boyfriend really is the godfather of superhero comics. (Yes, I know I've made that joke before. I will continue to make it until more people read Rebecca West.) "Clock Queen" isn't somebody we've heard of before, I think. Clock King, on the other hand, first appeared here, fighting Green Arrow--a story that prominently involves a clock store and a giant hourglass. (It was later established that he did have a sister, who was mentally impaired and died in an institution.) He was killed off here. But that's a good sign that perhaps Skeets is actually working with information from a different timeline--maybe one where Clock King's role was reversed with his sister's.

Oh, yes. And speaking of giant hourglasses, "Degaton" is Per Degaton... who first appeared here. In a story called "The Day That Dropped Out of Time"!

As for the Lord of Time, who's from the year 3786, well, he first appeared here. Yes, the same issue we saw a few weeks ago--the one that introduced Felix Faust. He also turned up here, sporting the dippiest costume/facial hair/facial expression combination ever seen on a supervillain, and again in this issue, which revealed that the Kamandi/Great Disaster timeline was different from the then-standard pre-Crisis DCU timeline. Later, he changed his name to Epoch, and apparently died in this Morrison-written issue, of which I have no memory at all, possibly due to a time disturbance. Of course, now that the whole Captain Atom thing has established the Wildstorm universe and the DCU as attached in continuity, anything goes.

Pg. 9: So I guess we've gotten a pretty strong indication that somebody we know is going to end up being Rip Hunter, yes? By the way, here's that Rip Hunter site that I think I've mentioned before, if anyone wants to bone up.

Pg. 10: Richard Dragon teaches Montoya how to punch the universe! (What's with all those spooky Montoya-eye reflections?) Back here, Stephen Wacker teased that this miniseries was reference material for 52, and here we are in Nanda Parbat again. Oh, look, it's a countdown! (Incidentally, it appears there may be a real Nanda Parbat--a mountain range, not a city.)

Pp. 12-13: Yes, it sure looks like Charlie's on his way out--and that he's decided that Montoya's his successor--and now we know why he knows so much about Big Tobacco, and why he's been so careless about danger. (As someone once put it, "if you intend to die, you can do anything.") But have we even seen him coughing before? In any case, I'm so much happier to be seeing the pack-of-cigs-falling-on-the-floor panel than the bottle-smashed-against-the-wall panel. Note also the glowing rose by Tot's lectern--the one that Isis gave Montoya.

The population of our world is about 6.7 billion people; it's been theorized that the DCU's Earth is larger and more populous (hence all those extra cities). On the other hand, back in 1980, giving superpowers to everybody resulted in "The Four Billion Supermen of Earth," and I can't believe I remembered the title of that story (thank you, aforementioned time disturbance).

Pp. 14-15: We're entering the Dense Text Zone. "The eighteenth beyond the calling of all saints"? The phrase "the calling of all saints to the work of service" is a commonplace in Christian theology, and is usually paired with a reference to the end of 1 Corinthians 15, which is relevant vis-a-vis Charlie right now, as well as Revelation 22:12, which comes right before the juicy Alpha/Omega bit.

The "land where dwells the lambs of the wise and the foolish" routine is a reference to the origins of the "Gotham" nickname of the real-world New York City! A comics writer (sort of) was responsible for that one too.

The "Cain"/"Kane" business is fantastic--another example of a clue I missed when it was staring me in the face. But, of course, we know another twice-named daughter of Cain who's been acting like her heart's been devoured lately. Still, Kate Kane is... whose daughter? "Katherine the elder"? Would that be the Kathy Kane Batwoman, somehow?

Pg. 16: The most brutal scene of the series so far. Ralph and Jean may have "ghosted out," but she still manages to knock over the flowers... and how do we get a "Day Minus Two"?

Pg. 20: I'm assuming the thing the Spectre told Ralph was that he could give him Sue back. And this is going to bring Ralph's storyline together with the Montoya/Spectre storyline? Cool! Plus the helmet is playing chauffeur now. Truly, Dr. Fate is America's most unusual adventure character!

The Origin of Black Canary: A nice boiling-down of her history--although no mention of Green Arrow? And as much as I love a lot of comics Chaykin's drawn (still waiting on that American Flagg! reprint, folks), I like his stuff a lot better when it doesn't look like he's drawing with a crapped-out felt-tip pen and a Photoshop pattern sponge.

Didn't I promise to keep it short this week? Maybe I'll actually succeed in keeping it short next week. Anyway, I'd love to hear everybody's theories about the time stuff and interpretations of the Crime Bible's prophecies.

Week 26: Achilles and the Tortoise

2006-11-01T17:14:00.000-08:00

We're at the halfway mark, as this week's otherwise not quite relevant title implies, which means Zeno's paradox applies. I know how the tortoise feels: I'm afraid I'm going to have to keep it brief this week and the next two, since I'm finishing a gigantic project of my own. (Of course, I'm already over the 1500-word mark this week, so "brief" is relative.)

Hope everybody caught the word over at J.G. Jones' cover blog that the alligator guy is named Sobek. It's a name with a very interesting history--including a form as a group of four (!) crocodiles who attack the dead in the underworld. If he is indeed going to be a power player later in 52, I bet he fits into Ralph's arc too...

There's also the "26 about 52" interview with Jones and Giffen over there. Most interesting factoid as far as I'm concerned: the reason we're only seeing one cover in each of DC's monthly solicitations may be that that's the only one that's finished--Jones is "finishing up" the cover to #30, and he's got the covers to 33 and 40 half done. (And we've already seen the cover to #32, with Fate's helmet in the snow near a bearded person who might be Ralph and might be Richard Dragon, and #35, the bodies falling past Luthor's office window--Jones is also doing a variant cover for that issue.)

So. On to the notes:

Pg. 1: Every time I see Montoya on panel, my interest perks up... Congo Bill first appeared in 1940, here--with Dr. Fate on the cover, no less!--and eventually got his own short-lived series. In 1948, there was a movie serial version--I'm a little surprised to see that the poster credits Whitney Ellsworth with creating him. In any case, as of the January 1959 issue of Action Comics, "Congo Bill" became "Congorilla"; over the last 15 years, there have been miniseries reviving both incarnations. He's never really been proposed as a Martha Stewart-type figurehead for a National Geographic-type magazine before the thing on the 52 site a few weeks ago, as far as I know, but I love the idea.

Vlatava is an actual river (it flows through Prague), but in the DCU, it's the country Count Vertigo was from. The Spectre destroyed the entire country in this issue. (Those fictional countries: they don't have a lot of luck, do they?) Bhutran is a sort of Tibet-analogue in the DCU's central Asia, whose spiritual leader is the Rhana Bhutra.

This may be the first time in recent continuity that we've seen a reference to Gotham City being very far away from Metropolis--odd, considering that in Seven Soldiers New York is the "Cinderella City," overshadowed by its (presumably nearby) neighbors Metropolis and Gotham. In pre-Crisis continuity, they were so close together that there was a bridge between them--the plot of this issue concerned that, and the bridge itself can be seen on this cover.

Pg. 2: Nanda Parbat is the quasi-Tibetan/quasi-Shangri-Lavian locale associated with Deadman; it first appeared in this issue, which featured Neal Adams' infamous "Jim Steranko effect" joke (that image was lifted from this page at Dial B for Blog).

Pg. 3: The return of "who is Renee" meme--he's even got Isis saying it now. And that flower sure is glowing brightly for a flower.

Pg. 4: Tot Rodor, who's got one of those great palindromic names (do check out that link), first appeared in this issue, whose cover asked Charlie's question about Charlie himself. Richard Dragon first appeared in a 1974 novel called Dragon's Fists--and if anybody can link to an image of its cover, I'd love to see it--co-written by Denny O'Neil and Jim Berry, as "Jim Dennis." It was later adapted into this series, and O'Neil spent the next few years expanding the kung fu mythology he'd set up, including the story where the mind-controlled Bronze Tiger kills the Kathy Kane incarnation of Batwoman. (Eventually, he ended up in The Question too. And while I'm thinking of it, wouldn't a two-volume b/w Question Archives rule?) Incidentally, going up is easy for drops of water if they're in vapor form, like the steam coming out of everybody's mouth...

Pg. 5: And speaking of Ditko creations... Apparently Booster's posthumous stock is now high enough that there are action figures of him, although perhaps the off-panel Black Adam action figure has ripped his arms off. What are the mysterious scribbles on the pillars behind Lex on the TV screen, and do they have anything to do with the phallocrypt on the cover of Week 35?

Pg. 6: It's only Nov. 2 or so: why are there already Christmas trees on set? And is Steel actually making the Civil War/Iron Man argument--especially since we saw him acting as a citizens' fire brigade to deal with a building on fire a few weeks ago? Apparently the DCU version of Mozotto is something different. Is the 26 here supposed to be the channel?

Pg. 7: Hob's Bay is the Metropolis neighborhood better known as Suicide Slum, and you'd think that Steel would take an immediate interest in trouble there. (Do we know what the trouble is?) And have elections already been held in the DCU? Even if the 52 week starts on Sunday, that would only make the date of this scene Nov. 6...

Pg. 8: In lieu of actually explaining who all the members of the Sivana family are, I'll just point you to this page at Walt Grogan's excellent Marvel Family fan site.

Pg. 9: Suspendium is another Denny O'Neil invention: the Blatant Plot Device Element (TM) introduced here to explain where the Marvel Family had been for the last 19 years. And the guy who appears before them is Waverider, a chronocop who first appeared here. He's saying "I know why"--emphasis on the "I" and the "why." Compare to Skeets, a few weeks ago, saying "He knows"...

Pg. 11: Robot bursting into flames: why?

Pg. 12: Human casualties on Oolong Island do seem to be written off pretty easily, don't they? Love that "I knew a girl once" bit, though.

Pg. 13: Dr. Veronica Cale was one of Wonder Woman's adversaries in Rucka's excellent run on Wonder Woman--here's a cover on which she appears--a sort of Lex Luthor type incensed over WW having gotten famous by being born into it, who always wears a string of black pearls her mother gave her. She's not quite the "mad scientist" type, though... (This, by the way, is an excuse to point you all--a little late--to the "Wonder Woman Day" charitable auction that happened this past weekend--scroll down for some excellent artwork; although I'm sad to say I didn't win the Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Michael Allred or Howard Cruse pieces, at least I can console myself that I was able to drive up their prices a bit...) The cyclopean mad scientist shoving his girlie pin-ups in the trash is, natch, Dr. Cyclops, who first appeared here.

Pg. 14: Looks like there's already been some serious robot carnage, and is about to be some more. No wonder Venus doesn't trust the 'bots to set the table.

Pg. 15: Unclear storytelling here: from later evidence, it looks like Isis and Adam fly out following Osiris, then Venus makes her nasty comment, then Isis and Adam fly back when they hear Sobek attacking, but you wouldn't guess they'd left from the artwork.

Pg. 16: There's a bit of a tradition of crocodile men in Captain Marvel's comics--most notably the ones from the planetoid Punkus who first appeared hereabouts, as members of the Monster Society of Evil under Mr. Mind's aegis. But--connecting two other threads going on in this issue--there were also some evil crocodile men in Hawkman #7, in an issue that also saw the "amazing return of the I.Q. Gang"!

Pg. 19: Not sure if Sobek's story adds up, as much as he's being set up as a Tawky Tawny type: what is he doing wearing shreds of human-style clothing if he's indeed a former crocodile? And his timeline leaves something to be desired too. One week less than six months ago, Sivana got kidnapped, so the "one day he left" would be very shortly after he acquired Sobek (from the Nile!). And how would he have built up the strength to leave if he hadn't eaten in months?

The Origin of Hawkman and Hawkgirl: Well, somebody had to boil down the origins of the Hawks, and Waid's the guy if anyone is. But can anybody who didn't give up on Hawk-continuity a while ago (the way I did) explain what their connection to Thanagar currently is? Like, how they got the wings and harnesses, and the hawk iconography?

Week 25: The Sudden Return of the Unreliable Narrator

2006-10-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

How about that Seven Soldiers #1, huh? I won't spoil it for those of you who haven't read it, but the final image suggests a rather strong tie-in to some plot and thematic points that are starting to get hit over and over in 52. (If you haven't been reading Seven Soldiers, you will find that #1 is very pretty and makes no sense whatsoever. If you have been reading Seven Soldiers, and I heartily endorse it, you will find that #1 is very pretty and that you'll have to spend weeks decoding it. But it's worth noting that "Dark Side" does indeed wear an omega tie-pin that looks, as a few people have noted, more than a bit like the 52 logo.) And we get at least three allusions to the project this week in 52...

So at last the "Four Horsemen" (who "will end her rain," according to Rip Hunter's chalkboard) have been mentioned elsewhere. The most obvious reference is a Biblical one: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. While you're looking at that page, make sure to check out the Albrecht Dürer image of the horsemen: George Pérez, eat your heart out!

DC doesn't have much in the way of "four horsemen," aside from one twenty-year-old licensed role-playing game, whose title is so apropos a pun that I can't believe 52 isn't going to use it: "Four Horsemen of Apokolips."

A good title this week, too: "liminal times" are the times when magic is strongest and worlds can come into contact with each other. (And I am far from the first person to think this, but I'm now fairly convinced that 52 is the number of parallel earths--I'm guessing that the "return of..." that Dan DiDio teased a few weeks ago isn't a person, but the coolest concept DC ever had.) Halloween is one of those times--the big one, in some traditions. The concept also suggests moments when one state of being is giving way to another, as with the Ninth Age of Magic making way for the Tenth Age (the Ralph/Fate plot), or the government being replaced by Intergang, or Checkmate moving from the U.S. to the U.N., or the first half of 52 turning into the second half, which I'm gathering will be significantly different from the setup.

All this behind probably my favorite cover of the series thus far: it took a minute to notice that the Booster kid is carrying Dr. Fate's helmet, and the Steel kid is making another Marvel reference. (Well, it could be an even more oblique reference to the guy on the lower left here, but the costume doesn't match up.) This is almost a New Yorker-type cover: a cute seasonal gag that references the series' (nominal) protagonists. At least one of them isn't dressed as Ralph and carrying a bag in the shape of All-Straw Sue's remains.

More notes:

Pg. 1: Bruno "Ugly" Mannheim is yet another Jack Kirby creation, introduced in an issue that also featured the official introduction to the DCU of another character with a long and distinguished history. In front of a cityscape so freaky and smoky I almost expected it to spell out "THE SPIRIT,"* we begin and end this issue with Biblical references, and with conflation of crime and sin--"crime is the moral standard"? Virtually every philosopher ever would have something to say about that... Again, we're seeing the phrase "new world order" invoked--does that ever signal anything good? And apparently there isn't only one copy of the Crime Bible, since the Question's now got another one.

*If anybody happens to have a link to a more appropriate Eisner page, like the splash page of "Showdown with the Octopus" or something, please let me know.

Pg. 2: The Mirage getting the kibosh here isn't the one who first appeared here, he's the one who first appeared here--and since he's a master of illusion, there's the possibility that what we're seeing is what he wants us to see. But probably not. Have we seen Laszlo before, or is he just a random assistant cannibal? Cannibalism is a taboo rather than a crime as such, right?

Pg. 3: I don't recognize any of the dead guys besides Kite-Man; somebody want to run the IDs? The "dark angel made of living granite," I don't think I even need to tell most of the people reading this site, is Darkseid (or "Dark Side" as he's referred to in Morrison's Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle): has his proper name been uttered in the series yet?

Pg. 4: Our second Seven Soldiers reference of the issue: Frankenstein! Neron is a Waid creation, and... maybe not the most exciting of Satan stand-ins (I believe by this point Lucifer had abdicated the throne of hell over in Sandman). But his early appearance had yet another tie-in with Ol' Stony Face.

Pg. 5: Yes, I do realize how nit-picky it is to complain about week/day numbers not matching up with our own, but while Day 3 of this week is when a lot of Halloween parties are being held, Halloween it is not. And Mary's not quite right about the "nature's toothbrush" thing.

Pg. 6: Of course, Halloween is just bad for teeth in general.

Pg. 8: The "Judeo-Christians" (great line) include a Chris Ware robot!

Pg. 9: Hey, it's some Jimenez and Lanning overspill! I'm not gonna complain about that! Nice gimmick to explain wandering away from this storyline from months on end: oh, oh, oh, it's magic. Count Marisius and Bous3dra don't seem to have any previous comics references--or any at all I know of. But this confirms that what we're seeing in this part of Ralph's arc is analogous to Dante's Inferno. Still, I don't think Dante specified a circle of hell for the vain; the fourth ditch of the eighth circle was where people (including Simon Magus) went for sorcery, not for "abusing magic." (Read a translation of the relevant canto here.)

Pg. 10: Felix Faust first fought the JLA in this fingertastic issue, and appeared in 2001 in the rather forgettable JLA: Black Baptism miniseries (in which he was finally separated from the influence of Hermes Trismegistus) and again briefly in Day of Vengeance. His "addict's cycle" has never really been mentioned before. My first exposure to him was in this 1980 story, in which he'd gone straight and become a librarian. And Ralph had the backup that issue! This is a good sign that Fate's helmet may be what's known in the biz as an unreliable narrator... note also that the helmet is considerably higher off the ground than head-level here.

Pg. 11: Etrigan's not in the soul-buying business, is he? Klarion (Seven Soldiers ref. #3) is really not in the soul-buying business, is he? And who are the other two buyers in the panels below Klarion? PLUS: Would that be a teddy bear the defenseless little girl is holding? Remember: teddy bears are an excellent sign of innocence!

I think we need to add "teddy bears" to "sports bras" in the 52 drinking game.

Pg. 13: Yup: unreliable narrator.

Pg. 14: Thought I could be the first to catch this, but Wizard's 52 Roundup beat me to it: the bank's named after Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson! And look to the right of that top panel: our first glimpse of Hawkman post-IC. Well, not really. Also, the Icicle/Tigress, um, "'ship" was revealed here.

Pg. 15: Iron Heights is near Keystone City; for crimes committed in Metropolis, wouldn't they be more likely to go to Stryker's Island?

Pg. 16: Not the John Byrne Matrix, I'm guessing. But somebody's wearing a Supernova outfit...

Pg. 19: The first version of Plutonium (before the one I mentioned a few weeks ago) appeared in the story that Chris at the ISB describes memorably here. And here we have, I think, the first suggestion that Intergang actually has designs on "the government."

Pg. 20: It appears that the Egg Fu here is less likely to be Egg Fu as such than to be Dr. Yes (here again is that Dial B for Blog link)... but "Chang Tzu" is an interesting name for him, since it's an alternate transliteration of the name of the pacifist Taoist philospher whose most famous quote is "Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." He was also an anarchist, but that's very different from wanting to replace the government with a philosophical devotion to crime.

The Origin of Nightwing: Wait! I was just kidding! Please don't eat your heart out! Not much to say here, except that it's great to see a preview of the Brave and the Bold team, and that I appreciate the two out of three classic trophies that show up in the Batcave panel (Scipio over at The Absorbascon recently posted the definitive rundown on them). And I only resent the incursion of the Monitor/"you're supposed to be dead dammit" business a little.

Week 24: Still a Few Bugs in the System

2006-10-18T20:00:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman in David Foster Wallace's novel The Broom of the System: Is it my imagination or did this comic book just get really weird? For a detail-crammed, sprawling, context-starved, fight-scene-packed comic with ten million characters you've never seen before striking impressive poses, Phil Jimenez is your only man--and since this is the issue that's referenced Infinite Crisis most since the early weeks of the series, it's nice to see him in the mix. (And yes, I'd rather see too much going on in 52 than too little. Glad to see this issue erring on the right side.)

Since there's a lot to say about the on-panel content this issue, and I don't have a lot of time for more thoughtful analysis right now, let's go straight to the notes:

Cover: I actively love the idea of treating Firestorm's flame-head as a light source. And "This Shirt's a Clue"--I want a T-shirt like that. Although this time it's Firehawk whose costume is different on the cover than it is on the inside. Hey, maybe that's a clue!

Pg. 1: We've actually covered Maggin before--the real-world one, who first "convinced" Ollie to run for mayor. Jack Ryder, of course, is the Creeper, and I mostly linked to that page because I love the image; "You Are Wrong!" is Ryder's lefty-bigmouth talk show. Plus you'd think the JLA phone would be a little less obvious, especially if Ollie is trying to play down his relationship with the other prominent Star City resident with his facial hair. Star City appears to have a functional streetcar system--I'd have thought that'd have been a casualty of the "Amsterdam Avenue Disaster"--and it appears to be in awfully good shape in the establishing shot at the top of the page, given that back in Week 8 there was so much rubble everywhere I thought I was reading a mid-'80s George Pérez comic (thus even more reason for Jimenez to draw this one). And is that the Space Needle in the background?

Pg. 3: Weird title, considering that the only direct association of the phrase "just imagine" with DC stuff is this. Maybe because it starts the same way as "justice"? This issue does keep riffing on versions of justice: Oliver's "Justice... For All" banner, J'onn's Justice League connection (and desire to do what's just), Al's Justice Society connection, and Jon's final words, on which more later. Ambush Bug is eating a bag of Ch'ps--Ch'p, whose Wikipedia entry breaks Blogger's HTML or I'd link it here, was the unforgettable 22-pound Green Lantern of space sector 1014, killed in this heartwrenching issue. I'm very happy to see Bulleteer again; I'm a little confused about her embrace of the superhero life, though, and I really wish she got more than ONE WORD of dialogue the whole issue. Do we even know where this scene is happening? It looks like a library of some sort (by the security device at the left of the page, and the books behind it); it might make more sense if we got a suggestion of whose idea the new League was...

Pg. 4: Ambush Bug's always been a metafictional sort, capable of jumping straight through the fourth wall whenever he feels like it; great to see him back, especially with Giffen's involvement. And somebody's got a Starfire poster on the wall! Do libraries have those?

Pg. 5: It's not just Rhode Island, it's the town of Happy Harbor, Snapper Carr's home town! The Doom Patrol and Young Justice both set up their HQs for a while there, too. And J'onn does seem to be around a lot when JLA HQs go boom.

Pg. 6: Have we seen Max's murder of Ted from this angle before? I don't think so--and it's probably worthy of note that Checkmate's gear has logos for ProGene Tech (the company responsible for sinking San Diego and lifting Aquaman's DNA in Aquaman), the D.E.O. (for which the Kate Spencer Manhunter and Cameron Chase both work), Task Force X (the official name of the Ostrander-era Suicide Squad), and Cadmus, which has been advertising all over the 52 site ("Nobody's Perfect... Yet")... and which was more or less created by Jack Kirby. Him again. Speaking of which, some of the weapons in the Checkmate armory look more than a bit like Montoya's Kirbytech gun. I don't think we've met Secretary of State Kakalios yet elsewhere, but perhaps his name is a nod to the James Kakalios who's the author of The Physics of Superheroes.

Pg. 7: "Justice is served"? No, that's what Scourge said. Oh no! Maybe the "crossover between universes" means that Booster is actually Scourge! That's why the title this week references Stan Lee!

Or not.

The Wizard 52 blog names all these characters; the short version is that they're all Leaguers who've died. Fascinatingly, the sculpture of Red Tornado incorporates his lower-half-of-body motion effect, although the Flash doesn't have what looks at first like speed lines--it's just the flag General Glory is holding.

Pg. 8: Oh no! It's Pride! I knew this was going to be a DC/Marvel crossover thing!

Or not.

Pg. 9: The "keeping the bad guy's head as a paperweight" thing sounds like Black Adam's old way of doing things. But Mr. Atom turns out to be an old Captain Marvel enemy who's a robot; I assume the new one is too. I confess I'm a little foggy on post-Crisis Shazam continuity, but this page suggests that he was involved in a nuclear explosion that destroyed the Marvels' home town (can anyone give me an issue citation?); keeping his head around might be a very bad idea for Kahndaq... Sabbac appeared in a couple of issues of Captain Marvel Jr., and was on the cover of this one.

Pg. 10: Might somebody have explained here how Firestorm got de-merged with Cyborg? "Schwartz" would have to be Julius Schwartz, a regular supporting cast member of the old Ambush Bug specials and miniseries (who did other stuff too). Oh, actually, here's that story I just linked to--and guess what, it's written by Elliot S! Maggin! Will coinkydinks never cease?

Pg. 11: Okay, this is where y'all come in; who can name all or even some of these pirates and robots (described on the Wizard blog as "villains from different time periods," which seems a little off)? And why are there no monkeys or zombies?

Pg. 13: Now that's funny. "Immortal Bald-Man-In-Armor" indeed. A different Crimson Ghost was a Republic serial villain (whose bare-skull image has been used a lot by the Misfits), and the Tornado Ninja has the same lower-half-of-body effect as the Red Tornado!

Pg. 14: Skeets has a new design, it looks like...

Pg. 17: Is this meant to be, like, the Happy Hunting Ground? The old guy isn't Jon's grandfather, it's Flying Stag, the first Super-Chief. So it looks like Ralph has been camping out in the land of the dead for a few weeks with the Helmet of Fate as his Virgil. Most intriguing element: the dead Jon saying "why can't I... do right?" He doesn't think his death (or loss of power) is unjust; he's concerned with his own failure of virtue.

Pg. 18: The return of bad lorem ipsum! And the Daily Planet's typesetters don't know how to spell "Metropolis"! Firestorm readers (I'm not really one of them), is it public knowledge that Lorraine is Firehawk? And--OH NO! 52 is going to be a Civil War crossover!

Pg. 20: And Atom Smasher's putting together the new Thunderbolts!

Or not.

That next-issue box had sort of better be a joke. Although actually I wouldn't object if it weren't.

Two curious things about the Booster Gold origin: one, it's in the present tense, with no mention of his unfortunate evisceration; two, Skeets "possesses no combat capabilities," despite what we saw a few pages ago. But it's "an excerpt from the Justice League archives," which perhaps is why it's not so up to date. Also, how did a 30th-century Legion flight ring end up in the 25th-century Space Museum? Anybody more up on Booster than I am want to explain?

Meanwhile, over on the official 52 site, there's this magazine subscription offer. Sign me up for Congo Bill World Travel!

Week 23: Black Adam and Grey Theology

2006-10-11T21:27:00.000-07:00

For a comic that, as a few of the writers' interviews have suggested, may not have room for the exploration of religion in the DC universe that they intended, 52 does seem to have a lot of religion in it. The Cain cult seems to take off from the cults in our world based on the idea of sin (e.g. Satanism), and on the long-running seductiveness of the idea that good and evil are artificial constructs, that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, etc. (Grant Morrison dealt with that a little bit in The Invisibles too, with the Marquis de Sade sequences and others--and actually I'm curious how many people who read this blog a. have read The Invisibles, b. haven't read it at all, or c. made it partway through and gave up. It's one of my favorite comics ever, although I'm always a little hesitant to recommend it to people.)

But here we have something else altogether: a cult based not just on "do what thou wilt" or even "evil" but crime, on the supposition that fidelity to the divine involves breaking secular laws whatever they may be. (Or maybe not, since it's named after Cain and one of its catchphrases is "the red rage and the rock"--Cain's murder of Abel, at a time when it's safe to assume there weren't any secular laws to speak of. The existence of the DCU Cain and Abel just makes that more complicated.) The cult's ritual is a straight-up parody of an Anglican church service, right down to the "here endeth the lesson." A crime cult is a very weird concept, but I kind of love it--especially since the DCU's heroic ideals have always brushed up against the distinction between "crimefighting" or criminal justice and actually doing right, and sometimes conflated them. (The "Justice League" or "Justice Society": what flavor of justice would those be? The Spectre does divine justice specifically in contrast to secular justice. Etc.)

The cult's HQ isn't just a temple, though--it's an "Intergang reeducation camp." Which makes it look like Intergang is trying to brainwash the orphans it's kidnapped into doing wrong for wrong's sake, rather than the goals that gangs generally have: mutual benefit, money, power, that sort of thing. Admittedly, Intergang's got ties to Apokolips, which is less concerned with normal gang-related activities than with doing whatever it takes to assemble and use the Anti-Life Equation. But it raises the question of what exactly Intergang's motive and intended goals are. I also have to wonder how effective Intergang's brainwashing techniques would be on the starving orphans chained to the speaker's platform in Yemen, given that the reading from "The Epic of Moriarty, Book of Crime" is in English, which I'd guess that very few of them speak--Amon doesn't, until he gains "the wisdom of Zehuti."

The title of this week's issue is a riff on this book by the amazing writer Rebecca West's boyfriend. (Although it does make me wonder if T.O. Morrow's actually got a doctorate, as the cover suggests; that'd make for a funnier title. "Professor"? He was obviously a teacher somewhere, since Doc Magnus was one of his students--was he just an adjunct or something?)

Interesting that "what you get when the world's maddest scientists are given an unlimited
budget and encouraged to let their imaginations run wild on the finest mind-expanding narcotics available to man" is so much like what we saw in the full flowering of the DC Universe's go-go checks era. Which leads to the broader point that the Silver Age is the source of so much of what we're seeing in 52--was there some kind of failure of imagination that happened as Silver gave way to Bronze? Or is there some other reason that the creations of the late '70s and '80s and '90s were fewer or more sedate or less interesting to revive as points of continuity?

More notes:

Nice cover "Pieta" homage, and once again, there's a discrepancy between what Amon is wearing on the cover and on the inside... I'm also not sure how I feel about Montoya being "the Answer" with a capital A--I like her too much as a non-superhero character--but I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a clue about where that storyline is going.

Pg. 1: Believe it or not, this is not a new robot. Its name is B.O.L.T.S., and it first appeared here, and again here. Which we'll be seeing more of in a moment. (Sorry about the weird links; comics.org doesn't seem to be working right now.) It also looks like Prof. Morrow has access to the Dr. Moreau-like creatures that signal Intergang involvement.

Pg. 2: Oolong Island isn't new either. In fact, it first appeared in Wonder Woman #157--as the secret island headquarters of the diabolical Egg Fu, the Very Most Racist Super-Villain of All Time. (We briefly saw him back in the second "Tuesdays with Morrow" sequence.) Do follow that link for Dial B for Blog's essay on his history with both Wonder Woman and the Metal Men.

Where do the beach bunnies come from? Are they mad scientists too? Please tell me so.

Pg. 3: So wait, the "Cricketron" incinerates a bunch of people and everyone's still just hanging out under their "Penguin Umbrellas" on the beach?

Pg. 4: Anyone know who "Bugsy" might be? Dr. Rigoro Mortis seems to be somewhat the worse for wear since he first appeared in House of Mystery #165. What's up with Doc's appearance? We didn't see him get splashed with anything last issue--and chloroplatinic acid is not nearly as easy to make as just dumping aqua regia on platinum, although that's a step in the process.

Pg. 5: "Ira" is Ira Quimby, a.k.a. I.Q., who first appeared in Mystery in Space #87 (written up here). His origin, interestingly, has to do with a bit of stone from the planet Rann; maybe he has something to do with the Adam Strange plot? Also, he fought the Metal Men back in DC Comics Presents #4, which looks like it's getting reprinted in Superman: Back In Action next January. Anyone know the story behind the giant robot in the last panel? Or what the headless little-boy robot Sivana's chasing is?

Pg. 6: "Moriarty" would have to be another mad scientist--a math professor, actually: Prof. James Moriarty. He's appeared in at least one DC comic (outside of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen): this one. Any others? I can't find a source for the passage she's reading (about Moriarty torturing Holmes?!)--the "weak ye are revealed, and thus choice ain't for ye" bit is a mixture of high and low speech that reminded me a bit of what Mark Twain makes fun of in "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Love that forked-tongued bookmark, though.

Pg. 7: I still want to know where she holsters that thing, or if she's just been wandering around the streets of Yemen clutching her big Kirbytech gun.

Pg. 11: Sports bra! Drink! And why would Montoya and Charlie have gone ahead to Dangerous Place Central without Adam and Isis already present to back them up?

Pg. 13: Oh, look, it's another talking tiger with a member of the Marvel family...

Pg. 15: And apparently you have to be crippled if you want to be a Captain Marvel Jr. analogue.

Pg. 17: "I am Osiris... even though I am not sure what that yet means." For one thing, it means his theology's confused: Amon-Ra and Osiris were two different gods, at the toppermost of the poppermost of the Egyptian pantheon. For another, it means you're going to marry your sister, dude, and after that things are going to go downhill.

Pg. 18: "Seeing if it's contagious": awesome!

Pg. 20: I'm sorry, but a happy-looking Black Adam just freaks me out.

The Origin of Wildcat: Jerry Ordway was a perfect choice for this one. Ted's looking at the cover of All-American Comics #16, although I like the color scheme of the Earth-Prime version better. It was specifically Green Lantern that inspired Ted in the original story, though. But "the finest boxer who ever lived"? What about Superman's other sparring partner?

Week 22: Fried

2006-10-05T02:31:00.000-07:00

That headline describes my current state--hence this week's late, abbreviated 52 Pickup--and it's also the punch line to a joke I liked as a kid, involving an elderly and memorious Native American.

The story of the original Standing Bear is worth looking into--it's the one really sharp reference to Native American culture this issue. The title "Burial Ground" is, er, a little on the corny side. As for the Manitou Stone--it's probably not this one--"Manitou stones" are in fact a generic name for certain kinds of headstones in New England; as this page puts it, "manitou" is "a word used by the Algonquin speaking peoples of New England to mean 'spirit,' as in having spiritual power."

That's Algonquin, not Iroquois. "A great noble of the Iroquois nation" wouldn't have called on "manitou, the great spirit in things"; he'd have called it "orenda." (If he'd been Sioux, he'd have called it "wakanda.") The effect is roughly the same as having, I don't know, a Greek character thinking back to growing up in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.

Super-Chief (no, not that Super Chief) first appeared here, in All-Star Western #117 (a story reprinted here, and I think I know what I'm looking for next time I go to the back-issue bins); he appeared in what I'm guessing was not quite his original context here. There were only three original Super-Chief stories, in the final three issues of All-Star Western, and I now desperately need to track down all of them to see if he actually fought dinosaurs. Or, you know, I could just wait for this. For a really, really long time.

Saganowahna, by the way, is not an actual name in any tradition other than the DCU's. You thought otherwise?

(Also: sorry to see Stephen Wacker go, and good luck to him in his new endeavors! As much as I've given him a hard time here, I do really appreciate everything he did to make 52 possible.)

More notes:

Cover: I like this one a lot, even though it manages to conflate two other people's trademarks on the same cover that sticks the little "registered" sign next to "Green Lantern." I can't help thinking those alchemical symbols look a lot like "PLOT 04" too.

Pg. 1: So Supernova does have remote disintegration power. Who do we know who has that power? Besides Coagula, that is.

Pg. 2: Good use of the teaser line.

Pg. 4: Luthor really likes that expansive "behold!" left-hand gesture, doesn't he?

Pg. 5: "Fastback" is a good name for a DCU bus line--the turtle of that name was part of Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. Silverblade was mentioned on Rip Hunter's chalkboard, and it's a perfectly appropriate subject for a big-budget action flick. And the Earth-Prime Highway 52 runs northwest-southeast between Portal, North Dakota and Charleston, South Carolina; apparently the DCU version cuts east a little further north to pass through or near Metropolis. Jon is reading the same issue of "Metahuman Journal" that was in Clark and Lois's apartment three months ago (cover-dated July); why is that one so interesting? The back page of the newspaper in panel 2 is apparently advertising a TV version of "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?", which the DCU version of Alan Moore will, I'm sure, make very clear that he's not going to watch.

Pg. 6: Of course it's Gate 52. Will we ever see Ms. Red-Hair-Glasses-and-Freckles again? And how do the cops know Jon's "service record"--and from what?

Pg. 8: Bad storytelling in the first panel--I guess that's a funeral (for Jon's father), but that's really not a convincing coffin, and I'm not sure what the thing it's on top of is. Beyond the service record, it looks like Jon's been in jail at some point...

Pg. 9: The "Six Nations" was an Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) confederacy (the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas and arguably the Tuscarora). But the book is also a kind of Secret Six (how great a cover is that, by the way?).

Pg. 11: Whoa: was killing him what Jon's grandfather wanted him to do? I'm thinking maybe not, since they're both wearing different outfits in this scene than in the previous one (and the grandfather is still making some noise in the last panel). Odd to see Booster on the cover of "TV Nation," since he couldn't seem to scare up much interest for his funeral...

Pg. 12: That's awfully old-fashioned architecture for a new business school (apparently the one Luthor was talking about last week). Is it a rededicated older building within an established university?

Pg. 13: Have we seen Mr. Ferry before? "Themyscira" just isn't as funny as "medieval," although I'm wondering if it's a cue about the DCU Mercy's background.

Pg. 15: "David" is Doc Magnus's brother, Col. David Magnus, first seen here--another fine cover design. Shade is apparently not this one or this one, but S.H.A.D.E.--the Super Human Advanced Defense Executive introduced here. And the Plutonium Man business Doc Magnus mentions happened in a three-part storyline ending here.

Pg. 18: When did Doc mix the aqua regia? It needs to be prepared immediately before it's used (and Doc mentions that it's "fresh")--otherwise it degrades very quickly. And Doc sure has a problematic relationship with Tina, doesn't he?

Pg. 20: Nice cliffhanger--Lead continuing to rampage in the background after the punch line is a very Morrison touch. Anybody recognize the Sentinel-ish thingie? Also, I like the preview of next week's Drew Johnson/Ray Snyder art, not least because it looks like we're finally getting back to the Montoya/Question plot.

The Origin of Green Lantern: So is Hal's chest insignia green, black or a hologram?... And the non-yellow problem is overridden by Hal's will? Interesting.

Question of the week: does anybody actually click through to the covers I link to? I'm curious.

Week 21: Thunderbird Rides the Lightning

2006-09-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

In honor of Eliza, the Thunderbird of the new Infinity Inc., I wanted to link to a special theme song for this issue: "Speed," the big rock-disco-biker-fetish-gang production number from the greatest science fiction disco musical ever made, The Apple. Sadly, the closest thing I could find online was a YouTube video of a drag queen called Suppositori Spelling lip-synching it. It'll sort of give you the idea, anyway.

Eliza's speech about how she doesn't care about Wonder Woman and Superman, she always wanted to be one of the speedsters, is curious, especially since Superman and the Flash are about equally matched, speed-wise. That does raise the question, though, of what's so special about super-speedy types in the DCU.

Of the four major Flashes the DCU's seen to date, the one I have the deepest attachment to is Barry Allen--he was the one I imprinted on, of course, but he had something Jay and Wally and Bart don't. The Barry Allen Flash stories were stories about physics and chemistry: Barry was a police scientist, and he usually resolved the story less through using his speed than through some scientific principle or other. (I love the bit in, I think, one of Mike Baron's issues of Flash where Wally is remembering how Barry always used to tell him "Flash Facts." The All-New Atom, in places, is trying for the same sort of feel.) Barry's "rogues" were generally science-based types (Dr. Alchemy/Mr. Element, Captain Cold, the Mirror Master, etc.), too. One of the first issues of The Flash that I bought was this one--not only is that an amazing cover, but the guy's name was Roy G. Bivolo. I never forgot the sequence of colors after that.

The other theme in the Barry incarnation of the Flash was time and its perception--Green Lantern got to go to 5700 as Pol Manning, but the Cosmic Treadmill could take Barry to any point in time, and even from that first story where the villain is the Turtle, Barry seemed to have a broader understanding of time and its meaning than almost any other character. (Thanks to Abra Kadabra, he even understood more about the relationship between magic and technology than most of his contemporaries.) Wally was a good, interesting character qua character, but aside from some of Waid's storylines and a few terrific issues like this one, I very rarely got the sense of why it was important that his power was super-speed in particular. Is Eliza's attachment to speed just that Bart was her hometown hero?

As long as I'm talking about subtexts, I should probably get into Infinity Inc., whose logo on this cover is a riff on Infinite Christmas rather than its old appearance. That whole series wore its theme on its sleeve: not-entirely-voluntary legacies--the "blood brats" that Fury III is talking about. The various iterations of Teen Titans have only rarely gotten into why kid sidekicks should start a super-group together, although Johns seems to be playing with that idea right now--but the difference between the groups is the difference between hereditary successors and hand-picked successors. But of course Luthor would be attracted to the only super-group with a corporate name--and of course he bought the rights to it. Does that mean he also owns the rights to the tech in the Cosmic Converter Belt, which Sylvester Pemberton invented? (And might that have something to do with Supernova's powers?)

A kind of obvious thing that occurred to me after I posted the question about the Joker card last week: how many playing cards are there in a deck? really? aren't you forgetting something...?

Odd that we get 22 pages of lead story and no secret origin this issue--it's not as if what there is in the way of plot is super-compressed. I was hoping the backup had been squeezed out by a 32-page story or something along those lines.

Incidentally, I've been loving the conversations going on in the last few weeks' comments, but I'd also like to see some new names in there--if you're a regular 52 Pickup reader and you've got something to say, jump in!

More notes:

Cover: I wonder: is there anyone whose job it is to make sure the scrolling copy on the bottom of the cover has anything to do with the issue's contents? Oh, right, the editor.

Pg. 1: Do we know who "James" is, or what this conversation is about? We saw Eliza talking about taking "sharp" in week 17; I could swear it was a plot point in some old issue of Flash, but maybe I'm confusing it with Velocity 9 and its sequel Velocity 10, which induced super-speed instead of suppressing it. Might it have been named after Golden Age Flash artist Hal Sharp?

Pg. 2: Yet another teddy bear! Remember: teddy bears are an underused symbol for innocence! In panel 5, Eliza's got an old comic cover on the wall behind her: it's All-Flash #16--you can see the full version of it here. The cover in panel 6 is Flash #225, an allusion to this... Geoff Johns citing his own comic's cover!

Pg. 3: And speaking of lightning, Xolotl is traditionally the god of lightning in Aztec/Toltec mythology--see Wikipedia--and he's supposed to be the psychopomp who guides people to Mictlan, rather than guarding the gate. (According to the Aztecs, everyone went to Mictlan when they died, except for warriors who died in battle--e.g. Eliza--women who died in childbirth, and people who were killed by being hit by lightning. Speaking of lightning.) I won't get into Mictlantecuhtli's story beyond the link, except to say that it could become a very interesting bit of mythology for this series to play with... and it looks like Ralph does have some gingold on hand after all.

Pg. 4: How's he going to open the door if he's tied into knots?

Pg. 5: The new Blockbuster is actually the third one. The first one, Mark Desmond, first appeared here (and later in this issue, with one of the all-time great Carmine Infantino covers), and died here. His brother Roland subsequently became a new Blockbuster here, and got killed here.

Pg. 8: The original Nuklon is now calling himself Atom Smasher (and is pals with Black Adam, although he was in jail for a while for killing the president of Kahndaq), but does that mean the name's in the public domain, since this Nuklon doesn't seem to be Al Rothstein? Or did Lex manage to buy that too? Ripping off the Mohawk: not cool.

Note that Lex's project is the Everyman project, and that his shape-changer is called Everyman too. (Everyman, as a name, is a neat contrast to Superman...) Plus he's the only member of the team still rocking the purple and green (although so does Gar). And he's bald. Also, what happened to Herakles?

Pg. 9: Once again, the "film the fight and fix it in post" routine that we saw in Week 3... and, before that, in Civil War #1. Well, it's a decent joke, anyway, and more proof that it's still possible to lay an egg even with four writers.

Pg. 10: Perhaps Eliza should just have called herself "Ballbuster." There was a Fury in the original Infinity Inc. too, of course, but a very different one. And there was a Golden Age Skyman--turns out his first story was by Gardner Fox and Ogden Whitney, two names I never expected to see together, although the Skyman (or Sky Man) being referred to here is the Star-Spangled Kid's adult alias.

Pg. 11: Here's Kalinara's breakdown of the interim Titans--I'm a few issues behind on reading that series, so I can't say much about a lot of them (although, hey, there's an Osiris hanging out with someone who looks rather Black Adam-ish; apparently that is where the Isis plot is going). Power Boy is apparently going to be Supergirl's new boyfriend, and it sure looks like he's from Apokolips (there was also a Golden Age Power Boy, who doesn't appear to be this one)... and "Little Barda": excellent! They've even got a Mother Box, as we see later. Ping ping ping.

Pg. 12: If the new rules of magic are that you don't get something for nothing, perhaps Zatara shouldn't be going "sgnidliub riaper" quite so cavalierly?

Pg. 13: Zachary Zatara, per Teen Titans #39, is Zatanna's cousin. And Hot Spot/Isaiah is the former Joto a.k.a. Slagger--another Dan Jurgens creation, first seen here.

Pg. 14: "Changed your mind" (also referred to on pg. 19): was there an earlier conversation?

Pg. 19: "Go practice our magic": groan.

Pg. 20: Those are rather Deathstroke-esque colors Fury wears, aren't they? And he leaves his mask on at the funeral? I see John's picked up Kala Avasti's habit of attempting to deliver crucial exposition in person, although with less success. Here's a hint for both of them: E-MAIL.

Pg. 21: "Johnny Warrawa," huh? Here's a line from the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "The religion of the Tasmanians, when cleared from ideas apparently learnt from the whites, was a simple form of animism based on the shadow (warrawa) being the soul or spirit." Perhaps this ties in with Ralph's plot?

Next week's 52 Pickup might be a day late (or it might not). Just warning you right now.

Week 20: Language Is a Virus from Outer Space

2006-09-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

The title of this week's issue is, of course, a riff on Nietzsche's famous rhymelet "Gott ist tot", which inspired one of the all-time great magazine covers forty years ago. (Since Time just put up their entire archive, you can actually read the story!) But as I've mentioned before, the DCU is an odd place to make that particular assertion even as a joke, since it's crawling with gods both old and new, from the Spectre's Judeo-Christian boss to Rama Kushna.

This was one of my least favorite issues of the series to date, partly because of the badly garbled fight scene but mostly because so little happened to advance the overall plot. Unless I'm missing something major, you could really boil it down to pages 2, 6 and 18-20 without losing much. Also, a small thing that kept bugging me: some consistency about the representation of alien tongues would be nice. Do they say "roklipi opto yok mikka yop yok," as pg. 8 would have it, which is a little close to Winsor McCay's Imp for comfort? Do they say "mama," as per pg. 13? Or do they talk in indecipherable marks, as Ekron does on pg. 16? (Actually, it's not all that indecipherable: as a cryptogram, the first three words he speaks match the letter pattern of I WILL KILL...)

Since there's not a lot worthy of in-depth thematic discussion going on this time (and also not a lot I can make my usual smartass allusions to old comics about), perhaps it's time to try to make a canonical list of dangling (or at least open) plot threads in 52, aside from the "52 Spoilers" list I revisited a few weeks ago. If I've forgotten or misconstrued any, please chip in...

Who's playing the Joker card (on the first page of the first issue)?
What's wrong with time?
What happened in the "52 missing seconds"?
Where is Wonder Woman?
Why are the Bats out of town? Where are they?
Who's kidnapping mad scientists? Why? What do they have to do with Egg Fu?
What's the significance of "artificial souls"?
What has Mr. Mind evolved into?
Why did Vic choose Montoya for whatever he's chosen her for? What's the answer to "who are you" that he's looking for?
What is Intergang up to? Where are they getting their Kirbytech and beast-man tech? What's their connection to 520 Kane St. and to Kahndaq?
Who is Devem and what's he up to? Where did he get all his Kryptonian gear? Why would his cult want to revive Sue as a dry run? Was that actually Sue they revived?
How did Lex acquire and alter Alex Luthor's corpse?
What's up with the Great Ten?
Why the Freedom of Power Treaty?
What happened to Adam Strange's eyes?
What happened to Alan Scott's eyes (including "the one that isn't his," which may have been answered here)?
How did Hawkgirl get big?
How did she get normal-sized again?
How did Firestorm and Cyborg get un-merged?
How did Adam, Buddy and Kory end up wherever they were in space?
Why was Devilance on Adon with them?
Why was he pursuing them?
What happened to the Red Tornado? How did he end up with one voicebox in Mal Duncan's chest and another one attached to his body in Australia?
Where and when is Rip Hunter?
A question that is actually many questions: What the hell does everything in Rip Hunter's HQ mean?
Who is Supernova? Is he Kon-El and/or Connor? How does he know where the Batcave is?
How did Kate get to be Batwoman?
What's the story with Isis's brother? Is he Osiris?
Why couldn't Green Lantern's ring find Ralph? Who was watching Ralph from the fence? Is Ralph sane? Who was it who helped him out after his collapse? What's his connection to the Dr. Fate helmet?
What's Lex up to with the power-creating/removing genetic stuff and his personal JLA?
What's Cain's connection to the suicide bomber?
What exactly happened to Booster?
What exactly happened to Daniel?
Why is Lady Styx after the space heroes?
How did Lobo end up getting religion?
Who's the "he" of "he knows," and what does he know? And what's Skeets up to?
What exactly is 52, anyway?

Meanwhile, readers of the official site know what the 52 missing seconds, excuse me, missing page in week 18 were: this page--I thought the segue between pages 4 and 5 that issue was a little abrupt! I'd be mighty curious to know at what point it was decided that it wasn't okay to show those two characters drunkenly cavorting in the printed pages of the comic; I'm guessing fairly late in the day. (And I also suspect it wouldn't have had that problem if Zalika had been Zalik.)

Lots of good discussion going on in last week's comments; have a look. As Squashua pointed out, if you look at "52" the right way, it becomes "SZ." To me, this means one obvious thing: an allusion to Roland Barthes' classic structuralist/post-structuralist essay S/Z. And if you're not careful, I'm gonna have to do a Barthesian analysis of 52 one of these weeks.

Also, Ragnell has posted her own response to the DC Tarot Challenge here, and yes, it totally counts.

More notes:

Cover: "Wayne Manor robbed?!" What? The first two pages don't suggest that Supernova's stealing anything...

Pg. 1: I'm guessing that Alfred went along with Bruce, Dick and Tim on their mysterious jaunt, since everything in the cave is covered up--although wouldn't it be more likely to have guano than dust on it? The "new vigilante" seems to be Batwoman, but given Supernova's presence in the cave (note in panel 6 that he's hovering rather than walking), it might be him, too...

Pg. 2: The first case he uncovers is a couple of umbrellas--I'm guessing from some case involving the Penguin. The second, obviously, is "good soldier" Jason Todd's Robin outfit, which evidently hasn't been retired since his resurrection. And the third is Luthor's gauntlet (built by the Calculator), which has four pieces of Kryptonite: red, green, blue and black. This Wikipedia entry has a lot of information on Kryptonite, but I think the crucial piece is the black K--we've seen in Supergirl that it can split Kryptonians into two entities (might Supernova in fact be the split-off half of Connor, or even Clark?), and Luthor claims he got his piece from Darkseid. Which brings us back to the whole Apokoliptic thread going on in 52.

Pg. 3: How perfect would it have been to bring Fireman Farrell in here? And does anyone who knows more about firefighting than I do want to evaluate the way this scene was written and drawn? From what little I know, the breathing apparatus seems fairly accurate.

Pg. 6: So Luthor can de-activate the metagene that gives people superpowers. How dangerous is that? Maybe not very. Let's have a quick look at the DCU solicitations for December, and see what exposure the named characters have to risk:

No superpowers to take away: Batman, Catwoman, Nightwing, Robin, Batwoman, Oracle, Manhunter, Green Arrow, Jonah Hex, Connor Hawke, Wildcat, Arsenal, Elongated Man (at this point), Captain Comet (?)

Not human: Superman, Supergirl, Metal Men, Red Tornado (at this point), Martian Manhunter

Superpowers from a magical or technological source: Blue Beetle, Atom, Captain Marvel (I can't bring myself to call him Shazam), Wonder Woman, Firestorm, Hawkgirl, Hawkman, all the Green Lanterns, Black Adam, Cyborg, the Atomic Knights, Starman, Zatanna, Vixen, OMAC, Ragman, The Spectre, Blue Devil, Kid Devil, arguably the Flash

An open question: Aquaman, The Creeper, The Weird, all the new Freedom Fighters

Might actually be in trouble: Damage, Doctor Mid-Nite, Black Canary (does she have her canary cry these days? I forget), Black Lightning

Pg. 9: I'm guessing the script here said something like "draw a zillion crab creatures coming out of the sky," not "draw a bunch of wavy lines."

Pp. 10-15: This is terrible storytelling--I had to go over it a few times to get any sense of what was going on, and it's still not clear what Buddy's up to with the "phitt-phitt" business, or what Adam's doing with the spaceship other than vaporizing the crabs around Buddy, or if the first alien to pick up the Eye gets vaporized, or why if that's the case Kory doesn't, or why she would even have any idea what the Eye was or how to use it. The "seeya" gesture Lobo's making on pg. 12 looks like a Giffenism, but doesn't make much sense with the dialogue...

Pg. 17: The little-kid aliens are way too cute and too human-looking--baggy overalls? And the teddy bear with antennae is really pushing it. I believe there was one of those in here. With three eyes. But this is basically just following the 52 rule in which little kids are required to carry teddy bears (cf. weeks 5 and 7).

Pg. 18: I do like Lobo being waited on by his dolphin-butler, and call-and-response whistling for his bike.

Pg. 19: Amusing that Lobo's apologizing for cursing when everything that's come out of his mouth is a euphemism... and I love that after almost 40 years (the Eye first appeared here, in 1967) we're finally finding out what Ekron is. It turns out, by the way, that it also has a Biblical referent, although I really don't think that's what was intended here.

The Origin of Adam Strange: Nicely drawn, if a little bland--note that Nowlan avoids ever drawing Adam's eyes--although that distant cityscape at the beginning of the second page is a total Carmine Infantino Silver Age enormous expanse. But it did remind me: have we seen Adam, almost as much a family man as Buddy, mention his wife and daughter? I'd also suggest Swamp Thing #57 and 58 as an essential storyline for him--and as a very good way of dealing with the "what language do aliens speak?" problem. (Waid neatly alludes to the story with the caption that starts "Eventually, Adam learned...")

Week 19: Rabbit Redux

2006-09-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

Trying to relive moments of youthful glory and ending up trapped in a tight little recursive loop: isn't that what superhero comics are all about these days? Daniel is Precut Archetype #14, the Ex-Jock Who Wants to Get Back That Moment of Athletic Majesty, and he's not subtle about it--even Harry Angstrom didn't obsess that much about it. This is far from the only comic I've seen in the last few years that's got some sort of grim and not-too-carefully-masked metaphor for the state of long-underwear stuff; to return to the Seven Soldiers references I was making last week, part of what's so valuable to me about the 7S project is that it suggests where the superhero concept can go next--ways to use the idea that respect the past but are forward-looking rather than backward-looking.

I could go on about the poisonous effects of nostalgia on superhero comics, and one of these weeks when I've got more time I probably will. For the moment, I'll just note that one of those poisons is a sort of stylistic leveling. A lot of my other favorite new comics of the moment are projects like Finder and Fell and DMZ and... well, I haven't really warmed to Casanova yet, but I'm still buying it. What I like about them is not that they aren't superhero stories or even that they're not wildly intertextual the way 52 is (obviously I'm probably a little too into intertextuality), but that they've all got incredibly compressed narrative urgency, and they all read like nothing but themselves--they're forward-looking in terms of the way they work as comics. 52, for all its mystery and momentum, still hasn't really found the kind of distinctive storytelling voice that I love about certain comics (including, actually, a lot of comics involving its writers); I read it because I'm dying to find out what happens next, but not because of the way it'll be expressed, if you see what I mean.

This week's cover has its own issues with the past, and with past incarnations of the future. Others (especially on Newsarama) have already analyzed the significance of the dates Booster's dashing through, but to recap:

*85,271 is the setting of DC One Million (one million months after Action #1)--smart of Jones to have its "5" and "2" offset just slightly from the numbers in the cover logo

*1938, 1939 and 1941 were the first appearances of the Missing Big Three

*1935 was New Fun Comics #1, the first comic published by the entity that became DC--and somehow I wouldn't be surprised to see Jack Woods pop up in this series...

*1985 was Crisis on Infinite Earths

*3006 is now + 1000 years = Legion time

*the significance of 4006 and 5252 aren't clear

A year I was hoping to see show up that didn't: something from the 5700s, the era of Pol Manning, Hal Jordan's future alter ego. Also notably absent: the 25th century (home of Booster and Skeets), and the 64th century (home of Abra Kadabra). And whenever Alix Harrower's ancestor, "Earth's first superhero," was active, cf. Seven Soldiers: Bulleteer.

This issue is also, I think, the first time we've seen Skeets actively breaking his own experience of time: if Daniel's caught in a time loop until the year 1,000,000, he's not going to get out in time to become a direct ancestor of Booster, is he? So who's going to ferry him 500 years into the past? And we're in "Chronocops" territory!

Reliving a particular moment indefinitely has been used as a device in a lot of other comics--Strontium Dog and the ending of this mystery in space come to mind--but it also reminds me of the monster in the time-stream in this issue, whose dialogue was even more screwed-up than the The All-New Atom's aliens', and included probably my favorite all-time line of awful comics dialogue: "IS/WAS HUNGRY! MUST/WILL/HAVE EAT!" Gerry Conway, thank you for traumatizing nine-year-old me. (Actually, there was an even more traumatizing line in an earlier issue of Superman Family, but I'm gonna have to dig through my old issues to try to find it.)

I'm happy to see that the DC tarot challenge I suggested last week yielded a couple of responses (and I'd be happy to see more): for those of you who don't read the comments, Dr. Obvious made a card for The Hermit, and Jonni made one for The Devil.

Also, if you haven't been looking at Keith Giffen's layouts at http://52thecomic.com , you might want to--they've started posting outtakes from each issue, too, and they're kind of fascinating.

More notes:

Pg. 1: Skeets meets his own primitive ancestor! Also, it looks like Daniel's high school was in Manchester--perhaps the Alabama home of Bart Allen and the speedster from last week's Luthor League. Anybody who read Impulse more closely than I did want to tell me if their high school football teem was indeed the Spartans? I'm doubly curious because my home town had the real Spartans. Well, not "real," but you know what I mean.

Covington, OH is a real city, but it's a little surprising that Daniel lives there--I thought it had been fairly firmly established that Metropolis was on the East Coast (one of the step-sisters of "Cinderella City" New York).

World's Finest Weekly seems to be another one of those Brave and the Bold-type DCU magazines. I wondered at first why Booster would be on the cover (the obituaries section in the new issue of my wife's alumni magazine includes a very short, deadpan obit for Ken Lay--he didn't make the cover, either...)--but I'm guessing it's an old issue from the "Booster Talks!" headline we see later.

Pg. 3: Of course his number was 52.

Pg. 4: Skeets, head-on, looks a little bit like an airplane, doesn't he?

Pg. 6: Q. Why is Kory still bothering to wear Buddy's shirt? A. To keep Buddy from getting embarrassed, I'm guessing.

Pg. 8: "Kettles in blue grass"? Seriously, the "I can't describe this using English" routine makes me think Buddy's about to bust out the 64-character alphabet.

Pg. 9: I guess Ted the Bug has a big sister, too.

Pg. 10: Lots of little Biblical allusions here--"follow the fish," indeed!--and I'm curious to see what the "Stygian passover" was, since "passover" implies that something was spared for a particular reason. "Sector 3500" would be out of the 3600 sectors that the Guardians divided the universe into in old-fashioned Green Lantern continuity; it's not mentioned here, so I'm assuming it hasn't been mentioned before.

The particularly interesting word is "Vegan," though--Vega, in the Giffen-plottedInvasion project, was home to the Warlords of Okaara, the Citadelians, and the Guardian-linked Psions. Also, the Khund invasion's beachhead was Australia...

I don't mind the quasi-Catholic iconography popping up--as Matthew pointed out elsewhere, extreme ridiculousness is not just acceptable but necessary in Lobo stories--but what almost spoils this scene for me is the artwork. Some of Olliffe's faces are really sloppy--the ones at the top of this page, for instance.

Pg. 11: The Wizard blog identifies the entity they're running from as Lady Styx, although she's never quite named that way on panel. And it sure looks like Lobo's "splendid eye" is indeed the Emerald Eye of Ekron.

Pg. 12: I thought the Weather Wizard's big fear was no longer jail but Hell... this scene feels grafted-on--it's pretty much an excuse to get Supernova and Wonder Girl together so she can ID him, but the fight with the Weather Wizard doesn't seem to serve the greater storyline at all.

Pg. 14: More awkward faces. And as funny as "Skeetles" is, it's kind of like an ice cream bar named after Kato Kaelin. "Respect my personal space, please"? A weird thing to say under the circumstances.

Pg. 15: The Flash T-shirt is a nice touch.

Pg. 17: A terrific reveal--a clue I've had shoved in my face for weeks & have been reading wrong anyway. Well done.

The Origin of Animal Man: Eight whole Brian Bolland pictures! I am not complaining, though. I was hoping to see Jog's suggestion of Waid writing Morrison realized, although I didn't actually expect it--but it would've been nice to see some hint of Buddy's unique metafictional position. If 1935 and 1985 are important years within 52, he's more likely than most of its characters to understand why.

Week 18: Magic Is Not Thermodynamics

2006-09-07T15:55:00.000-07:00

Bizarre that we only seem to have gotten 19 pages of lead story this issue--I hope this won't be a continuing trend.

As I understand, the rules for the "Tenth Age of Magic" have been determined by a monograph written by Michael Moorcock for DC, and the gist of them is that you don't get something for nothing (or, as the Dr. Fate helmet explains to Ralph, "nothing comes without a price")--that there's a law of conservation of, I don't know, phlogiston or orgone energy or something. That would make some sense if we're talking about this guy, who gets in under the "any sufficiently advanced technology" rule, but somehow it doesn't quite ring true for me. Magic, it seems to me, is all about getting something for nothing, or at least redefining nothing so that it becomes something.

(In fact, it consists in great part in setting the rules by which things are perceived. My favorite magic character in the DCU is John Constantine, at least in his initial version, in which he was always making things happen but we never actually saw him doing anything in contravention of physical laws.)

Grant Morrison did a nice job of outlining the rules of magic--or at least its about-to-end Ninth Age in the DCU--in Seven Soldiers: Zatanna; I won't spoil the rules as he presents them there for those of you who haven't read it yet, except to say that the last one he proposes, "think yourself lucky," applies well beyond the borders of Earth-One. They weren't quite coherent enough to act as signposts for other writers, I suppose, but if you make the rules of magic coherent enough to involve axioms, reproducibility, etc., then what they're outlining isn't really magic any more, is it? I suspect the kind of magic that works for stories involves a certain amount of rulemaking but also some loosey-goosey stuff.

I see that Moorcock's Tenth Age seems to have something to do with tarot, too, following the example of Promethea, although honestly did Giffen & Barrows have to stick to the same old Rider-Waite designs? I like these much better. Or these.

Actually, here's a challenge for 52 Pickup's readers: design a card for a Rider-Waite-style tarot deck whose image is an unaltered panel, or fragment of a panel, from a DC comic.

Thanks again to Ragnell for filling in last week. At least J.G. Jones pays attention to light sources...

More notes:

Pg. 1: Since this is the House of Mystery, I think we can assume that the "Cain" to whom the suicide bomber dedicated her death a few issues back is this one. Stonehenge and Kaspar Hauser and Easter Island I knew about, Rennes I didn't. But it's curious that they're called the Croatoan Society, given the whole Croatoan business in Seven Soldiers: Klarion. And that picture is so not left-to-right.

I don't know who Edogawa Sangaku is, but Edogawa Rampo was the father of the Japanese detective story--his pseudonym is a transliteration of "Edgar Allan Poe"--and a sangaku is a kind of mathematical problem. Terri Thirteen's name is very much like Terry Thirteen, a.k.a. Dr. Thirteen, Ghostbreaker, who was killed in a magical accident at Baron Winters' rather House of Mystery-like house in Seven Soldiers: Zatanna #1; he had a daughter named Traci Thirteen, not Terri, who first appeared in this Geoff Johns-written issue... but I do like the suggestion that any mystical character who dies is promptly replaced by another version of the same entity.

Ralph we know. B.T. Chimp? B.T. stands for "Bobo The," it turns out, and he's wearing a "Grodd Is My Co-Pilot" T-shirt. Tim Trench was a minor Wonder Woman supporting character who appears to have appeared in two solo stories ever: one of them was here.

Pg. 2: The bald guy would have to be Edogawa, although he doesn't look a bit Asian.

Pg. 4: Curious that the crescent is the symbol of choice in what appears to be non-Muslim Kahndaq, given its historical association with Islam.

Pg. 6: Sports bra! Drink! At least Kahndaq doesn't appear to have a homosexuality taboo (that doesn't seem to be what Adam's upset about, anyway). Disconcertingly big grin on Charlie's face in panel 2.

Pg. 8: Montoya's still beating herself up over having killed the bomber, but really, a) she's shot to kill plenty of times before, and b) shooting someone who's two seconds away from blowing up herself, you, and several hundred innocents in her blast range is pretty much as far as you can get into "defensible violence" territory--which is to say that not shooting her would have done vastly, inarguably more harm than good. Not much of a moral conundrum there. I'm sure the Vic Sage of Mysterious Suspense would have mocked her for even having a twinge of remorse. Also, do we have any idea who the "pretty lass" of Shiruta is?

Pg. 10: Kind of hilarious that one of the lines of dialogue that appears to have been rewritten here is the one that was used for this issue's solicitation--it was originally "We found Shakespeare's GHOSTWRITER, we can find one of our own GUYS"... also, Holmes was indeed partly inspired by Joseph Bell, and the rest of the line is very funny. So who was it who gave Ralph help pulling himself back together? Possibly the woman from the cover, who might be the reporter from a few weeks ago? Or is the woman on the cover supposed to be Terri Thirteen? And what's up with the spying waiters?

Pg. 11: As people in the CBR forums have pointed out, Booster's pallbearers include the Blimp from Inferior 5, the Yellow Peri, Mind-Grabber Dude (with his outfit from Seven Soldiers: Zatanna--wow, that comic's coming up a lot this week--and still a desperate horn-dog), Beefeater II from JLE, some Abe Lincoln lookalike (can anyone identify him?), and best of all, the Odd Man--a Steve Ditko creation so obscure that he first appeared in one of the rarest DC comics ever (in a story later rewritten for inclusion in this issue, a follow-up to the story two issues earlier in which Kathy Kane/Batwoman was murdered, and now my head hurts). Love the "Herolist" thing, too.

Pg. 14: So we do have the Shadowpact active here. J.G. Jones' cover blog over at Wizard says he originally intended to use them on the cover, then wasn't able to because of continuity problems... wow, one hand really doesn't seem to know what the other one's doing, huh? As the cover puts it, "When is the Shadowpact?!?" is a good question, since the first issue of their series implies that they've sat out an entire year, but also that the year starts after Superman's return.

Pg. 15: Speaking of the Odd Man, the look of the Tenth Age looks rather Ditkovian, like a Photoshop upgrade of the Dark Dimension from Dr. Strange.

Pg. 16: Nice to see Atheist, Princess of Germworld put in an appearance, however briefly.

Pg. 19: The Emerald Eye, maybe?

The Origin of the Question: Again, it'd have been nice to have a little nod to Ditko here. Two little things Waid has dropped into the origin that I don't think were previously canon (correct me if I'm wrong): that Tot Rodor worked up pseudoderm from "the extract of the gingold plant"--this could be tied to Ralph's arc--and "from the notes of Gotham criminal Bart Magan," a.k.a. this guy.

Week 17: I Can See the Light, Just Not the Sun

2006-08-30T17:39:00.000-07:00

Chris Batista (Pencils), Ruy Jose (Inks), Jack Jadson (inks), and David Baron (Colors) delivered the art this week, giving us a servicable performance. While spectacular art is too much to expect with the deadline for each issue, the lighting in the space sequence was driving me out of my mind. I simply could not stop thinking about it as I read.

I'm not a Teen Titans fan, so I'm unfamiliar with Starfire, but exactly how do her powers work? I read in a guest apperance once that she seemed to emanate light, and I know her energy blasts are solar based. I've seen some artists draw a glow around her as she flies, and others not bother. But, isn't her skin supposed to be glowing rather than simply "shiny"?

Also, there's a number of sequences where light seems to be coming from above, or in front of her, while her energized hands are too low or too far behind her to be casting that light. The shading seemed more intent on highlighting her feminine body than showing a consistant scene. I know its outer space, but seriously, where is the light source when she's facing Lobo and both of their faces are lit?

Art aside, this was a good week for me to fill in. The space story appealed to me while I'm on my "Cosmic DC" kick, and so much panel-time for Starfire gives me a chance to flex my Feminist Art Critique muscles a little bit.

The Lobo's origin backup, as I'm not particularly interested in the character, didn't catch me. It isn't new information for someone who's read enough DC space stories, or the main plot of this issue. Adam and Kory tell Buddy everything you need to know about Lobo in the actual plot.

More Notes:
Page 1: "Luthor's American Dream Team" would be a suitable name. The green and purple, and their facial expressions make them look as ominous as they're meant to be.

Page 2: Each of Luthor's Rent-A-Hero team gets a panel introducing them, and showing them in action. As I'm willing to bet more than one of these people will appear as guest-villains in upcoming books, its worth going over them once again here.

Erik Storn from Gary Indiana "whose claws seem capable of slicing through anything they touch." His character design, long claws and a shadowy purple facemask with white eyeslits, seems especially sinister.

Eliza Harmon from Manchester, Alabama with superspeed. I doubt that her hometown being the setting of the 90s Impulse comic is a coincidence.

Hannibal Bates of Gotham City, shapeshifter, seems unremarkable so far. The name Hannibal is loaded, though, between the crossing of the Alps and Silence of the Lambs. The last name of Bates is loaded from Psycho.

Gerome McKenna of Los Angeles, super-strength. (Seriously, where is the light coming from in the art? McKenna's biceps are lit from the point of impact where those two Kobra members are being slammed together, up and to the right, but his ear and the back side of his face are lit from a light source to the lower back left that is not illuminating any other part of his body!)

Jacob Colby of Oklahoma city "who can ride the winds." He's shown flying, but this could also be an elemental power. If you notice how the Kobra members behind him are moving (apparently lit by a different light source than he is), this seems quite likely.

Natasha Irons of Metropolis, whose light powers may be the reason for the art weirdness on this page.

Page 3: I'm unsettled by the amount of time Luthor spends commenting on Natasha's appearance. An entire panel. Jacob Colby also mentions her looks, more subtly, early on in the page.

Page 4: Nice to seee Mercy in action again.

Page 6: Lower right panel. I think an excessive amount of artistic effort was spent shading Kory's breasts. Time and thought that could have been spent on more important art details, like light sourcing.

Page 8: They've been in space since Day 7 of Week 16, that's five days, at most, if they left in the morning on Day 7 (Week 16) and this scene occurs in the evening of day 4 (Week 17).

Page 9-10: Grant Morrison's Animal Man Vertigo series is in continuity here. The concept of Existential Isolation Trauma (becoming "Void-Sick") is interesting. I wonder if Green Lanterns are susceptible.

Page 13: Gross.

Page 14: The smoke from Lobo's cigar can rise with no atmosphere.

Page 16: I'm really glad they cut out the dialogue for this sequence.

Page 18: I like Lobo's little hat.

Page 19: The 52 thing again, this time from Red Tornado's mouth. I wonder if any Australian readers are annoyed that "Mate" is shorthand for their accent. I also fully expect that Aboriginal Australian man to have a cell-phone next issue.

And that's all for this issue. Douglas Wolk will be back next week for some more plotcentric commentary.

Week 16: Oliveyoogh

2006-08-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

A good setup this week, and a potentially exciting convergence of plotlines, badly marred by major lapses in narrative logic. The biggest one is that Montoya makes the cognitive leap that "Intergang's going to hit the wedding" based on the presence of rat poison in the Intergang-related site... but a) not only had the wedding not been announced at the time they found the rat poison, Adam hadn't even proposed to Isis yet, and b) if Intergang's got access to Kirbytech guns and things that transform people into were-beasts, what the hell do they want with a low-tech/low-budget option for causing mayhem like a shrapnel bomb with anticoagulant coating? The bomb-at-the-wedding plot also assumes that there wouldn't be extensive security at a royal wedding, and that the other super-types there, including Captain Marvel Jr., wouldn't notice the commotion once Renee started yelling about the kid having a bomb, and that the stampede Renee and Charlie worried about wouldn't happen if she just screamed that there was a bomber and shot her. (It also really bugs me that this story is making the lazy jump from "Middle East" to "suicide bomber," but that's another issue.)

The other missing pieces of the puzzle are in the Adam/Isis love story, which is just about as forced as the Black Panther/Storm love story other commentators have been roundly mocking. We've seen so little evidence of why Adrianna should be attracted to Adam that we get a scene of Mary Marvel commenting on it so that Adrianna can explain it all away--and it doesn't work. At least I've got some hope that there'll be some explanation on this front later. As for this week's title: "Uhebbuki" seems to be a transliteration of Arabic for "I love you," as spoken by a man to a woman, although it's far from the most common way of spelling it. ("Ohiboke" is much more common.)

Hope everybody's been reading J.G. Jones' cover blog over at Wizard--this week's is a particularly interesting exegesis of a particularly terrific cover. As Wally Wood noted, a three-stage composition always works, and Jones has come up with a smart way to get a lot of depth into a scene where everything is actually pretty close together. (And he works in another Soviet propaganda poster design, while he's at it!) He does note, though, that "[t]he flowers that are raining down are a clue that Isis is overhead. When she flies around she is creating flowers and greenery wherever she goes like Mother Nature." That's a great visual effect, and it would be even better if, for instance, we'd ever seen it inside the comic. Also, I should know better by now than to complain that neither Montoya nor Charlie are wearing on the cover what they're wearing on the inside, but surely Tot could've thrown a khaki button-down shirt for her into that big ol' shipping container. And "who's she wearing"?!? Not the best question for Isis's outf--oh wait. Her belt-piece is red, black and yellow...

Black Adam's origin: nicely done, although I'd really like it if more of these two-page origins mentioned the characters' creators, who in this case are Otto Binder and C.C. Beck. Adam, it's worth mentioning, appeared in exactly one Golden Age comic--this one--whose cover features the same "vs." formulation Grant Morrison makes fun of in this fascinating interview. (I think I first encountered the story here--a much more affordable alternative, if tinier.)

And one other cool little surprise on the DC Nation page: it appears that the previously posted cover art for Week 17 is only a detail of the full image, a very cute parody of Week 1.

While we're at it, there's lots of 52-related material in Justice League of America #1. SPOILERS AHOY AGAIN FOR THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH. The most important one, I suspect, is that it suddenly makes a bit more sense what the significance of the "artificial soul" is: as in the case of Red Tornado and the Metal Men, it is capable of resurrection, since if its body is destroyed it can return once the body is reconstructed. Also, things look grim for Animal Man ("We should pay a visit to Ellen," Superman says, noting that Buddy's not available). And the Question is... open. Vixen gets a note from ?Q, and assumes that it's a come-on ("Firehawk said he's a pain in the ass. That means he's good in bed"), then asks for "him" and gets the answer "Ain't you gonnna be disappointed... the Question ain't operated out of Hub City for over a year." Of course, the "disappointment" could also easily be that ?Q isn't a "he" at this point. Plus: there's a "hush tube" and a "father box"!

More notes:

Pg. 1: I don't think we've known before that Isis's brother's name isn't Osiris but Amon--another Egyptian deity, associated with wind and "the breath of life," whose cult was pretty much overtaken by the Isis/Osiris cult. He's the first "A" among the gods who give Black Adam his S.H.A.Z.A.M. powers. Also, I wasn't familiar with lychnis before I Googled it, but how could I resist a link with a name so much like "Guy Gardner"?

Pg. 2: There doesn't seem to be an actual diamond that plays a significant part in the Caesar-and-Cleopatra story, but there is a line in George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, in which Apollodorus says "Friend Rufio threw a pearl into the sea: Caesar fished up a diamond." (The "diamond" in question is Cleopatra!)

Pg. 4: Is the box labeled "FRAG" (later "fragile") what Lobo is hiding inside?

Pg. 6: How does Isis change back to Adrianna, anyway? ("Oh not-so-mighty Adrianna!")

Pg. 7: Perhaps Billy's stabler the more distance he puts between himself and the Rock of Eternity. Perhaps this is just another one of those inconsistencies. And if his "authority as keeper of the Rock" means he gets to perform weddings, wouldn't the wedding have to be at the Rock? It's not like ships' captains get to go around marrying people wherever they feel like it.

Pg. 8: We keep seeing Kahndaq's residents with headwear of various kinds; wouldn't this be a good opportunity for Charlie to indulge his fondness for hats?

Pg. 9: Tawky Tawny, just as promised! And Uncle Dudley! But where's this guy? I ask only because his appearance here gave me a laugh I still remember 25 years later...

Pp. 14-15: An almost-fumbled bit of pacing here--the lightning that appears when they all say "SHAZAM" is a lot more dramatic the first time than "let's have some more lightning." Otherwise nicely suspenseful, though. The suicide bomber's prayer is, of course, a retelling of the first part of Genesis 4. (Perhaps you know it from the Golden Age version; it wasn't really covered in the '90s revamp.) It's worth noting, though, that the rock in question isn't actually in the standard Bible text; it's a traditional holdover from the Manichaean version. (Last time a Grant Morrison-related project had "archons" and "Manichaean" on the same page, one of his characters had this to say about it.)
Cain, of course, went on to a very successful career at DC. Actually, is the "rock" meant to be conflated somehow with the Rock of Eternity?

Oh, and "all universes"? Very interesting. Maybe Billy knows something we don't.

Pg. 17: Looks like the Kirbytech gun blew a hole in the bomber instead of vaporizing her as it did the creature at 52 Kane.

Pg. 18: One Adam carries his virgin bride across the threshold (followed by, dear Lord, a visible trickle of blood--subtle much?)...

Pg. 19: ...and another one can't get his rocket off the ground and claims that "this has never happened to me before." At least the "time slows down" thing makes a good excuse for the tabled-ness of this plot.

Next week, as I mentioned, I'm not going to be anywhere near a computer. (If you're in Black Rock City, stop by Vanilla Pod in Groovig at Chance & 4:30 and say hi.) Instead, we'll have a special guest star doing 52 Pickup; anyone who says "fill-ins suck" is way, way off the mark. As you can see by the sidebar, it's none other than the amazing Ragnell! See you in two weeks.

Week 15: Hapax Legomenon

2006-08-17T00:13:00.000-07:00

"Ballostro" appears to be a hapax legomenon. "Protocrustacean" isn't quite one, but it's close. The same goes for "frigly," which seems to be a euphemism for a euphemism; as the ad a few pages later puts it, whudafxup with that? Or perhaps Sanjay means "fragly." Come to think of it, "outshined" probably would have a much lower public profile without Soundgarden.

A little more seriously: Ballostro is a use-once-and-destroy sort of menace, and a newly invented character (or thing-from-another-world) is curious in the context of a project like 52 that's supposed to map the DC universe. It's sometimes maddening for new readers to keep running into ancient bits of continuity that they're "supposed to" know about to get what's going on; conversely, it's obviously a pleasure for experienced superhero readers to hit some reference to some long-ago story and think "oh, yeah: that one!" Even so, it's a mixed pleasure: comics that drink too deeply from the pulpy rivers of memory risk becoming nostalgia projects. I like the buzz of recognition, but I also like the shock of newness--when it's actually surprising. Which is another way of saying that Ballostro would've been a lot more effective if it were either a familiar concept or something worthy of repeated use: either way, there'd be more depth and history to it than "tentacle thingy." (And if somebody wants to point me at an Aquaman story where it appeared before, I will not only post the reference here, but leave this paragraph up as a badge of shame.)

What did work in this issue is the time-travel-paradox formula that never gets old--the one where you go into the past and change the future. That seems to be the deal with Booster: the information he's been getting from Skeets is about known historical disasters that he's gone on to prevent, and I bet a cascade of those could break the future something fierce. (What does it say about DC cosmology, though, that denying the documented truth of predestination "breaks time"? You could get yourself tied up into theological knots in that one in a hurry.) This time, of course, we see him actually causing the things he's declined to prevent (the carjacking and the blackout). And I see why the 52 writers have been saying they're enjoying writing the Booster scenes so much: he really is a petulant brat--the bitterness that comes off that first page is palpable--and it has to be fun to write the guy who always does the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Like I said, there are plenty of possibilities for this sort of plot--my favorite lately was this awesomely hilarious story (which has nothing to do with its cover), in which our heroes have to go back in time and make sure Abraham Lincoln gets assassinated on schedule. Another version of it you occasionally see is the one where the hero ends up fighting another version of himself. It's a decent assumption to make here--Supernova certainly seems to have it in for Booster in a personal way, not to mention that he's talking about "a genuine crisis." And either he's got some pretty advanced light/illusion powers or he's got teleportation powers ("I zapped it away"--yeah? where? and how did it get to midtown anyway?), but I'm starting to suspect the former. In which case, the monster may have been a bit of a setup anyway.

Also, I'm a little slow sometimes, but I think I'm now going to have to surrender to the theory everybody's been bringing up except me, about the Booster of 52 not being the same one who went home to the future during The OMAC Project. The evidence? Note the cybernetic patch the artists are careful to show us under the torn-away bit of Booster's right sleeve, before and after he goes boom. Note also that Booster lost his right arm hereabouts, got a cybernetic arm, and then later on made a deal with Monarch, in the course of which he uttered this deathless line, developed saliva strand syndrome, and got his arm grown back (in addition to turning into some kind of tentacle-monster--hmm). It looks like that's the time-period of the Booster we're dealing with--and it's also worth noting that we have yet another character who's come back from the dead here: Booster flatlined in this Waid-written issue, shortly after losing his arm.

(As a side note, does there seem to be a little motif of circles and rings in this series? Ralph's ring, the ring with the jailers' keys, Green Lantern's rings, the circles around the 52s on Rip Hunter's board...)

A solid origin for Steel--it'd have been nice to know a bit more about his armor, but maybe we aren't going to be seeing that any more now that he's Colossus instead of Iron Man. (We only get one panel of Silver Surfer Irons, fighting random robots, which maybe we'll actually see sometime.) It also appears that 52 is one of his "essential storylines"; perhaps it should get a chance to be demonstrably essential for him first? Curious that Luthor thought that powering up John Henry would mean "the end of Steel"; you'd think he'd just have poisoned him or something instead of making him stronger and "virtually indestructable" (sic).

More notes:

Pg. 1: I'd love to know what the "...als clause" in the contract is; it's also interesting to see that Kyle Rayner's lookalike signed the letter herself. Too bad that Booster's about to short out his special anti-perspective laptop. And does anyone want to suggest what "...EAK THUM..." is?

Pg. 2: Where did all of Booster's money go? And what's he doing living in the East Hope Hotel and eating out of a can Rorschach-style, anyway? ("Shorp. Lep.") He's still got at least two active endorsement deals, judging from his outfit.

Pg. 3: Ballostro's one of those great Cthulhu/Jim Woodring monsters, I see, with a color scheme a bit like the beastie from the end of Watchmen.

Pg. 4: "More questions." Dogs know it!

Pg. 7: I love those old-fashioned rings of old-fashioned keys that open both cell doors and handcuffs. And who's holding it in the final panel?

Pg. 8: Googling "atlantis aquaman" yields 185,000 hits, so Sanjay's Google-fu is very strong.

Pg. 9: Oh no! It's the Plummeting Head of Kal-L! Or is this a different statue from the one in #1?

Pg. 10: You know, if Booster really wanted to follow in Superman's path, he could've copped this pose. Failing that, there's always this pose. As long as he doesn't use Miracleman's car-throwing technique from this issue, though, everything's cool...

Pg. 16: Much as I like the theory that Supernova is the gentleman on the right, the speech pattterns don't fit.

Pg. 17: If you Micks Liquors, you're just going to get sick.

Pg. 19: Might there be some kind of problem with, I don't know, radioactive fallout? Note Clark's first-person plural... he's allied with Supernova, apparently.

Pg. 20: Flesh stripped away, bones and costume intact--even though the costume got ripped seven pages earlier. Something's amiss here.

Unrelatedly: some dude from Publishers Weekly Comics Week who's been hanging out with my family a lot interviewed me about 52 Pickup a few days ago. He says to remind everyone that subscriptions to PW Comics Week are free.