ANTI-LIFE WILL MAKE YOU RIGHT!

First, read this:  This is the Sunday school pageant I’d love to see: Psalm 82
Now what follows below, which was hastily dashed off by me in the comments section of the post(and has had some cursory editing done before being reposted here), will make slightly more sense.

“Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

Jehovah paused to allow those assembled to contemplate his words before moving forward on the path to the big finish; he was nothing if not a master showman, and he knew that if he was going to get the Council on board he would have to provide them with a show unlike any other they'd encountered.
Looking about the room, he was greeted by a series of impassive - yet solemn - faces...or the things that passed for faces with some of the less anthropomorphic among them, at any rate, and once he was certain that he had wrung out the last drop of drama that he could from the dramatic pause he cleared his throat and prepared to move on to his next point.
As he began to speak, he heard the sound of laughter, or at least he assumed it to be laughter. It was an empty, cold, and dark sound.
It reminded Jehovah of the silence that filled his ears in an earlier time, in the time before he first uttered the words, "Let there be light."
"It seems," Jehovah said, "that one among you has something to say." He searched the crowd looking for the source of the sound, and the assembled gods each in turn did the same, until, at last, a solitary figure stood.
The face was familiar to Jehovah - certainly it was a face that no one, particularly one possessed of omniscience, would be likely to forget - but he couldn't quite place it. The pitfall of knowing everything, after all, is that it's a lot of information to have to sift through, making rapid retrieval a challenge even for the omnipotent.
"I ask your forbearance," the god who stood said, in a voice that seemed to bring a chill to the air. "However, I was not aware that all of us were called here to witness a comedic performance."
Jehovah scowled. The impertinent god in the crowd smiled, though it was a smile that was out of place on the stony countenance, which, Jehovah could tell, normally bore a scowl that would put the one he himself was trying to muster to shame.
"I'm not sure what it is that you find so amusing..." he spared a glance at Jesus, who silently mouthed a name, "...Darkseid, is it?"
"Indeed it is. What I find amusing is your self-righteous appeal to 'justice' and 'deliverance,’ when it is clear that no one in this room, including yourself, can provide these things."
Unbidden, Darkseid stepped forward and up to the stage. He turned to view all of those present, extending his muscular arms in a sweeping arc. "None here is capable of rescuing the weak and delivering them from the hand of the wicked." He smiled. "None, that is, save...Darkseid!"
It was Jehovah's turn to laugh. "You? Delivering them from the hand of the wicked? You ARE the hand of the wicked."
"Not so! For where you have placed a curse upon the living, I seek the means to break the curse, to end injustice, to end all suffering. You have cursed the living to freedom! You have cursed them to life! But I, Darkseid, seek the end of freedom! I seek the power of Anti-Life! And when at last I hold the power in my hand, there will be no more wickedness, no want, no suffering, no freedom, no will. All will be Darkseid!"
The crowd began to murmur in an infinite number of voices; the cacophony carried the sounds of anger, amusement, confusion, fear, and, much to Jehovah's annoyance, some amount of agreement.
"You see? This sea of voices, the susurration of discord! This is what I shall remove from the universe! There will be only one voice! MY voice!"
"ENOUGH!"
The room fell silent at the sound of Jehovah's shout. He snapped his fingers and pointed to a pale white figure wearing a green cloak. "Corrigan! Get him out of here!"
The impassive figure moved toward Darkseid, who raised his gloved hand. "I'll find my own way out."
With that, a tremendous BOOM! shattered the silence and a great glowing hole, crackling with energy, appeared in the air behind Darkseid.
The great, stony figure turned towards the opening, but before stepping into it he turned back to face the assembled gods.
"Before I leave, I say, ‘You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince.’" He smiled. "And when you do, there will remain only...Darkseid!"
He stepped into the strange tube, which closed with another bone-rattling BOOM!
Jehovah stood in silence amongst the gods, who had once again resumed their murmuring. As he stood impassive in the din, he felt as cold and alone as he had in the time before creation.
"The worst part," he said, to no one in particular, "is that he stole my line about the gods dying like mortals."
Nearby, Orion, the Dog of War, approached Jesus.
"I apologize for my father. If it's any consolation, it's prophesied that one day he may die by my hand." He frowned. "Or I may die by his. The prophecy isn't as clear as I'd like. In any case, I'm sure to deliver a serious beatdown."
"Well," Jesus said, "that's nice, I suppose, but...I'm the Prince of Peace, so thoughts of violence don't really bring me comfort."
Orion seemed taken aback. "Oh. Well...huh."
"One day," Jesus continued, "I will be born as a mortal man on the Earth, and I will be sacrificed to my father to pay for the sins of the world."
There was the sound of metal scraping on metal as Orion scratched his helmeted head. "Yikes. As bad as my father is, he just sent me to be raised on New Genesis. Where will you be staying while you're there?"
"In the land of Israel."
"That shithole? You should come to Supertown instead. The place is amazing." He paused. "Wait...aren't you, like, also your dad? Some sort of trinity thing?"
Jesus nodded. "It's...complicated."
Elsewhere, Rama Kushna approached the green-cloaked figure who had been dispatched by Jehovah to remove Darkseid. "Excuse me, Corrigan, is it?"
The pale figure nodded. "At times. I've also been known as Jordan, and Allen. It's...complicated. I'm not even certain where - or when - I am. To be Corrigan, I'd have to be from...when are we?"
Rama Kushna shrugged. An interesting sight, considering how many arms she had. "This is a timeless place. But back to you...you're an angel, aren't you?"
"In this form, I am an angel merged with the soul of a departed mortal."
"You mean you're...a ghost?"
"Yes. It is how the Almighty bound me to the Earth to serve as the instrument of his vengeance."
Rama Kushna seemed to consider this, stroking her chin with several of her hands. "A ghost. Why didn't I think of that?"

Who Watches The All-Star Squadron?

A while back I picked up Showcase Presents:  All-Star Squadron Vol. 1, and, having finally slogged my way through Showcase Presents:  Young Love Vol. 1,* I recently got started on reading it.
For those of you (Scott) who have actually read my recent posts about the multiverse, All-Star Squadron was a comic that hinged on the concept of the multiverse, being set on DC’s Earth 2.
ASS – when the team was formed and named, someone actually hinted at the unfortunate initials – was an attempt at retroactively flushing out some of the continuity of the Golden Age.  Retroactive continuity – or retcon – was something of a specialty for writer Roy Thomas, who had, prior to moving to DC, established a lot of retcons over at Marvel, incorporating stories from the Atlas and Timely eras – the two companies that formed Marvel Comics – into the Marvel Age, and creating new stories set in now-shared past.
Thomas also had a strong interest in World War II – one of his retcons at Marvel was the creation of the team known as The Invaders, a WWII-era super-team of which Captain America was a member –and so he combined his two interests in the form of ASS.
ASS told the story of the WWII-era heroes of Earth 2, including the big names, such as Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, but also lesser-known characters such as The Sandman, The Tarantula, Liberty Belle, and Johnny Quick.
The premise of ASS was that at the onset of WWII, President Roosevelt reached out to the members of the Justice Society of America asking them to expand their ranks and seek out additional “Mystery Men,” as super heroes were known at the time, to form a sort of super-militia to help protect America from foreign and domestic threats of both mundane and super varieties.
This newly-formed All-Star Squadron soon grew to include virtually every costumed hero in the States, and it took the place of the JSA, which had itself disbanded for the duration of the war, as several members of the team, not content to simply keep America’s shores safe, opted to volunteer for military service in their non-costumed identities.
In any case, when it was still being published, I read ASS on a semi-regular basis – the lack of a proper comic shop made reading anything on truly regular basis a challenge for me as a kid – but there were a lot of issue that I missed, and most of the issues I had have been lost to the ages, which is why I picked up this collected volume.
I’ve already read most of the stories contained in this initial volume, though it’s been many years, and my memory is fuzzy.  The fuzziness of my memory explains why an element of one of the storylines is just now, as I re-read it decades later, jumping out at me and making me say, “Huh.”
And here we have to jump around a bit, and this next bit may constitute a spoiler for a world-famous, critically-acclaimed comic book from 26 years ago, so consider yourself warned.
One of the key plot points of Watchmen – the comic; the movie changed this plotline considerably – centers around a scheme to trick the world into stepping back from the brink of war.  The trick is to make the nations of the world believe that there is a larger threat to the entire world, one that requires the cooperation of all nations, and the setting aside of ideological differences to defend against.
This involves – and elements of this are threaded throughout each issue of the comic – a group of scientists and artists working in secrecy to construct an utterly convincing artificial alien being.  Those working on it had, over the course of years, simply vanished without a trace, walking away from their jobs, their friends, and their families without saying a word.
Those involved believe they’re working for an overly paranoid film company that is preparing to make a science fiction movie of truly epic proportions, but the whole thing is all part of the secret plot of former super hero Adrian Veidt, also known as Ozymandias, who, as the World’s Smartest Man, has determined that the escalation of the Cold War is inevitable, and that actions must be taken to not only save the world by tricking everyone into getting along.
Those involved in the creation of the monster have no idea that their efforts will be used to kill half the population of New York City and convince the world that this monster that killed half of New York may have been the first of many, and that to prepare for that contingency, we all have to work together to keep our world safe from horrible monsters from another dimension.
Here’s where I re-read an issue of ASS and say, “Huh.”
As WWII is truly underway, given the entry of the US into combat, a strange craft begins appearing in the sky all around the world, wreaking havoc in its wake, emitting strange rays that cause airplane and tank engines to fail.  The craft seems to be unconcerned about taking sides, as its rays are directed at Axis and Allies alike.
Finally, the craft appears over the White House, where Winston Churchill is visiting FDR, and a strange, alien being emerges from it, a strange being who is able to swat aside the combined attack of the All-Star Squadron with a mere furrow of his brow.
This being, Akhet, claims to represent an alliance of worlds who have decided to claim Earth as its own, and have therefore decreed that this little global conflict has to end so that the “Binary Brotherhood” can peacefully start running the place.



My name is Akhet, Smasher of Stars, look on my works, ye All-Stars, and despair

As it turns out, Akhet is merely an android built, along with his strange, eye-shaped craft, by a secret conclave of scientists and artists, most of whom have been quietly dropping off the face of Earth 2 for nearly a decade.
It turns out that their leader had, in the 1920s, devised a method of predicting the future, and had seen the terrible war that was coming.  To prevent it, he gathered like-minded people to create a hoax that would save the entire world by uniting it against a common foe.
Sound familiar?
It’s worth noting that while Watchmen was released in 1986, this issue of ASS was released in 1982.
I’m not suggesting that Moore lifted the idea from ASS – I think it more likely that he pulled it out of his own ass, so to speak – as there are a number of differences between the two similar schemes.  In fact, there was an episode of The Outer Limits with a similar idea, which Moore didn’t learn about until after he’d written Watchmen.  Once he did become aware of that fact, he managed to add a winking acknowledgement to the episode in the final issue, which served as a nice coda.
Beyond that, Watchmen has a lot more going for it than the mere events that transpire in the story, so even if it were a total rip-off of ASS, it’s still superior to it – and pretty much every other comic ever – in every way conceivable.  That’s not an insult to ASS, which, my joking use of its initials aside, was a fine, if unremarkable, comic in and of itself.
Still, the coincidence did elicit the aforementioned “Huh” from me, especially when it occurred to me that ASS and Watchmen had one other thing in common besides this plot point:  their editor.
Len Wein was the editor of both ASS and Watchmen.
So…huh.

*Distressingly, one issue collected in the volume contained a bottom-of-the-page house ad for another romance comic being published by DC at the time.  I have this nagging fear that DC will collect that in Showcase Presents form as well, and I’ll have no choice but to buy it.

Crisis On Earth Prime Part 2: Crises On Earth Prime?

1985.
The year seems to hold some sort of special significance, at least in the minds of Bowling For Soup, comic book writer Mark Millar, and in the mind of a certain blogger.
I became a teenager in 1985, and, to a very real extent, 1985 was when my identity and sense of self – for good or ill – really started to firm up, and I became something that could recognizably be called Jon As We Know Him.
I can’t really say why 1985 was significant to those others, but I know that, for me, for a lot of reasons, most of which I won’t get into, even at the time, 1985 seemed important.
For one thing, my sister Kim graduated from high school and moved out, and with my brother Stuart heading off to Northern to get his auto body certificate, that meant that for the first time in 13 years, I was the only one of my siblings still living at home.
With no disrespect intended towards my brothers and sisters, I have to say that life at home became a lot quieter and more peaceful.  I mean, how could it not?
My school life improved, thanks to the presence of a new Principal who served as something of a mentor, and proved to be someone I could actually talk to about the things I was interested in (science fiction, art), and while my interpersonal relationships with my fellow students weren’t exactly ideal, they were, at least, no longer calling me names and willing to just leave me alone most of the time.
Beyond any of that, however, for me, there were two things that made 1985 so significant:  Who’s Who and Crisis on Infinite Earths.Contrary to what the people in charge at DC thought, I really enjoyed the fact that DC had a 50-year history of stories and continuity.  Rather than finding the challenge of sifting through 5 decades’ worth of information a daunting, forbidding task, I relished the challenge of learning as much as I could.  In that regard, both comics – Who’s Who in particular – proved invaluable.
I loved being able to look through an issue of Crisis and see some obscure character lurking in the background and know who he or she was, thanks to his or her entry in Who’s Who.
Of course, as things wore on, and Crisis began having a major impact on the DCU – the deaths of Supergirl and Barry Allen chief among them – I began to develop a sense of just how significant this story was going to prove to be for the fictional universe I loved so well.
After all, at the time, I had no idea about the idea that Wolfman and Perez had pitched, so I went into it thinking that, sure, some exciting stuff would happen, but it wouldn’t mean anything.  When it was all over, a couple minor characters would be gone, some new characters would be introduced, their comics would get cancelled eventually, and then everything would go back to being the way it was.
By the time I’d gotten through the back-to-back deaths of those major characters, however, I lost a lot of that certainty.  Worlds will live, worlds will die, and nothing will ever be the same…
Being an “event” comic, Crisis, in addition to having its own monthly issues, crossed over with every title that DC published.  To a greater and lesser extent with each and every issue that came out from the spring through the fall of 1985, every comic featured stories that intersected with the events depicted in the main Crisis storyline.
It was, if you read DC Comics, unavoidable.
One such crossover occurred in the Superman titles, where we found the Man of Steel transported to another world, a world that was familiar not only to the Last Son of Krypton, but to the readers as well:  Earth Prime.
The Crisis, it seemed, did not discriminate, and when they said all Earths were in danger, they meant it.  But if the combined might of heroes and villains alike couldn’t save those other worlds, what chance did our Earth, lacking as it did anyone with even a hint of super powers – the best we’ve got is a guy who can possibly (though definitely not) bend spoons with his mind – have against this multiversal wave of destruction?
As it turned out, we weren’t quite so lacking as we’d always assumed, as there was a teenager living in a small town on Earth Prime who had, cruelly, been given an all-too familiar name:  Clark Kent.
Clark had been a foundling, and though they knew it was cruel, his adoptive parents, the Kents, decided to give him that fateful name. While he had spent his life living like any normal kid on Earth Prime, the passing of Halley’s Comet somehow activated his latent Kryptonian abilities – conveniently, on a night on which young Clark, embracing the joke that was his name, was attending a costume party dressed as his super hero namesake – and Earth Prime got its first super hero:  Superboy!

Look!  Up in the sky!  It's...actually, it really is just a bird.  Darn.

Unfortunately, even the combined efforts of Man and Boy were not super enough to save us, and Earth Prime – where we keep all of our stuff – was consumed by the unstoppable and insatiable wall of antimatter.  At the end of that story, Superboy disappeared into a vortex, only to reappear sometime later in the pages of Crisis, lending his power to its ultimate resolution.
It’s important to mention that while the first issue of Crisis was released at the start of 1985, the events depicted therein were actually said to be taking place in July of that year.
So Earth Prime – along with all of us – was fated to be destroyed.
This is where the anecdote that inspired these lengthy posts finally comes in.
One of the harbingers of every Earth’s ultimate destruction in Crisis is strange weather, exemplified by an oddly copper-colored sky.  Limitations of the color reproduction process of the time meant that on the printed page the skies simply appeared to be red, but the word “copper” was frequently used to describe the color.
So.
It’s 1985.  While I’ve just recently made the transition from child to teen, and the basic components of what we would later know as Jon were all properly assembled, I was prone to flights of fancy that frequently turned into a kind of existential dread as I followed them through to their terrifying conclusion….well…I guess I still do that.
In any case, it’s 1985 and I’ve seen how the stakes have been rising in Crisis, and while I know that we aren’t really Earth Prime, and there is no multiverse – at least, no multiverse as described in the comics; we won’t get into M-theory here – there is that nagging question of “What if it’s true?”
July 4th, 1985.  For some reason, even though it’s unlike me to do so, I wake up early in the morning, not long after sunrise.  I’m not sure why, exactly, but I feel like something is amiss, something beyond the fact that it’s way too damned early to be getting up on a summer day.  Something just doesn’t seem right.  It’s the light coming in through the windows.  It’s…off, somehow.
Uneasily, I get out of bed, approach the window, and look outside and up at the sky.
It’s a color that I’d never seen before, one that can only be described as copper.
Copper skies.
It’s July, 1985, I live on Earth Prime, and the sky is copper.
”Fuck.”
It’s a momentary thought – honestly, I don’t believe that we’re really about to be destroyed by a wave of antimatter – but, all things considered, how could I not have that thought?
Still, knowing that there’s nothing that I can do but await the end, and, given that it’s way too damned early to be up on a summer day, I shrug my shoulders and climb back into bed.
I wake up some hours later to a bright, sunny day, though I’m vaguely aware that we’d had some severe storms while I slept.
Even so, it seems that we weren’t destroyed by a wave of antimatter, and while I’m pleased that is the case, I can’t help but be a little disappointed to have it confirmed that the answer to “What if it’s true?” is that there’s no point in wondering, because it very clearly isn’t.
Except…
Twenty years later, Infinite Crisis comes along.  Written by Geoff Johns, who is roughly my age, and would have been reading the same comics I was reading, IC follows the story of some of the refugees of CoIE.
Events in CoIE unfolded in such a way that history was retroactively changed at the beginning of time, preventing the creation of the multiverse, and leading to one unified universe that was, at its core, the universe of Earth 1, with certain elements of the other Earths added into its history.  Not only was Earth Prime destroyed, it was now the case that it never existed in the first place.
So not only did we not have a place to keep all of our stuff, we no longer had any stuff and we never had.  In fact, we didn’t even have a we.
In this new, unified history, there were several anomalous beings, people from the previous history who had managed to stick around in the new one, such as Kal-L of Earth 2, and young Clark Kent from Earth Prime.  They had no home and no history, and as the rewritten history of the new universe wove itself into the memories of those who had survived the Crisis, they would eventually be completely forgotten, and would remember worlds that never existed.
So, in the end, they went off to greener pastures, another reality completely disconnected from the reality that no longer had a place for them, and they would live in this paradise dimension forever.
Or until Geoff Johns came along.
I won’t get into the details of IC here (mercifully), but the end result was that history was changed once more, and while it was no longer infinite, the multiverse was reborn in a massive undelete that restored much of its previous history.
Included in that undelete command?  Earth Prime.
So to go back to that question from July 4, 1985, “What if it’s true?
What if, while I slept that morning, we all really were consumed by a wall of antimatter, retroactively erased from existence, and then, in a manner that was seamless from our perspective, retroactively added back into existence?  What if there really had been Crises on Earth Prime?

Crisis On Earth Prime Part 1: The Birth, Death, Rebirth, And Re-Rebirth Of The Multiverse

By the time it reached the ripe old age of 50, the fictional shared universe of DC Comics had become a cluttered, confusing place that was, in the minds of those in charge, inaccessible to new readers.
It had started out simply enough with a handful of colorful characters such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern, most of whom had their own self-contained adventures, but who occasionally teamed up, either in pairs, the way Superman and Batman did in World’s Finest, or en masse, as in the Justice Society of America stories that appeared in All-Star Comics.
As the novelty of super heroes wore off and other types of stories – horror, crime, western. – gained in popularity, the DC Universe was simplified even further, as it was only The Trinity (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) that managed to remain popular enough to continue their monthly adventures, while the other characters faded into obscurity.
In the minds of the general public, at least.
As DC eventually came to learn, many of the readers they had assumed had long-since given up their funny book habit in favor of more adult pursuits, had, in fact, continued their regular pilgrimages to the newsstands and drug stores to pick up the latest four-color adventures.
These older fans remembered the panoply of characters who had once dominated the sales charts, and there was a demand for their return.
While the Golden Age of Comics had ended, there were those who knew that every ending is actually a beginning, and with the re-introduction of The Flash in the pages of Showcase #4, the Silver Age began.
These new stories featuring a character called Flash were not about lab technician Jay Garrick, who wore a blue, red, and yellow costume, and an improbable helmet in the style of Mercury, the swift messenger of the gods, but rather “Police Scientist” Barry Allen, who wore a completely different costume, and actually chose the name Flash because as a boy he had thrilled to the comic book adventures of Jay Garrick.
In Barry’s world, the super heroes of the Golden Age were just as fictional as they were – and as Barry himself was – in our own.

Birth of the multiverse.

The success of this new Flash led to updated versions of other Golden Age characters.  The new Green Lantern was test pilot Hal Jordan rather than railroad engineer Alan Scott.  The new Hawkman was Katar Hol, an alien police officer, rather than archaeologist – and reincarnated Egyptian prince – Carter Hall.
Some years later, Barry found himself on another world, one that was very much like his own, with the notable exception that Jay Garrick, his childhood hero, was a real person, and it was a world in which all the adventures Barry had read about actually took place.
And with that, the DC Multiverse was born.
The Silver Age heroes, it seemed, lived on a world known as Earth 1, while the heroes of the Golden Age lived on Earth 2  (though, chronologically, it would have made more sense to number them the other way around, but Barry was the one who discovered the other Earth, so he got to choose the name).  Both worlds occupied the same space, but existed at different vibrational frequencies.
I have to admit that I’m a bit fuzzy on when it was established that the then-current adventures of The Trinity also took place on Earth 1, but it turns out that’s where they were.
(For the record, it was later established that, unlike the rest of their contemporaries, who were completely different people from their Golden Age counterparts, The Trinity were simply younger duplicates of theirs, sharing the same names, careers, powers, and origins.  There were differences – the Superman of Earth 2’s Kryptonian name was Kal-L, rather than Kal-El, and, as Clark Kent, he worked at the Daily Star, rather than the Daily Planet.  More on that in a bit.)
This, in the minds of DC executives in 1985, is where the DC Universe’s troubles began, as it spawned the notion of the multiverse.  After all, if there were two different Earths, why not three?  Or four?  Or even an infinite number?
These infinite Earths became a springboard for a lot of stories over the next two decades, and served as a convenient explanation for a lot of mistakes and errors in continuity.  “Oh, that story contradicts another story?  Umm….well, it took place on Earth B.  Yeah, that’s the ticket…”
Similarly, this was used to retroactively explain continuity errors that had taken place in the Golden Age.  For some time, for example, Clark Kent worked at the Daily Star, with a boss named George Taylor, and then, thanks to, if I recall correctly, changes to the character made on the Superman radio show, things suddenly changed in the comics, and without explanation, he suddenly worked at the Daily Planet for Perry “Don’t Call Me Chief!” White.
This also gave them the ability to explore ideas that weren’t feasible within the framework of maintaining the status quo on Earth 1, which is where all of the primary stories of the day were set.
In back-up features and crossover stories between Golden and Silver age counterparts, or the annual team-up between Earth 1’s Justice League of America and Earth 2’s Justice Society of America, we got to see glimpses of how things had played out in the time between the characters of the Golden Age disappearing (or in the case of The Trinity, retroactively disappearing) from the shelves.
Superman, for example, had finally married Lois (as seen in the Mr. and Mrs. Superman stories that appeared in Superman Family, for which I feel a certain amount of nostalgia), and Batman had married a reformed Catwoman, had a daughter, become a widower, and been murdered.
Another use for the multiverse was finding a home for many of the acquisitions of the intellectual properties of other publishers that DC engaged in over the years.  Captain Marvel – more commonly known as Shazam to the general public – had been at the center of an extended lawsuit between DC and Fawcett Publications over copyright infringement.
After his debut, Captain Marvel, with his extended Marvel Family, had soon eclipsed the popularity of Superman, which, unsurprisingly, didn’t sit well with DC, who claimed that the Big Red Cheese was a blatant rip-off of their flagship character.  Most experts (and non-experts) agree that the lawsuit lacked merit, and that the decision in DC’s favor was a miscarriage of justice, but the end result was that DC acquired the publishing rights to the character (and eventually took complete ownership).
Rather than bringing the Marvel Family as part of the DC Universe proper and setting their adventures on Earth 1, DC introduced Earth S (“S” for “Shazam”).
(Part of the reason that Cap came to be known as “Shazam” – which was the magic word that transformed him from Billy Batson into Captain Marvel – was another lawsuit launched by Marvel Comics, who successfully blocked DC from ever referring to the character by his actual name on a cover, though they could still use the name inside of comics; Marvel introduced a Captain Marvel of its own, whose name could appear as the title of a comic, and the story of the life and death of Mar-Vell might well make for another blog post sometime.)
Similarly, characters who had formerly belonged to Quality Comics, amongst other companies, inhabited a world called Earth X.
While most of the characters from other Earths weren’t able to sustain their own stories – a revival of All-Star in the 1970s, featuring the modern-day adventures of the Golden Age characters and their children didn’t last long – the annual JLA/JSA stories, which always featured a “Crisis” on one of the assorted Earths in the DC Multiverse were a venerable tradition.
One such story introduced yet another Earth, one designated as Earth Prime.
Back when Barry met Jay, which wasn’t at all like Harry meeting Sally, the explanation for how Barry had grown up reading comic books about the adventures that Jay was actually having was that there were certain people who were sensitive to the vibrational frequencies that separated the two worlds and were unconsciously aware of the events that were transpiring on the other Earth, and they made comic books from what they thought were simply ideas for fictional stories.
And so it was with Earth Prime, an Earth where the writers and artists at DC Comics were able to pick up on the vibrations from all of the Earths and write about them, and the JLA and JSA found themselves in a world without real super heroes of any kind, where each and every one of them existed only as fictional characters on the printed page, and they even had adventures with the editors, artists, and writers at DC Comics who produced the comics about the heroes of these many different worlds.
Earth Prime, in other words, was our Earth.
So, that brings us to 1985, and the 50th anniversary of the company that had been known as National Periodicals, or, more commonly, DC (the DC stood for Detective Comics, though that technically made their name Detective Comics Comics).
50 is a big number, and DC decided that they needed an equally big event to commemorate this milestone, and also needed to find a way to clear out the accumulated clutter and find a way to appeal to a new audience that had little interest in tying together the threads of fifty years of continuity.  Writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Perez – who were the superstar team behind The New Teen Titans, the most popular and best-selling title DC published at that time – pitched an idea called The History of the DC Universe.They envisioned a twelve-issue limited series that would catalog the vast cast of characters who had been published by DC in the past half-century, explaining how all of the stories, and all of the worlds, fit together.  Then, once that was complete, in the final issue, they would blow it all up, and the next month every comic published by DC would reset to #1 and they would start the whole thing all over again.
This was a bold move, one that DC wasn’t quite bold enough to make.  Instead, the beginning of 1985 saw the introduction of two new books.  One was called Who’s Who:  The Definitive Guide to the DC Universe, a sort of comic book encyclopedia – inspired by Marvel’s Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe – which provided the vital statistics such as the height, weight, eye color, powers, origins, significant adventures, and other vital statistics of the assorted characters in the DC stable, featuring original artwork by a, ahem, who’s who of comic book artists.

Who are these people?

The other, hearkening back to the annual JLA/JSA team-ups, was entitled Crisis on Infinite Earths.  CoIE provided the payoff to a sub-plot that had been running throughout all of DC’s titles for some time, featuring a mysterious shadowy figure called the Monitor, and his lovely young assistant Lila, who could be seen observing the events of the stories they appeared in from an orbiting satellite.
The tagline for CoIE was, “Worlds will live, worlds will die, and nothing will ever be the same,” and in the very first issue we definitely saw the dying part, as alternate Earths in the DC Universe were consumed by a wall of anti-matter, with the heroes of Earths 1 – with the exception of the hero who started it all, Barry Allen – having no idea that it was happening until the Monitor finally stepped out of the shadows and summoned those he had been secretly observing for so long – both heroes and villains alike – to fight the destructive rampage of his evil counterpart, the Anti-Monitor.
Throughout its twelve-issue run, countless worlds were destroyed, and individual characters died – sometimes nobly, sometimes ignobly – and virtually every character that DC owned appeared at one point or another, even if only in the midst of a crowd in a single panel.

*Sniff*  I-I've got something in my eye.  It's tears, because I'm crying.

In the end, the multiverse was destroyed, and in its place a new, unified single DC Universe with an entirely new history emerged, one that combined elements of all that had gone before.
Most of the Earth 2 heroes, for example, managed to stick around, with the exception of the Golden Age version of The Trinity, who, in the new history, never existed, and all of their adventures in the 1940s and 1950s had taken place on this new Earth.
It wasn’t quite the fresh start Wolfman and Perez had envisioned, and it took several years of clean-up to establish anything even approaching a coherent continuity, and to figure out which stories had happened and which ones hadn’t.
Indeed, it took some time for the titles that DC was publishing to wrap up their existing storylines and be able to start fresh, and there were a lot of unintended and unanticipated consequences.
The first attempt at cleaning up the mess was 1986’s History of the DC Universe, which, while produced by Wolfman and Perez, was considerably less ambition than their first pitch, and which attempted, to explain the new status quo and serve as a springboard for the launch of new comics and the relaunch of the existing titles.
The second was a major crossover event in 1994 called Zero Hour, which attempted to streamline the new continuity.
Somewhere along the line the DC Universe kinda-sorta stabilized, but 20 years after CoIE, the DCU had managed to accumulate new clutter, and so comic fans were presented with a sequel to CoIE entitled Infinite Crisis.  This reset the DC Universe once again, and reintroduced the multiverse (though this one, rather than being infinite, was limited to 52), but ultimately it led to yet another Crisis in 2009, this one designated as Final.
Final Crisis didn’t have quite the same reality-altering consequences as either of its predecessors, but its status quo didn’t last long, as the time between resets of DC continuity seemed to be getting shorter and shorter,* and in 2011 we were presented with Flashpoint, which told the story of Barry Allen trapped in an alternate reality, and the resolution of which led to DC finally making that bold move Wolfman and Perez had called for so long before:  they blew it all up and started over again completely, launching what has been alternately called the DCnU and “The New 52.**”
Anyway, this not-so brief lesson in the birth, death, and rebirth, and re-rebirth of the DC Multiverse is ultimately leading to a point – or at least an anecdote – but I’m afraid this entry is already long enough, so that will have to wait for another entry, though I’ll bet that on Threshold 2 my Golden Age counterpart managed to get it done in one entry…


*Crisis on Infinite Earths:  1985.  Zero Hour:  1994.  Infinite Crisis:  2005.  Final Crisis:  2009.  Flashpoint:  2011.
**After the last issue of Infinite Crisis, every title published by DC jumped ahead in time one year, in the “One Year Later” event, and new titles featuring new characters were launched.  As a follow-up to IC, DC got a bunch of writers and artists together to put out a year-long weekly series entitled 52, which while containing its own narrative, filled in many of the gaps that occurred during the one year jump.  This seems to have been the source of DC’s obsession with the number 52.

Jon And I Don’t Get Along Part 9,567

(Getting ready for work the other morning, I decided I should bring the power cord and docking station for the tablet with me to work.)
Me:  I should buy another docking station so that I can have one at home and one at work.
Also Me:  Then fucking do it, tough guy.
Me:  Maybe I will.
Also Me:  Maybe you should.
Me:  Maybe you should kiss my ass.
Also Me:  Maybe I will…after I kick it.

****

(E-mail exchange with the boss)
Boss:  Remember that your weekly accomplishments are due by COB today.
Me:  They were due by COB yesterday, and I already provided mine.
Boss:  Shut up.
Me:  You should set up an Outlook Rule that automatically replies to every e-mail from me with a message telling me to shut up, or calling me an idiot, or both.
Boss:  Good idea.
Me:  Of course, I would actually have to set it up for you.
Boss:  True.

****

I’ve got three weeks of the “Captain America Workout” out of the way, with one more to go.
I don’t think I’ll be beating up any Nazis or taking on Ultron anytime soon, but I have made some substantial, noticeable gains in terms of muscle mass.  My shoulders and chest are visibly larger and more defined, and the scale tells me that I’ve gained nine pounds.
Of course, the scale also tells me that I’ve experienced a 4% increase in body fat, as if to say, “Who are you going to believe?  Me, or your lying eyes?”
Given that losing 45 pounds only represented a 6% decrease in body fat (per the same scale), it seems unlikely that I’ve gone up by almost that much by putting on a fifth of that.  I mean, even if it were nine pounds of fat, which, given the way I look and feel (and the way my clothes fit), it’s clear that it isn’t fat, I can’t see how I could possibly have jumped up that much.

****

So it turns out that I was correct when I said that it would not be Superman (or Batman) that DC outed as its most prominent gay character, but I was also incorrect when I speculated that it would be Wonder Woman.
I was closer to the mark when I used Jay Garrick as an example of a prominent (to comic fans) character, as it turns out that newly-outed gay character is Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern.  (Not the one portrayed by Ryan Reynolds in the recent GL movie)
To be fair, while I didn’t mention him, I had actually considered the possibility.
To be even more fair, at the time of my speculation, I wasn’t aware that DC had explicitly stated that 1. It was a male character and 2. It was a character who had not yet made an appearance in any of the New 52 titles.
Had I known those things, my suspicion that it would be Alan Scott would have been worth mentioning.
As it is, I never got back to the subject, as I was distracted by other things, and, really, my speculation as to how it could be Superman (kinda-sorta) after all, turns out to be irrelevant anyway, though ultimately, had DC gone that route, the net effect would have been the same (alternate universe, basically).
You can read more about Alan, and the outing here.  I have to say that, within the context of the New 52, the rationale for choosing Alan makes a fair amount of sense.
I have, as noted, no objection to making Alan (or any character, really) gay, but while I understand that comics are a business, I’m a little annoyed (though not surprised) by the “stunt” aspect of it.
Further, while I think that adding characters who represent the diversity of real life is a good thing, ultimately, this isn’t really a net gain, given that a pre-existing gay character has been lost.
So overall, it’s kind of a push.

Superman Probably Isn’t Gay (But That Would Be Okay)

Boss:  Hey, I saw an article that said that Superman might be gay.
Me:  I’ll bet.
Boss:  It was on Fox News.
Me:  Well, there’s your problem.
So this is the article in question.  For those who don’t want to give Faux News any traffic – and I don’t blame you there – the article mentions comments by DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio who stated that DC has shifted its position on gay characters from one in which no previously-established straight character would be outed as being gay, and any inclusiveness of gay characters would be limited to new characters, and that an as-yet unnamed pre-existing character would be revealed to be gay.
Fox Noise went on to speculate, based on nothing other than that he’s their most famous character, that the character in question could be Superman.
(They also made some random link between this announcement and President Obama’s recent announcement of tepid, unofficial support for same sex marriage, because of course they did.)
Shortly after I read the article a friend posed a question to me on Facebook as to whether I viewed this move as being necessary, stating that a new character could fill the need for a prominent gay character.
I suppose it depends on how you define “necessary,” but my short answer was, “Sure, why not?”
This post will contain my longer answer.
First things first:  I really doubt that Superman is going to be revealed to be gay.
There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that I just don’t see DC being brave enough to try something like that.
However, there was a key phrase that DiDio used in his comments:  re-introducing.  Strictly speaking, with the line-wide reboot of their comics – “The New 52” – last fall, DC technically “re-introduced” most of its characters.  However, there are many existing characters in DC’s stable that have yet to make an appearance in the new DC Universe, and all of the major characters – at least, the ones most recognizable to the general public – have all made an appearance, and have several months worth of new backstory already in place.
I have no doubt that Grant Morrison – who, in a recent Playboy interview  made some comments about the “gayness” of Batman, stating that while the character named Batman has always been presented as being explicitly heterosexual, there is a lot about the character, conceptually, that is “gay” – as the writer of one of the two current series featuring Superman as the main character – Action Comics – would be more than willing to push the envelope and make Superman gay, I just don’t see it happening.
While both Action and Superman are still in the early stages, having only 9 issues on the stands to date, there has been sufficient character development that the sudden revelation that he’s gay just wouldn’t be a very good narrative fit.
Is it impossible?  No, but it strikes me as unlikely.
The same goes for Batman, who managed to hold onto slightly more of his pre-New 52 continuity so that it would be even less of a fit.
Is it impossible?  Well, we’re talking about comics, where people can fly, run faster than the speed of light, and routinely come back from the dead, so nothing is impossible, but it strikes me as unlikely.
And, again, there’s that word, “re-introduce,” and when you consider that DiDio was talking to an audience of actual comic book readers, the word “prominent” takes on a different meaning than it does with the larger population.  For me, the Flash is a prominent character, for example, and while Barry Allen – the modern-day Flash – is already established in the DCnU, as some people call it, the original Flash, Jay Garrick, is currently in the process of being re-introduced.  Is he “prominent” to non-fans?  No, of course not.  But to people who know comics, he definitely counts as prominent.
But to return to the question of being necessary, I say that, despite the unreal and impossible worlds that serve as the setting for super hero comics, the best comics are the ones that resonate because they share at least some similarities to the less fantastical world we all live in, and to succeed, the stories have have to appeal to as wide and diverse an audience as possible, which is an area in which comics routinely fail, and it can’t help but be something that DC (and Marvel, and every other company that struggles with the issue) is keenly aware of as they struggle to stop the loss of existing readers and actually expand to reach new audiences.
So are gay super heroes “necessary?”  Absolutely.
Well, then, you ask, what about just sticking to new characters?
It’s an approach that can be taken, and certainly it’s worked for Archie Comics with their introduction of Kevin Keller, and DC itself has done reasonably well with Batwoman, but introducing new characters is always a crapshoot.  For every Batwoman there are hundreds of characters – either entirely new or reinventions of older, obscure characters – who never gain any significant amount of traction.
And frankly, it’s unfair to relegate the representation of a significant portion of the population – your friends, co-workers, and family members – to characters who are never likely to get much recognition, existing only as tokens, or novelties.
Beyond that, there are plenty of existing characters who have been around for decades, and who have name recognition beyond the ranks of fandom, who have always been written with a subtextual nod towards LGBT orientations, but who could never be brought out of the closet due to societal pressures (and the onus of the Comics Code Authority).
in a post-Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell world, why not make the subtext into actual text?
So, yes.  It’s necessary.  And, quite frankly, welcome.
”But Jon,” you might ask, “wouldn’t it bother you if Superman were gay?”
Well, first of all, is it even possible for Superman to be gay, given that he’s an alien?  Honestly, sex with any human – male or female – is vaguely akin to bestiality.
More seriously…yes, it would bother me, but not because of any sort of bigotry or concerns that he would be less heroic – he wouldn’t be – but because his romantic relationship with Lois Lane – despite how poorly it is often handled (and how much the men in charge at DC like to screw her over) – is an essential aspect of the character.
Is that a cop-out?  Maybe, but the fact of the matter is, if DC did decide to make Superman gay, despite my Lois objection, I would get the fuck over it pretty quickly, because no matter what, he’s still fucking Superman and that’s good enough for me.Honestly, I would have even less objection to Batman being gay, because – Catwoman and Talia aside – there really isn’t an equivalent to Lois in his life.
And here’s the other thing, and this is not directed at anyone in particular, such as my boss or my friend on Facebook, but rather at the sensationalist media and the people out there in the world who get off on being offended, when it comes to you having an opinion about what goes on in a sub-culture that you aren’t part of, and have no interest in – unless it gives you an excuse to create a sensationalist narrative or to get a good offendedness fix, or to laugh at us socially-maladjusted nerds with our arrested development who still read that “kid stuff”  – my thought is pretty much fuck you.
You don’t read comics, so your opinion about comics is worth exactly two things:  Jack and shit.
*Cough*
Anyway…
I didn’t actually mean to suggest that I think that Jay Garrick is the most likely candidate when I used him as an example, by the way (though come to think of it, based on the glimpses we’ve had of him so far, it’s a definite possibility), I was just citing him as example of a character who, in fandom, counts as “prominent” and is being “re-introduced.”
The same goes for the former Captain Marvel, who is, arguably, fairly prominent outside of fandom, at least in terms of the word associated with him, which will actually be his name when he’s re-introduced:  SHAZAM.
But honestly, I don’t think that’s who it is either.
There is another very prominent character whom I think fits the bill – and fits in with the “safer” approach to introducing LGBT characters that DC has historically taken – and who has a long history of gay subtext, whose re-introduction has been decidedly lacking any focus on a romantic life, is in the middle of a storyline in which such a revelation would flow pretty naturally as a consequence of what’s happening, and who is, honestly, something of a no-brainer:  Wonder Woman.
I don’t think there are a lot of people who would bat an eye at the notion of Diana being a lesbian – she grew up on an island inhabited solely by women, after all – and DC has found that lesbians are a little easier for the fans to accept, so I think it makes perfect sense.  It’s a bold move, but not too bold, which makes it the most likely choice that DC would make.
Would I be okay with that?  Certainly, though I think that the fact that it’s a very obvious and safe choice kind of robs it of some of its impact, but I can’t really object to the logic behind it.
I may have more to say on this in a future post, which will include some additional thoughts on the lingering possibility of “Superman” (the quotes are there for a reason) being gay after all…

Quick Hits

First of all, happy birthday to Scott!  You're not getting better, you're getting older!
Wait, is that the way it goes?
Meh.
Second of all, I've created an account on Hub Pages, and have just posted my first "Hub," a review of the new Action Comics #1.
Click here to check it out!
...
WTF?  Why aren't you clicking?  "Oh, I'm too busy to read Jon's little review!  I don't care about comic books!"
Fine, be that way.
See if I care.
Jerks.  *sniff*  Mean old doody-heads.

Warning: Language Ahead

I'm not a gamer, so I typically have little to no interest in anything about games, especially if it's an MMORPG - Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game - but sometimes I do appreciate the cool trailers made to promote the games.
Such is the case with this trailer for DC Universe Online:




(Edit: Now with non-jacked-up embed code)
Or to put it another way, HOLY FUCKING FUCK BUCKETS!
I'm still not going to become a gamer or actually get involved in this particular game...but damn.
I had a total nerdgasm when Superman just dismissively took out Black Adam.
Okay, I'll now resume my regularly-scheduled lack of interest in games...

!!!!!!

RE: Superman: Secret Origin #3

To: Dan DiDio, Geoff Johnns
Subject: RE: Superman Secret Origins #3

Dan/Geoff:

You know how Hallmark makes those greeting cards with the little chip in them that plays music when you open the cards? You should totally incorporate that technology into Superman: Secret Origin.
That way, whenever Lois appears, you can play these wacky, goofball sound effects that will finish the job of hitting the readers over the heads with how "zany" and "screwball" it all is.

xoxoxo

Jon

P.S. The scenes introducing Rudy Jones, showing him to be a mooch, or a leech or a parasite, if you will? Brilliant foreshadowing, and not at all over the top.

Rip Off!

On Wednesday when I was on my way to the comic shop I very nearly got into an accident, which wasn't a lot of fun. I was driving along Belmont Ridge Road, a winding, hilly back road that cuts across Route 7 and leads to the town center where the comic shop is located.
There's one last valley right before you get to the light at 7, where a side road/driveway connects to Belmont. It had been raining most of the day, and the road was pretty slick.
As I was heading down into the valley I noticed something odd a couple hundred yards ahead of me, though it took a second for it to actually register. Someone was trying - unwisely - to pull out onto Belmont from the side road, which caused the driver ahead of me to slam on his brakes, which caused the car to begin spinning out of control on the rain-slicked road.
I hit my brakes and felt my car start to skid, so I eased up on the brakes to avoid mimicking the actions of the car ahead of me that was getting ever closer. I did my best to slow down carefully, fully-realizing that I was unlikely to stop in time to avoid hitting the other car. Fortunately the other driver gained a modicum of control in the nick of time and was able to pull off onto the side road, very narrowly avoing what otherwise whould have been an inevitable collision either between me and the spinning car, or me and the car in the opposite lane.
So yeah, not a lot of fun.
Once I got to the comic shop, I decided to settle my nerves by splurging on one or more of the more expensive volumes in the shop. I was thinking about buying the entire Sin City collection, but ultimately decided instead to purchase another Frank Miller book: Absolute Dark Knight, which contains his 1986 masterpiece The Dark Knight Returns - beautifully recolored and generally given the "Absolute" treatment - and his early 2000's minorpiece The Dark Knight Strikes Again. I didn't buy it so much for the latter work. In fact, I bought it in spite of the fact that it includes Strikes Again. Once I got home I put my comics in their standard least-anticipated to most-anticipated order (at the bottom and most-anticipated spot: Fables #71, which features this wicked awesome cover), and set them aside for later reading. Somewhere along the line I had to adjust the order because I noticed something odd on the cover of Birds of Prey #116: the cover stated that it was written by Gail Simone.
Gail! Back on BoP! I have to admit that, in my opinion, the guys who have been writing BoP since Gail left haven't done a terrible job, and really, it's a decent title - certainly better than a lot of stuff out there - it's just that...well, they're not Gail. Gail is a phenomenal writer in general, but in my opinion it was her run on BoP that really stands out as her best work to date, and I was very sad to see her leave the title. I knew that current BoP writer Sean McKeever was leaving the book after a very short run, but I didn't think he was done yet, and I'd read that Tony Bedard, who was the fill-in writer between Gail's and McKeever's runs was taking over as the new regular writer.
So did McKeever bail early?
Was Gail just doing a fill-in issue?
Was she - one dared to hope - coming back as the regular writer?
Whatever the case, I was thrilled to see Gail back where she belongs. And then I actually opened the book up and found that Gail was not back for either a fill-in or permanent run.
In fact, she wasn't back at all.
While the cover said Gail Simone, the interior credits said Sean McKeever.
Why did it say Gail Simone on the cover? I have no idea, but whether it was an error or a bald-faced lie, the fact of the matter is that, per the interior credits, and the style of the writing, it seems that Gail did not write the issue.
So that was a bummer/rip off.

Rain Delay

We had some snow and freezing rain overnight and into this morning, so when I got up I called the “Inclement Weather Hotline” for work and learned that we would be opening two hours late.
I thought about going back to bed, but decided instead to just take a more leisurely approach to getting ready and to take the opportunity to start my car and let it thaw out completely before heading in to work.
By the time I left the roads were merely wet, and thus easily traversable, and I was pleased to note that there was considerably less traffic than normal, so, overall, I’d have to say “Yay snow and freezing rain!”
I ended up pulling in about 45 minutes later than usual, but given that I typically get there 45 minutes early, this meant that, technically, I was on time.
Most everyone else took full advantage of the delay, and more besides, rolling in somewhere around 11, and a lot of other people clearly opted to work from home, so the place was pretty quiet all day.
I had considered working from home – opting to bring my laptop home with me yesterday rather than simply locking it up in my cabinet in my cube – but there was a meeting I was scheduled to attend at 9. I figured it wouldn’t actually happen then, given the delay, but assumed that my boss would probably reschedule it for later in the day, which he did.
Of course, after the meeting started my boss turned to me and said that I could leave, as it turned out that my involvement wasn’t required.
(He’d thought that one of the results of this meeting was going to be a document that I would have to produce, but it turned out that someone else was producing the document, which was fine by me.)
It was a pretty boring day for the most part, as I didn’t have much to do. I have a lot of projects on my plate, but for pretty much all of them I’m waiting on information from other people, and am unable to really do much until I get the information.
On Tuesday, the latest in DC Comics’ direct-to-DVD animated adaptations of classic comic storylines, Justice League: The New Frontier, will hit the shelves.
I decided I couldn’t wait that long and did a search of the newsgroups to see if an advance copy had made its way out to the public. I found several copies and downloaded one to watch last night.
(I don’t feel guilty about this in the slightest, as I’m still going to buy the DVD come Tuesday, if for no other reason than that I’m hoping that, just as Superman: Doomsday had a sneak preview of New Frontier, New Frontier will have a sneak preview of The Judas Contract, which is the one I’m really waiting for.)
I won’t post a review – I already did a write up, via e-mail, for the only regular reader who cares – but I will discuss some of the troubles I encountered in watching it.
(Okay, mini-review: it was awesome. The too-short running time meant that a lot – and I mean a lot – of the story from the comic it was based on didn’t make the cut, but the essentials were there, and the animators absolutely nailed Darwyn Cooke’s style, producing something absolutely stunning to behold. The voice work was top-notch, with only a few minor exceptions, none of which were anything close to being deal-breakers.)
I’d started to watch it on my computer, but decided that while my new monitor is big and bright, it would still look better on the HDTV.
When streaming to my Media Lounge there are some issues with audio quality, so I decided to copy the file onto my USB drive and play it back from there, as the Media Lounge has a USB input for just that purpose.
However, there were still some audio glitches, so I decided to burn a DVD.
The encoding of the DVD took forever, and then, during the actual burning process, it crapped out at 92.9%.
Finally, two and a half hours later, I was back to where I had startedand decided to just watch it on the computer, though even that wasn’t without complications, as some encoding issues with the file caused it to randomly switch from color to black and white and back again at odd intervals.
Still, it was ultimately well worth all of the trouble, and I eagerly anticipate picking up the DVD on Tuesday.

New Frontier Trailer

'Justice League: The New Frontier' Trailer

Odd Dreams, Killing Time, And A Good Start

This morning found me getting up much earlier than I wanted to in order to get to an 8 AM appointment with my insurance agent.
After signing the papers and writing a check (from next year on the insurance payment will be taken out of my escrow account), I swung by McDonald’s to get some breakfast.
For some reason the McDonalds around here have been having someone actually sitting outside to take your order in the drive through, which is odd enough, but today this one also had someone outside to take your money, though you still got your change at the window.
Anyway, I got home and ate it, finding that the hotcakes on the McGriddle weren’t fully-cooked and seemed to be lacking the dollop of maple syrup that’s ordinarily mixed into the batter.
After that disappointing breakfast I said, “Screw this,” and went back to bed, where I dreamed that, in the interim between now and moving into my new apartment, I was living in an attic apartment in the home of the doctor who doesn’t grasp the concept of sleeves and his emaciated plastic wife from E!’s Dr. 90210 (I watch it every once in a while to see the before shots of the already decent-looking chicks as they stand around in their underwear to be examined before their surgeries). Some creepy old racist conspiracy nut – a friend of the family, apparently – had invaded my space while visiting my landlords. He was convinced that I was unemployed because I was home during the day, ignored my claims to the contrary, and kept suggesting places that I should apply to, ranking them based on how committed the proprietors’ were to resisting the worldwide Zionist conspiracy.
(I’ve been visiting way too many fundamentalist/conspiracy nut Web sites lately. But they’re just so good for a laugh that they’re hard to resist.)
I woke up, briefly, at one point and saw that it was 10 and decided I should get up, but then I fell asleep and went back to the same weird dream until my mother called and woke me up.
After that I did the usual sitting around until about noon, at which point I started getting hungry.
I had to go to a meeting in Dulles at 3, and I didn’t want to go somewhere for lunch (I haven’t been grocery shopping this week because I don’t see the point of loading up the fridge just to have to relocate the food), come home, and then go out again a couple of hours later, but I knew that it would be near-impossible for me to find a way to kill nearly three hours out in the world.
Still, I resolved to try.
I went to the Dulles Town Center first and had lunch in the food court (A foot-long bacon dog – take that, family history of heart disease!), and then tried to kill time walking around.
I went into the Borders Express and shook my head sadly at the ever-increasing amount of shelf-space devoted to Manga and the ever-decreasing amount of space devoted to American comics.
Of course, the first thing I’d noticed was a big book titled Human Anatomy for Artists, which I decided to grab. I browsed for a while longer, but couldn’t find anything else of interest and went to the register, where I was, eventually, greeted by a cute-ish Asian girl who asked if the book was for me or was a gift. I don’t think she actually caught my answer before moving on to asking me if I had the rewards card or whatever they call it. She then asked me if I wanted a bag, and then if I wanted her to double-bag it, as it’s a pretty weighty tome (as well-suited for whomping kids and little people as my Absolute Watchmen), and then talked about how bags always end up ripping on her, which prompted me to say that yes, in my case, double-bagging was definitely a good idea.
Now here’s where we run into one of the (innumerable) Problems of Being Jon ™.
As I said, the girl was kind of cute, and she was considerably friendlier than most service industry people I deal with, to the extent that she may have been flirting with me.
One of the Problems of Being Jon ™ is the inability to believe that someone flirting with me is something that can occur in nature. Yet another is that, if I get past that first one, I can’t tell if it’s just generic, pointless flirting that doesn’t actually mean anything or if it serves a sign of genuine interest.
For the record, I am able to easily determine when someone is flirting with me because she wants something. In fact, if I ever do decide that someone is flirting with me, and that it is not harmless, meaningless fun, that’s usually the assumption that I make.
Anyway, getting back to the girl at the bookstore, I couldn’t really tell if she was just naturally friendly and bubbly, or if it was something more, and if it was something more, if it meant anything beyond the standard, “I’m stuck here for eight hours; I might as well make the time more enjoyable by flirting with guys – even spastic dorks like this one.”
But whatever. It’s not like any of it matters anyway.
From the Town Center I went on to Wal-Mart, and then to Best Buy, where, after finding the well-hidden display where they were located, I picked up two copies of Superman: Doomsday.
After that I swung by Scott’s pod to give him his copy and kill some time before my meeting.

Excuse Me While I Geek Out Department:
I watched my Superman: Doomsday DVD shortly after I got home and I have to say it was pretty damned cool. Honestly, it’s the movie that Superman Returns should have been. Good story, some actual action, good performances by the voice actors (Adam Baldwin made a good Superman, but made an excellent twisted Superman, delivering his lines in that role with a creepy flatness and quiet menace that made you appreciate just how utterly terrifying a Superman who isn’t safely guided by his unerring moral compass could really be).
Anne Heche did not initially wow me as Lois, and I’m not entirely sure that she ever won me over, as I think that it was the overall portrayal of Lois – her dialogue, her behavior, and her skillfully animated mannerisms – that I warmed up to, making the voice almost irrelevant. Still, I do think Heche put forth a decent effort.
Speaking of creepy, James Marsters really laid on the creepiness as Lex Luthor, particularly in the unapologetically homoerotic sequence that added an interesting layer of complexity to the Superman/Luthor dynamic without being too cliché or tacked on. I don’t necessarily buy into that interpretation in general, but in this instance, it worked, in a skeevy sort of way.
And peaking of skeevy, John “Bender” Dimaggio made the Toyman into one of the skeeviest, most disturbing villains I’ve seen in a while. In the early 90’s Toyman in the comics was reinvented as a psychopathic child-killer. It was a disturbing interpretation of a classic, albeit mostly harmless, villain, but it had nothing on the interpretation of Toyman in this movie.
Toyman provided just one of the many “Holy Shit!” moments in the movie.
(There were even a couple “No Fucking Way!” moments as well.)
I really liked the style of the animation (though I question the wisdom of the whole cheekbones thing on Supes), as it had elements of some of the animated versions that have preceded it while still creating a look that was unique to this production.
The story presented in Superman: Doomsday, while following the basic plot, differed wildly from the comic storyline on which it was based, but honestly, there was no way to take that story, which had so much going on and so many intricate webs of continuity, and which was able to run for upwards of half a year, and actually fit it into a 70 minute movie without making radical changes.
So it’s not so much a question of if it would be changed, but whether or not the changes worked. And I think they did.
Overall, I think this effort bodes well for DC’s line of direct to DVD animated features and servers as an excellent start, and based on the sneak peek at Justice League: The New Frontier, the next movie in the queue, things are only looking up as we move toward the third project, The Judas Contract.
I hope that DC has many more in the pipe, and if they don’t, I would humbly suggest that they consider adapting the oft-mentioned Great Darkness Saga, Selina’s Big Score (like Frontier, a wonderful story by Darwyn Cooke, and is the story that godawful Catwoman movie should have been based on), Batman: Hush (I am so fucking kidding about that; please, please, PLEASE don’t make a Hush DVD), pretty much any one of Gail Simone’s Birds of Prey story arcs (though the one in which Black Canary trades places with Lady Shiva would be a good choice), a JSA story (maybe the relatively recent one, the name of which escapes me, in which they square off against Per Degaton as he attempts to destroy the JSA in the past), and something focusing squarely on Kirby’s Fourth World (seeing as how you’re going to be killing The New Gods off it could serve as a fitting obituary). Oh, and the first Generations story that Byrne did (the two follow-ups were okay, but that one was the best of the lot, and the one that I see as most adaptable).
But seriously; you’ve got plenty of great stories, new and old, to choose from, so keep them coming.

Career Counseling For Comic Book Villains

The most recent issue of the DC Comics weekly series Countdown prominently featured Batman villain Poison Ivy. That's hardly surprising given that Paul Dini is the head writer on Countdown, and when he was working on Batman: The Animated Series, he clearly had an affection for the character (particularly when she was paired with his creation Harley Quinn, who has also been prominently featured in Countdown).
As a Batman villain, I've never found Ivy to be terribly interesting (outside of the Animated Series, at least). Some of that is the result of whoever happened to be writing her in her various appearances, but I think the problem is mostly that she just doesn't "fit" as a Batman villain. Catwoman and Talia al Ghul have the whole femme fatale thing covered, and Ivy's brand of crazy just isn't a Gotham kind of crazy. Sure, she is, at heart, a tragic figure like most Batman villains, but I just don't think she clicks.
Therefore, it is my belief that Poison Ivy should uproot herself from Gotham and move on to greener pastures, and find herself a new hero to contend with.
My suggestion for the new hero in her life? Ryan Choi, the All-New Atom.
I have several reasons for believing this to be the right move for Ivy to make:

Dr. Pamela Isley became Poison Ivy as the result of experiments performed upon her by Jason Woodrue AKA The Floronic Man. Woodrue himself pursued a criminal career that brought him into conflict with Ray Palmer, Ryan Choi's mentor and his predecessor as the Atom. Pam and Ryan would be carrying on a tradition.

Ryan's base of operations as the Atom? Ivy Town. He-lo!

She could fight him with pollen. I mean, the guy is tiny.

As a neophyte hero, Ryan has yet to earn himself a true arch-enemy. Further, like any good hero, he needs to step into the morally confusing quagmire that results from having a femme fatale opponent, someone who both attracts and repels him.

They're both doctors, so beyond the Woodrue-Palmer connection they have something in common.

So far, despite its many strengths, The All-New Atom has been decidedly lacking an interesting feminine presence.

In the hands of a skillful writer like Gail Simone, Ivy could become a compelling, complex, and interesting character. Gail could conceivably do for Poison Ivy what she did for Black Canary.
(For any non-comic geeks still reading this, trust me, that's a very good thing)

So there you have it, my argument for why The All-New Atom should take on Poison Ivy as his new arch-enemy.
(Gail, if you're reading this, which I know you aren't, make it happen)