DC News & Views: Newsarama And Tirade Edition

News

As I am writing this, I have just written from a discussion with author William Rhoden, author of Forty Million Dollar Slaves. (I should get in here to clarify that I was not alone in this discussion. Janelle and several other Princeton folk were there too.) It is pretty fascinating stuff and has put me in a bit of weird state of mind. I wrote a Tirade in said state of mind, you can find it below the news. Just be forewarned that we start with comics and sort of”¦drift so if you are looking for my usual erudite work on Wonder Girl and Superboy having relations or why a creator transitions from Wonder Boy to overrated, you might want to skip this week’s Tirade.

But, please, don’t miss the NEWS!

Redemption Thy Name is”¦Wolfman

We first brought you word of Marv Wolfman returning to Nightwing as the writer of the characte’s ongoing series last summer when DC Executive Editor Dan Didio made the announcement at Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC.

Fans took the news”¦well to put it mildly. Very well.

Now, two issues into his run, Wolfman is able to speak a little more freely about his views on the character, what he came on to do, and what he plans to do, given that his initial four-issue arc has been extended to a run of indefinite length.

We caught up with the writer to talk about ‘Wing, his life and his times.

Does Newsarama have the tonic to wash the taste of Jones out of our collective mouth?

It is just me or is what I just wrote unintentionally sexualized?

Eh.

Confession time. Two issues in and I haven’t bought Nightwing yet. I know, I know.

At first it was accidental. I got caught up in avoiding the title because of how bad it was post OYL flip and did not initially realize that Wolfman was finally on it. I learned that from Mathan in his “What I Thought of What I Read” bit in Who’s Who and made a note to pick it up the next. It was a note I, of course, promptly forgot. Then, the second Wolfman issue came and I noticed it. And I realized that I did not really care about having not read the first one and did not really care about reading the second. So I haven’t picked it up yet. I reserve the right to change my mind, of course, and probably, eventually, will. But for now, I figure why add a title who’s only motivating factor for me to buy is that I really have liked the character in the past.

All of this said, is this Jurgens art?

Because, if so, it is great to see his work back up to par. I was more than a bit worried after his Battle for Bludhaven stuff.

Anyone out there think I’m making a big mistake not picking this up right now? Am I missing brilliant Nightwing tales? Let me know if I am because that would make me sad.

‘Til The End of the Kryptonian Road

Best-selling author Kevin J. Anderson just closed a major deal with DC Comics and HarperCollins Books to write “Last Days of Krypton,” an epic novel about the demise of Superman’s home planet. The novel, reminiscent of “The Last Days of Pompeii,” shows the pomp and grandeur of a doomed world, the politics and struggles, brave heroes and traitors, and finally the escape of one baby. The story features Jor-El and Lara (Superman’s parents), as well as famous villains General Zod and Brainiac, and how a whole planet came to be destroyed. In almost 70 years of “Superman,” this complete story has never been told.

Still Newsarama can’t let go.

This could be cool for Superman fans. For me”¦well, it is nice to see DC put out some novels (you know, books without pictures).

Waid Speaks, Promises Bravery and/or Boldness

With the release of DC’s February solicitations, two long-awaited DCU projects appeared on their schedule to the delight of many readers – Jeff Smit’s Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil limited series and the debut of the new ongoing Brave and the Bold series, from the “all star” (lower case) team of writer Mark Waid and artist George Pérez .

Originally announced n the summer con season of 2005 for a 2006 release, major events in the DC Universe like Infinite Crisis and 52has pushed that to early 2007, but now Waid and Pérez are ready to unleash it on DC fans.

While we spoke to Waid about the series when it was first announced, we thought it was time to quickly catch-up with him, get a refresher course on the title, and see what – if anything – has changed since that time”¦

Sadly, Newsarama fails to promise sandwiches

I don’t know what it is, but I just cannot seem to get my excitement up for this.

I do like the idea of the central mystery, that of a gunshot victim found floating in space. I think it is a good reason for a Batman/Green Lantern team-up, something that put them both nicely into and out of there element. The idea of then sending Batman to follow the space leads and Green Lantern to follow the earth bound leads feels a bit like reaching to me (and wildly illogical if this was happening in a “real world” DCU), but perhaps there is an in-story explanation for it.

So why still the lack of interest?

I’m not sure, but I am guessing that it stems from two possible issues. The first is my ambivalence towards Hal Jordan since he returned. There have been moments of “I’m glad he’s back,” but, generally speaking, he does not inspire much reaction from me these days. So there’s that.

The second problem is Green Lantern #9. It came out last year, it featured Batman and Hal’s first post-Reborn punch encounter. It is the one that got everyone into a lather because it looked like Bruce and Hal were about to kiss. Not that a lot of people who read comics are uncomfortable with homosexuality or anything. Anyway, I liked the issue a lot and it covered pretty much all the things I was looking forwarding to seeing from these two characters interacting. With those beats out of the way, there is not much I’m fixing to see.


I don’t see the whole “wanting to kiss each other” thing, but man oh man is that an awkward pose.

Again, I’m almost certain I’ll buy the first issue. I just wish I could be anticipating it a bit more.

Rodgers Steps Out

When Keith Giffen announced he was leaving Blue Beetle after issue #10, he assured fans that the direction and style of the comic would be maintained as he turned over solo writing duties to his co-writer John Rogers.

Leaving because his schedule had just gotten too full, Giffen said he felt secure about leaving this title because he had not only put together a two-year plan for the character with Rogers, but he had complete faith in his co-writer’s ability to successfully carry on what had been started back in March when the series was launched.

Solo is the only way to go at Newsarama. (That’s funny because of the rhyming, in case you were curious)

This article confirms (like we didn’t know) that there is a big New Gods event on the horizon. So”¦there’s that.

I’m wondering, and I have not heard anything on this so there may be nothing to it, if any fans are upset/disappointed that the beetle scarab is no longer mystical in nature. Is the whole “alien tech” thing getting anybody down? If you (yes, you) are someone who is disappointed, let me know.


It doesn’t matter how much you hate us Tim, we’re still coming.

Make Way Please, Genius Speaking

With Seven Soldiers Grant Morrison created a mini-universe inside the DC Universe of heroes on the fringe with a need for change in their lives. All seven stories lead up to climactic battle but the heroes never meet. Instead Shining Knight, The Manhattan Guardian, Zatanna, Klarion, Mister Miracle, The Bulleteer and Frankenstein overcome their obstacles, both internal and external, by themselves. All of these characters’ own personal victories benefit the fight against Gloriana Tenebrae and The Sheeda, faeries from Earth’s future who feed off history and raze culture. It echoes Joseph Campbell thoughts on how the hero’s quest as a personal journey of self-improvement affects the rest of a person’s environment “the influences of a vital personal vitalizes.”

Seven Soldiers is not so much a crossover like Infinite Crisis or Civil War. It’s more of a Homeric epic for characters who always lived a step apart from the superhero mainstream. The breadth of characters in Seven Soldiers ranges from Justina the Shining Knight a teenage girl trying to pass as a male knight of Arthur’s Round Table (traveling through time she becomes something of a paradox, she is both one of the youngest and one of the oldest Seven Soldiers) to Frankenstein one of the most famous of monsters, whom in Morrison’s hands is a brooding yet honorable defender of mankind. Morrison has utilized these characters’ idiosyncrasies with all the intelligence and creativity they deserve so by the end of each tale the heroes have a gleam of both quirkiness and nobility rarely seen in superhero comics. The author reflects on the ideas and stories of Seven Soldiers.

Groove on some vintage Morrisonisms at Newsarama

If you like Morrison like I like Morrison, you’ll enjoy this brief, but not surface-y talk with him about Seven Soldiers. I don’t want to spoil it for you by quoting it”¦

Okay, maybe one, “I’d like to have them all released as a boxed set of issues that you can shuffle around and also as individual miniseries plus bookends in a sumptuous Absolute collection printed using the finest intelligent inks from Mars and Venus on paper so smooth and so sexy that one touch is like fortnight’s worth of non-stop latex sex.”

Could anyone else get away with saying something like that?

TIM’S TIRADES

What Does Goodbye Mean For Those Still Here?

So, as anyone who reads Lying in the Gutters is aware, Rich Johnston every now and again goes the extra mile and links to something in his column that may not be rumor but he still thinks is important. Once it was this very website, so feel good about being on a site with street cred.

In any case, this week he linked to what is, essentially, a confessional novel in blog form called “Saying Goodbye to Comics”. Near as I can tell, given the topical allusions to the OJ Simpson “I Didn’t Do It, But If I Did” mess, it was almost entirely written in the past week or so. It focuses on one former female comic staffer (she leaves the company nameless but you could figure it out if you tried, and if not Johnston tells you and the woman’s identity as well) letting go of comics. Believe when I tell you, however, that is about a lot more than that.

So I sat down and read it, in pieces over the past day or so. And while it is not a particularly long piece (about a dozen or so posts running a maximum of a thousand words each) it most have taken a Herculean emotional effort to get it all down in the aforementioned short burst of time. It is, by turns, shocking, darkly funny, frightening, and depressing. There is blood, sweat, and tears (literally and figuratively) all over it and it was a worthy site for Johnston to turn his eye.

And yet”¦I can’t bring myself to link to it myself.

Which is not to say I do not think it is worth reading because it is. It is heart rending and affecting and entirely absent of the woe-is-meism that often put people off autobiographical texts. But it is all so deeply personal. I felt queasy after reading it all, for a host of reasons. We’ll get to all of them, but the first was that I felt like I had picked up someone’s diary and read it without their permission. That’s ridiculous, of course, because she wrote it and put it on the net as an act of what I’d imagine to be catharsis. And still, I feel intrusive somehow. Yes, it was an act of catharsis but was it really intended for all of us to look over and take apart. She was more than likely writing it for herself mostly, does the author really want the spotlight shown on it? I’ve got no answers on that call so I’ll say it is out there if you want to hunt it down and I’ll talk about it here, but be aware that it is no random work of fiction, it’s someone’s life.

Pieces like this always trip me up. Call it my liberal guilt or male guilt or white guilt or whatever. Thrown any label you want on it but the result is the same. I feel lousy for the way things are because, often, I am completely unaware of how bad they are. Until I moved to New Jersey this past year, I’ve called five places home and all of them were in the same town (this is omitting my time in dorms during college), Newington, Connecticut. Newington was and continues to be mostly white, mostly mid middle class. There was a decent representation of non WASP cultures (in fact, WASC would be more accurate if you wanted to shoehorn Newington as Catholics had it all over Protestants, population wise), but the overwhelming whiteness was evident. However, it was not, from my perspective, a particularly exclusive town.

Certainly there were moments that turned my stomach. In 1997, an Anti-Semitic exchange between two groups (one predominantly Jewish, one not, obviously) on Halloween that led to Newington High bring in the Anti-Defamation League to teach cultural sensitivity to first a select group of facilitators (a group I was part of that, I remark now as then, was ironically short on color). More personally, I can still remember a friend’s father calling my family “dysfunctional” when I was about twelve years old because my parents had the audacity to get divorced rather than spend years and years making each other miserable and creating a gloriously unhappy home for me to come up in. Of course, it was in a nice way, as in, “I mean look at you, you came from a dysfunctional family and you’re a great kid.”

By in large, though, I came up in pretty tolerant town in an incredibly tolerant household. We were a blended family who had lost friends to AIDS when it was still shaking the label of “gay cancer”, who attended as many Bar and Bah Mitzvahs as First Communions, who thought nothing particularly strange about interracial dating. I was not an idiot, I knew everyone was not growing up like this. I just kind of figured most people my age were.

Since my early teen years, obviously, I’ve lost a lot of that naiveté. Or, at least, I think I have. Then I read things like this and my eyes are open again to how much I overestimate the general goodness of others and underestimate how”¦well, backwards, so many people still are. How could I not know that it was this bad at DC Comics for women; in comics in general? If Marvel is the Frat House of Comics and DC is, apparently, the good ol’ boys club, where the hell does that leave us? And sure, there are other companies, but none of them are as big as Marvel and DC. Working for them is “arriving”. Even if it wasn’t, who’s to say the others are all that much better?

More to the point, am I all that much better? A portion of her story does not focus on, but makes a decent amount of hay out of Identity Crisis and Sue Dibny’s rape and the thing of it is”¦I like Identity Crisis. I thought the art was uneven in places and things did not quite fit entirely convincingly when all was said and done, but I still enjoyed it. I’ve defended the element of the rape because, as I reasoned, if comics can show all manner of murder can they not also deal with rape? That’s a position I still hold, even after reading the blog. But if those on the inside were so”¦zealous about the “rape pages” do I really want to throw in with them even if I do not think rape should be “forbidden” in comics and I enjoyed Identity Crisis? Or do I even need to worry about that because, by staking out those positions, I’m “on their side” like it or not?

Eventually, with these sort of things, I drift over to “What should I do now?” Sometimes the answer is obvious. Something like this, not so much. For one thing, purely selfish, I like comics. I like Marvel Comics and I like DC Comics. I like others too, but they make up, far and away, the bulk of my reading. I also work for this website and thus, I need to read comics to do this work. But removing those two elements, because I can make the decision to stop reading the Big 2 and I quit writing for this site, things still are not easy. If I boycott DC and Marvel, do I hurt them? Well, of course, however infinitesimally. But am I also hurting people who have not done anything wrong? Possibly. Well, what if I just buy comics written by people who I know to be racially, sexually, religiously, and gender sensitive? Great, except then it is a repeat of Alias Comics all over again. Sure, by buying Lions, Tigers, and Bears I was supporting two prominent gay creators, but I was also supporting an organization that hides behind Christianity to justify its bigotry. If I buy, let’s say a Gail Simone book from DC, what part of my purchase goes to buy the salary of that editor who was so excited about the “rape pages”.

It’s similar to Wal-Mart. I don’t personally shop there because I disagree with the way their methods, with their philosophy, with the way they treat their employees. However, in my line of work, I often find myself bringing consumers to Wal-Mart to purchase toiletries, clothes, whatever. And I hate it. I get it, but I hate it. Because, at the end of the day, even if I’m not spending my money, I’m still bringing money to Wal-Mart. With comics, I’m not supporting attitudes of sexism, cruelty, racial and cultural insensitivity, and homophobia, but oftentimes my dollars certainly are.

The whole thing leaves me feeling sick, tired, and helpless.

What’s worse than all that though? I just re-read this piece and I committed what is the cardinal sin of “Women in Refrigerator” storytelling. I took a story that was all about a woman’s pain and, hopefully, redemption and made it all about a man.

So I ask again, am I really any better?

Well, that is probably an unfortunately heavy note to end on, but that’s the way it has to be. Please let me know what you think of the above piece, some other piece of the column, or the whole thing via e-mail at parallax2@juno.com or use that comment button below. It’ll take you to the Forums and we’d love to have you there.

Un Gajje, Trying to Find a Way to Be Better