Here Come Blackest Night Spoilers!

The climax of Blackest Night #7 made perfect sense to Your Obedient Serpent.

Sure, everyone's been anticipating that BN would climax with some kind of "White Lantern" moment, but most everyone -- including Your Obedient Serpent -- has assumed Geoff was grooming Happy Hal for the role, what with his sampling ring after ring.

Of course, each successive sampling demonstrated that Hal simply wasn't SUITED to wielding anything but Will. His big moment of Avarice? Two hamburgers. His greatest Hope? "I hope you'll stop asking me." Carol's whole arc in Blackest Night has been the essentially unrequited nature of her love for Hal.

Hal's got drive and focus and determination, but he doesn't have a lot of passion. He's just too narcissistic. And Johns has been highlighting that by having him Taste the Rainbow.

At the same time Johns has been distracting us by decorating Hal's digits with different neon colors, though, he's been establishing those passions as part and parcel of Sinestro's character. Fear and Will were always there, but we've also seen his lost and secret Love, his Rage at the Guardians, his Hope for a "better", more orderly world, and his Compassion for those who suffer because of "chaos".

And he Wants. He Craves. He Covets. He wants the respect and honor that was once his, and is now Hal's. He wants Power. He wants to be the Greatest Of All Lanterns -- and this, too, has been part of his for as long as Fear and Will.

Hal is simply too pure. He's a Green Laser, a single frequency of Ego and Drive and Will.

Sinestro can wield the White, and should, because, of all the ringslingers we've met, he and he alone has mastered all of the emotional spectrum.

Though Guy has almost as strong a claim, come to think of it.

For the last time ...

Power Girl is Kryptonian.

She can casually lift an aircraft carrier.

She is not going to have "back trouble".

That headline again:

Disney. Buys. Marvel.

Tempting as it is to just follow that with "'Nuff said", I have to wonder....

• How will this affect Marvel Sudios and their ambitious "Avengers Cycle" movie plans?
  
• Will Disney cancel the Gemstone Comics license, and start releasing Disney titles using Marvel's production and banner?
  
• Conversely, will that matter if both companies continue to ignore newstand and grocery store distribution in favor of the hard-core fandom's boutique market?
  
• What does this mean for Kingdom Hearts and Capcom vs. Marvel?
  
• Will there be an even more vigorous crackdown on Marvel fanfic and games with "Character Creators" that let you "duplicate Marvel intellectual property", like City of Heroes and Champions Online?
  
• Will Howard return to his original character design? Will he turn out to hail from Duckburg? Will he lose his pants?

If this doesn't fall through, it'll bring a symmetry to the comics world: both major comics companies will be owned by massive global media juggernauts.

Strange days indeed.

Initial reaction to this news shows a lot of people are worried about Marvel getting "Disneyfied". Funny, that hadn't really occurred to me.

I'd hate to see the intelligent, thoughtful storytelling of recent years compromised by a company who didn't respect the years of development and history of these characters. I'm not sure the store where I work could survive without merchandise aimed at the mature, sophisticated sensibilities of the modern comics audience.

I know, I know, when people hear "Disney", they still automatically think of the "wholesome" Mouse Factory of fifty years ago, as if the company had no idea how to tell exciting, entertaining action-adventure tales. But, seriously, folks: the modern Disney megalopoly has its tentacles in a lot more than happy, sappy, saccharine kiddie stuff. When I hear "Disney", I don't hear "Cartoon Company" anymore. I hear "Entertainment Powerhouse".

When I mentioned the effect this might have on the Marvel Studios movie series, it was almost entirely wondering if that side of the business would see a cash infusion that would re-accelerate the filming schedule (which has been pushed back a couple of times from the original plan of two big-name superhero pictures a year for three or four years). Word is that Marvel owes its recent barrage of movies to "complex financing", and that this may have something to do with the acquisition deal. Ike Perlmutter's $1.4 billion net from the deal lends some credence to that hypothesis.

A lot of folks, on the other claw, are worried about them somehow compromising the integrity of the properties.

Personally? I think that the megacorp that gave us movies like No Country for Old Men and Miracle at St. Anna won't bat an eye at Tony Stark's antics.

It's a positive-sum game: the architect of Marvel's revival gets filthy rich, and the company gets a measure of financial stability that it honestly hasn't had since New World Cinema (hardly a financial powerhouse) sold it off in the '80s.

It's good for Disney, it's good for Marvel, it's good for Perlmutter. Yay!

On the other claw, is it good for us? One of the worst offenders in the copyright wars has suddenly gained control of yet another chunk of modern folklore, much of which would already be in the public domain if the Mouse hadn't repeated pushed Congress to enact ever-more-damaging Copyright Extensions.

But that's a whole 'nother topic.

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Edited and cross-posted from Your Obedient Serpent's LiveJournal. I've incorporated material from some threads that originated there; thanks to my loyal readers for contributing!

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In Brightest Day....

This made me laugh out loud:


I may have to print it out and post it at work.

Speaking as a long-time fan of the Green Lanterns, who's read the book(s) through all the ups and downs since 1970 or so, this multi-year arc that Geoff Johns has been writing is the Best Damned Run Of Green Lantern ever, one of the best things DC has done in the last decade, and Blackest Night is shaping up to be the "Final Crisis" that Final Crisis wasn't.

Honestly, it's a big part of why I still bother with superhero comics.

After, what, five years of non-stop Big Events and Red Skies Crossovers from both major companies, after a year of working in a comic store, and after my Fanfic Epiphany from a couple of years ago, I've come very close to burning out on commercialized adolescent power fantasies.

But Johns is good, and Blackest Night is not so much an Editorially-Mandated MegaCrossover as it is the logical climax of the story he's been telling for the last five years.

Still and nonetheless... "They turned Green Lanterns into Care Bears" is spit-take-worthy.

The Boy Wonder and the Last Pulp Hero

The other day, working at the comic shop, I had a conversation with one of my teenaged customers about the early years of Batman. and he reiterated something I've heard for decades. Jules Feiffer groused about it in The Great Comic Book Heroes, insisting that he'd felt this way since childhood, so the complaint's been around pretty much as long as the character.

It's the idea that the introduction of Robin the Boy Wonder was a Bad Idea and Ruined The Whole Batman Concept.

After reading the first few volumes of The Batman Chronicles, however, I think it's just the opposite.

Before Robin, "The Bat-Man" was just another pulp character.

Oh, those early stories are nice, tight little packages of action and suspense, just like the pulps that inspired them -- but there's the key. They were just like the pulps that inspired them; a bit more compressed, perhaps, and with the exotic appeal of the new medium, but the protagonist was interchangeable with any of the lesser mystery men of the Street & Smith line.

Unoriginal, undistinguished; a guy in a bat costume with (eventually) boomerang. He didn't have the intricate network and multifarious identities of The Shadow; he didn't have the small army of geniuses that followed Doc Savage; he didn't even have the exotic Old California setting of Zorro, the character he really most resembled in those early years.

It was only after the introduction of Robin that Batman really started to come into his own, started to develop his own distinctive motif and theme, started to evolve what could rightfully be known as a mythology. Even Miller recognized that, when The Dark Knight Returns has Bruce reminiscing that Dick named The Batmobile -- "a kid's name."

Before Robin, he was just Zorro in New York. Not The Shadow, mind you; despite what the revisionists of the latter day would have you think, the obsessed devotion to the War On Crime wasn't a major part of the character in those pre-Robin days. Bruce Wayne's effete disaffection with everything around him was misdirection, no doubt, but nonetheless, those early stories convey the impression that, on some level, he put on the costume to fight crime because he was bored.¹

It's tempting to assume that Robin just happened to be introduced at the same time as the elements that make Batman so distinctly Batman, but I don't think so. I think that the new character dynamic of the duo was a key factor that shaped a truly mythic character.

Before Robin, Bruce had a social life. Bruce had a fiancée. The Batman was something Bruce Wayne did. It wasn't yet who he was... until he took on a partner.

With a confidante, someone who knew both sides of his life, Robinson, Finger and Kane could let Bruce Wayne immerse himself in the role of Batman.

The conventional interpretation is that the introduction of the brightly-clad wise-cracking kid sidekick was a distraction that pulled the Batman away from his Holy Mission. If you really sit down and read the stories, though, the opposite is more the case. The idea that everything Bruce Wayne does is really just to serve the needs and goals of his alter-ego only emerges post-Robin.

The modern Batman, the revisionist Batman, the grim, obsessed avenger, lurking in the shadows, devoting his entire life to his personal War, is intriguing today only because he's an anachronistic example of a once-profligate phylum. In that time, in that place, he would never have stood out enough become the iconic archetype that we know today -- if he had ever really existed in that form back then.

It's not Superman who's the last survivor of a lost race.

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¹This is not, in itself, an unacceptable motivation for a fictional crimefighter; Sherlock Holmes got a great deal of mileage from it.

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A Fable of the Atomic Age

Back in 1997, I took an anthropology class. One of our first assignments was to pick a children's story from our childhood, one that had a "significant influence" on us, and try to wring out the cultural assumptions it contained, the lessons it tried to teach, and the lessons it actually taught.

After pondering the usual array of fables and fairy tales, I realized that those weren't really my culture, and that those stories hadn't had nearly the influence on me that comics and television had. (No big surprise, there: depending on your demographic preferences, I'm either a last-year Boomer or early Gen-X -- two generations pretty well defined by the subsumption of folk culture by pop culture.)

Early on in my youth, Jack Kirby asserted unequivocally that comics were flat-out modern mythology, that they were the Folklore of Our Times, and had that emblazoned right on the covers of his quintessential work. I briefly considered writing about the Fourth World, about the ideas of Life and Anti-Life that even today shape the core of my personal ethos, but the saga of the New Gods was both two obscure and too inchoate to discuss briefly. I settled, instead, on an earlier Lee and Kirby creation...

Once Upon A Time, there was a brilliant scientist. Bruce Banner was a quiet, unassuming man who designed weapons for the United States Government. He had designed a new kind of bomb called a Gamma Bomb, and, one day, this new weapon was about to be tested. Minutes before the bomb was supposed to go off, however, a teenager drove out to the testing range. Young Rick had driven out there on a dare, having no idea that a test was scheduled for that day. Dr. Banner saw Rick's car on the testing range, and, shouting to his assistant to halt the countdown, drove out to the range himself. Dr. Banner didn't know that his assistant was actually a Soviet spy, however, who saw this as an opportunity to dispose of an important American scientist. The countdown continued.

Dr. Banner reached Rick in time to get him to the safety of a trench, but, before he could take cover himself, the bomb detonated, bathing him in mysterious Gamma radiation. He survived - but ever after, whenever he became frightened or angry, he transformed into a huge, destructive creature of immense power and unbridled rage.

He did not live happily ever after.

The psychological stresses imposed upon society by the Cold War and the even colder realizations of the extent of humanity's destructive potential spawned a rich vein of mythology, folklore, and urban legend. Written in 1962, the story of the Incredible Hulk is an enduring icon of that era, familiar to many children who have discovered it though comic books or television. Stan Lee, co-creator of the Hulk, has written that his primary inspirations were Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He sought to combine the two into the tragic figure of a man who had created his own curse. The narrative that emerged, however, is something more than a simple re-hashing of classic stories. It is a tale rich in the culture of its day, reflecting both the values and the fears of the Atomic Age.

Comic books are often condemned for being populated by "cardboard stereotypes." In more traditional forms of children's literature, however, such figures are considered "mythic archetypes". While later writers contributed depth and dimension to this serial myth, in its earliest form, the tale of the Hulk is no exception. General "Thunderbolt" Ross, commander of Gamma Base, is the blustering, foul-tempered soldier - a "Man's Man." His daughter, Betty, is quiet and passive - and portrayed as desirable. She never voices more than a passing attraction for the quiet Dr. Banner, knowing that her father would disapprove, and eventually marries the vain, arrogant Major Talbot, who, whatever his flaws, meets her father's standards of machismo. Rick Jones, an orphan, is a reckless, irresponsible teenager - who immediately reforms after finding a surrogate father in the unlikely person of Dr. Banner. Banner's assistant is a ruthless, backstabbing, Communist spy. Bruce Banner himself is the stereotypical intellectual: quiet, pacifistic, physically weak, a social maladroit; Ross, on several occasions, refers to him as a "milksop", while his raging, green, gamma-spawned alter-ego would express his unflagging contempt for "Puny Banner."

And yet, he builds atomic bombs.

When scientist Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the very first atomic detonation, it is said that he murmured a line from Hindu scripture: "I am become Death, Shatterer of Worlds." Bruce Banner's tale is the literal manifestation of that event: he has become an iconic incarnation of atomic destruction, mindless and raging, dropping from the sky unpredictably, without warning, without reason. The fact that the Hulk frequently battles and defeats other monstrosities and even more destructive threats mirrors the anxiety caused by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction: we are protected by that which can destroy us.

Banner's transformation also reflects a subconscious attitude toward science and toward scientists, one closely tied to the undercurrent of anti-intellectualism that has always been a subtext of American culture. The Manhattan Project cast a new light on the scientific community: these quiet, unassuming men, rational and logical, often amusingly eccentric, frequently pacifists, could rip matter itself asunder and raze entire cities to the ground.

Buried inside each court wizard might be a monster.

Banner himself does not realize the enormity of his actions until he sees a hapless teenager about to be vaporized. Then and only then does it become clear to him that he has created something which will slaughter children. His willingness to sacrifice himself for Rick does not wholly redeem his transgressions, however. His transformation into the Hulk is wholly suited to his contradictory actions: he has been granted vast power, but it is beyond his control - an ironic parallel to the very nature of atomic science.

Rick Jones, too, must face the consequences of his actions. His irresponsibility has destroyed Banner's career and any possibility of a normal life. However, his subsequent loyalty to both Banner and to the Hulk has earned him something of a surrogate father in the one case, and the status of (in the creature's own words) "Hulk's only friend." Of course, having the strongest person in the world as one's best friend may seem like every child's dream, but when the behemoth in question has the intellect and emotional maturity of an ill-tempered three-year-old, it becomes something of a mixed blessing. A tantrum, after all, can level a city.

Serial fiction such as the comic book is an unusual art-form. Its tales never really end - they continue to grow and develop and evolve from month to month, issue to issue. Different writers bring different emphases and different styles to a saga. The story of the Hulk is no exception. While it is more unitary than, for example, the innumerable variations of the Batman, it has still garnered layers of detail and complexity over the years. No matter the baroque elaborations of the latest monthly tribulations of Bruce and Betty Banner, however, they still have at their core that central kernel of Atomic Age Myth: the tale of the scientist who discovers, beneath his veneer of intellect, the Shatterer of Worlds.

I Am Not A Number!

Last week, the scans_daily community on LiveJournal posted the extant pages of Jack Kirby's unpublished version of The Prisoner.

I love the opening on the first page:

In this age, when the individual can find himself at the mercy of advanced technology welded by an organized and ruthless enemy, THIS BOOK BECOMES IMPORTANT TO ALL OF US!!!

That's something Your Obedient Serpent has said for decades, now: McGoohan's eccentric experiment is an invaluable survival guide to anyone living in the (post)modern world. And Jack just comes right out and says it: this comic book is important. No "subtle themes" or "hidden messages" for Kirby. If he thought something was important, he'd SHOUT IT TO THE HEAVENS, in boldfaced italics.

Somehow, he made it work. Which is why we call him "The King".

And this, dear reader, is why it stokes Your Obedient Serpent's ire to hear Starlin and his sycophants expound on how Jack "never really said" what the Anti-Life Equation was. What they MEAN is, "we never read The Forever People." Kirby wasn't at all mysterious about the Equation: he explicitly spells it out (and yes, in boldfaced italics) over and over -- but he does it in the pages of what too many people consider the goofiest, most dated, most embarrassing installment of the Fourth World saga.

Your Obedient Serpent, on the other claw, read Jimmy Olsen, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People when they came out. New Gods, however, didn't cross my path until almost a decade later, thanks to a friend who dragged me to his college library's restricted-access collection of classic comics, specifically so I could catch up on those chapters of the Fourth World that I'd missed.

Perhaps that skews my perceptions of the Great Unfinished Work. Through the '80s, New Gods was reprinted several times, but the other threads of the saga were neglected until their black-and-white collections from a few years back and the wonderful, wonderful Fourth World Omnibus volumes currently being released. New Gods is grand, sweeping, epic, and bombastic -- but I think it's also the Fourth World title that explains the least about the actual philosophical struggles involved.

Viva Oracle!

This was originally posted as a response to Ragnell's post about Booster Gold #4, which ends with the surprise reveal that Barbara Gordon's crippling and subsequent career as Oracle happened because of the Bad Guy Time Travellers and their plot to thwart the origins of the whole Justice League -- including their "rightful" leader, Batgirl.

I love this idea, and I can't wait to see how it plays out... but until I read the comments in Ragnell's post, it never occurred to me that DC would actually have Booster and Rip succeed in "fixing" that one.

Frankly, I think they'd be damned foolish to consider it.

I can't consider Oracle a "mistake" on DC's part. Barbara Gordon as Oracle is a far more interesting, original character than Barbara Gordon ever was as the Earth-One Betty Kane, introduced to bolster the sagging ratings of a campy TV show that most fans would rather forget.

She's a more successful character, too. Her tenure as Oracle (1989-2007) is just three years shy of her tenure as Batgirl (1967-1988). At this stage, her Batgirl career was faltering; one reason Moore was allowed to treat her so cavalierly was because the character has simply failed to find a niche. She had never broken out of back-up series and Special Guest Sidekick appearances. The closest thing she'd gotten to a "team" was as a tagger-on to the Dynamic Duo. In the stories, Barbara was wondering if she was really making a difference as a crime-fighter, if she might do more good by directing her talents elsewhere.

At least one person has said that they want to see Barbara resume the Batgirl role because Oracle, the "Superhero OnStar", "makes things too easy" for other DCU characters, and writers tend to use her as a crutch. To Your Obedient Serpent, this almost qualifies for the Women in Refrigerators List: impose a major life change to a female character to produce a desired effect on a male character.

I keep hearing people object to the creation of Oracle because of the Fridge Listing of Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke. Sure, Babs's crippling is classic Fridge List material. That was Alan Moore's script -- and while it set the stage for the introduction of Oracle, it was NOT her origin.

Barbara Gordon's recreation of herself as the Oracle was the work of John Ostrander, and it was as far from the Fridge List as you can get. It pulled the character out of the shadows of the Established Male Dynastic Centerpiece, and made her a unique, exotic figure in her own right. It gave her her own story, in her own way.

Barbara Gordon was always a highly-intelligent character with a photographic memory. That was there from her introduction. Ostrander's genius was in using the crippling injury imposed by another writer to refocus the character on that intellect.

As a front-line fighter, Barbara was a B-List character, and her chosen nom de guerre insured that she'd remain there, as "Batman's Girl Sidekick". As Oracle, she's A-List. The idea of Barbara Gordon leading the Justice League only makes sense after 20 years of seeing her as Oracle. Batgirl was no leader, and showed no signs of developing into one. As a kick-fighter, she was playing catch-up to people with more training, more motivation, and more special "edges" than she would ever have. It took Ostrander's re-emphasis of the character according to her unique strengths that allowed her to become the formidable presence she is today.

Taking that away from her would be crippling the character. Frankly, if Barbara got the use of her legs back (without time-travel trickery), I'd be utterly disappointed if she gave up being Oracle. She's done far more good that way that she ever would as one more high-heeled boot to a bad guy's face.

(Okay, if she got healed and put the costume on again strictly because she was offered leadership of the JLA, I could buy it.)

And you know what? "Oracle" only works as an ex-crimefighter. Putting some random person hospitalized by violence into the chair and behind the keyboard just doesn't have the emotional impact.

Finally... I'm hardly a fan of the school that insists that a superhero has to have some driving trauma, but I've got to admit, Oracle has a lot more solid motivation than the librarian who took a few judo classes and started crimefighting for fun.

And now, a moment of perspective.

If Internet Fandom had been around in the '50s, the Silver Age of Comics never would have happened.

"Have you heard about what they're doing to Green Lantern? They're ditching Alan Scott and replacing him with some test pilot! And instead of a unique magic ring and an ancient lantern, they're making him one of THOUSANDS of space-cops with some kind of technological gizmo! Hell-OOO? National? It's been DONE!"

Grampa's Got A Brand New Blog

Well, after months of posting comments in other people's comics blogs, I've finally gotten a Blogger account of my very own.

This is where Your Obedient Serpent will post his musings on comic books, cartoons, and on occasion, other mass media. Goodness knows, I prattle on about such things often enough; I should certainly be able to muster an occasional column on sundry circumstances.

The title might require some explanation. Almost anyone involved with this particular subculture is familiar with Kirby Dots, the psychadelic pop-art effect that the late, great Jack Kirby developed to indicate vast, incomprehensible cosmic forces that would beggar "Doc" Smith's vocabulary.

A less-celebrated stylistic affectation that I have always considered at least as significant are the swooping trails and pathways that wove through Steve Ditko's otherworldly tales -- not only those crafted for Marvel's Master of the Mystic Arts, but in his excursions into the arcane for the cereal-box presses of Charlton. The Dark Dimension, the Astral Realms, all were permeated by strangely-angled curvilinear ribbons. It is no accident that subsequent creators have invoked the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak as the most distinctive signature spell of the good doctor.

Thus, while my aesthetics and philosophical sentiments hew more closely toward Mr. Kirby's, I thought it fitting to also honor his Objectivist colleague.