Welcome to the first of hopefully a series of random thought themed “Words of Questionable Wisdom” columns. I’ve been told by many people who’ve read my work online that I need a regular column to vent my venomous, often times borderline obsessive opinions on the comic industry. So here it is: A special edition of: Words of Questionable Wisdom on recent resurrections and comic book resurrection policies. Not to mention a suprise for those who get through the column that will make you laugh or recoil in horror at how lame it is….
Quesada Speaks On His Own Hypocrisy! News At Eleven!
Joe Quesada recently took time to address, via his weekly Newsarama column (available at http://www.newsarama.com/JoeFridays/JoeFridays5.htm ), the blatant hypocrisy of his much hyped “dead is dead” policy, which can be summed up as being “Dead Means Dead To Characters Mark Millar, Kevin Smith, and Brian Bendis Hate and To Any Writers Who Dares To Get On Joe Quesada’s Sh-t List”. The timing for such a massive “rule” comes in time for Marvel Comics resurrecting sacred cow Bucky Barnes in the pages of Captain America, not to mention rumors that the upcoming crossover “House of M” would feature Brian Bendis (the poster boy for the hypocrisy of JQ’s “Dead Means Dead” edict) using the Scarlet Witch’s increasingly deus de machina power to magically raise from the dead characters like Harry Osborn just because Bendis can.
For those who are actually curious, the revised rules are (complete with my thoughts on them):
1.) Think twice before you kill a character off in a significant way.
Tell this to Brian Bendis, who’s wholesale slaughter of Hawkeye, Ant Man, and Vision in the pages of Avengers was done with the full effect of Bendis being a fat, spoiled Eric Cartman type baby who’d set fire to toys he didn’t want to play with but damn sure didn’t want anyone else to play with….
2.) If it’s a death with a predetermined resurrection, in other words, I’m killing off this character in order to bring them back further down the line, then I need to know about it ahead of time and it better be a damn good character arc.
Jesse: This is where I call bullsh-t on Joe for this, since he repeatedly cock-blocked Chris Claremont on numerous occasions from bringing Psylocke back to life when Claremont repeatedly told Quesada that he only killed Betsy so he could restore her to her original British body when he brought her back. Of course Quesada DID let Claremont bring her back, but in a garbage story that is so bad that we at Inside Pulse had writers begging to be allowed to review the issues just to vent how pissed off they were at the unreadable nature of the issues.
Moral of the story? Any story that logically brings characters back to life are not allowed at Marvel, only bullsh-t stories like the recent Jigsaw story in Daredevil and Brian Bendis’s “Secret Wars”, which featured Brian Bendis resurrecting Jason Macendale for no good reason whatsoever.
3.) If you want to bring a character back who has had a significant death, then it better be a great resurrection.
So Joe, why the hell did you cock-block Chris Claremont all of these years when he had actually GOOD ideas for bringing Psylocke back to life yet approve the piece of crap “Betsy suddenly appears out of nowhere and goes off with the X-Men to immediately fight humanoid dinosaurs” story? Or better yet, the “resurrection” of Vision in Young Avengers #2 which consisted of Lil’ Kang removing Vision’s mind from his shattered body so that Lil Kang could use him as a glorified operational system in his Lil’ Iron Man armor ala Windows XP? Hell what about Jason Macendale, a cowardly, sadistic loser who had Hobgoblin pawn Ned Leeds murdered and who ended up getting his just desserts when the real Hobgoblin shows up and burns Macendale alive for being a pathetic disgrace to the original Hobgoblin’s legacy coming back with no explanation and WORSE, in a manner that totally undermined all of the work that was done to retcon the numerous Mysterio appearances that occurred after Mysterio was killed off by Joe Quesada and Kevin Smith, who did so, I might add, without telling the writers of Spiderman, who were using Quentin Beck in the pages of Spidey at the time? Or even f-cking Colossus, who died a heroic self-sacrificing death saving mutantkind by injecting the cure to the legacy virus into his body and armored up turning up alive and well and locked in a hospital room for all of this time?
When comic characters are brought back, it’s usually because a character died a stupid, pointless death, like Vision, Hawkeye, and Antman did in the pages of Avengers. Hell, Joe Quesada himself still refuses to acknowledge that ALLOWING Bendis to kill these characters was a huge mistake since even Bendis fans have complained quite vocally about how pointless and stupid these deaths were. And his article in question features Quesada totally avoiding the issue of Mark Millar’s “Enemy of the State”, which is essentially “Mark Millar destroys the Marvel Universe” with regards to the way Mark Millar is making an entire twelve issue arc about Wolverine and Hydra killing and maiming everyone in sight for no good reason. But characters are still dying, especially at the hands of Brian Bendis and Mark Millar; two writers who’s entire gimmick as writers are raping and murdering characters they find to be “beneath them”. Which is not a good sign whatsoever towards Quesada properly enforcing any sort of policy regarding characters being killed off and coming back to life.
But Joe Quesada’s comments about how he doesn’t see Bucky as a “sacred cow” in terms of the dead staying dead is just pathetic, and shows how utterly out of touch with reality Quesada is with the characters he’s responsible for. Bucky is just as important as Uncle Ben and Batman’s parents in terms of dead characters. Considering that Bucky’s death is Captain America’s motivation for being a super-hero after he was defrosted. Without Bucky’s death, Captain America would have had no motivation to keep being Captain America NOR would he have the gaping hole in his heart that would lead to him treating the Avengers as his surrogate family. Bucky’s death also was a major establishment of the fact that people DO die, since Bucky’s death was the first major death of a comic book super-hero even if it was done via a retcon induced flashback.
Which goes towards the overall hypocrisy of this “dead is dead” rule since it only applies to flavor of the week writers (Brubaker, I’m looking at you) and Quesada’s favorites, who can flaunt the rules that everyone else is handicapped by.
Donna Troy’s Not So Special Special
Speaking of resurrections, Donna Troy’s back at long last though Dan DiDio’s big fat lie about Donna’s return (and her death) being the nexus point in which “Infinite Crisis” spins out of is exposed with no signs of said thing happening. Hell even Phil Jimenez is shown to be utterly clueless with the stupid ass premise of Donna’s return, which spins out of the God-Awful and utterly unredeemable “Who is Wonder Girl” story from New Titans #50-54. For those who don’t know, “Who is Wonder Girl?” is the post-Crisis Donna Troy origin story that states that Donna was raised by the Titans of Myth, who kidnapped alien kids across the galaxy to groom as their replacements. The story is god-awful and even George Perez (who returned to the book to draw the arc) can’t save it.
So what does Jimenez do? He based Donna’s return on the notion that she’s been floating around in space in the moon-shaped space station that the alien Titans of Myth. This is a horrible, horrible idea that totally and utterly deflates her return.
The best way to bring Donna back that Jimenez chose not to do AND let DC tie Donna’s return to the current Infinite Crisis mania? It’s simple and also lets DC erase the damage done to Donna at the hands of John Byrne, who sadistically stole Donna from then Green Lantern writer Ron Marz for no other reason than because Byrne could do so.
During the John Byrne run, Donna was blinked out of space/time after Wonder Woman’s mother Hippolyta decided to go back in time and live in the 1940s and fight alongside the JSA and that in order to restore her to the timeline, a clay statue of Wonder Woman was created and reprogrammed with vague memories of Donna that were provided by Wally West. My scenario is based on a simple premise: what if Donna Troy was spirited away from the time-stream and has been stuck in an alternate universe since 1998 and that the Donna Troy who died was a fake, created by the Greek Gods to replace Donna due to them knowing that Donna Troy would be required to help save her fellow Titans when Cyborg returns to Earth several months later. This fake Donna is the one who has only ultra-vague memories of her past, which negates this major damaging plot twist towards the character.
The real Donna Troy has been stuck in a time/space limbo and has learned critical information about the coming crisis during her time in exile. The same crisis that the Titans were warned of during their recent trip to the future and has only now successfully escaped back to the DC Universe. However the shock of traveling through dimensions cause Donna to suffer contrived plot device amnesia (which gives us an excuse to reformat Donna’s origin BACK to the simplistic origin from New Teen Titans #38 (AKA the critically acclaimed “Who is Donna Troy?” story) as a horde of alien warriors arrive on Earth to kill Donna before she can remember the vital information regarding the upcoming crisis.
Now I know what you are going to say; why suddenly and without any contrived plot point would I restore “Who is Donna Troy?” as THE definitive Donna Troy origin? Because it’s the simplest way to fix the problem (and God knows DC seems to not give a damn about continuity these days). Just twist some of the details of the God awful Byrne Wonder Woman run around to explain Donna’s exile and the creation of the fake Donna to keep the timeline going while the real Donna was exiled.
Plus there would be a viable plot for the mini-series that would tie it into the current mad rush towards Infinite Crisis: Donna has full knowledge of what is going to happen inside of her brain and that she needs the help of the Titans and Outsiders to help her remember it so that they can try and stop the crisis from happening.
For someone who claims to be a big Donna Troy fan, Jimenez’s mini-series is a huge disgrace towards the character and does nothing but continue the stigma of Donna Troy being a character whose convoluted background makes her not worth the effort to write. He should be ashamed and embarrassed to have written such dreck.
And Now Our Moment of Zen:
That said, you’ve been a great audience and I’ll see you later!
