tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24045090157910000322024-03-12T19:25:07.703-07:00Rikdad's Comic ThoughtsRikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.comBlogger259125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-70011086263520017962022-04-26T09:31:00.001-07:002022-04-26T09:31:20.958-07:00The Death of the Justice League<p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It’s been done before, better. Much better.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Twenty years ago, Joe Kelly’s “<a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2015/10/retro-review-jla-top-5-obsidian-age.html">Obsidian Age</a>” arc gave us the death of the Justice League. The six-issue story, building upon many issues that preceded it, showed the Justice League being defeated and killed by another league of super-beings. The story was structured around two intertwined narrative threads that initially alternated issue by issue, odd-even, between the past and the present, with prophecy and the interleaved narrative challenging the reader to guess where things are going, and even where they’ve been. I have written about that story before and won’t try to reproduce here a tally of its merits, or even its faults, which surely exist.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Then today, there was this story, 2022’s <i>Justice League </i>#75, with “Death of the Justice League” emblazoned on the cover. Guess what happens inside? Spoiler alert: It’s the death of the Justice League. The cover needn’t have tipped you off, though, because DC’s promotion of the event has already detailed this, down to the fact that Black Adam would be the one survivor. So as you read, page by page, you know what is coming, exactly. There is no drama on any single panel of the issue. It doesn’t matter if Batman can get to Pariah’s machine to stop it (whatever that machine does). It doesn’t matter if Jon Stewart can summon a ring-powered army. It doesn’t matter if Green Arrow’s arrow does something. He will not be cooking chili as a celebratory dinner. We already know this. There is no drama.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In fact, I was at all points during this issue more certain about how it would end, and what would happen on the next page, than I often was about what was happening on the page I was actually reading. What does Pariah’s machine do? If the Dark Army isn’t fighting as themselves, what does that mean? When someone’s utterance is cut off mid-sentence, what were they trying to say? How can Aquaman and Aquawoman fight Doomsday fist-to-fist? These are details that I wanted to have clarified, but that never were. And they never mattered. Ultimately, Pariah had wave-your-hands-and-it-kills-Superman power. Why? Did he always have that? Did it come from his machine? Did the machine give him that power because Green Arrow failed to stop it? Or did that just not matter? This is the correct answer: None of it mattered. The Dark Army didn’t even actually do anything except fight the heroes to a draw for way too many pages of unimportant busy-ness on the page before someone waving their hands around did the one and only important event in the whole issue, and that was an event that we already knew was going to happen.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It was flimsy story telling that seemed like an imitation of better storytelling with not enough effort to make a pretense of being good storytelling.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Not only is the issue predictable, but so is this: As April 26 goes on, fan and professional reviews will appear online calling this a great issue. It will get ratings of 10/10, 9/10, 8/10, and perhaps 11/10. There will be false claims that this issue had drama and emotion, when it had zero of those. Reviewers will be impressed by the last cast of characters, even though there isn’t a single page worth of those characters exhibiting any personality. This was a visual spectacle, and in that, I will acknowledge the one thing that impressed me as interesting: The deaths of Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman visually echoed the death of Barry Allen in <i>Crisis on Infinite Earths</i>. their faces peeling away to bone, in a series of minipanels. The homage is not deep, but this act of borrowing, borrowing though it be, was imaginative.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“Pop will eat itself.” Andy Warhol said. Food looks a lot better going into the digestive tract than coming out. Anyone looking to have an engaging experience reading about the death of the Justice League today should put down today’s “new” <i>Justice League</i> #75 and pick up 2001-2002’s <i>Obsidian Age</i>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">I’m more interested in the source of the automatically-positive reviews than in anything Williamson put on the page. I suspect that it’s this: Positive reviews end up with higher click counts, and psychology’s study of classical conditioning tells us that a rewarded behavior will be repeated. Drama has been replaced by the presence of eyeballs on pages. It is mere gaze. Storytelling is dead. And that is the true death of the Justice League.</span> </p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-83330120282001402462022-01-05T20:02:00.001-08:002022-01-05T22:48:24.152-08:00Press Pause<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">I started this blog almost 13 years ago. It formed out of a few different motivations:</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">1) To continue the discussion that many of us had been having in DC Message Boards, where seemingly random deletions, bans, and uproars made some quality conversation just disappear. This was initially focused on Grant Morrison’s Batman run; I wish that some of the older discussions posted there could have been preserved.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">2) To reconsider the history of DC comics from the beginning. One of the first comic books I ever owned was a 1974 JLA-JSA meet-up, which was a confusing thing for a new reader! Those stories indicated that there was a vast, cosmic backstory of DC that I didn’t know and couldn’t possibly learn much about by reading new comics. It was only around 2008 that I really caught up on some of the oldest stories, which became fascinating for me in a sort of sociological sense, as Golden Age stories generally weren’t written for adults, but they presented me with an explanation for how DC’s characters began and became American mythology that later drew my admiration.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">3) To continue both of those “present” and “past” threads of discussion, breaking down new comics of interest to me (quite often, by Grant Morrison) and writing Retro Reviews of older works – sometimes old favorites of mine, sometimes as I was reading them for the first time – of particularly significant value.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">About four years ago, those two threads merged in my analysis of <i>Final Crisis</i>, a work that concluded only weeks before I began the blog, but that I didn’t feel ready to break down in subatomic detail until giving it obsessive levels of attention in late 2017. It was an enormously gratifying study for me, and felt like I took a bit of a risk there because I didn’t really have enough understanding to write the third part until after I’d already posted the first two parts.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Along the way, I took some considerable detours in topic, including the TV show <i>Mad Men</i>. I also have written quite a few drafts – even some extremely long and heavily-researched unpublished ones – that are sitting in my folders, so distant in my memory that I’d feel unqualified to finish them now.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It seems crass to be, in this online age, motivated by sheer numbers of clicks and likes, and I don’t want to convey that exact equation, but to be blunt: If I spend a good part of an hour working on a post for each person who eventually reads it, that feels like I’m speaking to an empty room. (E.g, if I spend 50 hours thinking about a post, then 153 people end up reading it.) And that’s how things are trending. I’m sure there are good reasons for this – there are reasons for everything. I could consider a shift in focus, spreading links in different places, but this is all meant to be fun. There are just about no DC titles that haven’t lost my interest at some point or another in the past few years and some top sellers have been aggressively off-putting to my taste. In a few cases, I’ve thrown down my money and held my nose while reading the issues of a pivotal event that I didn’t really like at all. In others, I’ve bought the first issue and regretted that I used my dollars to “vote” for creators creating something like that. Then I check online reviews and those works have 4.8-star ratings that tie <i>The Dark Knight Returns</i>. It’s hard for me to justify reading depressing, cluttered, subpar works in a life where good reading (viewing, etc.) material exists in overwhelming abundance.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Some comics that others have enjoyed have always – for decades now – seemed too inconsequential for me. Last year, I binge-watched <i>Friday Night Lights</i> and felt like it did an excellent job of something that so, so many mentor-and-sidekick comics had always done poorly. The mentor gives the sidekick an inspirational 30-second speech and then they’re ready to fight super criminals? Maybe someone reads that and finds it exciting. I find that it’s trying, with a pointed lack of effort, to do something that <i>Friday Night Lights</i> did with real effort and real conviction.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And increasingly, some of the news about the comics industry has been hard to stomach. A century ago, Proust advised us, “Never meet your heroes.” Well, that really undermines the point of a genre that is specifically about heroes. And there’s probably nothing in the news now that isn’t in a careful reading of several decades ago. Maybe Fredric Wertham hit the nail on the head.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">2022 will make 50 years since I first walked out of a “news” store with a new comic book in my hand. It’s been a good run and it’s not over. For all I know, I’ll soon be strongly motivated to blog about some new comic book. But right now, I’m not sure what that comic book will be.</p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-23347686585629504102021-12-30T11:19:00.003-08:002021-12-30T11:19:47.733-08:00Warworld Saga – Then and Now<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgyLVtQSxgGkEMnBAN_BEtv0wXQY1TuHE69fPrbx3rdjwB4JGKv1RrZrrmgkN3H59wZjbOQxqlrGkzmynrFTnm_iaxWT1hLW8ljpBfZrdgz8wcHUi22Thsjm4EMthiVLDJqL_yVLxjkhe_M5JMFUeIra3xUHzbGds-jZwgfJn5vjGXLKdBtAzv1wtz33g=s2922" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1092" data-original-width="2922" height="120" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgyLVtQSxgGkEMnBAN_BEtv0wXQY1TuHE69fPrbx3rdjwB4JGKv1RrZrrmgkN3H59wZjbOQxqlrGkzmynrFTnm_iaxWT1hLW8ljpBfZrdgz8wcHUi22Thsjm4EMthiVLDJqL_yVLxjkhe_M5JMFUeIra3xUHzbGds-jZwgfJn5vjGXLKdBtAzv1wtz33g=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br />Superman has been here before. Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s emotion, darkly lavish <i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">Warworld Saga</i><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"> has Superman facing a time in his life that he’s never seen before, but the setting is familiar. As the saga reaches its midgame, it’s an interesting time to look back at a previous epic-length story that covered a bit of this ground before, how they compare, and how they differ.</span><p></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In 1989, the creative minds behind Superman took a big gamble, moving the hero off-planet for an unprecedented span of time. That storyline, aptly referred to by an early issue’s title, “Superman in Space,” had Superman serve a self-exile from Earth for a whopping 13 issues, plus a bit of the issues before and after. Crossing three titles, it was a full six months in which Superman was not seen on our planet in his solo books, years before the death storyline, before any comparable story had removed a signature DC character from their main setting for so long.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The relevance of that story to Johnson’s current one is in the time they both spend on Mongul’s Warworld. While “Superman in Space” was a much longer storyline than this one, it devoted considerable prelude to many preliminary events and adventures before getting to Warworld, a place first introduced in a 1980 multi-issue arc in <i>DC Comics Presents</i>. It also gave large parts of its issues – including one entire issue with no appearances of Superman at all – to the supporting players back in Metropolis, developing those characters in a way that set up the subsequent Triangle Era’s storytelling that made Superman just the lead character in an ensemble cast.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In the early issues of Superman’s exile, he teleported from one venue to another, visiting no fewer than six different planets, spending some time in three different spaceships, and otherwise menaced while in deep space by alien amoebae, an asteroid bombardment, and one star that he got too close to. Some of these were full-fledged adventures, others more momentary experiences to get the man reflecting on his past sins and his traumas. In the big picture, what that storyline did was take the post-reboot farmboy Superman and give him just a pinch of the space-faring worldliness (universeliness?) of his Bronze Age self. It was a success for developing the character, though certainly a failure of his plan to remove himself from any situations where he needed to handle his powers responsibly.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Almost half of the story, however, involved Warworld. Quite unlike the premise of Johnson’s story, 1989’s Superman was taken there alone and against his will, picked up while unconscious by the pilots of a scavenging spaceship and auctioned off as cargo.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">At that point, however, the stories to a considerable extent converge in theme. Superman awakes to find his fellow captives looking to pilfer items of value from his person. His powerful physique leads his captors to choose him as a contestant to fight in Warworld’s combat arena. And he finds, among Warworld’s captives, a surprising and important link to Krypton’s past. Though a mere captive, he becomes a symbol of resistance and hope that upends the social order of Warworld from the bottom up. These are all shared between the 1989 story and <i>Warworld Saga.</i> For that matter, those themes are mostly shared by the 1960 historical fiction film <i>Spartacus</i>. And if you want to trace these things further back, there’s the 1950 film <i>Ben-Hur</i> and the actual slave revolt in Ancient Rome. Perhaps equally stirring, the screenwriter of <i>Spartacus </i>was the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, and the public success of that film helped to end blacklisting, a triumphant irony of which Trumbo was surely aware.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDI20DpBO7eo6a9f7XMWIeO8SWsBHBgD-0aKbO6KQue2UFIYBfFgS87ZNlggFmXRIKwED-1JsBOqIloRjkU7IGjfROphkvxYEs4NvZ1EF-Zgf5SbZ9EXyqZqN-RwKeG0hR5JenuXlstuzCGOvdNyoAqlY_qPtt1733oyKPwi8XrRAkEF9Ty25nc0UseA=s2360" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="2360" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDI20DpBO7eo6a9f7XMWIeO8SWsBHBgD-0aKbO6KQue2UFIYBfFgS87ZNlggFmXRIKwED-1JsBOqIloRjkU7IGjfROphkvxYEs4NvZ1EF-Zgf5SbZ9EXyqZqN-RwKeG0hR5JenuXlstuzCGOvdNyoAqlY_qPtt1733oyKPwi8XrRAkEF9Ty25nc0UseA=s320" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Warzoons Scavenge Superman, 1989 and 2021</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And so, some of the moments and images of the 1989 story are being repeated now. This is neither borrowing nor homage but sequence. Warworld was characterized a certain way in the past, and so was Superman, and so the stories have to cover some common ground. Not every reader of <i>Warworld Saga</i> has read the 1989 Superman titles, nor will many who have remember them 32 years later with crystal clarity. But revisiting the older story is worth it, to see how they align but more importantly how they don’t.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The 1989 Superman was a man who exiled himself because his psychological vulnerabilities made him recognize that he was a danger to the people of Earth. His values, sense of self, and identify were still being shaped. He was near the beginning of a career in which a Kansas farmboy was way out of his element. It was only in issue #22 of <i>Superman</i>, vol 2 – John Byrne’s last issue – in which his execution of the Pocket Universe Phantom Zoners began Superman’s cycle of uncertainty and regret that led to his self-exile in the hands of other creators. Along the way, he suffered a rather disturbing psychological breakdown, operating under a different identity, unbeknownst to himself, during a fugue state. Imagine how you’d view a local police officer who did that – probably not someone whom you’d wish to see remain on the job. In 2021’s context, for his earlier mistakes, he would already have been cancelled. (In fairness, Superman was beset by extraordinary hardship, psychic invasion, and actual voodoo before breaking down in the way that he did.) 1989’s Superman was unsure of himself, what sort of code of conduct he should follow, whether or not he had the needed self control, and moreover was ignorant even of the facts of his Kryptonian upbringing, with those prerecorded messages from Jor-El only going so far. This was a Superman far from the super-capable demigod of the immediately preceding pre-Crisis era. The Superman in Space story of 1989 sought to take that flawed hero and rebuild him, taking him a few steps back towards the demigod Superman of 1985. This was a story of redemption and growth through trial, missteps, and improvement.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In these respects, the 2021 Superman comes to Warworld on completely different terms. He is in some ways even more self-possessed than the 1985 Superman ever was. He knows exactly who he is, and he came to Warworld not by accident but on a mission. He came not alone but with a team. He came not turned inwards on his self but on the needs of others. He may have miscalculated – badly – on the matter of tactics, but he hasn’t wavered for a millisecond on the intentions of his mission. That’s not where the 1989 Superman began. It was where, at the story’s end, he arrived.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjxSvaG3paK10Yy2XQRbImc4LaooequQjmVjWu106cCnqT4GY-DPjGcH6RvCVvRa8Cj1MS_XFWParJJi1RAOroltts2n2sOjpdUgVqH9GLu3qjbPaksc0snW-a8jn00gwF0PkfmIrVXBBASryDyo2ou8JUMtNCLenXoB39Wm0qRZWE1VBimWbw1n1DU2w=s1094" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1094" data-original-width="894" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjxSvaG3paK10Yy2XQRbImc4LaooequQjmVjWu106cCnqT4GY-DPjGcH6RvCVvRa8Cj1MS_XFWParJJi1RAOroltts2n2sOjpdUgVqH9GLu3qjbPaksc0snW-a8jn00gwF0PkfmIrVXBBASryDyo2ou8JUMtNCLenXoB39Wm0qRZWE1VBimWbw1n1DU2w=s320" width="261" /></a></div><br /><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">To sum up succinctly the 1989’s story on Warworld, Superman was thrown into the arena to fight as a gladiator. He won all his matches, but refused to kill his vanquished opponents. (This marked an evolution from his execution of the Phantom Zoners and a rebuilding of his pre-Crisis vow never to kill.) Finally, he beat Warworld’s previous champion, Draaga (<i>Rocky IV’</i>s Ivan Drago, clearly the name’s inspiration, was then only a few years in the past). When he refused to kill Draaga, Superman drew the wrath of Mongul, who entered the ring to kill Superman, which was a massive political error. By violating the strict rules of the arena, Mongul initiated a campaign of unrest against himself. He also had mixed results in fighting Superman, as their three skirmishes in and out of the ring gave them each a close win over the other, then a result ambiguous to the characters but not to the readers when Mongul attempted to kill Superman with a ray blast from his amulet, but Superman was teleported away at the last instant, thus seeming to have died as far as Mongul knew. The two never met within the story again. Draaga himself fought Mongul and ultimately everyone fled the stage of the story – Mongul, overthrown, left to heal his wounds. Warworld itself teleported to some other part of the universe before Superman could return to enforce a revolution.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And in the story’s significant subplot, Superman learns a great deal of Krypton’s history from a Cleric who was on the planet long before the time of Jor-El. The Cleric was himself not a native of Krypton (enforcing the concept in 1989 that Superman was the last surviving Kryptonian). However, there was substantial backstory about Krypton’s evolution and how it went through dirtier and more sordid eras in its past before becoming the sterile world of Byrne’s – and Donner’s – visions. This also introduced the Eradicator artifact, a sort of power ring with a surly mind of its own, which has become an enduring feature in Superman’s storylines. It is intriguing that <i>Warworld Saga</i> also includes Kryptonians who come from a time before Jor-El, suggesting a role that they may play in changing Superman’s concept of his own origins, like the Cleric did in 1989.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiU4iFHtujYJJdNaoLH_omtbm2QvCeKTC56qTqiLIciChHZX9G7OoSLOlthjyaeI7Tmu89r0WMzdxmc9KWmqOifCT5dDQkS9uCdEHazivsB2UqaliQ8WTYSdHC4NYU-1GNwbygHkxnblC8VjZbHiq4A9z13AETSxeXBqmCkhUiQibNVY5aDIaIFqRJTnQ=s1364" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1364" data-original-width="644" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiU4iFHtujYJJdNaoLH_omtbm2QvCeKTC56qTqiLIciChHZX9G7OoSLOlthjyaeI7Tmu89r0WMzdxmc9KWmqOifCT5dDQkS9uCdEHazivsB2UqaliQ8WTYSdHC4NYU-1GNwbygHkxnblC8VjZbHiq4A9z13AETSxeXBqmCkhUiQibNVY5aDIaIFqRJTnQ=s320" width="151" /></a></div><br /><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It’s a pleasure and informative to re-read first the 1980 <i>DC Comics Presents </i>story that introduced Mongul and Warworld, and then the 1989 story before picking up <i>Warworld Saga</i>. Seen one way, it is one long ongoing story, representing three of the most essential of many Superman–Mongul stories. In Superman’s current stay on Warworld as in 1989, he is commanded to kill for Mongul’s pleasure, and as in 1989, he refuses. This commonality across the decades is true despite the fact that the continuity has rebooted, with the pre-Crisis Supergirl an essential part of the first story, and the Byrne characterization of Superman being an essential element of the second. There are little winks in Johnson’s writing to the past, such as Mongul declaring that he will go conquering “flying his cape from our spear,” just a little less brutal than the previous Mongul dreaming, in Alan Moore’s “For the Man Who Has Everything,” that he will place Superman’s head “upon a spike and goes out to trample a world, carrying it before him, his hideous standard.”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But, beyond the shifts in continuity – the tweaks in the biographical details and history of the DC Universe – one sees an incredible increase in sophistication from 1980 to 1989 and from 1989 to 2021. Johnson’s first remarkable innovation in this story was when the Phaelosians conveyed that they saw their chains as an honor – a culture of slavery that runs so deep, is so bleakly enforced, that its own victims embrace their subjugation, calling it “wearing iron.” To the same effect, the refrain, “So say the dead” shows Warworld’s inhabitants perversely celebrating the premature and brutal death that awaits many of them. Johnson writes dialogue to the character’s mental world, with Chaytil referring to Superman as “The master of Starro! The master of Darkseid!” and in so doing says much about how existing DC characters are part of the culture of one another, and makes some interesting choices in doing so (e.g., Darkseid but not Brainiac). Likewise, Johnson’s characterization of Manchester Black, of Mac, of Midnight – these sparkle.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I have often reflected on how so many great works from DC emerged in the years after 1985, and set a high bar of creativity and quality that has not often been matched or exceeded. However, looking at this one story – this one place and setting, comparable situations – across 41 years, it’s clear that the monthlies now are capable of greater things than one of the better innovative stories from those very years just after <i>DKR </i>and<i> Watchmen</i>. Even if we suspect that we know where the plot may be going – that Superman will end Mongul’s rule – everything we’ve read so far suggests that the way Johnson gets his story gets to its end will be a pleasure to read.</p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-50605874734497326162021-12-07T04:53:00.000-08:002021-12-07T04:53:11.998-08:00Batman and The Case of the Stolen Story<p> <b style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">The Shadow of the Bat</b></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sCinKjta5JI/Ya9UtarW7wI/AAAAAAAABaw/IWOYpgmz7ZMgBBIZX7frDTnSmPKKtAmEQCNcBGAsYHQ/s499/theshadow9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="348" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sCinKjta5JI/Ya9UtarW7wI/AAAAAAAABaw/IWOYpgmz7ZMgBBIZX7frDTnSmPKKtAmEQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/theshadow9.jpg" width="223" /></a></div><br />Before Batman, before Superman, before comic books at all, there was The Shadow. And there were many pulp series, comprising text without illustration, publishing stories quite similar to those also heard on the radio. Some years back, the revelation broke that the very first Batman story, from <i>Detective </i>#27, borrowed – heavily, it turns out – from an earlier story featuring The Shadow. This was revealed by brief comments from the Batman story’s writer, Bill Finger, and then explored more deeply by Will Murray and Anthony Tollin in a special issue, <i>The Shadow</i> #9, back in 2008.<p></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It’s worth beginning by making a careful distinction: Certainly many prior stories and ongoing serials helped inspire Batman as a character, as a concept. In the aforementioned issue of <i>The Shadow</i>, Murray and Tollin, in two separate essays, break this history down in impressive fashion, naming some obscure pulp stories that were available to Bill Finger and Bob Kane when Batman was being formulated as an idea. Murray and Tollin identify about six possible connections between certain 1930s pulp crime dramas and Batman; early Batman writer Jerry Robinson, penning a piece in the same volume, added more based on his in-person experience with the first years of Batman stories, and his knowledge of what he, Kane, and Finger had been reading.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It’s two different matters, though, to say that a character was inspired (or borrowed or stolen) versus to say that a story was inspired (or borrowed or stolen). In terms of defining the character either as we know him now, or even as readers knew him in the early 1940s, that first story isn’t particularly significant; it’s simply one story of many, and it easily could be shuffled into some other location in the first year’s worth of Batman stories, or omitted entirely, and the character doesn’t come across any differently. Without that first six-page story in 1939, Batman would still be Batman. So, we are not discussing here whether that story by itself robbed the entire idea of Batman from the creators behind The Shadow. The point under discussion here is if that particular story was lifted from an earlier story, and there is no need for the “if” – it certainly was.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Anyone who reads both of the stories will see the similarity; Murray and Tollin spend, combined, little more than a paragraph discussing the point. My ambition here is to flesh out the details and itemize exactly what was borrowed and what wasn’t. In doing so, we will find out, first, why the first Batman story creates such a strange and relatively insubstantial impression and, second, that perhaps the greatest thing borrowed from that Shadow story was not a few pages of Batman plot but some compelling details crucial in defining the Joker, who did not appear until nearly a year later.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>A Tale of Two Tales</b></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">To lay out the basic facts, the 1939 Batman story “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” (CCS, for short) obviously borrows from Theodore Tinsley’s 1936 The Shadow story “Partners of Peril” (POP); nobody could read both and fail to see the strong similarity. As Murray and Tollin note, POP even likens The Shadow – twice – to a bat. However, CCS is not simply a retelling of the entirely of POP, because that is not possible: POP is much longer than CCS, at about 60 pages of text as opposed to 6 of comic panels. POP has far more plot and detail than could conceivably be packed into the shorter format; POP has many more characters, many more scenes, and much more intricacy than CCS. And so, it’s not the case that CCS does or could contain all of the plot of POP; rather, essentially all of CCS is selected from the details of POP. Moreover, the selection of which details are borrowed and which are not was not very carefully made, and the comprehensibility CCS suffers considerably as a result.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UAAz763PXgc/Ya9ZGxMvI8I/AAAAAAAABbo/JMqTi5yBdIAkE4RufKmi3bC_BKaf9WxiQCNcBGAsYHQ/s938/detective%2B27%2Bgordon.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="740" data-original-width="938" height="252" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UAAz763PXgc/Ya9ZGxMvI8I/AAAAAAAABbo/JMqTi5yBdIAkE4RufKmi3bC_BKaf9WxiQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/detective%2B27%2Bgordon.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">That said, we may construct a breakdown of how closely CCS is borrowed from POP. CCS has a total of eight named characters, while five others (presuming that several brief appearances of a policeman represent the same policeman) have an extremely minimal quantity of dialogue. The eight with substantial presence are the following:</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• Four businessmen</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• Batman, appearing both in costume and as Bruce Wayne</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• Commissioner Gordon</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• The son of one businessman</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• The assistant of one other businessman</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This cast corresponds fairly well to the most prominent characters in POP, with some modifications: The “son” character in CCS belongs to the first businessman in the story, whereas the “son” in POP belongs to the third businessman we see. And, Gordon in CCS is a sort of amalgam of POP’s Commissioner Weston and a separate character, an ace detective of the police department named Joe Cardona. Some of the many additional characters in POP include a niece of one businessman, many faithful assistants to The Shadow, and an entire gang of armed thugs who participate in several action scenes that as part of a massive red herring of a side plot corresponding to nothing whatsoever found in CCS.</p><br /><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The plot of CCS boils down to this: Four businessmen are partners in the ownership of a chemical company. One of them decides that he can profit by killing the other three, eventually owning the entire company without needing to pay for the other three-quarter shares. In his effort to kill them one by one, he succeeds in killing the first two before Batman intercedes. In the end, Batman spares the life of the third partner, subdues the evil businessman’s assistant and a final struggle claims the life of the villain, who falls into a tank of acid. As far as that goes, it’s a simple plot, and a sensible one, as far as people who are willing to kill for large sums of money go. Nearly everything in this paragraph describes, equally well, POP, except that in POP, the assistant is killed, the evil businessman is arrested, and the hero is The Shadow rather than Batman. Moreover, the “son” in CCS is the son of the first businessman and is briefly put forth as a suspect for his father’s murder; the son in POP is the son of the third businessman and appears throughout the story, sometimes as a possible culprit and nearly becomes, more than once, a victim of the killers.</p><br /><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l0KmjHKuoXw/Ya9XSKWgMoI/AAAAAAAABbQ/6sRMNOtzR0QSUBzIKvF3dYPB79Kx89nwACNcBGAsYHQ/s1090/detective%2B27%2Bplot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="738" data-original-width="1090" height="217" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l0KmjHKuoXw/Ya9XSKWgMoI/AAAAAAAABbQ/6sRMNOtzR0QSUBzIKvF3dYPB79Kx89nwACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/detective%2B27%2Bplot.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Batman explains the plot of Tinsley's story</td></tr></tbody></table>Now, with the greater length of POP, we can imagine adding in the other elements of the plot, primarily the involvement of a gang who is trying to steal one of the products of the chemical company. While the story unfolds, the reader is uncertain if the murders were committed by the gang, who are in fact willing to kill if that helps them achieve their ends, but as it happens, they did not commit the two murders. The uncertainty the reader has throughout the story regarding the role of the gang, the involvement of one businessman’s niece, and many action sequences in which The Shadow and his helpers cross paths with the fourth businessman’s thugs and/or the gang is what makes POP a story that engages the reader for over an hour while CCS is a trifle that flits by in a few minutes.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This is the relationship between the two: A long story published in 1936 has a central plot and some side plots; a shorter story published in 1939 keeps the central plot, changing it only slightly, while eliminating the side plots. Case closed?</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Left in the Shadow…</b></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Around 2008, I read many comic book stories that had been published between 1935 and 1942. The first stories featuring Superman, Batman, and various members of the Justice Society were of great interest to me, and as “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” is such a quick read, and has such a central place in comics history, I read it many times. These readings left me with a minor but general sense of befuddlement that I might never have expressed if it weren’t for the fact that Grant Morrison put the same idea into writing. In their book <i>Supergods</i>, Morrison says of CCS that it has “a bizarrely complex plot…” “It’s not a great story, and no matter how often I read it, I’m still left slightly in the dark as to what it was about.”</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Several Golden Age stories give me a similar impression, that the logic doesn’t quite hold up, and I suppose that when it comes down to brass tacks, the writers were poorly paid, probably hustling through a chore to get their rent money, and had a juvenile readership to entertain. With the artwork providing more of the entertainment than in all-text adventure stories, the comic book plots didn’t need to stand up to the scrutiny of academics with advanced degrees, so we can explain the confusion, perhaps, on writers who were simply careless and had no great incentive to be otherwise.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">There are indeed gaping plot holes in CCS, as there are in other Golden Age comic book stories. That said, the extent of the plot holes and illogic in “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” exceed even that which was normal at the time. To list just a few:</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• The killer warns each victim, before the attempt on his life, with threats. There is no apparent reason to do this. The killer simply needs for the three men to be dead, and that could only be easier if there were no advance warning. Without such threats, the plan probably would have succeeded.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• Ordinarily, a series of murders that result in one person profiting would make the killer’s identity obvious, so the story asserts that the partnership was in fact secret, but offers no reason why it would have been secret.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• When Batman bursts into the lab where the third businessman is nearly killed, he enters a glass dome where the man is trapped, then plugs a vent through which gas escapes, then breaks the glass to free them. This is a strangely complicated death trap and it’s even stranger that Batman, who enters the room at the last moment, would understand the mechanism and how to defeat it.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• When the villain’s assistant subdues the third businessman, the assistant announces, “Soon, I’ll control everything!” It is unexplained why an assistant would believe that <b>he</b> would control everything, and this is at odds with the subsequent exposition indicating that the fourth businessman, the assistant’s boss, is the one who would control everything.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">When one reads POP, one finds explanations for most of these plot holes.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bgsq25hj4Xs/Ya9YS_xSzDI/AAAAAAAABbg/SCuzr3OLSUUTGiWTOOEoWxPMxqMTX1OiQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1078/detective%2B27%2Bgas.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="722" data-original-width="1078" height="214" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bgsq25hj4Xs/Ya9YS_xSzDI/AAAAAAAABbg/SCuzr3OLSUUTGiWTOOEoWxPMxqMTX1OiQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/detective%2B27%2Bgas.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gas as a weapon doesn't even make sense here</td></tr></tbody></table></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• The contracts, in POP, stipulate that the fourth partner is buying the company from the other three over a period of ten years, but must pay the same total sum even if one or two of the three die during that time. Therefore, when there is a threat to any of the three, it makes the others who are being bought out the likely suspects. The fourth ends up expecting to profit only because <b>all</b> of the other three are to be killed. [Why anyone would agree to such a contract, that robs one’s heirs of the payments, is never explained in POP, and is seemingly present only to drive the plot forward.] Therefore, the death threats towards the first two businessmen direct suspicion, at least temporarily, to the third victim rather than to the actual killer. In POP, then, the death threats serve a purpose. In CCS, they are counterproductive.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• In POP, The Shadow is present, but hidden, during a very lengthy scene in which the assistant explains how the death trap works. This scene, and the poison gas in general, drive an aforementioned side plot involving poison gas being developed as a weapon for the military and a gang that wishes to steal its formula. Therefore, in POP, there is a reason for this complex apparatus to exist, and the Shadow knows how to deactivate it. Batman, barging in suddenly from outdoors, should not have that information. A fragmented description of the death trap is just a weird digression from the plot and the whole story would make more sense if the assistant or the fourth businessman simply tried to kill the third businessman by more conventional means.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">• In POP, the assistant is for many pages offered as the most likely identity of the killer, and the reader is given reason to believe that the fourth businessman – the assistant’s boss – is to be yet another victim after the first three are killed. It’s a plot twist that comes after the assistant is dead when The Shadow reveals that the fourth businessman sought to frame his assistant as the killer of the other three. Therefore, the assistant has an important role in the narrative of POP, but in CCS is just a bizarre distraction.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Bill Finger not only took his plot from POP, but also took details indiscriminately from the longer story, which had lengthy exposition explaining some of its stranger aspects, such that Finger’s story, which includes certain details but no explanations, ends up almost nonsensical. In a better and tighter story, Finger could have kept the details of the contracts that offered a reason for the killer to issue threats to the businessmen. Further, he could have simplified the death threat to the third man from poison gas to something more conventional, and eliminated the assistant, who plays no useful purpose in the story that the villainous businessman himself couldn’t have performed. The haphazard inclusion of certain details from POP is precisely what makes the story, as Morrison notes, bizarrely complex, and hard to absorb. It certainly would be a better and tighter story with a few simplifications. We can say now with confidence that the eventual success of Batman was not hindered by the weakness of his first story, but this helps explain why that first story did not go on to become a staple for later writers to reference in loving homage.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before</b></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">While the above lays out the relationship between POP and CCS, it was another observation, coming as early as POP’s first page, which struck me earlier, and has perhaps never been noted before. Perhaps the most vivid match between POP and a Batman story is not with May 1939’s <i>Detective</i> #27, but with 1940’s <i>Batman </i>#1, and this detail does not reside only in a Golden Age comic book, but was also adapted, as a significant piece of Batman lore, into a memorable scene in 2008’s <i>The Dark Knight</i>. In fact, the character whose schtick is most directly borrowed from POP is not Batman but the Joker.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>While Anthony Tollin states, “there is no concrete evidence to suggest that Tinsley’s stories influenced the development of DC Comics’ Joker,” there is overwhelming evidence that the same story already discussed here influenced the first Joker story, if not the character’s overall concept. Less than a year after Finger borrowed extensively from Tinsley’s POP for the plot and many story elements for the first Batman story, he went on to borrow many plot elements for the first Joker story – more than could conceivably be a coincidence.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">While Jerry Robinson was the creator of the Joker, and his comments printed in <i>The Shadow </i>#9 go into some detail about previous pulp stories that may have provided inspiration for Robinson, his own reflections indicate that he did not write the first Joker story. Instead, he conceived of the character, and then, to his disappointment, Bill Finger was given scripting duties for the first Joker story, which opened the series of stories that appeared in <i>Batman</i> #1. And we already know that Finger read POP and felt free to borrow from it without limitation.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i>Batman </i>#1 contains both the first <b>and</b> second Joker stories, which also happen to be the second and fourth stories with Dick Grayson. (Hugo Strange and Catwoman serve as the villains in two stories that appear between the two Joker stories.) The first of those untitled Joker stories has the following plot: On three separate occasions, the Joker breaks into a public radio broadcast to issue a threat against a prominent man. In each case, the Joker names an exact time later the same evening at which the man will be killed. In the first two instances, the victim is a wealthy man and the threat also specifies a robbery that will take place; in the third case, the threat is leveled at a judge who had previously sent the Joker to prison. All three of these attacks proceed exactly as the Joker predicts, but he is followed by Batman and Robin after killing the judge. After tussles between the heroes and the villain prove inconclusive, the Joker heads off the same night to commit another robbery (apparently, he made this threat to Robin off-camera). During this fourth attempted crime, he is stopped and apprehended by Batman.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In its overarching structure, this story is only a little like POP: There are four prominent men, threats, and killings, but the main plot is different. Unlike in POP, there is no mystery regarding the identity of the culprit, and no major mystery regarding motive, as the robberies serve as their own motivation, and the Joker has a grievance against the judge. (There is no apparent motive for the Joker to kill the first two men aside from his twisted desire to kill.)</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">However, the first crime in the first Joker story is quite specifically similar to the first murder in POP. All of the following similarities apply:</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">1) The crime is threatened in advance.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">2) The time named in the threat is midnight.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">3) The victim is a wealthy man.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">4) The victim goes to the police for protection.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">5) The police go to the man’s home and provide what seems like overwhelming protection.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">6) Nonetheless, the crime is committed at the threatened time.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">7) The cause of death is poisoning, but there is no apparent source of poison.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">8) In both cases, the poison was introduced to the home long in advance.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">9) The poison causes the dead man’s face to contort horribly.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">10) After the man is dead, the police open a safe in the room and find that something was stolen.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">To be thorough, there are some differences between the two scenes.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">1) POP is a whodunit; the Joker identifies himself (though with that alias) before the crime.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">2) In POP, the weapon is a poisoned cigar which the killer is confident will be smoked just before midnight; the Joker poisoned the man directly (somehow) long before the threat and the poison (implausibly) acts only very suddenly after a delay with pinpoint precision.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">3) In POP, the death is threatened by midnight and occurs two minutes beforehand.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">4) The man’s disfigurement in POP is withered and grotesque; the Joker’s poison creates – here, for the absolute first time – a ghastly smile.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">5) The motive for the killing is unclear in POP, which is essential to the criminal’s hope of evading suspicion. The Joker robs the man’s safe, and that also had been performed before the threat was made.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MoJXACWvkvk/Ya9WIpVXRII/AAAAAAAABbI/hyhg6pmQ1D04zmfTjnez5X8w9hkugv1zQCNcBGAsYHQ/s818/joker%2Bbatman%2B1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="818" data-original-width="464" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MoJXACWvkvk/Ya9WIpVXRII/AAAAAAAABbI/hyhg6pmQ1D04zmfTjnez5X8w9hkugv1zQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/joker%2Bbatman%2B1.png" width="182" /></a></div>To put the whole matter in contrast, take a look at the first Sandman story from <i>Adventure Comics</i> #40, scripted by Gardner Fox in 1939. In this story, the Tarantula threatens to kidnap a wealthy actress, and her home receives heavy police protection, and yet the kidnapping takes place anyway, baffling the investigators. (Besides Wesley Dodds, who comes up with the correct explanation in a few seconds.) This story may also have been advised by knowledge of POP, as it matches similarities 1, 4, 5, and 6 from the above list. Then again, maybe some of those plot elements were tropes that had been floated about in the noir world of the time. It would take a lot more research to work that out. However, ten similarities are a lot more than four, and in my mind there’s no doubt that Finger lifted from Tinsley’s story again, when we already know that the author of the later story had previously done exactly that on another occasion.<p></p><br /><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In the initial Joker story, the similarities wane, though don’t end, after the first crime. One more detail perhaps also taken from POP, in that the weapons used in the Joker’s second crime included “a strange gas,” which is how the villains attempt the third murder in POP (after the second involves electrocution).</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PD2QaHZ5DB8/Ya9VxBSn_uI/AAAAAAAABbA/D3CrJVp04G42ZCTPYLykE_bYYvKOb9ptQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1240/MyCard_The_Joker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="775" data-original-width="1240" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PD2QaHZ5DB8/Ya9VxBSn_uI/AAAAAAAABbA/D3CrJVp04G42ZCTPYLykE_bYYvKOb9ptQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/MyCard_The_Joker.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>What binds the first Joker story and POP is not the overall structure so much as the motif presented during that first crime – a threat is made in advance, giving the villain an air of invincibility when the police are unable to prevent it despite the advance warning. Continuing throughout Finger’s first Joker story and into the second, this motif is repeated again and again, with the threat occurring in all nine of the Joker attacks in those two stories, and poisons leading to the distorted face occurring in all but the two of them that Batman prevents. These two motifs become almost definitional of the Joker not only in 1940 but to the present day, from the most obscure monthly comics of decades past to the global prominence of <i>The Dark Knight</i> movie and its billion-dollar earnings.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6Y6weQ7dcx0/Ya9XiS2HnZI/AAAAAAAABbY/WYZ7kAtldqYNd5DnOIeAH1ueIR4JrO76QCNcBGAsYHQ/s756/detective%2B27%2Bend.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="524" data-original-width="756" height="222" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6Y6weQ7dcx0/Ya9XiS2HnZI/AAAAAAAABbY/WYZ7kAtldqYNd5DnOIeAH1ueIR4JrO76QCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/detective%2B27%2Bend.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So, I would suggest that the most significant legacy of Bill Finger’s casual approach to lifting details from Theodore Tinsley’s "Partners of Peril" was in the creation of the Joker’s <i>modus operandi</i>, which established comics and movies created over the years right up to the present, and sure to continue onward, and not the previously-revealed theft of the threadbare plot of the six pages of CCS. A bit over a decade ago, comics historians and creators lobbied for Bill Finger to receive credit as at least a co-creator of Batman; however much this may be true for the concept of Batman, some stories themselves and the concept of the Joker owe more than a little to the ideas of Theodore Tinsley. And this closes the case of the stolen story.<br /></p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-12082168517981366362021-11-16T10:13:00.002-08:002021-11-16T10:13:48.376-08:00Jon Kent: Man of Tomorrow?<p>They married 58 years after they first met. Superman and Lois Lane certainly had a long courtship, so it’s not surprising that they took another 19 years before having their first child.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lmFbchJ4J4w/YZPzdm3XB3I/AAAAAAAABac/NOWdTIgVhpMGjpZJyNzHNtZdyN1L6pwHACNcBGAsYHQ/s960/superman-lois-lane-wedding-40th-anniversay-display.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="960" height="167" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lmFbchJ4J4w/YZPzdm3XB3I/AAAAAAAABac/NOWdTIgVhpMGjpZJyNzHNtZdyN1L6pwHACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/superman-lois-lane-wedding-40th-anniversay-display.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>For decades and decades, the status quo of Superman and Lois Lane turned so slowly you might have thought it was going backwards, and in fact, sometimes it did go backwards. They had fake weddings, imaginary story weddings, weddings on alternate Earths. In one line of stories, Superman had a son whom we saw and a wife who seemed to be Lois but whose back was always to the camera. They had a son on the last page of a famous imaginary story, an adopted son who was written out of history, had Jon Kent in a reality that was written out of history, and there were so many stories whose reality was considered to be imaginary or not, or hinted to be imaginary or not that even a DC editor couldn’t possibly keep track of which stories were asserted when to be real.<p></p><p>For over half a century, writers made Superman into the ultimate bachelor wary of commitment, and even now that he’s definitely married with a son, if you wanted to collect the issues where revealing his identity to Lois, the engagement, marriage, and birth occurred, you’d end up with a curiously thick stack where those events happened, then were altered or revised. However, if you want a quick summary of the lifetime that never actually unfolded in a single version of continuity, there’s an 11-panel spread in <i>Action Comics</i> #976 that gives you the latest story of how Clark and Lois met, married, and had a child. Then the way that their son grew up in space, on an alternate Earth, and in the future is another story or two.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-smtDRzbOfTA/YZPyc71-NbI/AAAAAAAABaU/5ZstB-UkPocJD3PS5q3OdL_e4S1dtVHdACNcBGAsYHQ/s2006/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-11-16%2Bat%2B10.03.08%2BAM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1554" data-original-width="2006" height="248" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-smtDRzbOfTA/YZPyc71-NbI/AAAAAAAABaU/5ZstB-UkPocJD3PS5q3OdL_e4S1dtVHdACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-11-16%2Bat%2B10.03.08%2BAM.png" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p>Then, suddenly, in four years, Jon Kent was born, grew up, and became Superman, sort of replacing Chris Kent, sort of replacing Connor Kent, sort of replacing both teenage and then adult Clark Kent.</p><p>I establish all of this curious timeline to set the context for today’s big news regarding Jon Kent’s one-panel kiss, which has been and will be variously portrayed as either the biggest cultural change in comics or no big deal at all, and for those seeing a cultural earthquake in it, will be variously portrayed as a very good thing or a very bad thing.</p><p>And given the shifting pace of change over Superman’s 83 years, I see it as a very precarious thing. What happens now has an undeniable tendency to unhappen or rehappen. Just as DC was for decades extremely reluctant to allow Clark to commit to Lois, DC is now extremely reluctant to allow anything to happen without a high chance of unhappening. And they have, I believe, creatively painted themselves into a corner. One way or another they have to change their ways, and I’m not sure that decision makers inside the company see that yet.</p><p>When the news about Jon Kent’s orientation broke last month, I thought of Sam Zhao as a cautionary tale. Do you remember the name Sam Zhao? Does anyone?</p><p>In 2012, the New 52 version of Earth 2 introduced an old-yet-new version of Alan Scott, young and in his prime like the original was back in 1940. Very soon, we learned that Alan Scott was a gay man with a partner and fiancé named Sam Zhao, who promptly died (one issue after his introduction!), then was resurrected as a sort of elemental spirit. Sam Zhao’s last appearance was in 2015, Sam having lost, in rapid fashion, his life, his planet (literally destroyed), and then their entire plane of reality. The 2012 Alan Scott was erased. The previous Alan Scott (it becomes tedious even to enumerate all the previous Alan Scotts, who were variously discontinued, killed, resurrected, renamed, banished to Valhalla, and so on) then became a sort of symbol for the destructive retcons of the DC Multiverse, with Dr. Manhattan’s erasure of Alan Scott’s life as Green Lantern becoming retroactively the single symbolic act of creating the pre-Doomsday Clock timeline. Dr. Manhattan brought that timeline back. But then even Doomsday Clock didn’t happen, and even the timeline after <i>Doomsday Clock</i> has now unhappened, and that was only 2019! Then for good measure, the current version of Alan Scott (who closely resembles the post-Infinite Crisis Alan Scott) earlier this year came out as gay like it was new (because in a sense it was). Sam Zhao and his version of Alan Scott are buried deep behind multiple numbers of destroyed past realities, like a sheet on a bulletin board papered over by newer announcements many times. And so I say, beware to Jon Kent, or to Jon Kent’s creators.</p><p>Sam Zhao was [that specific] Alan Scott’s Lois Lane, but Lois Lane remained Superman’s love interest for decades and Sam Zhao appeared alive on only <b>three pages</b> of one issue. And in various ways, Sam Zhao is a Lois Lane for our times, while Jon Kent is a [2012] Alan Scott for our times. DC’s creators want to do something momentous and meaningful with Jon Kent as they did with Alan Scott, but the persistence in sticking out creative decisions is a proclivity or capacity that DC has perhaps lost.</p><p>Let’s look at the timelines again. DC took 77 years from the introduction of Superman to the introduction of Jon Kent as his then-infant son, but only 6 years from the introduction of Jon Kent to his succession as the Earth’s primary Superman (and, making more headlines, as a bisexual young man). That’s a remarkable acceleration, and in the new, accelerated DC, a “Lois Lane” might only survive three pages. Sam Zhao’s entire planet was destroyed within two years, and his timeline gone soon after that. To turn this pragmatic, let us identify, finally, what caused this acceleration, from Superman revealing his identity to Lois back in 1991, through Superman’s death, resurrection, their marriage, and all the many reboots that made Lois and Clark’s marriage and Chris Kent and Sam Zhao come and go – big events drive sales.</p><p>This is the corner into which DC has painted itself. They, and many readers, celebrate the ascension of Jon Kent, and his identity, and what that means for representing so much of humanity on the stage of DC’s historical flagship property. This is the gesture made halfheartedly nine years ago with the immediately-doomed Sam Zhao. This gesture is at odds with the reality (or metareality) within DC since about 2006, that accelerated and increasingly accelerating change is a booster shot needed for keeping the readership reading. If DC now shuffles Jon Kent off to the limbo where Chris Kent, Sam Zhao, and the 1978 marriage of Earth Two Superman and Lois dwell, they retract a major statement of representation. If they lock Jon Kent in as he is today, they lose the creative strategy that has defined the last 15 or so years of DC, to reinvent constantly. One of these has to go.</p><p>There is, perhaps, another way. To consider yet another major DC brand’s invention and reinvention, the main Flash in DC Comics was Barry Allen for thirty years, but then changed hands <b>four times</b> in three years, when in 2006’s <i>Infinite Crisis</i> Wally gave way to a brief interlude with Jay Garrick, then Bart Allen, then Bart to Wally, and Wally back to Barry. But then Barry stuck around for a while. Let’s forget for a moment that along the way, Wally switched dimensions, Bart died and was resurrected (along with his friend Connor Kent, who is another character coming and going through a wildly-revolving door), and then “Wally” was reintroduced as a boy with the same name but another race, came back to our reality, became a tormented and possibly homicidal cinder of his former self, but then became a healthy and happy superhero and the main Flash again… Yes, there is another way, a return to stable timelines and realities, but as the case of the Flashes demonstrates, DC has neither the proclivity nor capacity to take it.</p><p>Let us add one more undeniably true observation of pragmatics: Nobody planned any of this mad scramble of timelines and characters and lives and deaths. A writer may have a year or two planned, but that writer moves on, and the juice that has kept sales up necessitates 180° turns when the next writer comes along. This isn’t any one writer’s or editor’s decision. Continuity has become a blender set to “liquify” and perhaps nothing can survive it for long, though every now and a second 180° turn undoes a previous one and we end up, for a while, back where we were, and so Alan Scott is re-introduced to us as gay – twice.</p><p>Jon Kent’s orientation is too important of a statement for DC to erase the way they annihilated Sam Zhao, but the blender’s slicing and dicing blades haven’t stopped for anyone. Jon Kent’s timeline or reality or status will change, and there’ll be 180° turns – <i>plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose</i>. In 2031, DC Comics will most likely still have a Jon Kent, and he’ll most likely “still” be LGBTQ, but will he be in the main Superman title? Will his life be rebooted back to conception and birth and start up from scratch again? Will he, like Alan Scott, come out twice? And will anyone, in 2031, be able to tell you who Jay Nakamura was?</p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-48535024852223276622021-10-30T12:04:00.002-07:002021-10-30T12:04:32.011-07:00Superman & The Authority 4<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"><br /><br />Grant Morrison’s last monthly comic for DC Comics (for now, anyways) begins with a walk down memory lane as the Ultra Humanite asks Superman, “Remember the first time?” I doubt if any of us were reading back then, but it’s in the archives. The first – the very first – superhero–supervillain matchup was between these two, in </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">Action </i><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wHAchv98rV8/YX2WwsIEj9I/AAAAAAAABZ8/CEv_qt8Q26420Q8mYQbQdXJAVD_HUZGPQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1066/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-14%2Bat%2B10.16.43%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="664" data-original-width="1066" height="199" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wHAchv98rV8/YX2WwsIEj9I/AAAAAAAABZ8/CEv_qt8Q26420Q8mYQbQdXJAVD_HUZGPQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-14%2Bat%2B10.16.43%2BPM.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">2021: Ultra-Humanite, Superman, and a Saw</td></tr></tbody></table>#13, a story that began remarkably ordinary, with a taxi racket (a gang taking out competing taxis and their drivers with violence and other dirty tricks) that surprisingly and strangely ended up being the brainchild of a mad scientist with superhuman intelligence bestowed upon him by “an experiment.” In that story, Ultra strapped Superman to a table and attempted to kill him with a metal saw to the head – the first time that anyone (other than foolish, frustrated gunmen) tried to kill Superman. Morrison lovingly takes us back to 1939, and once again, Ultra’s attempt to saw Superman’s head open fails. Some things never change, hmm? In the present story, Ultra waxes nostalgic over his/her/its other schemes, with references to a purple plague, invisible car, and atomic disintegrator, all stories from the first year of showdowns between Superman and his first supervillain. Remember the “her” I just mentioned? Well, Ultra’s first brain-body swap was with a Hollywood actress, and eighty years before Mac gives us his pronouns in this issue, the Ultra-Humanite was referred to as “she” in a little bit of sci fi gender nonbinary identity.</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Soon enough, the homages switch from the Golden Age to the Silver, as Superman and Lois tag-team and provide a shout-out to white kryptonite (the perfect weapon to use against Solomon Grundy’s swamp body). Lois shoots it out of a K-rifle with variant settings and makes a <b>red </b>kryptonite joke when she says that she’s glad she didn’t accidentally use the wrong setting and turn Ultra into something ludicrous and more dangerous. It’s a symphony of old classics – Superman winning a fight with his magnificent strength after <b>not</b> having <b>really </b>lost his powers (not in the same way that I predicted after issue #1, but to the same effect). Then, after Superman brutally wrenches off his enemy’s head (but nobody really dies), he discovers the real mastermind whom we saw speaking in computer-font green speech balloons last issue – Brainiac.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N2B-K7fTYEw/YX2WwnCBNWI/AAAAAAAABaA/riQ4MQMI5GMbW15uv0QEnS_GeH4JQC2jACNcBGAsYHQ/s1266/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-14%2Bat%2B10.16.13%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="858" data-original-width="1266" height="217" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N2B-K7fTYEw/YX2WwnCBNWI/AAAAAAAABaA/riQ4MQMI5GMbW15uv0QEnS_GeH4JQC2jACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-14%2Bat%2B10.16.13%2BPM.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">1940: Ultra-Humanite, Superman, and a Saw</td></tr></tbody></table></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">A devilish-looking red Brainiac (inexplicably but marvelously in suit and tie, space-monkey on shoulder) and Superman then battle by… talking. All the issue’s main action shows Superman’s superior squad, the new Authority, taking down all the villains<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>with perfect mismatches (light vs. darkness, magic vs. science, compassion vs. cruelty, and expanded social consciousness vs. a literal Nazi). During a string of wins that eventually becomes as tiresome for Superman as it is noxious to his foes, Superman verbally whips the villains with quips and smirks.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The issue’s – and the series’s – key word occurs after those battles are over: “convince.” For all of the dynamic action with punches, kicks, magic spells, floods of subatomic particles, and flashes of light, from the first pages to the last, the good side ultimately wins more often than not by convincing someone – not necessarily a bad person – of something. Superman convinces Manchester Black to join him. Manchester Black convinces the team to join them. The team convinces Enchantress to save herself. Superman convinces D’z’amor of a contradiction. Apollo convinces Mac that they’re on the same side. Manchester Black convinces Coldcast that he doesn’t want to be on the same side as a Nazi. And ultimately, Superman convinces Brainiac that he is quitting the field of battle, thereby ending the conflict for now. Along the way, Superman becomes convinced that Manchester Black is redeemable, that Siv has good reason to be frustrated with her people’s treatment. The Ultra-Humanite, despite his rage, and Brainiac, despite his predatory goals, both speak of their lofty aspirations to save the planet better than an international council is managing to, and even the villains try to convince humanity of something. With the exception of the aforementioned Nazi, virtually every character in this story exists somewhere on the spectrum between good and evil, including the binary characters of Eclipso and Enchantress and a Superman who is not quite as much of a Boy Scout (ripping the head off his defeated foe) as he once was. This series from the start is about reconciliation, and that’s not just a way to make this four-issue miniseries work: Morrison articulates a vision here of how DC’s future might look thematically, and it’s an important parting message for a DC that has increasingly headlined super-evil versions of its heroes as their marquee titles each month.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And in a world where the characters are trying to convince someone of something, rather than (or in addition to) delivering a beat-down, the battleground becomes one of words, message, and communication, and this is explicit throughout the series and the final issue. It moreover becomes clear that this theme is a comment – an explicit one – on discourse in the real world, on the Internet. Iron Cross whines that his Nazi ideology doesn’t get a fair shake from those who celebrate “free speech.” Manchester Black warns Coldcast that for siding with a Nazi, he might end up “canceled.” Lightray decides to leave social media. Eclipso tries pathetically to convince her that he is famous, and includes “the dark web” among his passions. Can you picture Silver Age Eclipso sitting at a desk looking at a computer screen? Throughout the miniseries, Morrison calls out the toxicity of discourse on the Internet, and it’s a kind of toxin that the superheroes aren’t particularly equipped to solve.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Many of the battles end with reconciliation. with Natasha Irons and Superman offering sympathy for Siv and the Haven, with Midnighter and Fleur de Lis joking about pride parades and financial advice. Only the most evil are beaten down physically, both literally (Ultra-Humanite, Iron Cross) and symbolically (Brainiac) decapitated.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And on that final point, Superman’s declaration to Brainiac, is quite a stunner if we can believe it. Superman tells Brainiac that he doesn’t believe that the two of them will likely cross paths ever again, then ends both the battle and the conversation. Brainiac is confused though Ultra-Humanite seems not to be. Superman wins a point in a battle of minds with this move, but leaving Earth is something that he apparently has to do anyway. And then, in one of the series’s several endings, Ultra-Humanite declares that he will continue the battle against Superman’s son. This is reminiscent of Morrison’s final pages of <i>Batman, Inc</i>. with R’as al Ghul ranting to the camera about his next big plan to attack Batman. That’s a Batman plot that subsequent writers didn’t pick up, nor, likely, was Morrison expecting them to. The point wasn’t that Morrison was to choose the continued direction of Batman as they stepped away from their years of writing, but that the genre does that itself. There’s always a big villain plan coming next; back then, why not R’as and now why not Ultra-Humanite? This is Morrison putting the toys back in the toy box so the next creators can start fresh.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">However, like <i>Batman, R.I.P.,</i> this story has multiple ending scenes, one after another. And, one of the series’s other endings does tie in with what’s coming next, as Superman’s upcoming mission to Warworld in <i>Action</i> will be scripted by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and that is coordinated with <i>Superman and The Authority</i>… but loosely. Some of the details of the two series don’t quite mesh, but that’s nothing new for Morrison events – think of Aquaman returning in <i>Final Crisis </i>then not really being returned after that event ended. We can look past such tiny details as Superman’s graying temples and the timeline running from Superman’s meeting with JFK up to the story’s present, its hints that the vintage lineup of the JLA had left in defeat, and with the two works being written years apart, acknowledge that the plots match up well enough. At the very least, this issue explicitly mentions the correct issue number of the next <i>Action</i> issue, and the scene where Superman changes back into his classic uniform might be the last detail added – note that the dialogue makes no reference to the costume change while we see it take place in the artwork – that makes this work transition into what’s coming.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Two other plot points may – or very well may not at all – lead into the future of Superman comics. One, the repeated, murky, and in the end never resolved comments about kryptonite may mean that Superman’s departure from Earth has a motive pertaining to kryptonite, even though other titles’ discussion of Superman’s departure don’t include this… or do they? If Superman is gradually weakening, is this perhaps tied to some circumstance on Earth – and might we hope, potentially a reversible one – involving kryptonite specifically on Earth? I don’t think we should be surprised if we eventually get an explanation like that, or on the other hand if we don’t. Plans shift, creators add their own creative details, and the odds are fair that this detail is up in the air rather than being predetermined.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Finally, the issue’s <b>final</b> ending, with Superman revealing a message from the Source Wall’s Uni-Friend (a floating hand of fire, going back to the first issues of Kirby’s <i>New Gods</i>) telling us “Lightray Is.” This is, perhaps, just an <b>extra</b> looming plot, as if Morrison had ended their run with Batman by showing us a big, shadowy plot by R’as and <b>then</b> one by Two Face. The implication is that Lightray, obscure but glamorous character whom Morrison borrowed and then largely reinvented, could have a future role comparable to that of Darkseid. But here we have to remember the original Kirby Lightray, a male New God wearing white. Are the two linked by some sort of cosmic reincarnation? Is this a bigger DC plan that we’ll see in the future, relating, perhaps to all of the references to Great Darkness in Bendis’s LSH? Time will tell. It is a resounding connection with the comics’ past (Kirby dots in the artwork, recycled character name, and all), but may not show up again in the future.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And that’s the same note on which we say goodbye to Grant Morrison. Their goodbye to us was on the last page of <i>The Green Lantern</i>, with Hal’s zooming off into deep space, uncertain destination, symbolic of Morrison’s. <i>Superman and The Authority</i> was written first, but published afterwards, but however you want to think of the sequence of these two stories, whichever is <b>really</b> last, both of these two final Morrison works for DC ends with the superhero taking off into space for a new adventure. This one, like <i>Superman Beyond</i>, ends with the words “To be continued.”</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I first picked up a Morrison story in the pages of <i>Legends of the Dark Knight</i> #6, cover date of April 1990. Here we are 31 and a half years later. Morrison will undoubtedly be asked to write some of those features that you see in big anniversary issues, where writers from the past, or even other genres jot off a story some four to eight pages long, something cute and out-of-continuity, and perhaps those will be coming down the road. Perhaps in a few years there’ll be a big rapprochement and DC will get Morrison back for some other “last” major commitment, say, a twelve-issue series about Barry Allen, or Ray Palmer. You can’t predict these things, and retirement announcements, even definitive declarations, have a way of being mutable over time. One way or another, for Superman, for Grant Morrison, for you, and for me: To be continued…</p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-51985714036459632002021-10-10T11:49:00.003-07:002021-11-17T02:30:17.274-08:00Retro Review: The Sand Superman Saga<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f7QMiKmkxqg/YWMz0I3VHqI/AAAAAAAABZU/qUgG-Z43U1AR2ipvU0boyjTJKztCyX61QCNcBGAsYHQ/s1414/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-02%2Bat%2B10.07.54%2BAM.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1414" data-original-width="1026" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f7QMiKmkxqg/YWMz0I3VHqI/AAAAAAAABZU/qUgG-Z43U1AR2ipvU0boyjTJKztCyX61QCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-02%2Bat%2B10.07.54%2BAM.png" width="232" /></span></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Imagine that Superman begins to lose his powers. A new Superman is on the scene and we’re not sure if the original, Kal-El, will ever be the same. That’s the situation in 2021, but what goes around comes around, and it also was true in 1971, half a century ago. Dennis O’Neil’s Sand Superman Saga, perhaps Superman’s first great alteration – at least, one that was written into the plot of a story – has just passed its silver anniversary.</span></div><p></p><div style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Before there were cosmic reboots, when creative minds wanted to change a detail about a comic book character they just changed them. Sometimes they didn’t even seem to do so on purpose. If the readers noticed when the Daily Star suddenly became the Daily Planet, or when Superman could fly instead of merely jumping high, there was no Internet or even letter column to leave a record of reactions to those retcons. But another way to revamp a character is to write a change into the plot of the story, and and that’s what O’Neil did, changing Superman in unprecedented fashion.</span></div><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This saga unrolled over the span of ten issues in 1971, but two of the issues in the middle – one written by O’Neil, one not – were not part of the larger plot. Thus, in eight issues, O’Neil, under the direction of editor Julius Schwartz, made bold and “permanent” changes to Superman, but most of the literal ones occurred, or began to occur, in the very first of those, <i>Superman </i>#233. In that one, bold issue, an experimental test of a new energy generation system destroyed all green kryptonite on Earth, Clark Kent became a reporter working on television rather than writing for a newspaper, and an epilogue teased the introduction of the nameless guest character who would do, basically accidentally, what hundreds of villains had attempted but failed – the permanent powering-down of the Man of Steel. However, the story did not fully culminate in one issue, nor could it have and been effective. Instead, O’Neil took Superman’s powers away, then gave them back, then took them again. In repetition that almost wears down the reader’s ability to keep track, Superman lost his powers partially or completely, sometimes one at a time, over and over, and in response became unsure whether he wanted them in full or at all. And keep in mind that two of these plot changes worked in nearly opposite directions: The elimination of kryptonite made Superman more potent than ever, while the varying loss of his powers and other injuries made him quite easy to defeat – and, moreover, to dislike.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Lest there be any confusion, this wasn’t simply Superman being written in a new style to the tastes of a new writer. This was a deliberate plan, with a flashy cover somewhat deceptively proclaiming “1” on issue #233, the first issue of the story arc: The amazing “NEW” adventures of Superman. The captions on the first page announced, “Beginning… a return to greatness!” and a subsequent caption called what was to follow “stunningly new.” Then, an extradiagetic splash page showed three panels of Superman flashily displaying his super powers while a suffering Superman in silhouette served as the black background for more introductory text, teasing that Superman has “a dark side” – a mention of his dark side on text written visually on his literal dark side! But as for style changes, there were those, too – beginning in this issue, Clark Kent’s previously-universally blue suit became brown.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">But there’s real substance behind the style, so much so that a reader familiar with the series as it had been wouldn’t have been ready to read it the way O’Neil allows to unfold. After all the kryptonite on Earth is destroyed, Morgan Edge memorably questions whether the removal of Superman’s primary weakness is a good thing: “Power corrupts… and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But Morgan Edge was a <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2017/08/kirbys-fourth-world.html">pawn of Darkseid</a>, and thoroughly unlikable in his best scenes; for Edge to say this begged for the reader to conclude the opposite, a sentiment which Superman soon enough articulated, saying that the destruction of kryptonite freed him up to do more good that ever. A reader who set down #233 for the first time would have to conclude that Superman was the moral compass to follow on this, or any other point. But by the last page of #242, that perspective had been definitively defeated.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uDbXGfkmSTU/YWM0623iliI/AAAAAAAABZw/l5FvVGthUK4GqZbFQd6szT2uUfwzzdRagCNcBGAsYHQ/s648/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-10%2Bat%2B11.45.33%2BAM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="408" data-original-width="648" height="201" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uDbXGfkmSTU/YWM0623iliI/AAAAAAAABZw/l5FvVGthUK4GqZbFQd6szT2uUfwzzdRagCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-10%2Bat%2B11.45.33%2BAM.png" width="320" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">Does absolute power corrupt Superman? In the scenes following the elimination of kryptonite, he casually knocks three criminals unconscious with blows to the head, when there’s seemingly no need for him to do so. His mental narration is full of hubris and self-celebration which is immediately followed by harsh contradiction from reality: twice, after Superman mentally celebrates his near-invincibility, he suddenly experiences the failure of his powers. This creates drama, but also makes the saga into a morality tale about pride coming before the fall. But after he loses those powers he regains them, then loses them again, for a total of four times in only the story’s first two issues. What this repetitive and disorienting gyrating accomplishes is to create dialectic and dialogue where previously Superman’s story was one of simple, fairy-tale moral certainties.</span><p></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As Superman’s problems deepen, three issues – the saga’s second, third, and fifth – build up an impending sense of doom as Superman keeps losing his powers – one power or another, or all of them partially – as the mysterious Sand Superman flies by, with an origin, purpose, and even name unknown to Superman. In these three issues, Superman takes on the challenge of an erupting volcano, a callous business magnate, a vengeful and bitter man named Ferlin Nyxly who uses a (perhaps magical) device to steal Superman’s powers one by one, and eco-terrorists who try to use a seized geothermal power plant to bargain their way into greater power. By and large, the Sand Superman looms nearby as a mysterious added conundrum, though for some uncanny reason, he helps Superman defeat Nyxly (who was later referenced in Grant Morrison’s <i>Action</i> run). Throughout this string of predicaments, Superman suffers the consequences of lost power, as the Sand Superman – initially made of sand – slowly becomes more visibly his duplicate, costume and all. But while the plot and the action move along in these issues, the theme that was initially invoked with Morgan Edge’s “power corrupts” line goes largely unaddressed.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">That changes in the saga’s fourth issue, #237. After Superman rescues the pilot of an experimental rocket plane, he finds that the pilot has been transformed horribly by germs originating in space. (Recall that this story was published less than two years after the first lunar landing.) Contemplating that he himself may have the same germs on himself after exposure to the pilot, Superman takes the step of flying up into Earth’s natural radiation belts in order to cleanse himself, thinking, “NO bug could survive exposure to these radioactive waves!” However, Superman is simply and smugly mistaken, and when he returns to Earth, the germs that he has carried back on his body infect an entire room of staffers at the Daily Planet. Moments later, he learns that Lois Lane, investigating a swarm of killer ants in Latin America, is in unrelated danger, and Superman becomes stricken with angst that he is unable to act normally to save her without spreading the infection to her and others, like those in the Daily Planet building behind him. Then the Sand Superman follows him on his way to try to save Lois, draining his speed and power. Superman tries to act from a distance, stopping a swarm of jungle ants but infects two of them, which makes them grow to the size of elephants.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Now the array of problems facing Superman – the worst of which appears to be his own fault –fills him with helplessness, guilt, and despair. He declares to himself, “I’m the worst enemy the planet has! … Should I fly away… lose myself in the vastness between the stars… and never return?” How the mighty have fallen! Only a few issues back, Superman exulted in being truly, absolutely invincible, with no weaknesses, free to solve any problem, and here, he finds himself worse than helpless, unable to save Lois, losing his own powers to a nameless doppelgänger who follows him around, and having spread a plague in Metropolis. However, as he floats in space despairingly, he carefully thinks over the day’s events, and decides that, in a twist, contact with the Sand Superman seems to have sterilized his right hand of the germs that he’s carrying. He deliberately seeks full contact with his erstwhile antagonist, and an explosion occurs, after which – he decides – he is now free of the germs. Superman saves Lois with a hint of anger in his tone, “I’m doing the same as I’ve always done – saving your silly, precious life!” Unable to fly, Superman holds Lois and the pilot of her plane and leaps with them to a place of safety, then with noticeable difficulty defeats a gang of bandits who had earlier menaced Lois. Then he confronts the Sand Superman (who was following close behind) and unleashes a verbal tirade at his unnamed nemesis and for the first time, the Sand Superman, who has now almost become identical to Superman in appearance, speaks, telling Superman in a cliffhanger that he is a being woven from Superman’s own mind, heart, and soul, that he is going to continue to drain Superman’s powers until he has half, until they are exactly equal, and that the process might kill one of them.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ssXorJmPtIg/YWMzp9j-QAI/AAAAAAAABZQ/JK4sAsxnZREOVjVKpli4C4ZV7dBw8VSeQCNcBGAsYHQ/s764/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-10%2Bat%2B11.39.54%2BAM.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="416" data-original-width="764" height="174" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ssXorJmPtIg/YWMzp9j-QAI/AAAAAAAABZQ/JK4sAsxnZREOVjVKpli4C4ZV7dBw8VSeQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-10%2Bat%2B11.39.54%2BAM.png" width="320" /></span></a></div><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Superman’s hubris in viewing himself as invincible has at this point been well-developed. He tries to hide his loss of power from the world, telling himself that this it to avoid emboldening criminals, but he hides it also from Lois Lane, and he seems to be full of shame as well as self doubt, which escalates heading into the saga’s final three issues. This is introduced by the cover of <i>Superman </i>#240 where an angry crowd lambastes Superman, who holds a Daily Planet proclaiming, “SUPERMAN FAILS!” and the titular hero tells the Earth’s people, “You miserable ingrates – I’m <b>through</b> with you!” This foreshadows the issue’s first sequence in which a weakened Superman is no longer able to disguise his relative loss of power: While saving people from a burning building, he tries to support the skyscraper from structural collapse but visibly fails while the fire department and crowds watch. With the building now too heavy for him, Superman is knocked to the ground by the falling structure, and is photographed walking away in shame. In the following day, as his enemies conspire to take advantage of his weakened state, crowds mock his loss of strength, and Superman stews with antagonism, bitterly thinking of the public as “ingrates” who don’t appreciate his “years of service… of sacrifice” in which he “denied [himself] the comforts of home… family” while helping people. In a true turning point, Superman has not merely lost his physical power (which is, after all, as old a plot point as kryptonite itself) but has begun to lose the will to continue on his mission, turning his back on a bank robbery with the thought, “it’s no concern of mine! The smug citizens can solve their <b>own</b> problems!” Moments later, he relents and engages the bank robbers, but is momentarily struck down and humiliated by their military weapons. After he succeeds partially in defeating them (their leaders escape), he privately reflects, “as a Superman, I’m a wash-out!”</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KgKCOPJYIeQ/YWMz_j67txI/AAAAAAAABZc/t0fGAnKRW8wM5bYISbmmDzOpasGagfCkgCNcBGAsYHQ/s1544/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-09%2Bat%2B1.24.35%2BPM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1544" data-original-width="1018" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KgKCOPJYIeQ/YWMz_j67txI/AAAAAAAABZc/t0fGAnKRW8wM5bYISbmmDzOpasGagfCkgCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-09%2Bat%2B1.24.35%2BPM.png" width="211" /></span></a></div><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">At this point, and for the remaining duration of the saga, I-Ching enters the story. An O’Neil invention from his concurrent run on Wonder Woman, the Chinese sage and mystic arrives to counsel Superman on the loss of his powers and how he can and should regain them. By unhappy coincidence, just as I-Ching places Superman under a trance, criminals who had surveilled Clark Kent arrive and strike at the unconscious Superman as well as I-Ching. A nearly fully depowered Superman wins a fistfight with the criminals after taking painful blows to the head and chest, which concludes with Superman deciding that perhaps, if he can win a fight without powers, he’s not sure that he cares if he ever regains them. At the beginning of issue #241, Superman shares this thought with I-Ching that he would like to remain powerless, and rid himself of the “responsibilities… the loneliness… of Superman.” The mystic man, however, talks Superman into reluctantly accepting his help in regaining his lost powers, and after a brief ceremony in which an astral form of Superman finds and power-drains the Sand Superman, the titular hero awakens with his full powers intact… seemingly the end of his troubles, but here things soon reach their darkest and strangest point.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As the issue continues, Superman finds that his physical powers are at their usual, maximum state, but his behavior, a reader can’t help but notice, is increasingly erratic, egotistical, and hostile to others. As I-Ching and Diana Prince notice from the news, Superman makes destructive mistakes in the use of his powers, and moreover makes reckless decisions that inconvenience good people while punishing evil doers. I-Ching determines that the cause is the blow that Superman earlier took to the head while depowered. Here, the story becomes a curious sort of sci fi / fantasy parable about mental health, with Superman angrily denying that he has a problem while his friends – Diana Prince and I-Ching – try to get him to accept help. Here, for the first time, the reader receives an explanation of what has been going on, as I-Ching’s magic reveals the nature of the Sand Superman.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Here, O’Neil introduces us, through I-Ching and the Sand Superman, to a dimension called the Realm of Quarrm, a “state of alternate possibilities, a place where neither men nor things exist, only unformed, shapeless beings” – sounding a bit like Plato’s conception of forms, superior to the things in our real world. We learn that the explosion at the outset of the saga created a rift between Superman’s world and the Realm of Quarrm, bringing one nameless creature through who assumed, through proximity to Superman, a link to him that caused the creature to take his form and begin to drain his essence and powers.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In performing a ceremony that procured this information, I-Ching, however, has made a serious mistake, opening a new rift between the DC Universe and Quarrm and allowing a second spirit to enter our world. This one animates the statue of a Chinese war demon, which then begins wreaking havoc in Metropolis. As the saga’s penultimate issue concludes, the odd trio of I-Ching, an unpowered Diana Prince, and the Sand Superman hope to cure Superman of his mental impairment, while the real but ill Superman is knocked out in battle by the War Demon, which drains most of his powers into itself.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As the finale begins in <i>Superman </i>#242, a pair of malevolent street criminals find that the War Demon will follow their orders and, after beating a now-depowered Superman mercilessly, they utilize the War Demon as a sort of evil genie on a rampage of crime. Doctors operate to repair the brain damage suffered by the fully-depowered Superman while the Sand Superman, possessing by its own calculation just a third of Superman’s original powers, fails to vanquish the War Demon.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In time, the War Demon turns on his masters, killing them, then is drawn to the hospital where Superman is recovering, seeking to kill him, too. But, in the presence of Superman, power flows back from the War Demon into Superman until the two of them are equal, and fight to a stand-off. Then the Sand Superman arrives on the scene and joins the original Superman in battle against the War Demon, which – outnumbered – flees back to Quarrm.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Now that the battle’s three are down to two, the Sand Superman declares that he wishes to take the place of the original Superman. With each possessing half of Superman’s power, they decide to fight a duel to the finish to see which will survive to continue as the only Superman. Over the course of a few pages, their super duel causes devastating damage to the Earth’s interior. Within six minutes, the strain placed on the planet causes massive earthquakes and eruptions that wipe the planet clean of all life… or so we see. I-Ching then reveals that he has simulated the battle in the minds of Superman and his double, when actually no battle at all has taken place.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Then the saga concludes with stunning suddenness. The Sand Superman decides to return to Quarrm to avoid such a conflict. When I-Ching proposes that he could perhaps return the stolen half of Superman’s power back to him, Superman refuses this, saying, “No! I’ve seen the dangers [of] having too much power… I am human – I can make mistakes! I don’t want – or need – more…” And in a shadowy final panel, Superman stares off into the distance, alone in his thoughts, with half the power he had when the saga began.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AXFdoFacr-A/YWM0KOm3mnI/AAAAAAAABZk/-en49YYRoo4JK4QKjUgsbblUV5kiBo5CgCNcBGAsYHQ/s504/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-09%2Bat%2B4.56.14%2BPM.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="504" height="191" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AXFdoFacr-A/YWM0KOm3mnI/AAAAAAAABZk/-en49YYRoo4JK4QKjUgsbblUV5kiBo5CgCNcBGAsYHQ/w200-h191/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-10-09%2Bat%2B4.56.14%2BPM.png" width="200" /></span></a></div><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The sense behind having Superman renounce half his powers doesn’t quite add up. When he makes mistakes in this story, none of those would be avoided by reducing his powers by half. If Superman decides to leave a car atop the Empire State Building, or if he accidentally infects people with an extraterrestrial germ, those things occur just as easily with half his powers as full. Moreover, in a DC Universe with many highly-powered beings, Superman just demoted himself relative to many villains such as the Phantom Zone inmates, Solomon Grundy, Bizarro, and others. In fact, in the series’s next issue (scripted by Cary Bates), Superman notes that “it would take a hundred Supermen many life-times to solve all [Earth’s] problems.” In the subsequent issue, again penned by O’Neil, Superman is knocked down by an energy monster and declares, “I’ve <b>never </b>been hit that hard…” Well, it would have been nice to have the other half of your powers back, then, wouldn’t it, Supes?</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Numbers aside, O’Neil’s saga injected some thoughtful characterization to DC’s flagship hero, and measurably powered <b>up</b> the maturity of the title. First, it shifted the black-and-white morality of the series to add some shades of gray. Superman could be wrong, not only about matters of fact (that the elimination of kryptonite made him invincible), not only making serious mistakes in the use of his powers (that a particular radiation exposure would kill the alien germs on his body), but it also showed that he was fallible in tone, aggrieved and bitter, subject to humiliation – in other words, human. This was a far bigger change to the character than twiddling his power levels in some meaningless way. And, for all the story’s quirks, it brought Superman down to our level – in character as well as sometimes in power level – by showing the folly of the sin of pride, a story arc right out of Greek mythology.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">An irreplaceable way to gauge the impact of story is to look at what came before it, and what after. Twelve issues before the Sand Superman saga began, the cover of Superman showed a morbidly obese Superman bursting out of a telephone booth and calling himself, in language that is shockingly insensitive, “a super-fatso” with the story title, “The Two-Ton Superman.” Five issues after the saga ended, Elliot S. Maggin’s highly-regarded “Must There Be A Superman?” story ran in issue #247, elaborating on the saga’s themes, as Superman must decide for himself when to intervene in human affairs and when not to intervene. That is quite a “before and after” comparison, showing a 1970 title with nothing of value to say and a 1972 title that was, if not high literature, at least asking questions with some relevance to real-world society, morality, and personal responsibility. We might gauge the impact of the story – both O’Neil’s capacity as writer and Schwartz’s as editor– in the increasing years in the age of the target reader rather than in how much Superman could lift or how fast he could fly. The Sand Superman story was part of the character maturing, and gave the series a creative direction it followed for nearly 15 years before <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2015/03/retro-review-john-byrnes-superman.html">its next big transformation</a>.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Fifty years later, while the character, and DC superhero comics as a whole, have been through numerous alterations, and the plot points of the Sand Superman saga are entirely unrelated to current continuity, it may be argued that the Superman title never took a bigger step up in maturity than it did in and around that story. Indeed, remembering that it appeared at the same time as a pivotally thoughtful story about control and rebellion in <i>Teen Titans </i>#31 and during O’Neil’s monumental <i>Green Lantern/Green Arrow</i> run – the story about Roy Harper’s drug addiction appeared just after the Sand Superman saga ended – 1971 might be the year in which DC Comics grew up the most. In the fifty years since, have they grown up any more?</span></p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-8927381941576524892021-09-22T21:40:00.000-07:002021-09-22T21:40:02.878-07:00Superman & The Authority #3<p><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u2Cim6eiY4U/YUwFDP_m_yI/AAAAAAAABZI/Mw4Or3G5wCUGyiLH9Yf-wAlnHipYgBswQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1290/enchantress.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="518" data-original-width="1290" height="128" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u2Cim6eiY4U/YUwFDP_m_yI/AAAAAAAABZI/Mw4Or3G5wCUGyiLH9Yf-wAlnHipYgBswQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/enchantress.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></div><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">Superman & The Authority </i><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">#3 begins with a cinematic opening. Six tall, slender panels neatly enclose June Moone and no one else, and then the camera pulls back, ending with a wide panel bringing her into company. When this ends with a caption – not the first and not the last time that the story has said this – “FORT SUPERMAN” it’s time to notice that there’s a reason why Grant Morrison has rejected the conventional name for this place, because it’s a place for community, almost a home, the headquarters of a team, and in sum, not in any way a fortress of solitude. In fact, the story’s first word performs a similar change in perspective, naming the location of the fortress not “the Arctic” but “Alaska” – not a place defined by barrenness and being uninhabited but a real place with a real name and a population to boot (although it’s a fair bet that Superman’s fortress is more remote than just sitting at the end of a cul-de-sac outside Anchorage). In the meantime, we see June subtly – easy to miss – dress herself by making her clothing levitate and float to her, contradicting the sense from earlier than June is powerless and the Enchantress side of her alone has power (which is subject to wickedness). Along the way, there’s a nod to The Wizard of Oz when June’s recollection of her Hell-dream includes “and you were there.”</span><p></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Personally, I found the story of June’s peril and subsequent rescue powerful. In a genre where internal conflict is often the struggle between a character and some factor that we can’t relate to, because it doesn’t actually exist (a hex, mind control, a Black Lantern ring), June’s despair stems from guilt. To be sure, her predicament begins with something mystical, but at heart, she is trapped by the feeling that she’s “too weak” and has “done everything wrong.” D’z’amor takes glee in her frailty. Superman’s message? We all make mistakes. Every moment is a fresh opportunity. And Manchester Black’s advice – use your strength, have it be on your side. In a miniseries where the enemies lash out with abusive language as much as with fists and ray-beams, where elements in the story keep mapping onto elements in the real world, I wondered if Morrison had some situations close to home in mind with this scene; either way, as unreal as June’s situation was in the details, the emotions rang true. This scene was interestingly divergent from the famous scene in <i>All-Star Superman</i> #10 when Morrison shows Superman rescuing a girl from suicide not with the powers he gets from Earth’s yellow sun but with caring and understanding and a message of hope. Here, Manchester Black makes the connection to the situation and a “Suicide Hotline” call, but takes a different tack, and Morrison is showing us that Black’s style of pep talk can work, too. In the meantime, Superman dissolves D’z’amor with an argument about good and evil a bit reminiscent of the way Superman defeated Emperor Joker; the Joker could not imagine a world without Batman and, evil as he wants to be, D’z’amor can not truly operate without imagining something good.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">When Enchantress has been saved and redeemed, the issue takes off on three new adventures, each of which is unresolved and going badly by the final page. We see that Lightray, moments before she would have been recruited by Apollo and Enchantress, is herself suicidal and is teleported off by Eclipso. The team of Manchester Black, Midnighter, and Steel is blindsided by a quartet of Ultra-Humanite’s team, and is suddenly outnumbered four to two even while a rain of missile-men bombard Dubai. Then, Superman is subdued by the Ultra-Humanite himself, in the form of Ultra’s superior brain in the body of Solomon Grundy – a bit reminiscent of the “Doomsday Wars” story, in which Brainiac’s brain took control of Doomsday’s body. Somehow, the situation in an issue that began with the characters in Hell managed to get much worse – or so it seems.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Thematically, the inclusion of Eclipso interplays interestingly with Apollo and Midnighter – all combinations on dark vs. light – Lightray, and Enchantress who is, like Eclipso, the pairing of a light and dark personality. And, as noted in my commentary of earlier issues, this theme was already evident in the contrasting styles of Superman and Manchester Black and Morrison’s project in this work is one of rehabilitating and redeeming the dark, making Manchester Black a force we can root for, as Apollo and Midnighter are, in their origin, weapons of a villain who have been redeemed. The details of Eclipso’s background have been retconned over the years, and his post-<i>Infinite Frontier</i> nature might be up for grabs; it would not be surprising if Eclipso is defeated not with punches but by some sort of incantation or even argument that nullifies his evil and lets the good / light side take over.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But before Eclipso shows up (such as he does, always cloaked in shadow), Lightray – Lia Nelson – has a gun aimed at her head and we don’t know whether her depression is a consequence of her natural mental state or the influence of Eclipso; her comment that she is “so sad all the time” hints that this may be unrelated to the doings of supervillains. Once again, as with the Nat Irons subplot, the darkness of social media in our real world (our real online world) may be the subject that Morrison is really addressing, not fictional people in tights involved with super science and magic; Lia’s "world that’s falling apart” may be ours.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Overarching the horrifying situation with Ultra-Humanite ready to put his brain into Superman’s body is a single, pregnant detail – before the team split up, Superman told the team that he himself would serve as bait, a hint that being attacked by Ultra is not really a surprise and not really contrary to Superman’s expectations, and his defeat might not be a real defeat. What he says to the team after calling himself “bait,” we don’t see, but we see him subsequently walk through the teleportation portal with the team before being back in the Fortress for Ultra’s attack, indicating that we’ve missed at least two phases of preparation that were almost certainly not irrelevant. This recalls the quick interaction during Apollo and Midnighter’s mission in issue #2, wherein Midnighter announced that he had already determined the certainty of his and Apollo’s victory, but then expressed alarm that their foe was outthinking him, but then it turned out that his confidence was well-founded in the first place. That may foreshadow what is happening here, where Ultra’s belief that he has launched an unbeatable surprise attack seems to be less informed than Superman’s confidence that his seeming vulnerability is merely “bait.”</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Whatever happens in the battle, it seems sure that the good guys will win – but what are good guys? This is perhaps the most important question in the miniseries and answering that seems to be the statement that Morrison wants to make as they exit from DC superhero comics. Is Manchester Black a good guy? Obviously, he’s now on Superman’s team and we’re rooting for him. Similarly, Enchantress has suddenly come around from being a wicked nightmare plaguing June Moone but is now, also, on the team. But this series does not simply whitewash the wicked, giving them a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. It also owns up to the imperfections of the good, accepts their faults, and redeems them. Superman’s secret identity was all along, as Ultra-Humanite opines (and as others have throughout the decades) a “lie” from a man who claims never to lie. Superman is, Ultra also observes, no longer required to pose as a paragon of virtue now that his son is taking greater importance. Superman owns up to the weaknesses and faults of his allies in issue #1 – their overconfidence, their underperformance, their failures.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Superman is a character whose history is much bigger than the portion of it in Morrison’s hands, and even Enchantress is a character with considerable definition in the past, so perhaps we learn the most about the miniseries’ message by looking at Lia Nelson, who seems to be all shining beauty goodness and optimism, but aims a gun at her head, proclaiming existential despair hidden from the world. Her birth was celebrated as one of the most special and wonderful ever, but in truth, her parents raged at one another and we learned of their infidelities. These are details fully in Morrison’s control and they’re chosen to package what Morrison is saying about Superman and all the DC “heroes” in this send-off: They’re not perfect and perfection is always just an illusion. What these fictional heroes have to teach us is not that being perfect and spotless is the way to live but that surviving one’s own imperfections is something we can do – as June Moone did in this issue, as Superman is doing in this miniseries, and as Lia Nelson has to do – if she can – in the next issue. Superman’s final message to us, with Morrison penning the words, is not that sunlight can make a man incredibly mighty but that every moment is a fresh opportunity to do something worthwhile.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-56130989592026356522021-08-30T08:24:00.004-07:002021-08-30T08:25:35.305-07:00Superman & The Authority #2<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CI2tHjChBTk/YSz4Yzv3p9I/AAAAAAAABZA/poVISpHnV64bLq9sgpqhJkJLyqyzEMOFQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1072/superman%2Bauthority%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="754" data-original-width="1072" height="225" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CI2tHjChBTk/YSz4Yzv3p9I/AAAAAAAABZA/poVISpHnV64bLq9sgpqhJkJLyqyzEMOFQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/superman%2Bauthority%2B2.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></div><i><br />Superman & The Authority</i>’s first issue was about two men coming from opposite ideological positions, one of them winning the other over for at least a temporary joining of forces. The second issue takes that same spectrum and turns it into a framing story, with an issue that begins in a kind of heaven and ends in a kind of – or perhaps the very one and only – Hell. Along the way, we see members of the team take on medium-sized threats, with technology as a recurrent threat across both issues.<br /><br />The first words, “Fort Superman,” hearken back to the Silver Age, not 1963 but 1958, in the title of the classic “The Super-Key to Fort Superman.” That’s about as Silver Age as it gets, and that’s why Morrison chose that phrase, to begin the blend that we see from the squeaky clean to, well, right down to Hell. The moral decline begins as Manchester Black has a transgressive smoke in the Fortress of Solitude and it angers Superman’s squad of Kryptonian robots, but not to the point of their, well, killing Black, as he dares them too. <br /><br />The second issue is built around a framing story, like many old JSA and JLA stories, where we see the parts of the team in side action (or so it seems) before they finally come together at the end. If you count both issues of the series, we have seen individual sub-teams in action four times, and these four encounters develop a couple of distinctive themes.<br /><br />First, there is a noteworthy relevance of technology, and in particular networks of computer-linked minds, in three of the stories. First, Superman and Manchester Black face robots from the Phantom Zone – a peculiar twist from the usual setup where good, old-fashioned human (well, Kryptonian) villains escape. Second, Natasha Irons faces off against a particularly sadistic and highly realistic threat from an Internet hive mind with all of social media’s worst characteristics. Third, Midnighter and Apollo confront a beast possessing a network of minds. It is only the fourth confrontation, with June Moone, that differs from the pattern, involving a supernatural threat in character with the character’s history. Perhaps three instances is not enough to infer a pattern, but while artificial intelligence networks don’t make for an absolutely novel threat, it is a bit noticeable to have it come up in three cases out of four.<br /><br />A more undeniable theme is that of duality, and conflict, between one “bright” personality and one “dark” personality on the side of the heroes. This is absolutely front and center in the scenes showing Superman and Manchester Black, and is moreover downright core to the concept of Midnighter and Apollo. Finally, it is equally apparent with June Moone and Enchantress, to the extent that Enchantress appears to be the villain in that substory. But, again, we have a theme that extends across just three of the four stories which perhaps makes us pay more attention to the one that doesn’t hold… Natasha Irons appears to have no dark counterpart. Still, it is obvious that the entire concept of this team is to bring together characters from opposite poles of the spectrum. It is virtually impossible to describe this series without pointing that out.<br /><br />SonOfBatmann pointed out in the comments of my last post that Manchester Black, describing his disdain for Superman in the first issue, was serving as a stand-in for fans in the real world. This in fact was core to Joe Kelly’s original story with the Elite. In issue #2, the enemy facing Natasha Irons is even more obviously borrowed from the real world of ours; in fact, it has never been more blatant that the villain in a DC story is a reflection of some of the people who are reading the story (at least, if some sliver of the worst people on social media are also DC fans). Nat’s villains attack her with words and other forms of information rather than physical blows, body-shaming her posterior, insulting her looks, and threatening to send nude photos of her to her grandmother and her boss. And, amusingly, Morrison renders these trolls as literal trolls. She somehow defeats them with the combination of a heavy hammer and sharp words, which is unlikely to solve the same problem in the real world, but then that’s true of all superhero stories, isn’t it?<br /><br />Midnighter and Apollo happen to be the only original Authority members in the issue, and their story, with the piquant title, “HARD,” begins with the kind of backstory that may be a colorful way of introducing their personalities or may just tie into the bigger story. We won’t know until later. But we see the two go into action and crush their threat so decisively that we have to suspend disbelief that such a formidable pair (and couple) could have existed in Superman’s world without having met him previously. I have to salute the issue’s four artists – whichever is appropriately to credit – in capturing Apollo’s expression with brows that communicate the combination of affection and consternation for his difficult and loyal (perhaps unfaithful?) partner.<br /><br />Enchantress crossed paths with Superman’s world way back in 1980, as a sort of frenemy to Supergirl in <i>Superman Family</i> #204-205. Here, as there, Enchantress is the real threat in the story, at least while under someone else’s influence. Here, as there, her supernatural archfoe Dzamor (first appearing in the first Enchantress story in 1968) is the big bad behind the scenes. This time, the feeling is distinctly like the film Rosemary’s Baby (also from 1968!), with June Moone a horribly mistreated victim of the evil beings who try to corrupt her. Then, with a satisfying turn for the better, D’z’amor (now the name is spiced up with apostrophes) is punched offscreen by our hero; in what is presumably an oversight in the art, the punch comes from a bare arm, which doesn’t match Superman, Apollo, or anyone else, but is probably from Superman.<br /><br />The team’s challenge in Hell is foreshadowed in the framing story’s title, “One Soul at a Time,” which out of context would imply a mission of saving sinners in a Christian sense, which makes Superman, in this story, an agent of God. We begin the issue expecting the recruitment of the new team, but at the end, it seems to identify June Moone as the poor soul who needs salvation but will surely end up being a member of the team fighting at their side, at least insofar as the Enchantress “is” June Moone, a tangled identity which is often a pair rather than an individual, which brings us back to the theme of duality among our heroes. Most likely, though (as we can see from the cover), Enchantress will be redeemed rather than eliminated.<br /><br />The cover also reminds us that the Ultra-Humanite (in his big, white gorilla form) is part of the story, and it’s therefore remarkable that we reach the mini-series’ midpoint without him having done anything but talk in three panels, all the more remarkable in that the heroes (and antiheroes) will enter the third issue facing a threat that is – maybe – not even related to the Ultra-Humanite. The pacing of the mini-series, sadly, already, half over – highlights that it is transitional and more about putting this team together for future adventures than about a single four-issue battle against a single foe.<br /><br />Perhaps the substory threats are disconnected sideplots, but we’ve seen Morrison before turn those seemingly disconnected elements into one big web. Either way, the Midnighter / Apollo case is full of familiar Morrisonian notes, such as kids with metahuman powers being abducted and utilized as an weapon (<a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2018/01/final-crisis-retro-review-part-i.html"><i>Final Crisis</i></a>) and the genetic / biological engineering of a superpowered henchman (<i>Final Crisis,</i> <i>Batman Inc.</i>). This storyline echoes the origin of Midnighter and Apollo, who were biologically engineered by a villain – Midnighter reminds us, “That’s how they made me” while Black reminds us that Apollo came from a vat – and plainly indicates an unseen Big Bad somewhere offscreen. And if we’re looking for clues on who that might be, consider that the lab in Batman, Inc. – specifically 2011’s <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2010/11/batman-return.html"><i>Batman: The Return</i></a> – and in this story were both in Yemen, not a likely location to come up twice by coincidence. Could the person behind the scenes be, if not Talia herself, someone who’s taken over part of her operations?<br /><br />Another choice element from another time is the Supermobile, which originated in <i>Action Comics</i> #481 in 1978. The in-story motivation was that the light of an exploding red star took away Superman’s powers just when he had to battle Amazo with all of the world’s other superheroes already beaten. The out-of-story motivation was to create a merchandising opportunity for a triple crossover between <i>Superman: The Movie</i> coming out that same year, the comics, and a toy and – yes – I owned one. When Manchester Black calls it Batman envy, he’s psychoanalyzing Superman, but the merchandising people were clearly copying the Batmobile as merchandise (and I owned one of those, too). Here, the Supermobile, like the limited speeds on Superman’s treadmill, reinforce the earlier claim, despite my suspicions of a ruse, we still see signs that Superman is losing his powers and needs any kind of help that he can get.<br /><br />Now, with the team facing one crisis, recruitment not complete, and the big villain yet to appear in his fourth panel, this miniseries has to have a seriously packed final two issues. If there’s a lingering thread that’s yet to unspool, it’s that the Ultra-Humanite’s hate-filled spiel in the first issue is about Superman’s dishonesty, calling Superman’s double identity and more “lies” and he’s not strictly wrong to do so. When the Ultra-Humanite says that kryptonite will destroy Superman, I think we’re going to see that be about something other than the effects of radiation. In issue #2, Superman talks about atomic bombs having been utilized by idealists. While the first issue showed us Manchester Black being brought over to the light side, there are hints here, besides the black in the chest shield, that Superman’s going to show something of the dark.<br /><p></p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-11906626054794540512021-08-15T15:34:00.005-07:002021-08-16T11:32:55.870-07:00Superman & The Authority #1<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-38Ku1z1wkJA/YRmVBkattaI/AAAAAAAABYw/CJWak76YzYIsQjIwN-hcV7MBcpyGWbx_ACNcBGAsYHQ/s500/superman%2Bauthority%2B1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="432" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-38Ku1z1wkJA/YRmVBkattaI/AAAAAAAABYw/CJWak76YzYIsQjIwN-hcV7MBcpyGWbx_ACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/superman%2Bauthority%2B1.jpg" width="276" /></a></div>It feels like we’ve been here before, but where is “here”? Grant Morrison’s “Superman & The Authority” is an Elseworlds made of Elseworlds, with several worlds placed into a blender. It’s a world where the Justice Society – sans Superman or Batman – served during World War Two, but Superman is around early in his career to meet President Kennedy… that feels a lot like Darwyn Cooke’s <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2016/06/retro-review-dc-new-frontier.html"><i>DC: The New Frontier.</i></a> Superman’s previous go-arounds in this continuity with Manchester Black are possibly much like the ones we saw in <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2009/12/best-of-decade-1.html">Joe Kelly’s issues of <i>Action Comics</i></a>. Superman tapping Manchester Black to serve on his team is a notion that Kelly entertained, briefly, in 2006’s “Superman, This Is Your Life.” A Superman who has long since retired to the [Ant]arctic, facing unsolvable problems, and wearing black in his shield, is how <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2015/11/retro-review-kingdom-come.html"><i>Kingdom Come</i></a> begins. And heroes haunted by their failure to prevent the assassination of a President is the premise of Morrison’s <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2014/11/multiversity-pax-americana.html"><i>The Multiversity: Pax Americana</i></a>, riffing hard on Alan Moore’s <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2014/07/retro-review-watchmen.html"><i>Watchmen</i></a>. With winks and nods, Morrison tells us that we’re visiting a world a little like all of these but exactly like none of them.<br /><br />From the start, and befitting the titular characters, Morrison hits us with rapid-fire alternation between optimism and pessimism. The first panel shows the last leaves falling off a tree and a caption that informs us that John F. Kennedy is about to die, while the doomed President speaks of “tomorrow dawning.” Superman asks if Kennedy will need his protection in Dallas. We know that the answer is yes, but Kennedy says “No.” All of Kennedy’s words in 1963 speak of a bright future and limitless potential, but his imminent assassination is just the first of things to go wrong. While JFK’s sunny aspirations give us detailed exposition of the superheroes’ history in this Elseworlds, a few other details check off how this world is and isn’t like the real world of 1963, with the objective of sending astronauts to Mars rather than the Moon before the end of the Sixties, and an ominous reference to ending all wars – a hope that never works out in the real world, and didn’t in this world, either.<br /><br />Then the framing of the panels tells us that this is the history of this world as seen in newsreels, or – as Manchester Black wakes up – Black’s dream of history, a dream that ends as he is awoken by a police raid that overcomes his considerable abilities.<br /><br />Morrison has long maintained that Superman is most interesting when he’s strong, which makes one of this issue’s surprises the fact that Superman is now – apparently – physically weak, an unexplained (and misleading?) exact 180° from <i>Kingdom Come</i>. But this Superman is morally as strong as ever we’ve seen, with an optimism that pays off when he is – apparently – able to win the acidic Manchester Black over to his side in a moment of super crisis. I slather on the “apparently”s because I see possible deception everywhere, and in the one panel where we see Superman while Black is unconscious, the hero lands dramatically – and seemingly powerfully, but the artwork keeps that intriguingly ambiguous, with a mighty fist joining his feet in a three-point landing that could project either power or (by Superman standards) weakness.<br /><br />When Black awakens, he gets the pitch: Superman needs his help. There’s a war, but first there’s a battle. Superman needs Black’s help in a larger sense, a strategic sense, and Black isn’t prone to agree, but first there’s an imminent, urgent and arguably worse crisis with a massive breakout of Phantom Zone robots due to occur in minutes. Again, it feels like possible deception: Superman’s Pollyannaish recruitment speech to Black served only to alienate him, as Superman must have anticipated. The imminent Phantom Zone breakout, on the other hand, was an urgent crisis in which Superman and Black inarguably faced a mutual enemy, and gave Black no time to think the matter through. Black needed either to accept Superman’s pitch, or to reject it and in so doing possibly risk his own life, should the Phantom Zone escapees ravage the entire planet after they’d beaten Superman. And it seems a bit of a coincidence that this singular existential threat would arise “exactly twelve minutes” after Black awakens. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we are to learn that Superman manipulated the situation and showed a bit of deviousness on his own part. In any event, even if the timing were coincidental (and existential threats to the DCU have a way of showing up at least daily if not hourly), the outcome is the same – after Black contemplates, with the minutes that he has left, whether or not he and the Phantom Zone prisoners are on the same side, he chooses to back Superman and, with a savvy nod to the Silver Age, he tries to defeat the escapees with a Kryptonian Thought Beast. Guess when those first appeared in publication: 1963, a year that is brought up over and over again in this issue. Did Morrison choose that 1963 reference knowingly? I don’t know.<br /><br />I’m also not sure if it was on purpose, when Superman first mentions that year in the present, that Morrison curiously quotes every note of a line from the Eighties Dream Academy song, “Life in a Northern Town”: “In Winter 1963, it felt like the world would freeze, with John F. Kennedy and the Beatles.” This refers to a notoriously severe wave of winter cold that hit the UK in early 1963, when the native Scotland of Morrison, just then turning three years old, had subzero (Fahrenheit!) temperatures. So much is coming together here that ties Morrison’s biography with this story that we should pay careful attention to the author’s place in the story – presumably on a symbolic level. The story features an acerbic, sarcastic, cynical Brit coming face to face with the symbol of American idealism and power. The story begins in the early 1960s. After decades in which things go variously well and poorly, there is a time of reckoning in which the Brit decides just how much he believes in the god-hero of American superheroes, and we can ask, perhaps thumbing through the autobiographical pages of Supergods just how much this story is about where Morrison’s viewpoints, and possibly the world’s current geopolitical status are now in 2021. Perhaps it's Morrison and not Manchester Black who's referencing "Amazing Grace" in asking whether or not Superman can "save a wretch like me."<br /><br />The plot itself, on the surface, is brimming over with pregnant details and mini-mysteries presented by the shadowy villain who not revealed in the story, but the solicits promise us that he is the Ultra-Humanite, a choice which takes us back to the absolute origin of DC supervillains, and moreover hints at another one-and-done Elseworlds series with an ampersand in its title, <i>Superman & Batman: Generations</i>. All of the little expository details slipping from the dialogue of Superman, Black, and the Ultra-Humanite set the stage wonderfully, as Morrison has done in his <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2016/09/retro-review-grant-morrisons-batman-run.html"><i>Batman</i> run</a>, <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2011/09/action-comics-1.html"><i>Action</i> run</a>, 52, and elsewhere, mixing details that are respectively from canon and contrary to canon, freeing the author to tease us with hints, then go back on those teases later, or confirm them as they see fit. Perhaps kryptonite in this reality is nothing like it is in any reality that we’ve seen before. Or perhaps it’s exactly the same. Perhaps Superman really is losing his powers, or perhaps it’s all a big ruse and, like in <i>Kingdom Come</i>, he’s stronger than ever. We just don’t know, but we have to consider both – all – possibilities, which is wonderful.<br /><br />The title hides one such alternate possibility, which is likely rife with meaning. While Manchester Black was the leader, in Joe Kelly’s DC stories, of a group called The Elite, it was based on Wildstorm Comics’ The Authority; here, Morrison uses the inspiration’s name for, presumably, the version of the group in this reality. But why? Maybe the answer is a superficial “just because” but it makes the title say something that we ought to listen to with common nouns instead of proper nouns: The story is about Superman and the authority (small “a”) that he has. Whether he really has lost his powers or is only pretending to do so, this story clearly brings into question whether or not Superman has authority (small “a”) that comes from his qualities as a leader, as an inspiration, and not simply whether or not Earth’s yellow sun has charged his muscles with incredible power. And that promises a much more interesting story than a title that promises us meditations about Superman and the elite (small “e”).<p></p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-25694883579259547932021-03-15T00:49:00.003-07:002021-03-15T00:49:27.411-07:00The Green Lantern Season Two #12<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Yoqsp4wNgkE/YE8QdgBwGTI/AAAAAAAABWY/OfXhmvtjXFM4QJjX1jDQJNK30segjGL9ACNcBGAsYHQ/s1568/tgl_bye.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1568" data-original-width="1018" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Yoqsp4wNgkE/YE8QdgBwGTI/AAAAAAAABWY/OfXhmvtjXFM4QJjX1jDQJNK30segjGL9ACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/tgl_bye.jpg" /></a></div>On the last page, the hero flies off. We may not see him again anytime soon. He doesn’t know where his path will take him. Yes, that’s a statement about Hal Jordan, but it’s also a statement (give or take pronouns?) about Grant Morrison, and not an accidental one. Morrison, who identified with and championed Batman so intimately a decade ago fully took the Hal Jordan character to heart and for as long as this run has lasted, it’s been a statement that Jordan is Morrison’s champion, and that he is worth of being ours. And so, Morrison’s send-off is Hal’s send-off. For now.<br /><br />For such a landmark issue, <i>The Green Lantern</i> Season Two #12 is remarkably formulaic for much of its story. Someone powerful faces off against Hal and Hal tells them, in essence, Fight with me or lose. He’s always right about that and he knows that he’s right about that. Earlier, I compared this upcoming ending to the end of Morrison’s <i>Batman</i> run, but Batman was beaten low, unconscious, out of his mind. Hal really never stops smirking at any point in this issue. He doesn’t negotiate with enemies; he threatens them, and along the way, he belittles them; he informs them that he has absolute control over the outcome of the conflict. “The ‘Golden Ones’ – I figured you’d show up eventually. You shouldn’t have… and you’ll wish you hadn’t.” Hal wins over his allies and takes down his enemies in sequence: Draatha, the supervillain surrogates, a brainwashed and transformed Fekk and Samandra, Hector Hammond, and finally the Golden Giants – and by extension, offscreen, Hyperwoman. Each time, Hal states the outcome in advance. Fekk and Samandra join him. The Golden Giants accept a deal. The others go down in a fight. Hal barely, at any point, seems worried. Ultimately, he wins with whatever weapon he uses against whatever other weapon. If his enemy has a massive space fleet and Hal has a sharp rock, Hal will win. Hal wins because he’s a winner and this is his story. This isn’t a clinic on combat techniques. It isn’t really about the way the Intelligence Engine (the issue’s title) works or how it selectively interferes with the power ring. It’s a parable about the comics industry and the hero genre itself. Everybody represents a larger class. The fighting always goes Hal’s way. The real story is in the talking.<br /><br />As we’ve seen with other Morrison works, many supporting characters are drawn from DC lore that hasn’t been thought of as in-continuity in quite some time, but Morrison changes the original conceptions profoundly. I came into this run expecting that, perhaps, we would see many such characters from Hal’s past, but we rather saw many characters from throughout the Silver Age, but not specifically from <i>Green Lantern</i>, Volume 2 (1960-). The Hyper-Family debuted as heroes in <i>Superboy</i>. The Golden Giants debuted as antagonists in <i>Flash</i>. These characters look like their original versions but, like Doctor Hurt with respect to the unnamed doctor from which he originated, are profoundly corrupted: Hyperman and Hyperwoman turned from happy, smiling superheroes into psychopaths while the Golden Giants turned from primitive brutes into tyrants. Athmoora, from an Abin Sur scene in an early Hal story, is also rooted, stylistically in the past, but Morrison doesn’t change it so much as he makes it dirtier and grittier. In the 1962 original, Athmoora was a planet in the present that remained stuck in a medieval past, with knights fighting in swordplay – but not too busy to stop and explain to Abin Sur that alien invaders had stolen their “I-Factor” which trapped them in a less developed state rather than progressing.<br /><br />The irony is that Hal Jordan was created as a representation of futuristic technology – a test pilot only years after the sound barrier had first been broken – but <i>TGL</i> Season Two is a parable about past and present. And it’s necessary to tease apart how these different takes on the past interrelate. We have the Golden Giants rooted in prehistory (25 million years ago, <i>Flash</i> #120 says) but they represent nothing from the past so much as a timeless greed. Athmoora, literally in the present but living in the style of hundreds of years ago, represents the style of superhero comics produced in the Silver Age but representing something that Morrison values today. Characters like Vartox (destroyed) and Hyper-Man (now evil) represent those Silver Age value corrupted and diminished. This is similar to how Morrison depicted the downfall of <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2014/09/multiversity-society-of-super-heroes.html">Earth-20’s Society of Super-Heroes</a>, with everything going wrong as soon as the Atom killed a man. The Silver Age bit performers, the Golden Giants, and Athmoora’s warriors are the players representing the past but what of the present?<br /><br />Every now and then a Morrison story has a line that doesn’t seem to fit – something jarring, out of character, or otherwise defying the expected logic – and, not seeing the reason for them, I read on, but there’s usually a very good explanation for them in the end. And in #12, that line is Hector Hammond saying, “I was an ordinary person once. Ordinary like you. Like all of us.” And then later, “I get to kill a superhero. Admit it! Wouldn’t you want to kill a superhero?” And the simple question is: Who is “you”? To whom is Hector Hammond narrating? And the answer is, us. Some of us, at least. And it’s Hal talking back to those who want to see his style of superhero destroyed when he asks Hector, in rage, “You did all this just to kick over my sandcastle?”<br /><br />That’s Hal, the erstwhile man of the future, now a man of the past in certain ways, talking back to those – fans and creators – who want to see Athmoora destroyed. For what is Athmoora? The answer is way back in Season One #9. On Athmoora, the ring sassily says to Hal, “I don’t know why we come here” and Hal answers, “Don’t know about you. I came for a vacation.” And that, 18 issues back, is the simple answer to the simple pleasure that Morrison is standing up for in this parable. Why the hell does anyone pick a comic book up, anyway? Hal came for a vacation. An escape. Didn’t you?<br /><br />The Young Guardians (recent DC writers), the Golden Giants of the Nomad Empire (the corporate control of creativity and “change for no sake other than change itself”), and Hector Hammond (the creators and fans who have nothing but disdain for this sort of comic) are ready to kick over the sandcastle, end the vacation, end the escape, and move on for no sake other than change itself. This is why Morrison showed Earth-15 with its dead Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. This is the Depressoverse. This is the ugly revamp of Fekk and Samandra into gaudy video game characters (they drop terminology from World of Warcraft).<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r2LXIkwofsY/YE8RVLmKsYI/AAAAAAAABWk/QEHr3i6R9AUlPhla3mW_hUA5TM4mCKGwACNcBGAsYHQ/s922/quing_hammond.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="922" data-original-width="379" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r2LXIkwofsY/YE8RVLmKsYI/AAAAAAAABWk/QEHr3i6R9AUlPhla3mW_hUA5TM4mCKGwACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/quing_hammond.jpg" /></a></div>Who is the real villain here? Hyper-Woman was a Silver Age character ruined by adultification. Morrison dismisses the Young Guardians (his colleagues, until now) as “knowing everything, understanding nothing” (Season 1 #7). The chattering online fans (“i h8 u!” “terf!”) represent the Ultrawar of everyone against everyone else. Hammond is their leading voice, but he’s just a pawn. The artwork seems to pin down the answer. The latest Quing of the Nomad Empire – a mispronunciation of “king”… “Long live the Quing!” (Season Two #4) – is depicted as an infectious virus – the perfect symbol for the Coronavirus era. From his first appearance he’s looked like a particular type of virus called a bacteriophage, but now we see him land on Hammond’s overdeveloped cranium and infect him, leaving him babbling gibberish like a virus-infected cell (perhaps bacterium). Check it out:<br /><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ctes-aRM1nA/YE8RK5uou4I/AAAAAAAABWg/yFRXhL8974wBvXDkfncUXg0IaAkwpGE7wCNcBGAsYHQ/s1040/bacteriophage.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1040" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ctes-aRM1nA/YE8RK5uou4I/AAAAAAAABWg/yFRXhL8974wBvXDkfncUXg0IaAkwpGE7wCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/bacteriophage.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />This story is the encounter between Hal – good old fashioned superhero comics… a vacation – and those corporate interests, but he doesn’t crush them, kill them, or eliminate them. He makes them a deal. Morrison’s message is that Hal’s style of superhero is the real, pure thing. They’re the kind of heroes that people are really looking for. Not itchy-looking brutes like Draatha (who goes down hard after bragging of his superiority) or the World of Warcraft downgrades of Fekk and Samandra (who becomes a franchise in comics, movies, and games). Superheroes. That’s the Cosmic Grail that they had and lost. They lost it because of change for change’s sake. And Hal makes them a deal. They can just have it back and profit off it forever. And all he has to do to consecrate the deal is to summon up his will and say the oath, and let it sound all over the Multiverse. Love and will. And when he’s done saying his oath, the war is over.<br /><br />If they accept this, Morrison is saying of the creative conglomerates, if they let the superheroes be superheroes, they will have what they want, taking the golden lamp (a wonderful and moreover profitable source of new stories) into the over-space. Maybe Morrison’s right. And maybe they will.<br /><br />In the epilogue, the Young Guardians confess that Hal was right. They were wrong to want to end his tenure. Letting Athmoora grow and advance seems to be compatible with what Hal asked – it can still be a place for vacation. Hal asks the Young Guardians – Morrison speaking of the new new crop of DC writers – “the next generation of artificial Guardians will learn from your [the 2016-2020 writers] experiences, right?” Morrison’s hoping, but also preaching.<br /><br />And then it ends where it began. Asked to stay around, Hal beams himself off in a goodbye that is temporary for Hal Jordan. But this isn’t just the last page of The Green Lantern, but perhaps, of Grant Morrison’s DC work. Until if and when our paths cross again.<br /><p></p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-2422920223753433262021-03-07T02:09:00.002-08:002021-03-07T02:09:30.791-08:00The Green Lantern: Last Chapter<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FFt8D7_KQZc/YESlBw__J1I/AAAAAAAABWQ/sw89nbSjUIg7ekx_bTK0ghPsLsF13sh1QCNcBGAsYHQ/s1006/tgl_fall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1006" data-original-width="786" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FFt8D7_KQZc/YESlBw__J1I/AAAAAAAABWQ/sw89nbSjUIg7ekx_bTK0ghPsLsF13sh1QCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/tgl_fall.jpg" /></a></div><b> The End?</b><br /><br />With one issue and less than two weeks until the end of Grant Morrison’s 28-issue <i>The Green Lantern</i>, it’s clear that we’re headed for a climactic finish, quite a bit like the final two issues of <i>Batman, R.I.P.</i>, where the hero is facing a carefully-prepared trap made just for him. It’s not just a tank of piranhas or some walls squeezing in or a vat of acid. This finale is not just about one particular gizmo or one particular scenario. This will be an existential crisis, with multiple enemies. And it’s big enough that we can’t see the broad edges around him: What will he face? Who is behind it? And is it unrelated that the Guardians have just told him that his time as a Green Lantern is basically up after this mission, and that the very way he has always operated is anathema to them? Hal Jordan is facing total doom. After all, he’s already escaped death multiple times in this run, and not just by dodging death, but actually coming back from it. The stakes in the finale are not comic book death but the total destruction of Hal Jordan.<br /><br />If you’ve ever read or watched anything about the superhero genre, what I’ve just said may not move you. You know what to expect. He’ll pull victory out of nowhere. He’ll will a power ring to do something it’s never done before. He’ll defeat six entire corps of enemies with a wooden spoon. We’ve seen Morrison’s JLA give the whole human population super powers. We’ve seen Morrison’s Batman climb out of a grave. The hero wins at the end. That’s how this works, right?<br /><br />Maybe. But in fact, Hal was killed out of DC Comics once before and it lasted for quite a while. And in fact, the April solicitations for DC hint that we may not be seeing any Hal comics in the coming era. When Trilla Tru says, in #11, “You okay, Jordan? It’s like you’re saying goodbye,” in fact maybe he is.<br /><b><br />The Money Plot: Mass Consumption, Mass Destruction</b><br /><br />There’s another thread to this story, one bigger than just Hal Jordan, that goes back to Morrison’s works early in the last decade. There’s a meta-story, as with most good DC events from the better writers over the past thirty-six years. Morrison has assiduously laid out a theme in which the bright, happy superheroes really are in trouble. There really is a threat to them, and Morrison believes it. There is a sharp turnaround from <i>Final Crisis</i> and <i>Superman Beyond</i> in which the irreducible optimism of Superman – as a fictional character – overpowers any threat on the printed page or off of it. Beginning with <i>Action</i> and <i>Multiversity</i>, Morrison depicts a real threat off the page to optimistic superheroes, one in which depressing stories prove more marketable, and we may really see these market forces in the real world put an end to the like of Hal Jordan.<br /><br />I commented <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-green-lantern-before-end.html">in my last post</a> about <i>TGL</i> Morrison’s theme of this meta-enemy they associate with “mass production, mass consumption, mass destruction” of the DC superhero franchise, but I’m returning to it here because it’s hard to say anything about the run – at least since <i>TGL</i> Season One #9 – without putting this theme front and center. What I mentioned about this theme in my last post comes up so centrally from the first page of <i>TGL</i> Season Two #11 (“worthless toys… and those towers of shining glass”), and I gave the whole series a re-read looking for how this abstract theme interacts with the specific plot of <i>TGL</i>, to see how the former drives the latter.<br /><br />First, Morrison takes many, many of the most light-hearted characters from the most light-hearted era of Silver Age comics and turns their stories dark, making some of them into psychopaths, and others into victims. The Hyperman family is the most prominent example of happy, sappy heroes turned into killers, but we also see the death of Vartox and the ghosts of the Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman of the “perfect universe” Earth-15. We see the now-wicked Powerlord (once Power-Boy) pledge allegiance to a “Great Lah!”, a reference that confounded me until I finally, with head-slapping clarity, realized that “Lah” is “Hal” spelled backwards. We later learn that the Qwa-Man’s name is Qwa-Lah.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s6Xg-QNPnYY/YESkeQtL-_I/AAAAAAAABWI/aeFSVL95R5cumk01RarYXQAwevu5sZ9IQCNcBGAsYHQ/s2074/tgl_inks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1012" data-original-width="2074" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s6Xg-QNPnYY/YESkeQtL-_I/AAAAAAAABWI/aeFSVL95R5cumk01RarYXQAwevu5sZ9IQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/tgl_inks.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />The meta-message is hammered home in <i>TGL</i> Season Two #4 when the Golden Giants of Neo-Pangaea declare that a court is in session, overseen by judges in the colors magenta, yellow, azure, and black. That’s a strange set of colors, isn’t it? Not four colors you’d likely see come up in any combination except that those are the four colors of printing – magenta, yellow, cyan, and black. These judges order Hal to submit and be destroyed and he escaped them back in #4, but their kind, the Nomad Empire, is back now, and as we’ve been warned, Hal’s going to face a worse version of them in #12. The specific reference to printer’s ink colors tells us that Morrison’s not referring to an abstract sci fi entity but something in the real world – the publishers of the comic book themselves.<br /><br />Another meta-message made clear in #11 is when we, and Hal, find out that the new Young Guardians will surprisingly be leaving and be replaced soon, right after they were born and after a short reign. Hal notes, “But they’ve barely been here! You mean they changed everything and we’ll be left with the consequences?” I think here Morrison is commenting on many of the lead writers at DC in the 2015-2020 era. And throughout this run, Morrison has used the Antimatter Universe as a comment on the dark themes of the Dark Multiverse, the Joker Who Laughs. In the Hal Jordan storyline, antimatter has meant opposite and evil since the first mention of Qward in 1960. In <i>TGL</i>, the light-hearted Power-Boy who turns into the dark Powerlord now worships Lah – Hal spelled backwards, a representative of the evil antimatter world. Morrison has created a central plot line in this run about money, but it is about what money in the real world is doing to the comics industry.<br /><br />This begins in Season One #10 when Hal says, “Some profiteers kick a hole in the antimatter border.” An Illegal antimatter mining operation blows a planet to pieces, and destroys many of the happy, positive Silver Age heroes while turning others of them evil. This is not the offhand creation of a plot device to make the story go. I suggest that this is a comment on writers (recall the printer’s ink) mining dark themes, which is lucrative (higher sales) but destructive (e.g., Vartox is killed, Hyperman and Hyperwoman become psychopathic killers). The central plot of Season Two is a critique of the direction of DC’s output over the past few years, a critique earlier seen pointedly during the <i>Green Lantern: Blackstars</i> interlude with the Depressoverse spawning a Batmanson whose evil, laughing Bat-family was “infectious now.”<br /><br />But Morrison’s first invocation of this theme was in 2012, with Superdoomsday. The language that Morrison used then was “maximum cross-spectrum, wide-platform appeal.” This sardonic celebration of business values is echoed in <i>TGL</i> Season Two #2: “all-out opportunism” and the toy plot of #4, then picked up again in #11, in Samandra’s vision of “wild trolls chained to moving belts building worthless toys… and those towers of shining glass.” If the Dark Multiverse inspired Morrison to parody it as the Depressoverse, it was a development confirming the direction they saw coming well before <i>DC: Metal </i>began in 2017. <br /><br /><b>Moore of the Same?</b><br /><br /><a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2018/02/final-crisis-retro-review-part-iii.html">In my 2018 analysis of <i>Final Crisis</i></a>, I expounded at length upon the many elements of Alan Moore’s work echoed and commented upon in <i>FC</i>. There, Morrison took a very different trajectory from Moore’s pessimism, particularly 1986’s <i>Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?</i> Now, in 2021, we see a few elements from Moore’s late-1980s work arise again.<br /><br />Strikingly, Moore’s unpublished Twilight of the Superheroes had as its pivotal event a royal wedding between two “houses” of superhero, particularly involving the son of Superman to a powerful princess, Mary Marvel Jr. In <i>TGL</i> Season Two, the pivotal political event was a royal wedding between Hyperboy – the son of a Superman knock-off – and a powerful princess. In Moore’s story, this event would make the two families so powerful that other parties planned to start a war to prevent it. In TGL, the groom-to-be’s identity as the son of a Superman surrogate is parallel, and there is also a sense that the marriage will guarantee the power of the two families, in both cases a Superman Family to be feared, and a fear in turn, by Hyperwoman, that revelation of Hyperman’s criminal activities would cancel the wedding, and so she has to kill Hal Jordan before he can arrest Hyperman. As it turns out, the trial and conviction of Hyperman and the arrest of Hyperwoman fail to halt the wedding, which falls apart on its own. In Morrison’s story, the “success” of the dark family is doomed of its own sterility, with Hyperboy rejecting and insulting his “Shadow-Princess” bride-to-be at the altar and the two of them vowing war against one another. Mining the darkness of antimatter – or in comics – is not to be successful in the long run after all.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gom0dWNB9zc/YESj4LctwTI/AAAAAAAABWA/igEuT-Bpxn85wseOKr_84sN9PP-OY7rpACNcBGAsYHQ/s1050/tgl_doubles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="743" data-original-width="1050" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gom0dWNB9zc/YESj4LctwTI/AAAAAAAABWA/igEuT-Bpxn85wseOKr_84sN9PP-OY7rpACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/tgl_doubles.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />To return to the potent influence of WHTTMOT, the entire arc of Season Two has led us there. In Moore’s story, light-hearted Superman characters like Bizarro, Toyman, and the Prankster become homicidal. In Morrison’s, light-hearted Superman characters like Hyperman and Power-Boy become homicidal. At that point in WHTTMOT, Superman asks, “If the nuisances from my past are coming back as killers… what happens when the killers come back?” He is soon answered by the arrival of an array of his killer villains. Hal, at the end of #11, is stunned to see that the Nomad Empire, at Hyperwoman’s request, has gathered a collection of his more serious foes, including the Shark (deadly), Black Hand (virtually synonymous with death). The final attack on Superman in WHTTMOT is led by a Brainiac-possessed Luthor, featuring a weird composite of their heads, and lo, the leader of this final attack on Hal is led by Hector Hammond, with a weird superimposition of Sinestro over his head. Coincidence?<br /><br /><b>Chiaroscuro</b><br /><br />Earlier in Season Two, we saw Hal in a seemingly fatal jam, falling from the sky at the end of #3, when his bird-sidekicks caught him in midair. By issue #11, they have already grown to maturity and seem to leave him, and Hal is notably saddened. A family of birds referring to their guardian as “Unca Hal” – this is a lighthearted echo of Huey, Louis, and Dewey. They’ve saved him in the past. But for now, they have left him. This is the light…<br /><br />…and subsequently, the dark: Hal has found himself in the most dire of circumstances. His bosses want to end his time as a Green Lantern. His foes have planned his annihilation. The entire setup on Athmoora is modeled on the darkness of Game of Thrones, from the comically parallel issue title “Contest of Crowns” to the map of multiple kingdoms and Hector Hammond saying, “Hyperwoman sends her regards” paraphrasing a key line in Game of Thrones, “The Lannisters send their regards.” In both stories it is a threat. Like Batman in Batman, R.I.P., Hal is in a trap made just for him, with a new villain asking his old villains to participate. Like Superman in WHTTMOT, this is to be Hal’s final fate.<br /><br />Or will it? We know the pattern in which the hero pulls out the win at the end. We might suspect that Hal’s bird nephews will bring the light aspect of comics to him and save him once again. This is the R.I.P. ending. But how will Morrison’s view of real world “mass consumption… mass destruction” play into this? And we already know that this series ending will not be followed by another series with Hal right away. Maybe according to Morrison’s final GL issue, maybe according to the plans of the writers who take over next, this really is a grim fate awaiting Hal Jordan.<p></p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-53769373941169087052021-02-08T00:19:00.001-08:002021-02-08T00:19:17.582-08:00The Green Lantern, Before the End<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5B95ghNVERw/YCDw_-0EDII/AAAAAAAABVE/v0Lyu9N8TSk3PKhJEajaurRUzYmwMdBsACNcBGAsYHQ/s1080/tgl_s2e9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="974" data-original-width="1080" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5B95ghNVERw/YCDw_-0EDII/AAAAAAAABVE/v0Lyu9N8TSk3PKhJEajaurRUzYmwMdBsACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/tgl_s2e9.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>If <i>The Green Lantern</i> is to be Grant Morrison’s last work writing a monthly title for DC, the final two issues should be a grand gesture, long remembered. With twenty-five of the issues behind us, what can we say of Morrison’s love letter to Hal Jordan? Where has this journey led and how will it finish?<br /><br />In some regard, Morrison’s earlier runs with <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/search/label/black%20glove">Batman</a> and Superman (on <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/search/label/action"><i>Action</i></a>) are two of a kind, with this Green Lantern run as the third in a set. These are not just runs that start with a story, followed by another story, then another, until there’s a last one. Morrison builds a structure. His Batman run had, primarily, three arcs, with a Big Bad lurking in the shadows until late in each run. His <i>Action</i> run, the shortest, had just one such season, with one primary Big Bad, <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2013/03/action-comics-18.html">Vyndktvx</a>. Morrison’s run, thus far, organized around three distinct titles of 12, 3, and 12 issues, has had one clear Big Bad in the first, but the third has not, so far, suggested any one central villain lurking.<br /><br />All of these plot lines have rosters of villains backing up the main one; sometimes they are underlings of the boss, and sometimes they are parallel, lesser, but unrelated threats. The Batman stories had Doctor Hurt and Talia as the central villains, but Ra’s al Ghul, the Joker, and Darkseid’s Hyper-Adapter and several others played major roles. In <i>Action</i>, Vyndktvx was the central villain, but Super-Doomsday was pivotal, the muscle in some respect, to Vyndktvx’s brains. And in The Green Lantern’s first twelve issues, the Qwa-Man, Hal’s antimatter double, is something like that for Commander Mu.<br /><br />The structure even for <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2019/03/green-lantern-2-5.html">Season One</a> (the first twelve issues, not formally named as a season) was more complex than “seasons” of Morrison’s other runs. It appeared, near the end of issue 6, as though Commander Mu’s plan had reached fruition, and he had just about built the machine at the center of his master plot, hinted as far back as issue 1, and then… he was killed, by Alanna, no less. Furthermore, Hal and the universe as a whole were at death’s door along with him. But then, late in #12, we found out that Mu had not died (and perhaps could not die), and the plan suddenly went forward just exactly twice as far into the story as when it had seemed to have been halted the first time. And just as before, Hal was faced with imminent death. Just as before, creating, and giving to Mu, the miracle machine (Geh-Jedollah, the very same ultimate wishing machine from <i>Final Crisis</i>) seemed to be the only way for Hal to save his own life. And then, once again, Hal feigned compliance but at the end of the three-issue mini-season, <i>Green Lantern Blackstars</i>, it turned out that Hal had a massive ruse going, letting the Blackstars win in a different universe. Belzebeth believed that she would be able to fight back, but, once again, Mu had turned out to have escaped death and perhaps to be beyond death. Even fifteen issues in, the run had turned out to be a sort of Möbius Strip of repeated subplots. Has Mu won? Has Hal? Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes.<br /><br /><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JtrAsTQ766M/YCDwzRiKnfI/AAAAAAAABVA/tpK50WTL1QgAIV3U6haFgRsXmHfg_eBJACNcBGAsYHQ/s1095/tgl_buddies.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1019" data-original-width="1095" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JtrAsTQ766M/YCDwzRiKnfI/AAAAAAAABVA/tpK50WTL1QgAIV3U6haFgRsXmHfg_eBJACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/tgl_buddies.jpg" width="320" /></a>For Hal, too, being on the verge of death, and actually dying, has occurred three times so far: around the midpoint of each season, and then at the end of the first. Everything is cycling; the run is not only a flashback to each of the major themes of Hal Jordan’s publication history, but a repetition of them. Old girlfriends come up early in each season. The Qwa-Man and Zundernell come up in both seasons. Marriage comes up near the end of each season. Each season has a buddy team up with a Silver Age JLA member important to Hal’s lore: first, Green Arrow; then, the Flash.<p></p>And, of course, as with Morrison’s Batman run, this run features plenty of alternate Green Lanterns; what the League of Heroes and other imitation Batmen were in that run, the Green Lantern Corps and Green Lanterns of other Earths in the Multiverse (no pair being more memorable than Batman Green Lantern and Hippie Green Lantern) are in this one. Hal succeeds where Superman and the JLA fail in Season One, manipulates and bests Superman in GL Blackstars, fights and ultimately bests the Superman surrogate Hyperman in Season Two. Repetition is everywhere, until even Hal, in Season Two #2 (two twos like Harvey Dent is behind it) says, “Feels like I’m trapped in my own history.” Morrison’s Green Lantern run is a carousel ride, repeating Hal’s history while it also repeats itself. Girlfriends, Silver Age -style sci fi plots with aliens, coming back to Earth, going back to space, buddy team-ups, the anti-universe, death, weird doppelgängers, his Guardian bosses, betrayal, defeat, victory. It all repeats, then repeats again. Morrison’s GL run is a microcosm of Hal’s publication history, but it’s also a microcosm of itself, loops upon loops.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0czN9-akAi8/YCDx93Bs54I/AAAAAAAABVc/i2WN2eEomBUHTjGx5A1pqET__woZID7zQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1258/tgl_glc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1258" data-original-width="1014" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0czN9-akAi8/YCDx93Bs54I/AAAAAAAABVc/i2WN2eEomBUHTjGx5A1pqET__woZID7zQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/tgl_glc.jpg" /></a></div>And what is the story of Hal Jordan? Limitless talent, limitless self confidence, limitlessly prone to screwing everything up and then getting it all back again. He works as a pilot and is on the hot seat. He works for the Guardians and is on the hot seat. His knack for disobeying authority makes him the ultimate inside agent to bring down the Blackstars from the inside. He faces death and survives. He even dies and comes back. He wins over the lady and then blows it. His real romance as Green Lantern is with the power ring, personified as Pengowirr in Season One. His big scary enemy, the (yellow!) Zundernell, he shrinks down into a harmless joke. He’s a little bit comfortable in absolutely every situation and at home nowhere. In Season Two, the big universe-ending Crisis on Infinite Earths gets remixed and turns into another riff. Morrison didn’t invent any of this – it all goes back to the dawn of the Silver Age. Morrison simply refines it and repeats it. And this is the perfect time to pause and consider the story before its final arc because in the last story line, a proposal to Carol Ferris just might break the loop couldn’t do that because, as Carol said, “In the end maybe but it’s not – it’s not the end… not yet.” <br /><br />This isn’t just the story of Hal Jordan. It’s also a work – potentially his last DC work, potentially a touchstone work – by Grant Morrison, and it may be following one long, slow-developing story that is taking perhaps the medium and perhaps the author on a path towards disenchantment.<br /><br />After <i>Final Crisis,</i> Morrison’s three high-profile series have been <i>Action</i>, <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-multiversity-1.html"><i>Multiversity</i></a>, and <i>The Green Lantern</i>. <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2018/02/final-crisis-retro-review-part-iii.html"><i>FC</i> and <i>Superman Beyond</i></a> delivered a message of optimism about the medium, that Superman was bigger than the writers, bigger than any of us, and the story of Superman drew so much power from its optimism that it was destined to go on forever. But in the three subsequent runs, we see this optimism undercut by metatextual messages in the stories as Morrison works in subplots that are about the superhero medium and the superhero as merchandise. In Action, perhaps the most ominous foe faced by Superman is Superdoomsday, “a brand” with “maximum cross-spectrum, wide-platform appeal, a violent, troubled, faceless anti-hero... a global marketing icon.” In <i>Multiversity</i>, <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2015/05/multiversity-2.html">The Empty Hand</a>, symbolizing the economic pressures on the publishers and The Gentry, symbolizing the market and market forces that pervert the heroes, often, into something darker and more sensational, reinforce the message that marketing and branding would lead to something violent and troubled. And while I didn’t see it at first, I feel sure that it is significant that the agents of The Empty Hand, seemingly sweet and benign but dark and possessed were the Little League of Earth-42. Above all others, these are the versions of the DC characters aimed directly at the youngest, most innocent readers. And is there a common thread here? Yes, definitely: The Little League first met darkness when Superdoomsday from Earth-45 arrived and killed their Superman. And by the time we see them in <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2015/01/multiversity-guidebook.html"><i>Multiversity Guidebook</i></a>, they are evil, possessed, red-eyed agents of marketing as perverted into darkness.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-POee-fuOFpY/YCDxgWioWrI/AAAAAAAABVQ/flk4fFYtyUMS73A20UCSnesDgZNPqE32QCNcBGAsYHQ/s1523/batmanson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1523" data-original-width="1158" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-POee-fuOFpY/YCDxgWioWrI/AAAAAAAABVQ/flk4fFYtyUMS73A20UCSnesDgZNPqE32QCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/batmanson.jpg" /></a></div><br />And now, in <i>The Green Lantern</i>, two subplots echoed and built upon this pessimism. First, the darkly satirical metatexual opening to <i>GL Blackstars</i> #2 amplifies the grim tone of <i>Heroes in Crisis</i>, the Dark Multiverse, and other works, with a Depressoverse, culminating with a clearly Batman Who Laughs -inspired Batmanson who is infectious, making the real Batman, the paragon of conviction in the DC Universe, “give in.” Later, quite parallel to the Little Leaguers, the team-up with the Flash in <i>TGL Season Two</i> #4 introduces Hal and Barry and Olivia Reynolds to an enemy world of toys. The world itself is a toy, smelling of “canned plastic” and ultimately, Olivia’s career expertise in toys allows her to defeat them, but not before we see how dark these toys are in a very modern way, “beta-testing” the heroes, play until they break, and when the lead toy, Quing, is broken, how unsympathetically he is replaced with one of the others as the new Quing.<br /><br />In all of this, we see the underlying optimism – an affirmation of the superhero medium – turn to a darker metatextual comment with marketing as the enemy that may corrupt superheroes for once and for all. And it may not be coincidental that this message has picked up pace now as Morrison is, perhaps, moving on.<br /><br />And so, a run that is full of repetition is going to stop repeating soon, because the end is coming. The big finale (#11 and #12) will take place on Athmoora, a world first shown in two panels of <i>GL</i> #16 back in 1962. Morrison places Hal on Athmoora in Season One #9, where Hal visits just for the fun of the adventure of brawling in combat where his ring is weakened. That is one of astonishingly many times in the run that Hal has voluntarily forsaken the security of his ring, confident in his ability to face danger in any circumstance. Now he returns to that danger again. If we have just two issues left of new Morrison monthlies to enjoy, I will be enjoying them and looking forward to seeing on what directions he takes Hal and us in his finale.<br /><p></p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-44846701976703106722020-09-20T23:56:00.003-07:002020-09-20T23:56:35.916-07:00Legion of Super-Heroes 1-8<p><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--kYlihvZHjA/X2hN36CPB-I/AAAAAAAABTY/Pd94T-o_EXA0gxTJEPTaoYJWUCBv9qgPQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1362/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-09-20%2Bat%2B11.52.50%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wpHIqpmWZJM/X2hOionOQ_I/AAAAAAAABTg/2CzyaHJZcdonPThVHDm5ieE4Ped6DaBOgCNcBGAsYHQ/s1158/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-09-20%2Bat%2B11.55.53%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1158" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wpHIqpmWZJM/X2hOionOQ_I/AAAAAAAABTg/2CzyaHJZcdonPThVHDm5ieE4Ped6DaBOgCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-09-20%2Bat%2B11.55.53%2BPM.png" /></a></div>Against the background of 82 years of DC comics, storylines begin and storylines end. A writer, sometimes paired with a particular artist will work on a series and usually it’s a pairing that few will think of very often afterwards. At times, though, a run will take hold of the imagination and command a vast readership and serve as the foundation of many memories and future directions for years to come.<br /><br />With those eight decades of precedent, it’s more often the case now that a writer will take something old and make it new rather than inventing from scratch. Brian Michael Bendis came to DC from Marvel and his great talents were aimed first at Superman. It’s a run that has entertained me considerably and keeps me engaged but if there’s a title now that seems to me to show the full potential of superhero comics in the third decade of the 21st century, its Bendis’ work on the Legion of Super-Heroes.<br /><br />The LSH had already been invented, reinvented, and reinvented again literally to death. The LSH began as a fertile Silver Age lark, then under Paul Levitz and Gerry Conway became a more mature work, taking the characters and by extension the readers through adolescence. A post-COIE storyline by Keith Giffen narrated a series of cosmic reboots before things settled into a new continuity – one that has since been rebooted three times now – or four?<br /><br />Like many series over the years, the Bendis Legion mixes old continuity (not necessarily the latest one) with some entirely new elements. It also mixes in elements of DC history that were never associated with the LSH before, which often has the feeling of a puzzle piece fitting in where it had previously been missing. This is by no means the first such addition to the LSH, with Rond Vidar bringing in the legacy of the Green Lanterns way back in 1966, followed shortly thereafter with the Tornado Twins tying in the history of the Flash. Bendis makes some more unusual choices, with Rose (of “and Thorn” fame) actually kicking off the story, aside from cameos showing the new LSH in Doomsday Clock and the Superman titles, and the various worlds of Batman, Aquaman, and Doctor Fate making appearances along the way.<br /><br />It’s not a cast of characters that make for a great run, but what Bendis does with them, and 10 issues in, we see enormous potential for character development. The LSH has always had some members who are more equal than others, with Superboy originally and often at the forefront. Pointedly, Bendis’ boldest creative decision is in placing Jon Kent in the central role for the first time. And throughout the first issues, Jon Kent plays a role that’s familiar from other literature: the newcomer. Or, in terms of children’s literature, he’s the new kid in school. He begins automatically in this new century facing unlimited amounts of unfamiliarity and social awkwardness. A recurring subplot about a missed orientation presentation fills one with dread as he continues to be behind on his lessons. But Jon Kent not only fills the shoes and chest emblem of Superman – he is (“will have been”) Superman, and the reverence that the LSH shows in his presence develops the Jon Kent character in an interesting way. It is in a future that we – and he – have not seen that has earned him the LSH’s initial respect. Thereby, every word, every glance is potentially foreshadowing, and we have to wonder why. This was not so true with the teenage Kal-El of LSH past, whose future – much of it – we had already seen. However, Bendis also elevates Jon Kent with his leadership in the “present” (as the narration comes to us). The boy who had previously appeared as a child grasping instruction from his parents has a star moment in issue #7, mending a conflict between the LSH and the United Planets with a short, effective speech after Brainiac 5 and Cosmic Boy had failed in their attempts.<br /><br />In the character development of several other LSH members, Bendis explores parent-adolescent conflict with a variety of experiences that range from rebellion to submission. Ultra Boy is highlighted most of all, as his father becomes something of the LSH’s primary opponent in the series so far, but the old setup of heroes and villains is much closer to gray here. Ultra Boy never stops thinking of the General as his father, and we see a struggle between his relationship with family vs. that with friends and in all things, he is reluctant. Cosmic Boy and Lightning Lad also struggle to be the successes that their lives ask them to be. Reep Daggle is still within the grasp of parental authority, acting as a spy, if a benevolent one, for his mother, R.J. Brande, who is the Legion’s biggest frenemy thus far. But the women shine: Saturn Girl has moved without doubts beyond and above her family expectations, and Lightning Lass, initially reluctant to join the Legion, is perhaps the boldest member they have, at least among those who have had some time to develop.<br /><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--kYlihvZHjA/X2hN36CPB-I/AAAAAAAABTY/Pd94T-o_EXA0gxTJEPTaoYJWUCBv9qgPQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1362/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-09-20%2Bat%2B11.52.50%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="898" data-original-width="1362" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--kYlihvZHjA/X2hN36CPB-I/AAAAAAAABTY/Pd94T-o_EXA0gxTJEPTaoYJWUCBv9qgPQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-09-20%2Bat%2B11.52.50%2BPM.png" width="320" /></a><br />Perhaps the most interesting Legionnaire’s story for me so far is that of Mon-El. As with the other primary characters, we know him from previous history, but we don’t know what Bendis may have changed. As the LSH is struggling in their first battle with the General Nah, Mon-El flies in with complete confidence and takes him down with one punch. But then it turns out that it’s a political nightmare, and the easy win has made Mon-El the new leader of Rimbor. After that punch, almost everything crumbles, and Mon-El is full of self-doubt, insecure in his romantic standing, insecure as the most powerful Legionnaire after the arrival of Superboy, (and he eventually loses a rematch with the General Nah when the LSH’s own power is turned against it). And there are a pair of revelatory tweaks to his backstory: this Mon-El is Kryptonian, not Daxamite, and he is a descendent of Jon Kent. From time to time, a critic will say that a superhero isn’t interesting if they’re too powerful. Here is a rebuttal; Mon-El’s story, sharing screen time with the rest of his team, is interesting in multiple ways, even when he is invincible in battle.<br /><br />For all the characters who are battling to overcome something, there are others where something else is going on. Having read Bendis’ work only for the past couple of years, I don’t know if he plants clues that spring on us later, but if he does, watch Triplicate Girl. In issue #1, the pink-haired version asks a question that the blue-haired one answers. Innocuous detail, right? In issue #4, she tells us that when they merge back into one body they all gain the accumulated memories of each of them. This pair of details means that the Triplicate Girls have not remerged in a while. Meaningful? With another writer, I might feel certain that this was done for a reason, but in this case – we’ll see.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--kYlihvZHjA/X2hN36CPB-I/AAAAAAAABTY/Pd94T-o_EXA0gxTJEPTaoYJWUCBv9qgPQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1362/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-09-20%2Bat%2B11.52.50%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"></a><br /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I don't hate this part.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />And the last character study of particular interest says something about Bendis’ larger direction: Bouncing Boy, whose biography has not been explored as much as some other Legionnaires, seems particularly joyful and free of angst. In one quick interaction with Superboy in #5, he exudes confidence and capability, and, ostensibly because of his hand on the former’s shoulder, Jon Kent, a paragon of physical strength, says, “You’re strong, Bouncing Boy!” to which the latter says, “Aw, thanks!” When nearly every other Legionnaire is battling some sort of insecurity or strife, this is exceptional. I wonder – time will tell – if this choice is making a deliberate counterpoint to the body image issues that might otherwise poke fun at a person carrying great weight, and which have made Bouncing Boy an object of humor (and lesser status) in previous incarnations.<br /><br />In a similar vein, we see overt changes made to several characters – including the Ranzz/Lightning siblings as well as Ultra Boy – to introduce some racial diversity where there had been none before. One may recall that the LSH’s Ferro Lad might have been DC’s first Black superhero had editor Mort Weisinger not vetoed Jim Shooter’s plan, and thus the team had members from other planets who were green and orange when it was too controversial for one to represent a non-Caucasian from Earth. Bendis is taking this one logical step further and supposing that beings on other planets might just have skin colors resembling the non-Caucasian people of Earth.<br /><br />With the series now tallying over 10 issues when crossovers are included, there is a lot more to say about it, particularly regarding the swirling plot. From my point of view, this run has the potential to be a true classic, and the plot is not the reason why. Bendis has thus far given us a world that is both fun and funny, social and socially aware, new and studiously mindful of decades of past history. The last time I was this fond of the Legion of Super-Heroes was the 1980s, and Bendis is bringing back many of those memories, proving that time travel is not only science fiction.<p></p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-25269111180116981932020-08-09T18:37:00.001-07:002020-08-09T18:37:07.696-07:00What I Did on Summer (and Spring, etc.) Vacation<p>There's a condition known as writer's block where a writer is unable to produce anything new. The ideas aren't there, or nothing seems right, so nothing is written. When I look back at the dates of my last posts on this blog, I myself am surprised at how quiet it – and thereby I – have grown on the subject of comics. It seems as though I have writer's block.</p><p>In fact, that is not the case. Not only have I written a great deal on other topics, posted elsewhere or manifested some other way, but I have even written quite a bit about comics since the summer of 2017. As it happens, a good deal of what I have written has not been posted. So perhaps one might say that I have had poster's block.</p><p>In the past two and a half years, I have in fact posted quite a bit about <i>Doomsday Clock</i> while it was in the process of being published, but scarcely about anything else, with just a few posts about Grant Morrison's <i>The Green Lantern</i> and one on <i>Heroes in Crisis</i>, whereas back in 2017, I posted on no fewer than eight different creative works across film, TV, and comics. And then, after a very detailed analysis of <i>Final Crisis</i>, this blog has, aside from the aforementioned foci, gone silent.</p><p>Part of that has been due to the overall interruption in regular life that has affected all of us over recent months and recent years. But in the meantime, I have begun unpublished posts about, among other works:<br /></p><p>• Grant Morrison's <i>Supergods</i>.</p><p>• <i>Twin Peaks: The Return.</i> <br /></p><p>• Scott Snyder's work on <i>Dark Nights: Metal</i> and <i>Justice League</i>.</p><p>• Grant Morrison's <i>The Green Lantern</i>.</p><p>• Frank Miller's <i>Superman: Earth One</i>. <br /></p><p>• Tom Taylor's <i>DCeased</i>.</p><p>• Tom King's <i>Heroes in Crisis.</i> <br /></p><p>• Brian Michael Bendis' Superman series.</p><p>• The 2019 <i>Joker</i> movie. <br /></p><p>Why write things and not post? Or: Why begin a post and not finish? There isn't one reason that applies in every case, but three reasons came up often:</p><p>1) I enjoyed a particular work but just didn't have much to say about my enjoyment. That was certainly true of Tom King's <i>Batman</i>, Morrison's <i>Green Lantern</i>, and Bendis' Superman titles.</p><p>2) I was nonplussed when a work that seemed to have great bearing on the future of other storylines fizzled, reaching an end with no impact on what was to follow. I could say that of <i>Doomsday Clock</i> and <i>Superman: Earth One</i> and some others.</p><p>3) I had things to say but they weren't very nice. This was true, in particular, with the aforementioned works from Scott Snyder. I found myself beginning posts that explained in great detail why his works brought me little pleasure and mucked up the cosmology of the DC Universe. I also found myself variously displeased and even sickened by <i>DCeased</i> and sorry that I had picked it up. And even as I wrote down these opinions, I found that they were exactly the kind of piece that I did not enjoy when some other commentator posted them about some other work: If a reader does not enjoy a work, why not move on to the other things in life? And as I moved on to the other things life, this blog went quiet.</p><p>That said, I am enjoying one series so much that I will remain silent no longer, and my next post will be about that series. See you soon.<br /></p><p><br /></p>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-49151716182359938722019-12-18T01:22:00.000-08:002019-12-18T01:22:19.175-08:00Doomsday Clock 12<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There is a war between optimism and pessimism, a childlike joy triggered by how wonderful things can be and then there is an awe and fascination in how terrible things can be, a desire to see the old ways shattered and hell let loose. But does that describe <i>Doomsday Clock </i>#12, or does it describe what has happened in DC Comics since <i>Rebirth</i>? Or does it describe both, with the two situations delivering up opposite outcomes? And which will lay the ground for 2020 and beyond?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ordinarily, I would respond to an issue of this series by going into the small details and see where they are going. As the previous eleven issues, as well as <i>DC Rebirth</i> #1 and "The Button" and various crossovers like the Mr. Oz subplot beforehand ticked by at a remarkably leisurely pace, those small clues pointed us towards the end, an end which in many broad strokes – the JSA and the Kents returning; Superman turning Dr. Manhattan "good" – was visible from the outset. Other details led my prognostications, anyway, onto wrong paths and dead ends; perhaps there were some red herrings in some places, but then again, maybe some plans were changed. In many ways, we don't know, at the conclusion of issue #12, how things end because we ought to be wondering, is <i>Doomsday Clock</i> a turning point in DC's plans or is it a now-out-of-continuity story from a writer who has lost favor during the slow roll of this long, long running miniseries? I will post again on <i>DC </i>#12, looking into the small details, in the days to come. But as I reach the end of this issue, I find myself thinking most about the big picture, and that's what I discuss here.</div>
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Without unpacking them, I'll chronicle a list of plot points that I found relatively surprising: That the Superman-Manhattan meeting began as backdrop to a continuing attack on Superman from various villains. That Johnny Thunder had no significant role in saving the day. That the LSH and Superman's career as Superboy were affirmed while Bendis' LSH series seems to have taken a different path. That Veidt's plan prevailed and was not interrupted by Batman or anyone. That Johns provided an expansion of the Multiverse, placing old familiar timelines into the "Earth-" + number scheme. That Johns would flash-forward through the future of DC's reboots "predicting" many future years' worth of stories and hint at this continuing for over 900 more years. That Dr. Manhattan will get to live a non-superpowered life as a married man, a bit like the ending that Alan Moore gave Superman in <i>Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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In many respects, there were no major surprises at all. Superman's goodness prevailed and as far back as <i>DC </i>#5, I posited, "<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial;">Veidt will likely… orchestrate a meeting between Superman, the DCU's symbol of hope, and Dr. Manhattan. But to what end, and to what intended end? Veidt sees the DCU in stark terms, and his only goal is to get Dr. Manhattan to return to his own universe and save it." That was a bit over one and a half years ago – the ending of <i>Doomsday Clock</i> was visible from farther out than any of DC's previous events have even lasted in their entirety!</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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But as the story ends, I find myself noting the possible dissonance between Johns' prognostication and what I see in much of the rest of DC's output, and I don't mean on mere small plot points (are the Kents alive again?).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Watchmen </i>delivered up a worldview in which superheroes couldn't possibly be the sunshiny and beneficial saviors of a world, at least not one interestingly like ours. Johns, we could see from early on, was going to show the darkness of Moore's vision being illuminated and vanquished by the unstoppable optimism of Superman. On the page, in his own story, and his own miniseries, Johns had the power to make that happen. But what about the rest of DC's superhero comics? What about, as it was dubbed two weeks ago, the Depressoverse? DC has called 2019 "The Year of the Villain." Their flagship character in the making is Harley Quinn. The demonic force behind the scenes of several titles' stories is The Batman Who Laughs. While Johns' story tells us that Superman prevails in the long run, are DC's other stories – are the sales figures – telling us that characters with morality closer to that of the Comedian and Rorschach prevailing in their future output? Was the year of the villain a harbinger of many more years of the villain to come, or is it ending now to deliver up something closer to Johns' vision than to Snyder's? I reach the last page of <i>Doomsday Clock</i> more curious than ever to see how the story will end. We'll start to find out in 2020.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-49415035244895371392019-10-06T22:59:00.002-07:002019-10-06T22:59:30.435-07:00Doomsday Clock #11<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Three details. Thinking over <i>Doomsday Clock</i> #11, I began to focus on three details ranging in scope from a few words in a single panel to the longest scene in the issue. Each of them made me wonder, why this detail? In each case, I wondered if Geoff Johns put a significant key to the finale in plain sight or if the details are just random happenstance of no great importance. Upon further contemplation, I noticed that each of the three has a parallel event in the Watchmen Universe, which inclines me to believe that there is a deliberate pattern, though that need not be the case for all three. Those three details concern:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Batman's battle with the U.S. military.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">• The reference to John Hinckley.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Veidt revealing much of his plan in a long speech.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">If these details are simply there to move the plot along in a convenient way, then people may remember <i>Doomsday Clock</i> as an unworthy sequel to <i>Watchmen</i>. If, however, they are there as a matter of design, we have an intricate finale awaiting us. I'm going to consider each of these three details in turn and then pull back to see how what they tell us is likely to fit into the finale.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial;">1) Batman vs. the USA<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In just a few impeccably drawn panels, Gary Frank shows us a fight between Batman and several uniformed members of the U.S. military. There is voiceover narration by a newscaster, but the details don't seem to match. What is Batman doing, anyway? The interfaces referring to "launch" seem to mirror similar scenes in <i>Doomsday Clock</i> #1, when they indicated ICBM launches and a nuclear war. I don't think that's what they mean here, though.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The answer may lie in the uniform patches.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">First, we see Batman in what appears to be a missile launch facility, subduing four or more soldiers. One of them has a patch showing the Earth and space. Then, from behind him, at least four more soldiers emerge, with two arms revealing yellow patches. The narration indicates that the National Guard arrived in Gotham City in order to arrest Batman. Later, on Veidt's monitor, we get a hint that Batman has – not astonishingly – emerged from the fight victorious. What happened?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The Earth and space patch is close to that of a U.S. Space Force that existed before 2002. It appears as though Batman is preventing a missile launch that one might associate with the risk of a civilization-destroying nuclear war, one that Batman certainly couldn't stop if he needed to be in more than one launch facility at a time. Is the DCU on the verge of nuclear war?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">No. The apparent scenario is that the missile launch was a staged event, designed to lure Batman into a trap that sprang when the yellow-patched soldiers – the National Guard – burst into the room, with Batman's backward glance indicating apparent surprise. Thus, the television coverage is about the relatively minor matter of Batman battling the authorities and not about the infinitely larger concern of nuclear annihilation. According to what we see on Veidt's monitor, Batman has escaped from the ambush, surprising no readers, and is free to continue his quest, as Alfred reveals, to find Reggie and join forces in confronting Veidt – the only plot point of the issue that is described in the solicitation of #11. Evidently, how that search plays out will be important in the finale.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">What this shows is that the U.S. government has turned on Batman, and a later scene shows that Superman is also subject to arrest, but Superman's intention to speak with the President is sidelined by other events. Ultimately, the point of the Batman scene is not that nuclear war is imminent but that Veidt's frame-up of Superman succeeded in turning the U.S. against both Superman and Batman. Veidt has a plan and his wish to pervert American power has succeeded, although he may or may not have anticipated – or cared – that Batman would still be on the loose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial;">2) Why does Dr. Manhattan refer to the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Not often does such a small detail seem so important. Dr. Manhattan narrates history often, but why would this particular event be chosen? Why not the inauguration of any of the 45 Presidents? Why not the British occupation in 1814?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This occurs in <i>DC </i>#11 during the continuation of a scene that began at the end of <i>DC </i>#10. Looking only at the portions that occur in #11 make it quite confusing: Dr. Manhattan is on the sidewalk in Washington, D.C. when he narrates the 1981 event, then promptly says that four hours later, his confrontation with Superman will take place. But the confrontation with Superman is in the present, not 1981, so we have two confusing gaps: 1981 to 2019 (38 years) and the aforementioned 4 hours. What is going on here?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The earlier portions of the "scene" in <i>DC </i>#10 shed some light on the structure, or lack thereof, of Dr. Manhattan's narration. His narration is moving wildly back and forth through time, and from event to event: About 12 years ago, Five years ago, one year ago, 1938, the present, 1954, 1971, 1938, 1954, 1985 (in the Watchmen Universe), and only then 1981, and the present. At a minimum we can say that the wild gyrations are more salient than any of the individual events.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The Hinckley assassination attempt stands out from the other events that Dr. Manhattan names in that it only involves actual historical figures. For what it's worth, it occurred in the real world and in the DCU, but not in the Watchmen Universe, in which Ronald Reagan was not President in 1981.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The location of the Hinckley assassination attempt was in Washington, D.C., about two miles from the White House, where Superman encounters Black Adam. It is plausible that the punch that lands Superman where Dr. Manhattan was waiting for him knocked him those two miles in distance. So, the location of their encounter may match the 1981 event. That could partially explain the connection, but since the event was 38 years earlier, why mention it? Why single that one event out from other events that have taken place in Washington? There are two likely answers that build upon one another.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">First, there is a corresponding and contrasting event in <i>Watchmen</i>: It is asserted in a very small number of panels that Dr. Manhattan knew in advance of the Kennedy assassination but did nothing to stop it. (<i>Watchmen </i>#3: "failed to prevent J.F.K.'s assassination." <i>Watchmen</i> #4: knew Kennedy would get shot but didn't do anything; he states that he "can't prevent the future. To me, it's already happening.") Brief though those may be, they do much to illustrate Dr. Manhattan's stoic indifference to humanity, and Moore included this not as an incidental minor detail, but a major insight as to the nature of Dr. Manhattan's role in his universe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Second, Hinckley's assassination attempt may thematically symbolize Veidt's plan (whatever its precise details may be) as the attempt of a violent (and unstable?) figure to bring down a leader. And in this, if so, what is significant is not the violence that took place (alternately, Reagan's injury and Superman's incapacitation and loss of prestige) but that the effort failed (Reagan survived with a quick recovery and we may likely see Superman prevail in the next issue). Thus, it symbolizes not a successful attack but a failed one, and its inclusion bodes poorly for Veidt's plan.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">What would be more meaningful would be if the contrast with <i>Watchmen</i>'s JFK assassination is explored actively in the finale and we learn that during his time in the DCU, Dr. Manhattan intervened in the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, saving Reagan's life, and that in some other timeline, without his intervention, Reagan died. This would show the moral arc of <i>Doomsday Clock </i>to be one of redemption, with Dr. Manhattan losing his stoic indifference, or fatalism, or the predetermined nature of his action and inaction. While this could involve some sort of sci fi mechanism to explain it, it would also entail moral development on Dr. Manhattan's part, and the triumph of Superman's hope versus Veidt's cynicism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial;">3) Veidt's long, expository speech<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading <i>Doomsday Clock</i> #11, my thoughts turned to a speech from <i>Watchmen</i>'s issue #11. I'm sure most of you recall it:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">"I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">That is surely one of the best-remembered lines from Alan Moore's <i>Watchmen</i>. It is also likely to become one of the keys to how Geoff John's <i>Doomsday Clock</i> is remembered. Because, if Veidt's long, expository speech to Saturn Girl in <i>Doomsday Clock</i> #11 (one that largely revealed things already decoded from <i>Doomsday Clock</i> #10 and earlier) turns out in the final analysis to be what it seemed on the surface, Adrian Veidt is at least a notch or two less sophisticated in Johns' story than he was in Moore's. (FWIW, Republic Pictures was a maker of films and not-so-well-regarded serials. Characters in Republic serials included Zorro, the Lone Ranger, and even Captain America.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">And, sure, it could be argued that <i>Doomsday Clock</i>'s Veidt is so absolutely certain that Saturn Girl cannot interfere with his plan that his expository speech to her cannot do harm. But let's be clear about what the "Republic serial villain" line meant in Moore's original. It wasn't a tactical examination of how Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, and Rorschach, in Antarctica, might possibly have interfered with events in New York. It was Moore elevating his characters and his work above those of other, clumsier works from the past. Now, if Veidt has revealed the better part of his plans in <i>Doomsday Clock</i> and there is no forthcoming reference to his "Republic serial villain" remark from the same-numbered issue of <i>Watchmen</i>, it will have seemed as though Johns has dropped the ball. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It could play out in one of three ways:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Johns goes on with his story without returning to the "Republic serial villain" line. Veidt's speech to Saturn Girl was ultimately without major effect except to reveal his plan to the readers and one character that is no longer alive. In essence, Johns' version of Veidt will be one notch less self-aware than Moore's, and if the story itself does not address that, then Johns' story is one notch less deep than Moore's.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Veidt is eternally a step ahead, and was knowingly speaking those words in order to facilitate his plan. We are going to get an intricate reveal in #12 indicating how he, again, is on a higher level of awareness than those "Republic serial villains."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Before pride comes the fall: By speaking those words aloud, Veidt has unwittingly doomed his own plan because someone in a position to ruin his plan has heard them. If so, that would almost certainly be Johnny Thunder, dismissed with contempt by Veidt. We know that Johnny is close enough to Veidt's conversation with Saturn Girl to have overheard. We also know that Johnny's return to power is coming, whether it involves Alan Scott's lantern or the Thunderbolt or both. In essence, Johns' version of Veidt will be less sophisticated than Moore's, and the story <b>will</b> make the contrast clear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Which of these will we see? I hope it's the third. (Though the second might set up a brilliantly complex finish that I can't anticipate.) Small details – a close-up of the lantern and the fact that Johnny could overhear the conversation – seem too salient to be coincidental. We are seemingly ripe for an ironic turnaround where Johnny Thunder – the most lighthearted and laughable member of the Justice Society – could instruct the Thunderbolt to act on what he has overheard and upend Veidt's plan, either by intervening in the Superman-Manhattan showdown and/or by having it take the lantern back to 1940 and save Alan Scott's life and Green Lantern career. This is what I think will be a pivotal event in #12, and Veidt giving his speech to Saturn Girl may be what #11's title refers to as a "lifelong mistake." It will turn out that Veidt is not Moore's bitterly cynical genius trampling over optimistic superhero comics, but is, indeed, no better than a Republic serial villain, and will have blown his evil (well, extremely Machiavellian) plan by reciting it aloud.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial;">The Big Picture<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Around the many small details in <i>Doomsday Clock</i> – the three upon which I focused here, and many, many others – there is a larger design and it has a striking simplicity to it, with a great deal of symmetry. From the Watchmen Universe, we have the blue superpowered godlike figure Dr. Manhattan and a counterpart of sorts, a non-superpowered genius, Veidt. From the DCU, Superman and Batman play a similar role. There are supervillains from each, with Mime and Marionette representing their universe to the many supervillains at home in the DCU. The American cast of superheroes is mirrored by other groups internationally. The international politics of the Watchmen Universe and the DCU both reflect a U.S.-Russia dynamic in the real world which is taking form and being revealed too quickly for Johns' story to capture faithfully. And as intriguing guest stars from other teams, we have another kind of symmetry: Johnny Thunder representing the past and Saturn Girl representing the future. This symmetry is not accidental, not in a story where multiple panels show off Rorschach's eponymous symmetries. And now, Black Adam's lightning calls to mind the numerous shout-outs to the Thunderbolt.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial;">Doomsday Clock</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> was introduced in the final pages of "The Button" storyline in <i>Batman</i> and <i>Flash</i> monthlies and it ended with a bold image: The soiled and marred Superman symbol in close-up. This told us, provocatively for an image in the pages of <i>Flash</i>, that the story ahead would focus on Superman. Given the small reveals in the dialogue of Dr. Manhattan and a few others in <i>Doomsday Clock</i>, we may interpret it more firmly according to the interpretation that Mark Waid gave us in <i>Birthright</i>, that the symbol means "hope." It is this idea that Veidt attacks after hearing a hospital employee say that, "Superman's the only thing you can believe in anymore." However, in Dr. Manhattan's vision of the upcoming calamity, he "saw a vision of the most hopeful among them… now hopeless." He also shows a sort of transformational disappointment in the fact that Carver Colman was once full of hope but died an early and inglorious death.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Knowing all of this, Veidt concocted a plan for the upcoming encounter between Dr. Manhattan and Superman. He knows there are two possible outcomes: Either Superman destroys Dr. Manhattan or Dr. Manhattan destroys the universe. What is Veidt's plan?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The pivotal moment in Veidt's orientation occurs in <i>Watchmen </i>#2 when the Comedian bitterly declares that the world cannot be saved from nuclear catastrophe by people in costumes fighting crime. On the basis of that moment, Veidt moves towards a plan to save his world by bringing about a catastrophe. In order to prevent total annihilation, he orchestrates a massacre. In order to save billions, he kills millions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">His plan for the DCU is no different. "In order for things to change, they must hit rock bottom. So what if I could turn the world against Superman?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The dialectic in this story has been clear from the beginning: Veidt, Dr. Manhattan, and the Comedian are, in their own ways, morally bankrupt. Johns will show the DCU's leading lights upend Veidt's bleakness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Veidt believes that the DCU will be his tomb. He likely believes, then, that Dr. Manhattan will give up hope when he sees Superman fail. He may believe that Dr. Manhattan will reboot the DCU, making it better, then return to the Watchmen Universe to save it, too. Instead, we seem sure to see things rebound in the DCU without hitting bottom. The future is gone (as the new Bendis LSH reboot already shows). But the past is not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I believe that one or two of the DCU characters will "turn" Dr. Manhattan, this will be one or both of Superman and Johnny Thunder.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We've read many stories over the years where someone tries to corrupt or break Superman and cannot. The victory is not in Superman's immense powers but in his unrelenting sense of hope. Will this happen? Perhaps. We see Superman attack Dr. Manhattan in a rage, likely when he learns that Dr. Manhattan's manipulation of the timeline killed Jonathan and Martha Kent. But is that the last moment before catastrophe? Is there a last-second change of heart, Superman pulling back his fist in the last instant?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Or (and/or) we could get the Johnny Thunder finish. If we find out that Dr. Manhattan was, all along, the Thunderbolt, then Johnny could successfully summon him and pull him away from the final encounter with Superman, then set him to the task of fixing everything on both Earths. It is perhaps key that the death of Alan Scott "saved" the lantern from being applied to the third and final of its three roles, which have always been since its first appearance in 1940 been, "once to bring death, once to bring life, and once to bring power." Johnny could now use it for power, and be the savior in the story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We also have Batman and Luthor both seeking to intervene, and other players, such as the superheroes on Mars, could step in as well. Between the showdown in Washington and Johnny in the cell and Batman and Reggie in Gotham, what is the key series of events? Will Johnny Thunder save Superman or vice versa? Will Batman play a key role at all?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Whatever the intricate details, I see the finale taking the form of a comedy, as opposed to <i>Watchmen</i>'s tragedy. As the Thunderbolt always represented cheerful, humorous fun, it would be a symbolic defeat of Moore's dour pessimism if it turned out that this story transformed Dr. Manhattan retroactively into a benevolent character who has always been a bit of a gag.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I think Johns' mind may turn to a pair of JLA-JSA crossovers from the late 1970s, each of which, scripted or co-scripted by Martin Pasko, became more elaborate by adding a third world to the mix. In <i>JLA </i>#137, Johnny's Thunderbolt personally zapped the unpowered Marvel Family into becoming their superpowered identities. In the very next JLA-JSA meeting, the LSH was the third team joining them. The juxtaposition of Johnny Thunder and Saturn Girl in <i>Doomsday Clock</i> makes me wonder if Johns also remembers these stories and has chosen Black Adam as one of the major threats onstage precisely because the Thunderbolt can take the place of magic lightning and zap him into his powerless identity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The long interval between issues of <i>Doomsday Clock </i>allows a lot of time for us to contemplate the story, and I for one am in favor of it. While, in many cases, I have blogged about issues the day they came out, I have pondered this one for weeks before compiling my thoughts. With weeks to go before the finale, I'm sure there is more to contemplate still.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-90968514565775277442019-08-08T09:35:00.002-07:002019-08-08T09:35:41.799-07:00Doomsday Clock: The Golden Age and The Metaverse
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Doomsday Clock</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> #10 mentions, a striking ten different times, the date April 18, 1938.
This, it has been determined, was the date that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Action Comics</i> #1 went on sale. The title of the issue's story is
"Action." The closing quotation is, "Every action has its
pleasures and its price." We are both told of, then shown, the famous act
from the cover of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Action</i> #1, Superman
lifting a car full of wrongdoers over his head before smashing it into rocks.
There is no light touch being employed here. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC </i>#10 is about how the introduction of Superman changed
everything. And then, how that event that changed everything was itself
changed, or, using a term that emerged decades later, retconned, and how things
followed from there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There's something exciting,
I find, in seeing artists with more modern and refined skills and color
technologies revisit the classic moments and eras of comics. You see in in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Killing Joke</i>, and in Tony Daniel's
and Lee Garbett's work on Grant Morrison's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman</i>
run. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC</i> #10 lets Gary Frank redraw Superman's
introduction to the world and there's something powerful and fresh in seeing
his fine technique re-render Superman's smirk embodying a bold confidence that
the "Boy Scout" Superman lacked in later renditions. The impact of
that Superman is echoed when Johns and Frank re-present us with the origin of
the Justice Society in (again, using the newsstand date from the real world)
November 1940. The gathered heroes speak with reverence of Superman, the best
of a remarkable lot, and they pause their meeting to wait for his arrival, an
arrival that, a bit sadly, never occurs. The Flash, Jay Garrick, says that if
the Justice Society is to work, that they need Superman. Green Lantern, Alan
Scott, replies that Superman is a busy guy. Sadly, this is all correct.
Superman does not make it to their meeting, and ultimately, the Justice Society
does not succeed. But this is all a blend of two different things: What
happened to the comics in the real world (the Justice Society went out of print
after 11 years) and what happened in the comics (at the Justice Society's first
meeting, it was asked why Superman wasn't showing up, and he never did).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This blend of the world
within the comics and the historical – publication – history is
fertile ground. Johns re-creates and gives new life to a special time when the
DC Universe is born and the very first time when any of their characters speak
of Superman. (In the Red Tornado's debut, with the cover date November 1940, Ma
Hunkel makes DC's first cross-storyline reference to another superhero, Green
Lantern.) There was a time, Johns reminds us, when the short but sensational
first two and a half years of Superman inspired a colorful explosion of many
other superheroes, and then it was all undone. Ultimately, DC un-did and re-told
their own origins, but here, for the first time in years, Johns has DC reassert
that first beginning as the true beginning. And he gives it back to us as
something called the Metaverse. But even he changes it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">If you examine the JSA's
first story, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All Star Comics </i>#3,
it goes a bit as Johns shows it to us in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC
</i>#10. He's got the right cast of characters and the round table. Johns and
Frank pay attention to the details, many of the tiny details, like the order
they sat in, and who has which hand on the table. Johns places Johnny Thunder
and a camera in position to capture a photo with the cover/splash page art.
(Johnny is himself present in the story but absent from that art.) With that
sort of attention to detail, it's worth noting what Johns changed. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All Star</i> #3, it is indeed pointed out
that Superman is absent, and it is indeed observed that he is likely too busy
to attend. Which of the superheroes has which lines is one thing Johns changes,
but what I find most striking is who is left out. For in reproducing faithfully
eight superheroes, plus Johnny Thunder and his Thunderbolt, plus the mention of
Superman, Johns deletes, or skips, others. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All Star</i> #3, the Atom asks about "Superman, Batman, and
Robin." He also mentions the Red Tornado. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC </i>#10, the only absent hero named is Superman. Why skip Batman?
Maybe Johns is making a dramatic cosmological decision here, one that will be
examined in the remaining portion of the series. Maybe he is not so subtly
amplifying Superman ("Why is he the center of this universe?") and
quietly deemphasizing Batman, but in a re-creation so faithful that they pay
attention to who has which hand on the table, I find the subtraction of Batman
to be striking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">For the moment, though, we
have another sort of subtraction presented to us. Superman, after being given
to the world in 1938, is later subtracted from 1938 and reinserted with new origins,
in 1956, 1985, 2011, 2016. If you look closely, you see the designs of the
rocket change to that from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Birthright</i>
and from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superman: Secret Origin</i>.
There are seven different Superman reboots here, Johns picking publication
years to communicate years within his story.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">DC has retold the story of
how the superheroes began several times. If we reduce the matter just to
Superman and Green Lantern, the major Earths and timelines in continuity have
gone like this:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Golden Age:</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">
Superman, then Alan Scott</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Silver Age Earth One: </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">Superman, then Hal Jordan</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Silver Age Earth Two: </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">Superman, then Alan Scott</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Post-COIE: </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">Alan
Scott, then Superman, then Hal Jordan</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">New 52: </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">Superman,
then Hal Jordan</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If you get into the fine
details, it's actually uncertain what, if anything, from DC's past retcons Johns
is showing us when he shows the JSA origin suddenly shift from the approximate
events of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All Star Comics</i> #3 to a
reality without Superman. There was never a retcon in any "Earth"
with a Justice Society that had Superman's debut shift from 1938 to 1956. If
one returns to the strict details of 1985-1987, COIE did not produce a world
without the 1938 debut of Kal-L, because Kal-L retained a memory of fighting
with the JSA, noted in (among other places) the last issues of both <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">COIE</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Infinite Crisis</i>, and even Power Girl retained this memory once
events in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Infinite Crisis</i> reminded
her of them. The 1956 debut of Superman seems to belong to the Silver Age Earth
One continuity and the 1940 Superman-less debut of the Justice Society seems to
belong to the Post-COIE continuity, which are different Earths <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">and</b> different timelines.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It seems possible that Johns
is proposing a new cosmology, perhaps akin to Hypertime, in which all timelines
and continuities are separate realities, not necessarily existing side by side
on different Earths. It's also possible that we could think up details that
Johns isn't even trying to raise, and so I'll pause before parsing the text of
old retcons and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC</i> #10 like a lawyer
applying strict logic and the law to a case in order to determine what Johns
means by the Metaverse. It is clear, though, that he sees a sort of
hub-and-spoke nature to DC History: There is a main reality, and there are
variations of it, and at the center of the main reality, there is Superman
– and not Batman.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Whatever the rules of this
cosmology, we can speak of the key players, and what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC </i>#10 shows us is that, alongside other bad actors who have
triggered changes in the Multiverse, Dr. Manhattan has caused one of the
divergent realities, specifically creating the New 52 reality by allowing Alan
Scott to die. As he himself now recognizes, he is one of the villains of DC
(meta)history. We can expect Superman and other heroes to reverse the harm that
Dr. Manhattan has done, and quite likely, we will see a Dr. Manhattan who has
learned from the DC superheroes how to perform magic shift from
"inaction" to "action" and, inspired by the hope that
Superman provides, return to the Watchmen Universe and undo a nuclear war.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There's a bit more of a
mystery story, though, still left in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday
Clock</i>. We now have multiple pointers indicating a special role to be played
by Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt. Dr. Manhattan killing Alan Scott in July 1940
would not seem to delete the JSA superheroes that had already debuted, such as
Sandman, Hawkman, and the Flash. We know that Johnny Thunder, dispirited by the
McCarthy hearing asked the Thunderbolt to protect the JSA, and this apparently
hid them entirely from the timeline, perhaps as a second crucial step following
Dr. Manhattan killing Alan Scott. Johns has called attention to Alan Scott
being bold before the McCarthyites on a completely separate occasion, and
perhaps without Alan Scott, the JSA hearing goes much worse, less heroically.
Is it a coincidence that the last moment of the Justice Society meeting before
the reboot occurs is when Johnny Thunder asks the Thunderbolt to interact with
Superman, or is that event a trigger? (Incidentally, Johnny Thunder did indeed
use the Thunderbolt to summon Superman in the final pages of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All Star</i> #7.)</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tLKC39ckiRk/XUxPUEcBXTI/AAAAAAAABNY/vFVb0AOE6tITkgsng_J3Kk7vZJPDDJ7yQCLcBGAs/s1600/allstar7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="590" data-original-width="874" height="135" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tLKC39ckiRk/XUxPUEcBXTI/AAAAAAAABNY/vFVb0AOE6tITkgsng_J3Kk7vZJPDDJ7yQCLcBGAs/s200/allstar7.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
Yet another striking moment
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC</i> #10 shows Johnny Thunder on the
set of Carver Colman's movie in 1954, as an errand boy: Just a random detail or
a significant tie between Johnny Thunder and Dr. Manhattan? And, to the point,
is the Thunderbolt actually Dr. Manhattan, or is the Thunderbolt simply a
separate entity with powers that work a bit like Dr. Manhattan's? It is certain
that the final two issues of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday
Clock </i>are going to put both Dr. Manhattan and the Thunderbolt to work in
setting things on a new path, and issue #10 begins to define the cosmology in
which that path exists.
<br />
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</style>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-37380848766506467812019-06-09T22:45:00.000-07:002019-06-09T22:59:16.523-07:00Doomsday Clock #10: Superman and Dr. Manhattan<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-D4MXn3bpWo4/XP3uQeZYGEI/AAAAAAAABMo/pF0hK9d1PEkm2QJOsum6ICz_RTPPtmVHACLcBGAs/s1600/doomsdayclock10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="936" data-original-width="1214" height="153" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-D4MXn3bpWo4/XP3uQeZYGEI/AAAAAAAABMo/pF0hK9d1PEkm2QJOsum6ICz_RTPPtmVHACLcBGAs/s200/doomsdayclock10.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Doomsday Clock</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> #10 was
unusually packed in reinterpreting DC history, and there are so many facets to
it, I will split my comments into two posts. In this one, I will focus on the
major players in the issue and what seems to be the message of the issue, at
this late stage in the game, comprising a lot of the message that Johns intends
for the series. In a second post, I will comment on the Justice Society and the
striking – to me – omission of Batman.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Doomsday Clock
</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">#9
featured one of the most sprawling casts the DCU can muster, with a huge force
of superheroes taking part in a showdown on Mars. Issue #10, in contrast,
shrank the whole story down to a few principal characters; though a few
characters from the past and some from this story had extended cameos, almost
all of the major narration focused on a few men. These characters are not merely
playing roles in this story. Johns uses them to deliver a reframing of the
history of superhero stories. It is probably most instructive to see these
major characters in the issue as archetypes, standing for major eras in comic
book / heroic fiction. The focus of the issue is primarily about the use of and
messages conveyed by Johns' use of the following: Nathaniel Dusk, Alan Scott,
Superman, and Doctor Manhattan. Along the way, there is heavy use of Carver
Colman, the actor who plays Dusk in the movies.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
story intertwines, in a legitimately weird way, several different substories
– some of them classics of the superhero genre – some more obscure
stories from the past, one – of course – Moore's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i>, a comment on the superhero genre, and then the main plot
of Johns' work that we're discussing here – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i>, along with the side plots and stories within a
story. All told, we have nearly a dozen separate fictional universes wound
together into one larger story. But, unlike the pre-Crisis or Morrisonian DC
Multiverse, these worlds are not parallel. Part of what Johns is doing here,
within his story and no doubt to launch a reframing of DC's sub-universes is to
discard the notion that all these separate universes are separate but equal.
C'mon, we always knew that Earth 3 and Earth 19 and Earth whatever were not
universes equal to Silver Age Earth One. Most of the universes in the
Multiverse are and always were derivatives of the main DCU. Johns is advancing
the conversation in this issue by recognizing that in the cosmology, the main
Earth is special, and other things flow from it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
story has so many threads going, of such different kinds, that the issue alone
needs a map of them, or at least a list. It goes as follows:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1)
DCU timelines, keying around the origin of Superman:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Golden Age 1: Superman debuted in
1938 before Alan Scott</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Golden Age 2: Alan Scott debuted in
1940 in a world without Superman</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Silver Age: Superman debuted in 1956
in a world without Alan Scott</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Byrne: Superman debuted in 1986,
long after Alan Scott</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Birthright: Same Golden Age
backstory as GA2</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Secret Origin: Same Golden Age
backstory as GA2</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Wally West and Johnny
Thunder remember this</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>New 52: Same Golden Age backstory as
SA</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Rebirth: Same Golden Age backstory
as SA</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Seemingly inevitable reboot: Same as
Secret Origin?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">2)
The Watchmen Universe</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">3)
The Nathaniel Dusk universe</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">4)
Carver Colman's story: He inhabits various DCU timelines, possibly all of them,
though we only get direct indications of his intersection with the first two
DCU timelines, and after that, at least in the one we last saw, he is dead.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One
of the jarring aspects of the story is how profoundly obscure Dusk and Colman
are, and yet Johns elevates them to central roles in the story. The Colman plot
takes a man of no particular importance and gives him one of the most
influential roles in DC history, with the (in some respects) godlike Dr.
Manhattan pairing up with him in a strange and somewhat incomprehensible
partnership, meeting once a year in the same location. It is easy to see how
Dr. Manhattan's vision of the future provides a pivotal, life-changing boost
for the career of Colman, but less obvious why the company of such an
unimportant man would be a draw for Dr. Manhattan. Similarly, the Dusk sideplot
is, on the surface, a distraction from the main story, of no causal
relationship to it. Neither Colman nor Dusk seems of interest on a par with the
superbeings who headline the series. Why did Johns give them these roles?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">For
Dusk, the answer is clear: He is an archetype of the detective genre. His kind
starred in comic books, novels, and movies, peaking in approximately that
order. The "D" in DC <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">stands
for</b> "detective" and that hearkens back to 1937, a little over a
year before the debut of Superman. One of the detectives who launched the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Detective Comics</i> title in issue #1 was
Bruce Nelson, name-checked by Johns in the end materials in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> #3. Nelson and other,
generally similar, tough guys who tackle crime appeared in the monthly title
for 26 issues until they were overshadowed by, and ultimately replaced and
virtually eliminated by a new feature in that title — Batman. Ultimately,
old-style detectives did not survive contact with the likes of Batman; he
immediately took over the cover art of the title and the conventional detective
stories inside the issue rapidly became scarce, as well. A similar rise and
fall took place in the movies, as well, with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">film noir </i>genre starting to peter out during the same mid-50s
timeframe that, in Johns' story, sees the onscreen death of Nathaniel Dusk. Dusk
serves as a single example of that kind of character, standing in for comic
book Bruce Nelson (whose run ended in 1940), and movie detectives like Nick
Charles, Mike Hammer, and Sam Spade, whose popularity also rose then fell (but
later enjoyed various revivals).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dusk's
story, though, is packed with references to the meta-story arc that Johns gives
us about DC history, most obviously when he is given a glass globe representing
a "world" from the past, and he smashes it while using it as a
weapon, with the voiceover narration echoing a <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2014/07/vintage-review-crisis-on-infinite-earths.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crisis on Infinite Earths</i></a> tagline, "Worlds live. Worlds
Die." Just as various DC timelines (and eras) have died, just as the eras
of comic book and movie detectives ended (or, at least, greatly waned in
popularity), Dusk's storyline came to a definitive end in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adjournment.</i> Moments after Dusk shatters the globe, he is shot
in the back, and his world – his time as a detective in the movies, anyway
– also dies.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Much
the way that Batman and other costumed heroes ended the run of Bruce Nelson and
his kind, Dr. Manhattan elevates, then indirectly ends the life of Carver
Colman. Colman initially feels (literally) blessed by the presence of Dr.
Manhattan in his life, wondering if the erstwhile superhero is an angel. But
from the beginning, their association takes Colman down a tragic path. Colman's
movie success brings him fame and riches, but his fame combines with secrets
and lies to attract the blackmailing that ends his life. Colman receives from
Dr. Manhattan in much the way that Faust received from Mephistopheles, getting
precisely what he wished for in the short run, but damnation in the long run.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Clearly,
the rise and fall of Dusk and the actor who played him, Colman, are told in
parallel fashion, both killed from behind in successive panels after being
betrayed by a woman they loved. As I have suggested that Murray Abrahams plays
a part intended to parallel that of Dr. Manhattan, we see them occupy the same
position in that pair of panels. However, Abrahams is actively the killer,
facing Dusk and pulling the trigger, while Dr. Manhattan passively brings about
the end of Colman, with his back turned as Colman is killed. As Dr. Manhattan
himself narrates, he could have stopped it, but did nothing. He is a being of
inaction in a world where the heroes practice action.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">"Action"
is the title of the issue's story, and it should be interpreted on a few
different levels. It is yelled by the director on the set, and it is what, in
Dr. Manhattan's formulation, distinguishes Superman from himself. It is, of
course, the title of the series that launched Superman, the title whose first
issue appeared on the newsstands on April 18, 1938, the very date during which
Dr. Manhattan appears in the DCU. Johns also slipped the title of the famous
comic book into the climactic dialogue at the end of <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2016/03/retro-review-infinite-crisis.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Infinite Crisis</i></a>, with Superman telling Superboy Prime that being
Superman is "about action." (Much the same synopsis of heroism
delivered a couple of years later in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman
Begins</i>: "It's… what we do that defines us.")</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dusk
and Colman are no-name characters used as archetypes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i>, and Dr. Manhattan is also an archetype, created by
Alan Moore to make a comment of his own. It may be easy to forget reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock </i>in 2019 that, if there is
a single character that Dr. Manhattan was meant to represent, it was Superman,
at least Superman as he was when Moore plotted the story around 1984. Blue,
buff, godlike, weirdly dysfunctional in relationships with women, incapable of
symmetric relationships with the people closest to him, phenomenally
self-absorbed (as Moore has Superman say of himself in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?</i>, "over-rated and too
wrapped up in himself"): These are the characteristics of Bronze Age
Superman that Moore packed, with distaste, into his rendition of Dr. Manhattan.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dr.
Manhattan is toxic, and he was meant to be. Moore was trying to use him to tell
comics fans, see how sterile, self-serving, and off-putting your heroes really
are. Johns turns Dr. Manhattan loose in his interactions with Colman, all of
his godlike powers ultimately availing his friend nothing when he watches
unconcerned as Colman is murdered by his own mother.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Remembering
this, consider the question that Dr. Manhattan has asked of the blackout
following his upcoming encounter with Superman: Does Dr. Manhattan destroy the
universe or does Superman destroy him? The interesting thing is not to take
this as the headline on a "versus" thread – how do the powers of
the two characters match up in a fight – but how do the two visions of a
comic book superhero square off? And here, I think we return to the message
that Morrison closed on in <a href="http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2018/02/final-crisis-retro-review-part-iii.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Final Crisis</i></a>,
with Mandrakk representing, for the most part, Alan Moore in that story and Dr.
Manhattan representing Moore's worldview in this one. If Moore was right, the
superhero genre was on a path towards oblivion way back in 1985. This is 2019,
and the good guys haven't given up yet, so Johns has plenty of room to take the
opposite side of the argument.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And in case there's any doubt where that is going, the final lines of the end materials, featuring the screenplay of <i>The Adjournment</i> give it away: Dusk, seemingly shot dead during the scenes that were filmed, survives the shooting and recuperates to walk again. The good guys aren't dead yet. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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-->Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-74427021543310522322019-05-21T22:22:00.001-07:002019-05-21T22:22:27.215-07:00Doomsday Clock: The Adjournment
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bIh2z-evrtc/XOTcXFUHg4I/AAAAAAAABMM/BqbIYGk0boo5QAMQ2rnEf_QhHw8xWm6JACLcBGAs/s1600/adjournment.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="660" data-original-width="418" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bIh2z-evrtc/XOTcXFUHg4I/AAAAAAAABMM/BqbIYGk0boo5QAMQ2rnEf_QhHw8xWm6JACLcBGAs/s200/adjournment.jpg" width="126" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Doomsday Clock </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">has paid considerable attention to a story within the story, a 1954
detective movie called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adjournment</i>.
Like the pirate story "Marooned" in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i>, the story within a story can and almost certainly does
provide insight regarding the main story. This is particularly fertile given
that the star of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adjournment</i> is
intertwined with some of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i>'s
main characters, and the screenwriter himself is a Golden Age superhero. It's
certain to be with good reason that Geoff Johns has devoted seven pages so far
to giving us the story of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adjournment</i>,
but what is that reason, and what does this story tell us?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are at least three
directions to follow in understanding <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Adjournment</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">1) On a surface level, what
is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">its</b> story? It's a story we've
only seen the early portions of and we don't know its ending and/or the answer
to its central murder mystery. This may not be highly compelling in and of
itself, but it is part of the big picture.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">2) Probably most important,
what does the movie plot tell us about the main <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> story? It seems highly likely that it parallels part
of the main plot, and understanding that parallel could be used either to
predict what is coming or to see what Johns is emphasizing as the most
important aspects of the larger story.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">3) Because the superhero
Tarantula is the movie's screenwriter, the story may tell us something
important about him and his relationships with other Golden Age characters.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The Adjournment</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">'s Plot</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">First, the facts. We have
seen only the first portion of the movie, and while we have two spoilers
regarding the upcoming portions, we don't know how it will end, nor do we know
if there are more major characters to be seen. But we do know this:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Nathaniel Dusk is an
ex-cop turned detective.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• On Christmas Eve, a former
colleague of his, Murray Abrahams, comes with him asking for help with a case
that involves the death of Abrahams' brother-in-law.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Two men, Alastair Tempus
and Bentley Farmer, have been shot dead and lie in blood on Tempus' floor alongside
the pieces of a chess game.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Dusk and Abrahams visit
three different buildings: The crime scene; the former home of Dusk's dead
lover, Joyce; and, the home of Tempus' employee Wellington.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• There is considerable
friction in the lives of these men: Dusk doesn't consider Abrahams a friend;
Abrahams "never liked" Farmer; Wellington stole from Tempus; Farmer
is divorced; Dusk has enemies he's hiding from on both sides of the law. At
both of the last two stops, Abrahams warns Dusk against "breaking and
entering."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• We are told of the
men's various female companions: Dusk's "greatest love" is dead.
Abrahams is married with young kids. Tempus' wife is dead. Farmer is divorced.
Wellington claims to want a sex-change operation, which may or may not be an
excuse for the women's clothing in his luggage.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• The crime scene appears
suspicious: There is only one chair visible near the chessboard. A white knight
is standing on its base on the floor, an extremely unlikely position for a
chess piece to settle into after a table is knocked over. Dusk is in a position
to see if the knight was on the floor before blood flowed around it or if it
was set down into the blood.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Dusk seems to believe that
Wellington is not the killer, despite the cash he has stolen from Tempus.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• In the last frame we have
seen, two scarab beetles appear onscreen behind Dr. Manhattan. I don't see the
relevance of this, but they are linked to Blue Beetle, who was the inspiration
for Nite Owl, and there were two Nite Owls in the Watchmen Universe.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• We are told of a
"big twist, where one of the dead guys turns out to be a killer,
too."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• The cover of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC</i> #10 shows a man stepping on Dusk's
head while a woman in an eye-catching dress looks on with scorn.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• The very first comment by
Abrahams in analyzing the scene concludes that Tempus was the killer's intended
target and Farmer was not. Dusk does not agree that this is certain.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The Solution</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In a strict sense, we cannot
solve this mystery with any certainty. Johns has a free hand to augment
considerably the little we have seen of the movie, even bringing in several new
characters. What we know so far may end up insignificant in comparison to what
is coming. However, if we can solve it given what we've seen, there is only one
plausible solution (and it is bolstered by working backwards from some things
that would follow if the rest is true):</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The killer (of at least one
of the two men) is Murray Abrahams. Farmer is a primary target of the killing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We have the following
evidence:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• The crime scene was
tampered with. Abrahams saw it before Dusk did.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Abrahams did not like
Farmer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Abrahams is not a friend
of Dusk, which makes him suspect.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Abrahams is smarter than
Dusk gives him credit for.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• The only characters in the
movie besides Abrahams are Dusk, the two dead men (at least one of which had a
killer who wasn't one of those two), Wellington (who, Dusk assures us, is
innocent), and two unnamed women (Farmer's sister and Farmer's ex).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• One more reason involving
a parallel to the main plot that I will mention later.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Abrahams knows more than he
is letting on, and is either the killer or, at the outside, is covering for the
killer. He is looking for Dusk to solve the case incorrectly, and in so doing,
clear him. Therefore, he wants to lead Dusk off the correct track.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Perhaps we will see more <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adjournment</i> characters in the story yet
to come, and my solution will prove to be off-track, but there are reasons
besides the internal logic of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Adjournment </i>that make it an effective solution.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Parallel Plots</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Whether this or something
else is the solution to the whodunit, we still have to deduce why Johns is
sharing any of this with us. I have, over the past several months, considered
many combinations of characters in the main story and in this one, trying to
find patterns where someone in the movie matches someone in the main <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC</i> plot.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">1) Alastair Tempus = Alan
Scott?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A few clues point me in a
particular direction. First, the killing of someone, in this story, if it's to
represent a pivotal<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>event, would
stand a good chance of representing Dr. Manhattan's killing of Alan Scott in
1940, changing the timeline. Now, zero in on the first part of
"time"line and note that Alastair Tempus' last name is Latin for
"time." This seems like a good place to start. Does Alastair Tempus
represent Alan Scott? There are some matching characteristics, such as age and
wealth. And look at the name alone:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">ALA_S_Tair <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="background: white; color: #545454; font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">→</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">ALAn ScotT</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It's quite an odd choice of
given name, increasingly the likelihood that that similarity is deliberate. (Also
note: Alastair is derived from Alexander and Veidt is obsessed with Alexander
the Great.) But "tempus" means "time" in Latin, not "lantern"
or "scott." It may be more apt to posit that Tempus represents the
post-<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">COIE </i>or post-<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Infinite Crisis</i> timeline, with the JSA
living in the JLA's past, and that the death of Alastair Tempus represents the
end of the Alan Scott timeline, which is to say the entire pre-Flashpoint
continuity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">2) Nathaniel Dusk = Adrian
Veidt?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-irVSafQH47U/XOTaH68CuVI/AAAAAAAABLk/vEZD9llW2cAGXkITanOoPgeUvC0c1aX9QCLcBGAs/s1600/duskveidt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="588" data-original-width="850" height="138" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-irVSafQH47U/XOTaH68CuVI/AAAAAAAABLk/vEZD9llW2cAGXkITanOoPgeUvC0c1aX9QCLcBGAs/s200/duskveidt.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Another pair who may match
up is Dusk and Veidt. Look at these panels that occur in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC</i> #3, Veidt in the lower-left corner of page 7 and Dusk in the lower-left
panel on page 17 – ten pages apart, in the same part of the page. The
composition is identical, and their hair is similar, though the lighting is
nearly opposite. Now consider the following lines of dialogue:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Erika Manson to Veidt:
"What's the price on your head anyway?"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Abrahams to Dusk:
"Everyone knows about the price on your head."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And, consider the thematic
arcs for each: Veidt is disgraced and preoccupied with tragedy in his past
while trying to make sense of a new mystery. This is also true of Dusk. Most to
the point: The prime mover in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday
Clock</i> plot is Veidt undertaking a plan to save the Watchmen Universe by
finding Dr. Manhattan. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adjournment</i>
centers on the investigation by Dusk of a pair of murders. The central figure
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adjournment</i> should likely
correspond to a central character in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday
Clock</i> and that's quite a short list. The aforementioned clues place the
focus on Veidt.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">3) Murray Abrahams = Dr.
Manhattan?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZukcI3o54EA/XOTaQQQxG7I/AAAAAAAABLo/Fsarq4zrl5wud52y2Ol5jChBm4uQwU4OACLcBGAs/s1600/abrahamsmanhattan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="774" data-original-width="810" height="190" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZukcI3o54EA/XOTaQQQxG7I/AAAAAAAABLo/Fsarq4zrl5wud52y2Ol5jChBm4uQwU4OACLcBGAs/s200/abrahamsmanhattan.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If the first two matches are
correct, then Abrahams has to be Dr. Manhattan. We already know that Dr.
Manhattan is the killer of Alan Scott; killing Scott changed the timeline and
Tempus is the timeline, so whoever killed Tempus represents Dr. Manhattan. Dusk
and Abrahams have an established relationship, have worked together before, but
are not friends. Reggie, the New Rorschach could also fit the bill of Abrahams,
but then he certainly didn't work with Veidt before this case. And Dusk asks
Abrahams for the favor of helping him revisit Joyce's home; Veidt's entire
mission begins with seeking Dr. Manhattan's help, and nobody else in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adjournment</i> plays that role. These
panels from #5 and #7 may provide another clue that this pair of characters is
linked.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">4) Bentley Farmer = The
Reverse Flash?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xaV1lMA7cJM/XOTa1uGarzI/AAAAAAAABLw/BNP4zpVTz68R2wLjY2ngQ90STiHLZZYiQCLcBGAs/s1600/reverseflash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="646" data-original-width="811" height="158" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xaV1lMA7cJM/XOTa1uGarzI/AAAAAAAABLw/BNP4zpVTz68R2wLjY2ngQ90STiHLZZYiQCLcBGAs/s200/reverseflash.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Two players in this story are
associated with changed timelines. Two, counting "The Button," are
killed by Dr. Manhattan. Thawne recognized Dr. Manhattan when he saw him,
indicating a past interaction between the two. And Alan Scott is not a killer,
so the other of the two victims must be. Pandora – killed by Dr. Manhattan
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rebirth</i> – could possibly also fit
the bill, but for centrality to the larger story, a better match is the Reverse
Flash. If you recall the details of "The Button," Reverse Flash
actively sought out Dr. Manhattan, with confidence that the latter had never
faced anyone like him. That didn't go well for Eobard Thawne. The two had some
past association, just as Farmer and Abrams are related by marriage. The art,
again, may hold clues, as Farmer was shot in the left side of his face and
Thawne was blasted, strangely, with the left side of his face blown off. To
match the main plot, we may end up learning that Farmer tried to kill Abrahams,
but was himself killed in the attempt.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">5) Jasper Wellington =
Johnny Thunder?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-adpCk5NRVVs/XOTa_H-c74I/AAAAAAAABL0/01VkTCYv6Honkcazf-r6OjFj6J-7NPv9wCLcBGAs/s1600/wellingtonthunder.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="658" data-original-width="995" height="131" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-adpCk5NRVVs/XOTa_H-c74I/AAAAAAAABL0/01VkTCYv6Honkcazf-r6OjFj6J-7NPv9wCLcBGAs/s200/wellingtonthunder.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There's a curious
complication about the JSA's removal from the timeline, which seems to involve
both Alan Scott and Johnny Thunder: We know that the JSA is not part of
anyone's memory in the current timeline. The fact that Dr. Manhattan removed
Alan Scott from the timeline might seem to be part of a larger pattern that
removed the entire JSA. Dr. Manhattan indicates in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC </i>#7 that when he removed Alan Scott's survival from the timeline,
the meeting of the JSA in November 1940 did not go on to occur. According to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rebirth</i>, Johnny Thunder belonged to a
"<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">covert</b> team of mystery
men." He later told his Thunderbolt to protect the JSA at the meeting
wherein McCarthy told them "Take off your masks" in October 1951. It
appears that the JSA was removed from the timeline in two steps: First, Dr.
Manhattan moving the lantern in 1940, then Johnny Thunder sought to protect
them via his Thunderbolt at the hearing in 1951. The cause-and-effect
relationship of timeline alteration may be pretty tricky, but the chronology of
those two "events" goes from Dr. Manhattan in 1940 to Johnny Thunder
in 1951. Now, we can say that he removed the JSA from their would-be lives, but
unlike Dr. Manhattan's killing of Alan Scott and the Reverse Flash, he didn't
actually kill anyone. The visuals are a tip-off, too. Check out this pair of
panels, both from issue #5. And how many characters wear a bowtie? Finally, one
of those ambiguous speech balloons in that issue refers to Wellington with
"This poor man never hurt anybody" and overlaps with a panel of
Johnny Thunder, a hint that they are the same "poor man."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">6) Chess pieces = Characters
in the DC Universe?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N6pEgbWmUcM/XOTbLfkt6tI/AAAAAAAABL8/XWlIgQQGXvkDeC4aDPy6q2CydX3_Dv3KQCLcBGAs/s1600/chess.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="736" data-original-width="364" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N6pEgbWmUcM/XOTbLfkt6tI/AAAAAAAABL8/XWlIgQQGXvkDeC4aDPy6q2CydX3_Dv3KQCLcBGAs/s200/chess.jpg" width="98" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If Tempus and Farmer
represent Scott and the Reverse Flash, who in turn involve timeline
manipulation, then the chessboards and pieces may represent those timelines and
the characters within them. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flashpoint </i>has
been referenced in this for a reason. Perhaps each of the pieces we see
represents particular DC characters. When we see, then, Dusk closely examining
the white and black kings, this may represent Veidt considering the DCU, and
contemplating two opposing sides, either the heroes and villains, or the polar
icons of Superman and Batman.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Now, does all of this wash?
I wouldn't bet the farm on this, but a lot of details fit together in a pretty
comprehensive way. Others don't, such as the fact that Alan Scott and the Reverse Flash never played a game of chess against one another, so far as I know, and if any characters in the larger plot are akin to chess opponents, there would be better ones to choose from. Because this is all on the level of symbolism, the story
isn't obliged to declare that the plots are parallel in the way I describe
here; this is the sort of thing one may see or not see or argue about weeks or
years after the series is over. I'm going to go out on a limb, though, and
suggest that these alignments of details in the plot and the art are part of an
intended framework of parallels.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In any case, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adjournment </i>plot is much smaller than
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> one and I spent
some time considering if the older and younger victims might represent the
personalities of Firestorm – Martin Stein and Ronnie Raymond. It could just be
that they work in that fashion, too, because parallels aren't obligated to be
unique. "Marooned" certainly doesn't map to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i> plot in a singular way. This or other parallels may work
in addition to or instead of the ones I have mentioned. We don't know, but in
the meantime, I find myself thinking that the art parallels are not likely a
coincidence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Author, Author</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The Golden Age Tarantula is
not one of DC's most beloved and enduring characters, but Johns has mentioned
Tarantula's alter ego, John Law, in some detail in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC </i>#3. As the screenwriter of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Adjournment </i>and a suspect in Colman's murder, Law has at least two roles to
play in this story. His divorce from Libby Lawrence may be driving some
animosity between any other man who has tried or succeeded in winning Lawrence
over. This could explain why he's a suspect in Colman's death. If so, there's
some a major soap opera style plot going on. Consider that Lawrence, the
original Liberty Belle, is the mother of Jesse Quick / the second Liberty
Belle, and the possible connection (via "tick tock") between Colman
and Hourman: A romance between Lawrence and Colman could be a
one-generation-earlier pairing up like the marriage between Rick Tyler and
Jesse Chambers, a romance originally authored by Geoff Johns.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In addition, Law's angst
over losing Lawrence (shown in great detail in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Golden Age</i>) could also surface in the plot of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adjournment</i>. In only seven pages,
we've seen how no fewer than three men have lost the women in their lives
– two to death and one to divorce. The evil-looking woman on the cover of
#10 may be another facet of Law's bitter feelings towards women and romantic
relationships.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wheels Within Wheels</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One unmistakable
characteristic of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock </i>is
the attention to detail, something we have not seen in all that many works,
including some of Johns' more sprawling epics like "Sinestro Corps
War" and "Blackest Night" that are more broad and vast than
deep. I, for one, admire the obvious degree of intricacy in the scripting, and
I'm more than accepting of the slower release schedule that has been necessary.
It's a pleasure to have a story with our favorite superheroes be worthy of this
much attention. However posterity may remember <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock </i>in relation to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i>,
I think fans will salute the effort that Johns put in and the intricacy that
resulted. I'm looking forward to seeing what the next three issues bring and
how well the patterns I cite here continue – or don't – as the story
moves towards a finish.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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</style>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-14578197503914304392019-05-08T15:28:00.001-07:002019-05-08T15:28:44.339-07:00Doomsday Clock: Carver Colman<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5cg-K3D_-3U/XNNX6RrUicI/AAAAAAAABLI/vdydo0unZR0Mq7dna09P8pH4iVzi0cV5QCLcBGAs/s1600/colman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="724" data-original-width="1242" height="186" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5cg-K3D_-3U/XNNX6RrUicI/AAAAAAAABLI/vdydo0unZR0Mq7dna09P8pH4iVzi0cV5QCLcBGAs/s320/colman.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">A significant degree of
screentime in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> has been
devoted to the integration of a sideplot (Carver Colman). Dr. Manhattan has
indicated that Carver Colman figured large in his thoughts. What role does the
Colman sideplot play in relation to the main story?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Colman is tied directly to
the main plot. He lived in the New 52 DCU timeline in which <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> begins. He was born circa
1912, moved to Hollywood as teenagr in 1928, and starred in the Nathaniel Dusk
films from 1943 to 1954, dying in a mysterious murder that mirrors the original
Nite Owl's death in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i>. In the
meantime, he had at least one encounter with Dr. Manhattan that significantly
altered that being's perspectives because Carver Colman "was once full of
hope" before dying.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">I emphasize dates because
there are at least three significant connections to be made that have not, so
far as I have seen, been made online yet. Two of these involve the McCarthy
"Red Scare" witch hunt that has been intertwined with the Justice
Society backstory since 1979 and other ways in which Colman's timeline
intersects with the DCU superheroes'.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">1. Colman's death occurs in
the early hours of June 9, 1954. This is not an arbitrary date. In the real
world, an Army attorney named Joseph Welch had an encounter with Senator Joseph
McCarthy on that date which famously ended public and political support for
McCarthy. The pivotal quotation, which many have heard in Welch's Iowan accent
culminated with, "</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-size: 10.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial";">Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have
you left no sense of decency?"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">We know that Colman's life
intersected with the Red Scare because Ring Lardner Jr., the screenwriter of
his third movie – a real man from the real world – was part of the
Hollywood Ten, a group that was prosecuted criminally and blacklisted by
Hollywood for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities
Committee. (Lardner returned to screenwriting decades later and won an Oscar in
1970.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">We know from discussion in
Johnny Thunder's retirement home that Colman is remembered as a deviant by some
and a hero by others. What was so polarizing?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The timing suggests that
Colman's "hope" was extinguished just hours before McCarthyism was
otherwise eliminated. He had eaten dinner with Hollywood power brokers shortly
before his murder. Presumably, they learned that he had views that were
dangerous to them during the reign of McCarthyism. It seems likely that he died
on the last possible day before his views, sympathetic to Communism or, at
least, hostile to McCarthyism, would have become acceptable. Colman's death
seems to be a key trigger for Dr. Manhattan, making him experience feelings,
such as he has them, of futility and abandoning hope, a path that has taken him
into encounters with Firestorm and, eventually, Superman, with a dangerous
disregard for the worthwhileness of human life.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Perhaps incidental to the
story, Colman's death reminds me, in certain ways, of that of George Reeves,
the actor who once played Superman on TV. Like Colman, Reeves was a Hollywood
actor who played a hero, and after socializing with other Hollywood figures,
and died somewhat mysteriously, with an official ruling of suicide but some
suspicion that the shooting was actually a murder.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">2. Dr. Manhattan's brief
biography of Alan Scott highlights that Scott spoke before HUAC (another arm of
McCarthyism, although McCarthy was a member of the Senate, not the House, and
did not belong to HUAC) on January 8, 1950 and "refuses to implicate
anyone in his employ." Aficionados of JSA lore may recall that Scott and
the JSA spoke before HUAC and refused to cooperate with them, and at that point
retired from their superhero identities, another loss of hope.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">However, this is not the
same event. Back in 1979, a story in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adventure
Comics</i> #466 explained the backstory of the Justice Society, who had retired
before Jay Garrick met Barry Allen in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flash</i>
#123. (To be precise, Jay claims to have retired in 1949.) According to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adventure</i> #466, the JSA appears, led by
Alan Scott, before HUAC on October 13, 1951, and rather than unmask themselves,
leave the proceedings and retire from their superhero roles.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">The January 8 event, however,
took place over a year earlier. This is not the hearing involving the JSA, but
rather one involving the professional role of Alan Scott as a businessman, and
it is depicted in the 1993 Elseworlds work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Golden Age</i> with the same date. It is not clear if the events, in Dr.
Manhattan's timeline, are the same as depicted in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Golden Age</i>, but it is, strikingly, this meeting before HUAC
that Dr. Manhattan cites, not the one involving the JSA. In the new timeline,
Dr. Manhattan visits Alan Scott's grave on January 1950, ten years after
Scott's death and at the time he would have – but in the new timeline
– meet with HUAC. Subtly, then, Dr. Manhattan is twice motivated by events
involving McCarthyism.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Why did Dr. Manhattan kill
Alan Scott? These details imply that he was profoundly disturbed by the outcome
of the January 8, 1950 meeting, but it is not clear why, and we can't be sure
that the events of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Golden Age</i>,
leading to a showdown with the Ultra-Humanite, are part of the timeline in
question. It is probably impossible for us to guess why Alan Scott's testimony
so disturbed Dr. Manhattan, but it seems likely that some unanticipated consequence
of his heroic stance led to the defeat of "hope" and that Dr.
Manhattan canceled the entire timeline by killing Alan Scott, just to prevent
that outcome. In the new timeline, Colman Carver becomes a new source of hope
before he dies. And now Superman plays that role. Maybe Superman will
demonstrate hope that cannot be defeated, and redeem the DCU for Dr. Manhattan.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">What is Veidt's plan? The
cover of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> #8 shows
Veidt manipulating Superman and Dr. Manhattan as marionettes. The best we could
say for Veidt is that he is orchestrating the meeting between them because it
will end with Dr. Manhattan concluding his experiments in the DCU, and will
lead to Dr. Manhattan returning to the Watchmen Universe to save it. This would
amount to Superman providing the hope that Alan Scott, in an earlier time and
earlier timeline, could not.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CaMZxmnqyv8/XNNXRrZ5_VI/AAAAAAAABLA/ajzH3TbnEEsTsCcm_wOOqc9A7Pz0fFHSACLcBGAs/s1600/barryallen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="481" data-original-width="1600" height="96" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CaMZxmnqyv8/XNNXRrZ5_VI/AAAAAAAABLA/ajzH3TbnEEsTsCcm_wOOqc9A7Pz0fFHSACLcBGAs/s320/barryallen.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Doomsday Clock #10 vs. Showcase #4</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">3. The cover of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> #10 shows a boy on a farm
whose mailbox reads "Colman." The boy is reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All Star Comics</i> #3, the comic book issue that in our world introduced
the Justice Society. However, this has a major twist: Dr. Manhattan is seated
at the table with the Justice Society. Obviously, no such event ever took place
in any DC timeline that we've ever seen. A cover is not bound to narrate fact,
but this cover is asserting something – what is it?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">I looked at this cover many
times, supposing that the blonde boy there was a young Carver Colman, but the
timeline doesn't fit. Colman would have been 28 years old in 1940 and working
as a man in Hollywood, while the boy in the picture is much younger. Although
timeline manipulation is part of the story, it seems that the boy is not
Colman. It is, more likely, Barry Allen. Compare that cover with the first two
panels depicting Barry Allen back in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Showcase</i>
#4. Though Barry here is a man, not a boy, and the details are provided in two
panels rather than one, it shows similar composition and intent, with the
"real" superheroes appearing fictional on a comic book cover, and Jay
Garrick part of the cover in both cases. However, given that Barry Allen's
youth has remained fixed since 1956, we can no longer posit that Barry was
alive and reading comic books in 1940, so it could be that the Allen boy seen
here is not Barry but Barry's father or even grandfather. That would match the
claim made by Wally that the watch was once owned by Barry's grandfather.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">This scene likely could not
have happened in any of the timelines we're familiar with but it does assert a
few remarkable things. Strikingly, it suggests that in at least one timeline,
Dr. Manhattan tried to "find a place among them" by serving as a
member of the Justice Society. One imagines that this may have gone badly, with
the squeaky-clean and optimistic Golden Age Heroes clashing with Dr. Manhattan,
a clash that may have ended with his murdering them and terminating that
timeline. However, that is, given the previous discussion, likely not the
reason why Alan Scott and the JSA were eliminated from the New 52 timeline.
That is due to some combination of Alan Scott's HUAC testimony, Johnny Thunder
using his Thunderbolt "trying to protect them" from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">their</i> testimony before McCarthy (who,
again, was not a member of HUAC; this detail may be a mistake), and Dr.
Manhattan going back to July 1940 and killing Alan Scott.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">However, it does suggest,
strikingly, a connection between Barry Allen and Carver Colman. There may be no
way to make the timelines work nicely anymore and match the current Barry Allen
to any kid who would have been alive and reading comic books before 1950, but there
is one more reason to suspect a significant connection between Carver Colman
and Barry Allen – a watch.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">One detail of Colman's death
is that his watch was missing. A watch is, of course, the metaphor that runs
throughout <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i>, beginning with
the first syllable of its title. It is also what we see first and last in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC Rebirth</i>, but the watch there, as
signified by the inscription, "Every Second is A Gift," belongs to
Wally West. That watch, or so Wally believes, belonged to Barry Allen's
grandfather. The cover and the "two" watches suggest a link between
Colman and the past of Barry Allen (and further, on to Wally West).
Furthermore, as Colman's family is from Indiana, as the farm location
reinforces, that provides a plausible geographical link as well to the pasts of
the Allen and West families, who are Midwestern.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Additionally, Colman is tied
plausibly to the JSA and Golden Age superheroes, and could even be one of them,
living a life where timeline manipulation, say by Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt,
may have placed him safely in a life where the HUAC showdown in 1951 would not
affect him. Because his bio associated the phrase "tick tock" with
him, and a fascination with clocks, I repeat my earlier supposition that Carver
Colman <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> Rex Tyler, "Tick Tock"
Tyler, the Hour-Man, hidden in an alternative life. Born in 1912, he would have
been 28 in 1940, a fine age for a scientist–superhero to begin his career.
Sadly, both of his lives turned out poorly, from some level of analysis, with
Hourman retiring due to HUAC pressure in 1951 and, in the new timeline, Carver
Colman being murdered due to political reasons in 1954. Dr. Manhattan is aware
of this, was physically present in the life of Colman, and feels hopelessness
due to the poor ends that Tyler-Colman inevitably met.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This would provide an interesting additional thread of
connection, for a chain of continuity involving time-based heroes if Hourman
passed a watch to Barry Allen who passed it to Wally West. Time and
watches/clocks thus serve as a symbol, as they did in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i>, but here the generations of superhero become the
"hours" that tick by: Golden Age, Silver Age, and then on to the
generation of Wally West (though he debuted in the Silver Age).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Furthermore, Colman had an association with John Law, the
Golden Age superhero known as Tarantula, who was present for the culminating
battle in January 1950 in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Golden Age</i>.
Law was a writer in his original formulation and, in the end-notes of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC</i> #3, a screenwriter, and therefore
also plausibly entangled in the Hollywood-HUAC mess that brought down many real
people as well as some in this story.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don't think the entire story and reveals to come can be
guessed with certainty now, particularly as there are timelines involved that
we've never seen, but the Carver Colman story will take, at least, the loose
outlines of this form, and in so doing provides thematic support to the main
plot, and even a direct role in the JSA-HUAC-timeline part of the story that's
largely been hidden from us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The case of Carver's biography aside, Carver Colman is tied
to a completely different sideplot – the plot of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adjournment</i>, the Nathaniel Dusk movie whose action has been
shown to us directly in several scenes. The plot of a story within a story has
no logical requirement to correspond to the main story in any way, but it is
not for nothing that Johns has chosen to devote a few pages. In my next post,
I'll ask what role<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adjournment</i> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>plays in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday
Clock</i>.</div>
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-->Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-9877609143588190972019-03-20T14:33:00.000-07:002019-03-20T14:33:03.236-07:00Doomsday Clock 9
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When I first read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i> in 1989, part of my response, following
the patterns of all the DC stories I'd read before, was to wonder how the Justice
League would respond to the deadly events wrought by Veidt and accepted by Dr.
Manhattan in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i>. Neatly thirty
years later, a partial answer to that question was offered by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> #9. Reduced to a pure
"versus" between Dr. Manhattan and most of the most powerful
characters in the modern DCU, it appears that the result is no contest. In a
direct confrontation, Dr. Manhattan absorbs most of their most powerful blows
and he is not so much harmed as inconvenienced. Almost as though to add insult
to injury, he is fascinated rather than angered by their attack, as their
powers are manifestations of physics that he'd never seen before.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Yet, in both <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC</i> #8-9, Dr. Manhattan is a mere physical force, reduced to a
feckless judge of events around him. His direct contribution to Veidt's plan
was nothing more than killing Rorschach, to preserve the secrecy that Veidt's
plan required. He was, moreover, a failure in this regard, Rorschach's journal
having leaked eventually, and the Watchman world is eventually in chaos because
of/despite the collective efforts of Veidt and Dr. Manhattan.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But Veidt is the real agent
at work here, as we're reminded when a single panel pairs Wonder Woman's use of
the phrase "single villain" with Veidt's hands at work pushing a
button. Veidt orchestrated the spiraling tragedy in Moscow, which is clear to
the reader, but it's important to note that his ruse is very sophisticated,
layered two deep. First, he made it seem to the world that Firestorm attacked
the good people of Russia and that Superman took Firestorm's side, turning the
whole world against the last, most respected superhero. The superheroes see
through this first ruse, tracing the radiation to Mars. But, as Batman
suspects, there is a double ruse: Dr. Manhattan didn't attack Superman, either.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Veidt's self-stated purpose
is to save everybody. And yet, Saturn Girl is so horrified by what Veidt had in
mind (much of which, we've seen) that he had to knock her out to subdue her. Veidt
is trying to reshape events according to his design, and he's surely reshaping
events, and certainly things will change, but the endgame can't go quite the
way he's imagining.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Xtuvxwf6ozU/XJKxa8rHviI/AAAAAAAABKU/kLzCfUDn7jM8yEwqFtkmndWZyx0EUOlkQCLcBGAs/s1600/dc9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="369" data-original-width="575" height="128" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Xtuvxwf6ozU/XJKxa8rHviI/AAAAAAAABKU/kLzCfUDn7jM8yEwqFtkmndWZyx0EUOlkQCLcBGAs/s200/dc9.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A real eye-opener in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC </i>#9 is that the group of superheroes
who go to Mars ("they all" in Batman's formulation) lacks Wonder
Woman. A reason that makes sense of this within the story is offered, but what
is Johns' reason? Because the design this creates is that, of all the major
superheroes, the only three who didn't leave the Earth for Mars are Superman, Batman,
and Wonder Woman, and anytime those three share something in common, we ought
to take notice.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">At this point in the story,
we have:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• A single superbeing who is
capable of beating any of the DC heroes, perhaps all of them at the same time.
He goes immunity even to the strongest magic as well as science-based powers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• When an army of
superheroes attacks the superbeing, he lashes out in retaliation, besting all
of them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• A genius who himself lacks
superpowers but is directing the actions of that superbeing. He wants to change
the nature of reality for the better but cannot be trusted with regards to his
tactics or objectives.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• The supervillains of Earth
united into an army.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• The Trinity held aside
from all the other superheroes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Lex Luthor is working on
his own behalf, opposed to the aforementioned genius.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• The superbeing has just
resisted an attack launched by another version of himself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What interests (and concerns)
me about this is, this is much where we were at the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Infinite Crisis</i> #6, also written by Geoff Johns. (Noteworthy:
Superboy Prime shows up in Guy Gardner's ring-projected circle of villains.) Without
opening up a full re-discussion of that story, I find it to be an epic of
impressive scope, many exciting scenes, and a story that ultimately becomes
disconnected from its own arguments. After raising many interesting questions
about what the superhero world should be, it has a brawl create an accidental
choice of what the future (2006–2011) DCU would be like, with no compelling demonstration
that the outcome was different was a rejection of what the villain (Alexander
Luthor of Earth-3) had hoped for nor a positive affirmation of the world that
the heroes would have chosen (if there'd ever been a consensus hinted at). The
result was a world where the JSA had begun the era of heroes, and Wally West
and the Teen Titans were part of a modern era alongside the JLA.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If, 13 years of DC comics
later, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> takes a
thus-far exemplary 12-issue story to get us back to that same basic point it
would feel like a very roundabout path to get back to where we started. And,
yes, comic books like other serials have, at their heart, circular time at
their essence, but when a story begins as well as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> has, one hopes for more. This is, we hope a response
to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i> rather than a replay of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Infinite Crisis</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Means and Motives</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">To see where the story is
going, the prime movers are the knowledge and motives of Veidt and Dr.
Manhattan. We already know that Veidt wants to save "everything and
everybody" on both worlds. But what does Dr. Manhattan want?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In #7, over a long discourse
with Veidt, Dr. Manhattan reveals, "At first, I thought I might find a
place among them." But, then he saw a vision of the upcoming confrontation
with Superman, "the most hopeful among them… now hopeless." "Carver
Colman was once full of hope, too… but everything ends." And, later, in
#9, says that his point is "even hope decays."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Given the first of that
information (and perhaps inferring it all), Veidt begins the plan to create the
encounters we've seen transpire. He knows that Dr. Manhattan sees no hope in
Superman when their future encounter will take place, in one week. Is Veidt's
double ruse an effort to bring Superman and Dr. Manhattan together, forcing the
positive action he desires from him? If so, perhaps it could involve one or
more of the following:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Superman's actions will
indeed inspire Dr. Manhattan with hope.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Superman is perhaps
capable of destroying Dr. Manhattan (his easy dismissal of so many superheroes
may lead the reader to doubt this, but Dr. Manhattan himself obviously
considers it possible), and his own mortality may prompt him to abandon his
stoic outlook and act.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">• Dr. Manhattan appears to
have learned magic, and perhaps other things from seeing the DC heroes
demonstrate them. He may be more powerful now than ever.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Back to the Future</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of #9's surprises is
that the gloved hand that mailed a USB drive to Lois Lane belonged to Lex
Luthor, not New Rorschach. We don't know how he accessed film from alternate
timelines, but Luthor has some sort of cross-timeline information source; he also
knows that Wally West paid the price for Dr. Manhattan's timeline manipulation.
He considers the invasion from the Watchmen Universe to be one that undermines
"all of creation" and will add his assistance to Superman's efforts.
Luthor's intervention may end up being key in informing Superman of the stakes,
and alter the confrontation with Dr. Manhattan to a result we are meant to
favor.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Aside: The name-checked film
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Back to the Future</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i> both offer specific dates
corresponding to their events and have their main action take place the same
week of October 1985!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Parallel Lives</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Though we learned, as
expected, that Dr. Martin Stein, the older half of Firestorm, is the mysterious
head of the governmental superhero initiative, this story seems to be only half
revealed. Stein remains determined to prevent the course of events as we've
seen them, and after Dr. Manhattan shows Ronnie Raymond a past in which Stein
basically abducted Ronnie as his means into metahuman powers, Stein says that
Dr. Manhattan cannot be trusted. Meanwhile, it is noteworthy that Dr. Manhattan
has this information when he seems generally disoriented about the other
superheroes. What is their relationship? Is Stein another manifestation of Dr.
Manhattan, created by but now quite different in outlook from the blue man from
the Watchmen Universe? Is Stein actually the hopeful one who will inspire Dr.
Manhattan?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The Nathaniel Dusk movie
holds a parallel for some other part of our story. A young man and older man
are both killed, because one was targeted. Are Stein and Raymond the older and
younger men this represents? Did Dr. Manhattan create the Firestorm storyline
to mirror the movie?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Back to the Past</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">As we've learned before, Dr.
Manhattan created the current DCU timeline by causing the death of Alan Scott.
This erased the JSA from history, and also erased the LSH from eventually
existing, as shown by the disappearance of Ferro Lad, the Legionaire who
sacrificed himself to kill a Sun Eater in a 1967 story. Why did Dr. Manhattan
do this?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lEoM1pfbUMs/XJKxhs2MabI/AAAAAAAABKY/wx-Dj1npHpEXg0NtBaB7o7c2b2I_tUs_QCLcBGAs/s1600/ferrolad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1042" data-original-width="1045" height="319" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lEoM1pfbUMs/XJKxhs2MabI/AAAAAAAABKY/wx-Dj1npHpEXg0NtBaB7o7c2b2I_tUs_QCLcBGAs/s320/ferrolad.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We know that Dr. Manhattan
is pained by the loss of hope that Carver Colman experienced. Did Alan Scott
cause this by offering the JSA's retirement in the face of HUAC demanding they
reveal their identities? Dr. Manhattan stood "on set" of Colman's
movie. He was apparently in the guide of a real person, either Colman or
someone close to him. This entire manipulation of the DCU may be due to the
disillusionment that Dr. Manhattan experienced as a result of the 1950s HUAC
affairs, with Alan Scott drawing the blame.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Errata or something else?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the final two pages of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DC</i> #9, two apparent discrepancies occur.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One, Green Arrow
congratulates Ronnie/Firestorm after Captain Atom temporarily blasts Dr.
Manhattan. Is this misassigned credit, or did Firestorm participate in some way
we didn't see?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Later, we see superheroes
lying unconscious on the sands of Mars, and this includes Guy Gardner, in his
Green Lantern costume, but he had lost his costume when Dr. Manhattan dissolved
his ring earlier.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Are these errors or
indications of some intended change?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">With <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doomsday Clock</i> entering the final issues, this is something I'm
asking myself more. Is this fine series holding more wonderful surprises in
store, or is it going to be forced into a desired ending despite what we've
seen so far? For us as well as the heroes, only time will tell.</span></div>
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</style>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-55086463693238466302019-03-16T07:00:00.003-07:002019-03-16T07:00:55.014-07:00Green Lantern 2-5
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WNmJMdkKbZQ/XIz_P9QA_RI/AAAAAAAABJ4/xhMkvhrXyvgrtYLi-HFoYt6Z9d_NUaajwCLcBGAs/s1600/starbreaker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1082" data-original-width="1600" height="216" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WNmJMdkKbZQ/XIz_P9QA_RI/AAAAAAAABJ4/xhMkvhrXyvgrtYLi-HFoYt6Z9d_NUaajwCLcBGAs/s320/starbreaker.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">1972's Starbreaker and his Daughter, Belzebeth</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Take a writer. Take an established character. The run that
results is going to reflect both of them, who the two of them have
traditionally been. And then there are creative choices, where the writer
chooses among possibilities. The Grant Morrison Batman of 2006 was not the
Grant Morrison Batman of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arkham Asylum</i>
or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gothic</i> and Morrison's Hal Jordan
of 2009 is one out of maybe several choices he might have made. If it's a
recipe, it's a stew, with lots of tasty things thrown in. So far, it's been a
feast.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Legend</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hal Jordan to some extent fits a template that Batman or
Superman can fit but Animal Man cannot: He is an alpha character. Most
superheroes seem super in the world of their own stories, but some of them are
on a higher level. Superman at his best is the best and most famous and
accomplished being in the history of the Universe. Batman at his best is
unbeatable. Hal Jordan at his best is the most confident and capable hero who's
ever wielded a power ring – the champion not just of his planet and time,
but all planets and all times, capable of transcending fear and doubt in an
absolute way.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Other writers have weakened Hal, making him a troublemaker,
hapless at love, a drifter who can't hold a steady job, the predictable stiff
who can't be as interesting as John Stewart or Guy Gardner, and even a drunk
driver and psychotic killer.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Morrison can put Hal into heroic situations and ignore those
weaknesses in his past, but instead, he's opening them up, acknowledging them,
redeeming them. The heroic situations are many, to be sure, and provide
pleasure after pleasure. It begins in #1 with Hal doing nothing but observe in
amusement as the meganthrope destroys himself. Since then, he's gone on a tear
of victory after victory. He doesn't fail, can't fail. He wins on the field of
action, he enters every situation with unfailing confidence. Morrison is making
Hal supreme in ways we've never seen before, superb as a detective, student of
the cultures and civilizations of the 3600 space sectors, and even in the interrogation
room. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But we also see Hal moving past the ghosts of his past. He
dismisses his career failures as unimportant. He isn't, as the 1960 formulation
of Hal went, utterly without fear, but, as he tells Countess Beelzebeth,
"you have to know fear to overcome it, own it. Turn it into something you
can use." He has been possessed by a demon, and having moved past that,
has no inner demons. Geoff Johns, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Green
Lantern: Rebirth</i> explained Hal's greatest failings away, made them not
really his fault. Morrison goes further, redeeming Hal totally. It's not just
that he's not to blame. He's even better now because of his earlier defeats.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I missed posting single-issue responses, so I did not have
time to dwell on, as I would have, the seeming anomalies along the way where
Hal's rectitude was brought into question – most strikingly when we saw
him execute a prisoner from Dhor at the end of #3. As we now know, this was
part of a ruse, taking Hal's extremely-well-established trope of being in
trouble with the Guardians and using it as a way for him to infiltrate the
Blackstars. The haunting foreshadowing at the end of #1 about a traitor in the
Green Lantern ranks turned out to be Hal, carrying out that ruse. Specfically,
Morrison is creating one instance in which Hal, purportedly a traitor, is
really acting from a position of good and within the system. Symbolically,
Morrison is redeeming a history of bad behavior by Hal. He is a winner and none
of the past charges stick.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The triumphs, then, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Green Lantern</i> are absolute ones, and follow a time-tested formula of
showing the hero besting not only his ordinary enemies, but even extraordinary
ones, and surpassing his fellow heroes. Thus, when Earth is shrunken and stolen
(one may recall that Metropolis was shrunken and stolen at a comparable moment
in Morrison's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Action</i> run), Morrison
took Hal's rescue to new (and blasphemous) heights, with Hal Jordan putting
what looked like the Christian God under arrest – a (symbolic) superfeat
for the ages. Less of an affront to a major world religion but perhaps more
significant in Morrison's worldview, the same issue also shows Hal as
triumphant in wrestling Earth from the false god while Earth's other top-tier
superheroes (including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and – particularly
relevant to the GL Corp – John Stewart) were helpless to save the planet.
Then, as yet another token of Jordan's supremacy, we see him put the entire
population of Earth under arrest (whatever that means). In a tie-in to our
times, Morrison serves up social commentary by implying that the population of
the world, bent by mind control to accept their capture, didn't rightly know
what they were choosing and "drunk in charge of an planet… jeopardizing
their own lives and future generations" needed to be set straight by Hal
– there's a deliberate parable there for political events in recent years.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Mythology</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While Hal is the single dominant figure in the story, the
cast is not small. Tapping Hal's publication history, Morrison has gone broader
than one might have imagined. Yes, Hal's up and down personal life (once
represented by an unstable professional career, later leading to mass murder
and death) has been mentioned, as well as other traits such as loose liaisons
with romantic partners. And yes, we have seen quite an imaginative use of the
vast GL Corps, freely borrowing from the imaginative output of earlier writers
(Rot Lop Fan, the sightless, acoustic-based F-Sharp Bell created by Alan Moore)
as well as offering some new GLs and twists on some old ones. But broader
still, Morrison has drawn upon the sci-fi Silver Age as a whole, with villains
from Dhor (introduced with Kanjar Ro in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">JLA</i>
#3). A particular emphasis has been paid to the legacy of Starbreaker, a JLA
super-foe from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">JLA </i>#96-98, a cosmic
vampire who vastly outpowered Superman, Hal, and Barry before pausing to feast
upon the Earth. Starbreaker's original cover art was used as the inspiration
for Morrison's Mandrakk. (On a personal note, that story was a bit before my
time, but I found the cover so cool that it was, I think, the very first older
issue of a comic that I ever bought from a used comic store just because it
looked interesting.) Here, Starbreaker's daughter, Countess Belzebeth (named
for the Old Testament's Baalzebub with a feminine suffix tacked on) seeks
revenge with a particularly bitter memory, Hal anticipates, for the way Green
Arrow shot her father with a silver arrow in <i>JLA</i> #98.</div>
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At the close of #5, we see Adam Strange, the latest example
that, for all of the expanse of Green Lantern history to choose from, it's
clear that Morrison has some favorites, with a lot of focus on characters from
the 1959–1965 era from which Hal himself originated.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Cop Shows</b></div>
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Contributing some drama, and quite a bit of humor, sometimes
in the same panel, Morrison has imbued this run with the superficial qualities
of a trope-heavy TV cop show. Morrison's fine ear for dialogue has resulted in
some hilarious uses of these clichés, perhaps best when the false God,
threatened with arrest, tells Hal, "Thos shalt ne'er make thine acusation
stick." It's probably not a coincidence, either, that Hal works with GL
Tagort in issue #4, and a British TV cop from Morrison's own Glasgow was named
Taggart.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Big Bad</b></div>
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Morrison's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman</i>
run was as pure an example as you could imagine of an extended story with one
central villain behind it. While the Joker, the al-Ghuls, and some minor
figures popped up from time to time, the great majority of Batman's troubles
there were due to a massive plan emanating from Doctor Hurt. To different
extents, some of his other runs have also built up to a pivotal encounter
between his heroes and one, profoundly menacing villain, someone worthy of
demonstrating the ability of any hero who could defeat them.</div>
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In Morrison's run, Controller Mu is referenced at the end of
the first issue. Mu is working on multiple threats at once. In order to
construct the "ultimate asset," an ultimate will-powered weapon, requires
obtaining five different components, of which a Luck Dial was second and Evil
Star's starband the third. Component one was already in their grasp, an
antimatter being that was apparently alive and formidable: They obtained it
from a moth world, as seen in flashback in #4. It killed several pirates before
they subdued it, then ambushed Green Lanterns Maxim Tox and Chriselon. This is
apparently what they vivisect for its heart at the end of issue #1, an
Antimatter Lantern that curious resembles Hal.</div>
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If they only have three of the five, we have to expect
something big. Hal gave the Darkstars his ring, which seems likely to
contribute, but since it was a ruse from the beginning, it is unlikely that he
and the Guardians are knowingly (literally) handing them a victory. Either this
ring is spiked somehow or they have a sure way to stop Controller Mu from
getting/after getting the fifth component.</div>
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Whatever that ultimate weapon is, it suggests Morrison's use
of this idea in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Final Crisis</i>,
realized into an ultimate wishing machine (itself originating in a Sixties LSH
story). Will-powered weapons are one of the roots of superhero comics (and certainly,
centuries of stories before that) and Morrison seems sure to make a grand use
of this idea before the run is done.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Multihero</b></div>
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There's a point in superhero comics where the creators
really have fun with the hero by putting them in multiple, unusual situations,
showing the hero's flexibility. There might be a hundred stories where Superman
or Batman were cast as some sort of wild variant on what they normally are
– a pirate, a cowboy, a magician, a movie star. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Return of Bruce Wayne</i> encapsulated that into a single work. But
while that's old hat for Superman and Batman, Morrison is doing something we
haven't seen much of with Hal in that position, showing him not only as a tough
cop (the focus of the series), but in quicker, temporary roles as a noir figure
(undercover in #4) and in a wildly un-Green-Lantern-like goth scenario on the
planet of the vampires. Seeing a couple of these makes it seem likely that
we'll see more, and I couldn't pretend to guess which ways that will go. Pirate
Hal? Cowboy Hal?</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Pending</b></div>
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Clearly, there's a design here for a story that will take a
year or more to come around to where Morrison is planning. Hal ends #5 in a
cliffhanger where he has to kill Adam Strange in order to continue his ruse. The teasers at the end of issue #1 are largely untapped, so there's a vast Multiversal storyline still ahead. We
will see Controller Mu build his power and offer an ultimate challenge for Hal.
There's a traitor within the Green Lantern ranks. And the free will of Hal vs. the authority of the
Guardians remains a tension that could turn into something bigger. The Guardians have told Hal that if his undercover mission goes bad, they will disavow him. What could be a more ultimate challenge than to have the source of his powers revoked, and need to escape unjust persecution?</div>
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A decade back, Geoff Johns wrote a Hal run of 75 issues (plus lots of extras) that was truly for the ages. Now his friend Grant Morrison is on a mission to write Hal a new, defining epic. If it remains self-contained – no big crossovers like <i>Darkest Night</i> – it may not capture fan attention on the level of a Batman or JLA run or Johns' <i>GL</i>, but it has begun as compelling and well-balanced as any of Morrison's earlier big runs. I'll be sitting back and enjoying.</div>
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</style>Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-44757162269946147962018-12-22T15:27:00.001-08:002018-12-22T15:29:16.477-08:00Doomsday Clock 8<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NYkmIf5p0Oc/XB7IvyEKD3I/AAAAAAAABJc/ZFwi3ZTt-ZwJMuNp3YCzop43s30wXpS1gCLcBGAs/s1600/dc8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1292" data-original-width="806" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NYkmIf5p0Oc/XB7IvyEKD3I/AAAAAAAABJc/ZFwi3ZTt-ZwJMuNp3YCzop43s30wXpS1gCLcBGAs/s320/dc8.jpg" width="199" /></a></div>
<b>A Crossroads</b></div>
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I've paused considerably before posting thoughts on <i>DC</i> #8. While the narration in the issue is considerably action-packed and the physical events that occur are presented in a clear fashion, there is a disorienting degree of uncertainty surrounding the hows and whys of these actions. The majority of the issue is devoted to a two-phase catastrophe in Moscow, but some events that get less coverage are still striking and mysterious. It's clear that some very important events took place off-panel and/or inside someone's mind between the meeting between Veidt and Dr. Manhattan in DC #7 and Firestorm's arrival in Moscow in <i>DC</i> #8.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To be succinct, the framing scenes with Veidt that start and end <i>DC</i> #8 strongly imply that he is directing all of the major events in Moscow, making moves behind the scenes and from a distance to give Superman, many Russian citizens, and apparently Firestorm one very bad day. His stated goal is to save everyone and everybody, and apparently, and in keeping with his master plan in <i>Watchmen</i>, he is quick to sacrifice many individual lives along the way. But what is happening, and why?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Moscow: Superman, Firestorm, and (?) Dr. Manhattan</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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What happens in Moscow? Firestorm arrives, which is to say that Ronnie Raymond has decided to confront those he perceives as his tormentors who have aimed the Supermen Theory against him and other superheroes. His temper and his powers get out of control and this leads to many Muscovites being turned into glass. Firestorm flees the scene. Later, Superman gives Firestorm a pep talk after which Firestorm succeeds in changing one of the glass people back to normal. When Firestorm and Superman arrive in Moscow seeking to restore the many other glass people, Russian superheroes and Russian military forces under the command of Vladimir Putin respond with force rather than give Firestorm a chance. This escalates rapidly into Superman losing his status as the world's one, truly universally respected superhero. Immediately thereafter, an explosive blue flash leads to Superman (and Firestorm) disappearing and damage done to many of those in and near Moscow, including a rapidly-approaching Batman.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As others have already noted, this structurally resembles Veidt's surreptitious plans in <i>Watchmen</i>: Firestorm's angry outburst, followed by the use of his powers, resembles Dr. Manhattan's angry outburst when a talk show guest accuses him of having caused many people's cancer. Second, a large explosion in the middle of a city resembles Veidt's master plan creating mass casualties in New York. We may further note that Firestorm is one of the DCU equivalents of Dr. Manhattan (Captain Atom may fit <i>the</i> bill better, but Firestorm is the one who's on-panel here). However, the similarity with Watchmen only goes so far: Superman seems to be the main target of all of this, and Firestorm seems to be more of a weapon used to place Superman in this situation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This leaves us in search of an understanding of why and how Veidt is making all of this happen. We should moreover be wary of false assumptions, because there are some inferences made at many points in the discussion, and some anomalies that are surely setting up some major reveals.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Perhaps the biggest clue to all of this is the alternate cover that shows Veidt's hands manipulating marionette versions of Superman and Dr. Manhattan on Mars. It seems like a good bet that the blue flash at the end of the Moscow crisis consists of Dr. Manhattan's powers teleporting Superman and himself to the surface of Mars, a getaway that Dr. Manhattan also chose in Watchmen. Veidt tried, unsuccessfully, to get Dr. Manhattan to return to the Watchmen universe, and that is still his goal. His plan may be as "simple" as believing that a face to face meeting between Superman and Dr. Manhattan will produce a conversation in which Superman, as the paragon of hope, talks Dr. Manhattan into doing the right thing, which will be what Veidt wants, to save everyone and everybody. We may also predict that this won't work: Saturn Girl already disapproved of Veidt's plan, Dr. Manhattan's vision of the future shows him and Superman in battle, and both the art and the dialogue cast Veidt as the same sort of would-be-hero-but-villain role that Alexander Luthor played in Johns' <i>Infinite Crisis</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Even if this successfully describes the aim of Veidt's plan, it is unclear how he goes about it. He seems to have engineered the following events that seem to be the product of others' choices, or by chance:</div>
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• Ronnie Raymond decides to go to Moscow as Firestorm</div>
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• Many citizens are turned to glass – apparently by Firestorm</div>
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• One glass citizen is turned back</div>
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• Dr. Manhattan's powers send Superman away, probably to Mars<o:p></o:p></div>
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Some of this seems to require superpowers, and some does not. Veidt is hyper-intelligent and skilled at manipulating others into doing his bidding while they think they are utilizing their own free will. Veidt could probably trick Ronnie into going to Moscow with something as simple as a forged text message or handwritten note. Turning people to glass, however, is not part of Veidt's skill set, so he apparently accomplishes this through one of the following:<o:p></o:p></div>
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• Bubastis has some version of Dr. Manhattan's powers and is capable of using them as Veidt desires.</div>
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• Veidt uses some DCU power such as Alan Scott's lantern or a kidnapped superbeing such as Zatanna, the Martian Manhunter, or Psycho Pirate to make the glass transformations occur or Firestorm to cause the transformation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Finally, the teleportation to Mars may be performed by Veidt or by Dr. Manhattan himself, as a response to events in Moscow.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I will note a (literally and figuratively) glaring detail on page one: The lighting in the Oval Office scene switches from bright (white) to dark (blue), which may symbolically indicate that Veidt is creating a darker reality, or may mean that Bubastis is glowing blue as we've seen before. This is also echoed symbolically in the next scene when Perry White refers to Clark Kent's "blue suit" and Kent says that it's navy (a darker blue). Of course, Kent's more famous blue suit is that of Superman.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Given that list of options, it is perhaps not so important as to how Veidt manipulates events: There are plausible means at his disposal for doing so, and his choice seems like a mere detail. That gives us a broad explanation for much of the Moscow scenes. But, we have a puzzle piece unmatched and a hole where a puzzle piece should go: Where is Dr. Manhattan, and why is Martin Stein referenced so much in this issue (but unseen and unheard)? In the broader story, we have a major puzzle piece yet to fit and a hole regarding the Supermen Theory and the unobserved plan of Dr. Manhattan. It is likely time for all of these to fit together. I can't cite everyone who has previously posited that Martin Stein is the DCU identity of Dr. Manhattan, but the evidence stacks up pretty deeply now.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Martin Stein and Jon Osterman have similar enough careers. Both were nuclear physicists and both were given nuclear transmutation powers because of a nuclear accident. Luthor said that the head of the Supermen Theory conspiracy was a metahuman and a former JLA member, and Stein qualifies as both. Dr. Manhattan was likely present for the events in Moscow, and Stein – as the subordinate personality inside of Firestorm – was known to be present. The Supermen Theory produced many new metahumans and we know that Dr. Manhattan at some point manipulated the number of superheroes in continuity by allowing Alan Scott to die. And, there has to be a good reason why the Supermen Theory subplot is part of <i>Doomsday Clock</i>, which has not yet been completely explicit.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And, there's one more subtle detail way, way down in the weeds. In the end materials for <i>DC</i> #6, the file for the supervillain Typhoon says that his metagene was deliberately triggered by exposure to radiation, and that he was named "Typhoon" by the Director of the U.S. Government's secret Department of Metahuman Affairs. Typhoon first appeared in a Firestorm story as a backup feature in <i>Flash</i> #294 (1981), a story I happened to buy off the newsstand. Johns uses the introductory issue as a code name for three metahumans, including Typhoon, Moonbow, and Puppet Master, with Typhoon as FL294-1981. With just a few pages per issue, the Firestorm story played out over multiple issues, and the name Typhoon was first thought and then said in <i>Flash </i>#296 by Firestorm, who is both Ronnie Raymond and Martin Stein. Though technically this indicated the will of Ronnie, that seems to be a knowing clue that Martin Stein is the head of the Supermen Theory conspiracy. Furthermore, the director's name is blacked out in the end materials of <i>DC</i> #6, and it appears to start with a vertical stroke (as 'M' does) and be of about the right length (this depends upon the font, which may or may not be Arial Narrow) to be Martin Stein.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Let's examine Martin Stein's wishes as relayed by Ronnie in the issue:<o:p></o:p></div>
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• Didn't want to come to Moscow</div>
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• Get back in the sky</div>
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• Give up trying to restore the glass boy</div>
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• Don't trust Superman</div>
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• Can't restore the glass people</div>
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• Wants Superman to leave</div>
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• Says thanks to Superman</div>
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• Tells Ronnie to leave Moscow<o:p></o:p></div>
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Stein is constantly striving to prevent or end the situation in Moscow by having Firestorm and/or Superman quit and/or leave. Seven of his eight comments are to that effect, while the remaining one thanks Superman. The likely explanation for this is that, as Stein, Dr. Manhattan is forced to go where Ronnie wishes. Knowing what will occur, Manhattan/Stein would naturally be upset about the deaths of bystanders and, perhaps more important to him, the tarnishing of Superman's reputation. It is essential to this that Veidt's plan arose in response to a small number of comments in which Dr. Manhattan identified the hope in Superman and Colman Carver as something to which he responded and apparently seeks.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The question is, is that all Veidt's plan? Veidt knows, as of <i>DC</i> #7, that Dr. Manhattan seeks hope, and that Superman is the ultimate representative of hope. By ruining Superman's reputation, Veidt ruins Dr. Manhattan's quest for hope, and thereby eliminates Dr. Manhattan's stated objective for refusing to return to the Watchmen Universe. Now Dr. Manhattan is motivated both to fix the DCU and also the Watchmen Universe. But does Veidt actually know that Dr. Manhattan was present inside Firestorm, or is that by happenstance? It depends what he means when he looks through the files in the White House and says "Yes. Yes, this one will do nicely." If he's selecting Firestorm as an arbitrary weapon to frame Superman, then maybe his plan didn't depend upon Dr. Manhattan to be present for the tragic events. If he knew that Firestorm included Dr. Manhattan, then "should do nicely" may mean that he was selecting some other DCU individual to assist him in the control over events.</div>
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Dr. Manhattan's course of action, then, seems to be one in which he has continually tinkered with the timeline in search of some outcome he finds desirable, and then using his powers to reboot the timeline, with changes, when the last version did not work out. This is, also, like the role that Alexander Luthor played in <i>Infinite Crisis</i>. The sequence of timelines he has experienced or witnessed may include:</div>
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• The Justice Society as originally seen in <i>All Star</i> #3</div>
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• The Justice Society with Dr. Manhattan as a member (seen on a cover for <i>DC</i> #9)</div>
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• The DCU without a Justice Society (described on the first page of <i>DC</i> #7)</div>
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And causes of his disenchantment, making him give up hope may include:</div>
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• The JSA surrendering before HUAC</div>
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• Colman Carver's murder after he stands up to HUAC</div>
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• Superman losing his status as a universally beloved hero (at the end of <i>DC</i> #8)</div>
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<b>The Justice Society</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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A brief, but weighty, event early in <i>DC</i> #8 shows Lois Lane receiving a package that Reggie/Rorschach sent last issue. This contains a keychain drive with newsreel footage of the Justice Society in action, dated 1941 like the corresponding story in <i>All Star Comics</i> #4, the first in which the JSA went into action together as a team. The underlying fact is not new to us – there is a timeline, since banished into oblivion by Dr. Manhattan and/or Johnny Thunder's Lightning Bolt, in which the JSA existed in the Forties. But we have no explanation how Reggie obtained that imagery. We know that Johnny Thunder told him about the JSA, but where did the pictures come from? Something cosmic is working on Reggie's side. Maybe Alan Scott's lantern. Maybe Dr. Manhattan. Maybe the Thunderbolt or some other JSA-era force with cosmic powers has returned. A clue may be in the fact that someone rummaged through Lois' desk before the mail arrived. It seems like someone who knows a lot about what's going on is working at cross purposes with Reggie. Veidt? Someone else?</div>
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<b>Superman v Batman (and Black Adam): Where's the Hope?</b></div>
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One of the episode's surprises is the flight of Batman (almost certainly towards Moscow) as he monitors the situation and calls out to Superman. He has learned some things during his painful brush with the Watchmen Universe characters, and he seems to have made some important inferences, getting ahead of the readers. As he shouts out desperate orders contradicting Superman's intentions, orders that Superman does not heed, the final tragedy and explosion seems to indicate that Batman is informed and wise while Superman is uninformed and foolish. The dynamic also looks bad for Superman when Black Adam tells him that the Supermen Theory is correct (which documents in <i>DC</i> #7 already showed us).</div>
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This is news because the first seven issues of <i>Doomsday Clock</i> were unrelenting in showing a Batman who was unprepared for the challenges that faced him, from being outplayed by Rorschach and Veidt, subdued by a crowd, and shocked by the Joker. The series had begun to look like a polemic against Batman while Superman was elevated to the embodiment of hope. Here in the final pages of <i>DC</i> #8, the dynamic reverses, with Batman's perspective seeming to prove correct as Superman, by taking sides, leads to catastrophe.</div>
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But was Batman correct? He certainly seems to have tactical knowledge of the situation, including the fact that Superman's words would anger Putin and the fact that the pending explosion was not due to Firestorm (but rather, it seems, due to Dr. Manhattan, although it could be more complex than it seems). But perhaps Superman was on the right moral track, saying, correctly, that Firestorm was not to blame. Batman says that Ronnie is a reckless kid who has too much power, but perhaps both Ronnie's rashness and the tragic events in Moscow were due to Veidt's manipulations, not Ronnie's decisions or actions.</div>
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As action escalates, this is still a confrontation primarily of beliefs and ideals. There is likely to be little pause in the final issues of the series now that Superman and Dr. Manhattan have, apparently, met. It'll be fun to watch the action, but Johns' big message is probably going to come across in the speech balloons, not the art.</div>
Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2404509015791000032.post-67057478109225652582018-11-28T20:48:00.001-08:002018-11-28T20:48:41.671-08:00Heroes in Crisis #1-3: Signs and Contradictions<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
All I have to add are some observations from lining up, side-by-side, events where the three issues have given us at least two accounts. There are numerous inconsistencies. (That's not to say that they are all contradictory: There are various ways to explain these.) The location of Roy and Wally has been mentioned, but there are also these:<o:p></o:p></div>
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1) The trio of greeter androids inside the house is an older couple (who resemble the Kents) and a younger woman. In <i>HIC</i> #1, the younger woman is black. In <i>HIC</i> #3, she is white with red hair in a ponytail.<o:p></o:p></div>
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2) The cluster of dead heroes outside the house is considerably different in <i>HIC</i> #1 and <i>HIC</i> #3. Lagoon Boy and Hotspot are feet-together in #1 but heads-together in #3. Those around them include Commander Steel in #1 and Red Devil in #3. Basically none of the details match.<o:p></o:p></div>
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3) Wally's costume leg is ripped in #1. In #3, he's killed with a single blow to the head. There'd be no reason for his costume leg to become ripped.<o:p></o:p></div>
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4) Obviously, Booster and Harley contradict one another, each saying that the other did it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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5) Booster's memory and recordings are inconsistent. At the time he apparently sees Harley kill Wally, he says that it's his first day there. The session recordings are not the same, and in one, he says that it's his first day. If all of these scenes are real and on the level, then he must have made two recordings introducing himself on the same day. (There are many other explanations.) Harley says that she didn't know he was there and his explanation is that it's his first day.<o:p></o:p></div>
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6) Booster and Harley have scratches/cuts, and costume tears in #1, but none when they meet in #3. Perhaps we missed a fight between them, but it would seem odd for any of Booster's weapons or tactics to give Harley scratches.<o:p></o:p></div>
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7) The shadows fall in almost opposite directions when Booster arrives at the house in #3 and when Superman arrives in #1. This is probably just an error, but it could indicate sunrise vs. sunset.<o:p></o:p></div>
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8) Ivy's testimony in #3 involves a direct and immediate contradiction/correction/refinement of how long she's been there when she says "A week. Nine days." We don't know if that recording and the one seen in #2 are from the same session or not. It seems that the one in #2, coinciding with Harley's arrival, must likely be shortly before the murders. This makes it odd that she is still explaining her justification for being there, nine or more days after her arrival. There's no direct contradiction here, but it calls into question the soundness of Ivy's thoughts.<o:p></o:p></div>
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9) Booster's costume is intact after Skeets wakes him up, despite the tears and injuries earlier. Perhaps Skeets' technology includes costume repair.<o:p></o:p></div>
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10) Booster's memory of the session where he's talking to a virtual copy of himself indicates that the attack began when he was not present, another contradiction of Harley's assertion that Booster committed the murders.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Obviously, this is a lot of contradiction, and it's got to be resolved. A lot could be resolved in one tidy package if we simply find out that Booster is delusional. More could be resolved if we find out that someone rearranged the crime scene.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I think we're a long way away from answers here. Neither Booster nor Harley is the killer in the simplest sense: The solicits for #5 and #6 indicate that someone or something corrupted the Sanctuary AI and the Sanctuary AI, by giving the heroes counterproductive "therapy" made their problems worse rather than better, until one or more of them snapped. The villain stands a good chance of being someone we haven't even seen on-panel yet. A bug in the software owing to Batman's paranoia (see the kryptonite in the belt) would be a plausible explanation except that's just what the Brother Eye plot was.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I'm glad we've got six issues to go. There's a long way to go for the mystery, and we haven't gotten very deep into the psychology yet.<o:p></o:p></div>
Rikdadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14475851964933197612noreply@blogger.com3