Life In Ivy Town
May 12At the beginning of Justice League: Cry For Justice, the James Robinson-penned miniseries that features Hal Jordan torturing people, Ollie Queen stabbing a villain with an arrow “for justice” and the murder of an eight year old girl as the emotional payoff for said villain leaving a star-shaped crater in the middle of the DCU’s Star City, The Atom (Ray Palmer, the classic Silver Age hero) teamed up briefly with The Atom (Ryan Choi, who replaced Palmer as DC’s shrinking superman after his retirement following Identity Crisis). In that scene, Palmer tells Choi that he wants him to continue being the Atom, that there is room enough for two men sharing the mantle. There is, after all, room for several thousand Green Lanterns, including four from Earth that currently coexist together. There are two Flashes, too and at one point two Nightwings and two Flamebirds.
Apparently, Ray Palmer was mistaken. Less than a month after the official announcement of an Atom backup feature in Adventure Comics by Jeff Lemire and Mahmud Asrar (accompanied by a tour around the comics Internet in which Lemire played coy about Choi’s fate beyond confirming that he would not appear in the story), Ryan Choi found himself on the wrong side of Slade Wilson and his new team of villainous Titans and got himself killed. Well, it wasn’t exactly Ryan’s call. It was Eric Wallace’s. Or Dan Didio’s.
DC should not surprise me anymore, and yet it does.
I’m not going to start screaming that DC is racist (though plenty of people have pointed out the White Lantern and White Power Rings that come out of Blackest Night) – I think that it’s an unfortunate side effect of the current editorial mood and not a witch hunt against characters of color (created after 1986). That mood is represented by a spiral of diminishing returns, each banking that the death of a niche character will spike fan interest/outrage* without driving off readers the way a substantial permanent change might.  So we’ll sacrifice the Chinese Atom, because he could never sell 30,000 copies a month, and in the process overlook that a vast library of characters is what makes a shared universe feel populated. Every cheap death squanders that library. Like those maniacs on fringe talk radio who rant about peak oil, we fans are becoming more and more acutely aware that DC can’t sustain itself forever on what it’s got left from 50 years ago.
The question, whether it’s at a convention or in a comic shop or on your friend’s back porch, comes up more than occasionally: why haven’t we had an iconic new character in the past twenty years – maybe even since Giant-Size X-Men #1 – or possibly, as an outlier, since Booster Gold. The answer is that nobody’s giving these characters a chance**, and nobody is clamoring to put them in front of an audience that might love them.
Comics have never not had their creativity driven by short-impact sales goals, but to see it done so wastefully is saddening.
I liked Ryan Choi. I own every appearance of the character. I enjoyed the way his brilliance was counterbalanced by his naivete and enthusiasm for his superhero lifestyle – the sense of joy he had that couldn’t help but be transferred to the reader. His romantic relationship with Giganta was as surprisingly touching as it was hilarious (and humanizing to Giganta). He was an Asian character that wasn’t a martial arts master. Ryan Choi’s stint as the Atom was the first time I cared about the Atom name in at least 20 years.
You know what? Fuck Ray Palmer. I admire Jeff Lemire and Mahmud Asrar as creators and normally, I’d be a fan of their work no matter who it featured, but I’m not going to buy it. I’m not adding Adventure Comics back to my pull list. I won’t be buying any collected editions of Ray Palmer’s adventures. Fuck Ray Palmer. This is not some outraged fanboy stamping his feet and threatening to quit DC forever – this is me making a focused promise to vote against regression and senseless death with my wallet. I urge you to do the same.
*my professional opinion is that sentiment analysis is important in marketing; DC Comics clearly disagrees with me.
** Where ‘chance’ is not defined as a series that doesn’t feature popular talent and is isolated from the current metaplot. Why did Booster Gold stick? It wasn’t because of his ongoing – it was because he was in the Justice League and had an ongoing and was visible in a noteworthy way during his era’s biggest event – the death of Superman. Why did Wolverine stick? Just because he was mysterious? Try because he was in one of the most popular books of the early 80s. Because he was on merchandise and in house ads and it took a few years of exposure to make it work. DC Comics gave Ryan Choi even less of a chance than they gave the Kate Spencer Manhunter.
Second Thoughts
May 12The Second Coming crossover event currently running through Uncanny X-Men, X-Men Legacy, New Mutants, and X-Force reaches its midpoint this week. The story centers on Hope, the so-called ‘mutant messiah’ as she returns to the present day after being raised in the bleak, post-apocalyptic future by her guardian Cable, who is himself the time-tossed son of Cyclops and his wife Maddy Pryor (the psychotic evil clone of Jean Grey created by Mister Sinister who turned into some kind of crazy witch called the Goblin Queen and hooked up with Cyclops’ brother after he ditched her and his infant son to be with his resurrected ex* who later attempted to seduce an alternate-universe version of her own son**), and the X-Men’s struggle against the forces determined to stop her from laying her messianic mojo on Marvel’s merry mutants.
So, at the halfway point, where are we? Hope has made it to Utopia, the island fortress of the X-Men, but not before Nightcrawler (and Ariel and, apparently, Vanisher) gave their lives, Magik got sent to Hell and Karma lost a leg. The legion of resurrected former X-Men villains led by the half genocidal-robot-from-the-present/half genocidal-robot-from-the-future Bastion (aka Bad 90s Concept #54) seems to be targeting teleporters (despite some messy scripting in X-Force #26 where Bastion initially ignores Nightcrawler as not being as high-priority a target as Rogue) and former Hellfire Club member Donald Pierce is free on Utopia and clearly looking to explode some of the X-Men’s stuff. Team Evil hasn’t been unscathed, though, even if they do have the upper hand at the moment. Archangel bisected anti-mutant religious leader William Stryker (the Marvel Universe version of those Westboro assholes) in a shower of gore that discriminating readers have come to expect from the members of X-Force, while Cameron Hodge (leader of the battlesuited terrorist group The Right) was taken out by the New Mutants’ Warlock.
As an outspoken fan of X-Men crossover events (I love Inferno and Messiah CompleX), I’m still up in the air about Second Coming. In a landscape where the X-Men’s biggest antagonists right now have been off-the-radar threats or their own internal bickering, the sudden prominence of Bastion’s conspiracy (which has been running through X-Force from the beginning and has never bled into the other books prior to the ramp up to Second Coming) seems kind of random and off-putting and almost punishes the readers of the other books for not wanting to pay attention to the book where all the X-Men with knives and/or claws trudge through graphic violence and teenage girl chainsaw torture.
Ostensibly, this is the story of the return of the Phoenix. At least, that’s what all the clues in the marketing materials and the cute convention panel answers have been telling us. That’s a cosmic scale story, by its very definition. It is not dead bad guys from the 80s and 90s getting their gangs back together and facing off one by one against Cyclops and Wolverine over a girl. That’s River City Ransom.
For a story that is supposed to be about Hope Summers, we’ve seen her do precious little except for drool over hair care products, sulk and bravely but ineffectually assault Bastion with a steel pipe. Other than her status as the only mutant born since the Scarlet Witch’s Decimation of the mutant populace at the end of House of M, there is nothing noteworthy about Hope save for Scott’s belief that redheaded girls have magical powers. Wolverine is right; she’d better be worth it.
As the reader, we don’t know if she is or not. Nor do we really know what the stakes are (and don’t give me ‘survival’; I’m ready for an X-Men story that isn’t just about the mutants’ fight to survive their genetic obsolescence and a villain with a plan that’s not ‘kill the mutants’). In fact, you might have noticed that Second Coming is re-serving the same story as Messiah CompleX – Cable trying to keep Hope safe, the X-Men trying to find them, random villains teaming up to take them down, Wolverine and his crack team of violent sociopaths crossing the line in order to serve the greater good. Except three years ago it had more immediacy and more impact. So far, Second Coming feels silly and bombastic, and I hope that I turn out to be wrong about it.
Have you been keeping up with Second Coming? Am I wrong? Do you love it? Don’t you just wish they’d bring Jean back already? Let us know in the comments.
*The first case of what the kids now call “resurrexting”
** I’ll admit that I’m fuzzy on the events of X-Man, but this actually happened, right? Or is this fanfic?
Lost 6.13 "The Last Recruit"
Apr 22Last time on LOST:
Nothing heals a broken heart like a bucket of chicken.
Hubby* picnic, make out, don’t get shot.
Michael is a terrible human being.
Desmond continues the long history of cast members committing car-related crimes.
Never play with dynamite.
Throw the Scotsman down the well, so the smoke monster can be free.
There was a point in time where I thought that James “Sawyer” Ford had really gotten his act together. And so it saddens me to learn that he can’t even run a con correctly anymore, can’t even anticipate a double-cross. I mean, we’ve already established that Charles Widmore is completely untrustworthy and that Jungle Strike Tina Fey is completely inept and even still they manage to pull one over on Sawyer. Did he swap bodies with Jack or something?
I love Sawyer, in a purely platonic Viking way, and I have spent most of this season waiting patiently, watching him play along with Flocke and Widmore and roll out some amazing long con that takes everybody by surprise. Because that’s what Sawyer does. Right?
To recap, this is the master plan of the professional con man:
- Convince the ageless, murderous smoke monster who knows everything about everything to walk into a trap.
- Convince Charles Widmore, who used to be the leader of the Others and who therefore knows most of the shit that’s going on the magical Bible wine bottle electromagnetic mystery island, to try to ambush the aforementioned ageless murder monster (because I cannot stress that shit enough).
- Grab (some of) your friends and ignore that the rest of them might be watching you escape.
- Sneak away in the least subtle way possible, barring Hurley playing the fucking tuba while everyone makes a run for it.
- Steal a boat.
- Take the boat to another island.
- Steal a submarine.
- Learn to pilot a submarine.
- Freedom.
Now, to be fair, things aren’t as bleak as they may seem. JSTF probably forgot to put bullets in her guns, first of all, and Desmond is probably going to come crashing out of the jungle with a machete and a Segway, cutting down Widmore’s goons and shouting “JUMP ON, BROTHER!” I don’t anticipate that our castaways are in any danger. And who knows? We may eventually find out that this was all Sawyer’s plan all along. “Well, Liz Lemon, I knew you had surveillance on our camp, so I pretended that I was good ol’ Barbecue Pit’s lapdog so that you’d try to double cross us when we defected. In fact, Mean Girls, I was counting on it.”
Meanwhile, let’s talk about Jack.
It is refreshing to finally see Jack embrace his insanity, represented by his new, “I could give two shits about my own well-being attitude” this season. He’s gone from control freak to a man who leads from the front with no regard for his own safety. He’s eaten poison, attempted to blow himself up, jumped off of a sailboat, trusted Sawyer’s ludicrous plan, et cetera. Oh, and nearly gotten hit by a missle. He is living on the edge and there is a certain, seat-of-the-pants charm to Edge Jack – he’s that crazy friend that just smiles and shrugs when you ask him what the plan is tonight.
Stuff is also happening in LA in the mirrorverse and all lines converge at St. Sebastian hospital, universes hinging on the fate of John Locke’s dural sac and shattered spine. Ilana is a lawyer! Of course she is! Sun sees Locke and flips out! Sawyer takes down Sayid! Kate displays guile, if not actual intelligence! Stuff is happening. It feels more and more to me like this timeline is some kind of monkey’s paw bullshit from the smoke monster. Sayid wants Nadia alive. She’s alive – but not in the way that he expected! And so on.
After a week of downtime, LOST is going to rocket into its final few hours and it’s still anybody’s guess how it’s going to shake out. And there’s still plenty of stuff left on the Mystery Board that hasn’t been crossed off. Next week, Matt and I will hit you with some general thoughts on the season so far and the show as a whole. For now, though, hit me with your theories and accusations in the comments.
*Hurley + Libby. Keep up.
The Bin – 4/16/10
Apr 16
Once, in ages past, four nerds banded together and vanquished the forces of darkness that lurched in squamous form across the countryside and skulked necrolently through the catacombs beneath our cities. When the threat had passed and the land was safe, they took Stuff They Liked, a bunch of Links and a Miscellany of other treasures and had them sealed away in…The Bin.
Legend foretold that the riches contained within would spill forth once again in a time of great need. A time…like today.
Nerdly Advice: Lightning Round
Apr 13Most of the time, nerds force advice onto anybody they make eye contact with. You can tell it’s coming if you hear words like “Actually.” But sometimes nerds need advice and have nowhere to turn without damaging what they believe to be their credibility as wise sages.
Nerdly Advice is a safe and anonymous haven where you can ask your nerd questions and get nerd answers full of Jeff’s delightful misanthropy. This week, we tackle several different Important Questions. Have a question of your own? Email us at nerdlyadvice (at) gmail (dot) com.
Jeff, should I buy an iPad?!
I like the idea of the iPad a lot. I’m a believer in lightweight, intuitive-interface tablet devices making a lot of changes in the way we do a lot of things (I worked in the health care industry for awhile, where I think the iPad can do huge things in terms of revolutionizing the way patient data is charted and analyzed). Some pundits can complain about the iPad murdering innovation, but what it’s really going to do is get a bunch of people in the industry off their asses and working to make a better, more user-friendly tablet while Apple will keep refining its hardware until it gets it right. I don’t believe it’s had the perfect iPod until the recent iteration of the Nano, and it cribs a lot of features from the Zune, whose newest version is basically a matter of preference over the iPod Touch – long strides from a competitor whose first offering was a joke.
The iPad has flaws. It will get better. Or a competitor will fill those gaps with a superior product. Get that. Unless you have a giant pile of money. Then you should buy two and send one to me.
What am I going to do after LOST is over?
You might want to consider falling in love or adopting a pet. Maybe starting a book club or designing a board game.
