For You Blue

For You Blue

Apr 07

I finally started to catch up on all my Infinite Crisis backreading last night, when I read Countdown to Infinite Crisis, the opening chapter in which Blue Beetle gets plugged in the brain by a batshit-crazy Maxwell Lord.

Many have said that one strange and ultimately distressing byproduct of the “new” DCU is that they seem to be gleefully dismantling the characters that made up Giffen and DeMatteis’ “bwa-ha-ha” League back in the late eighties and early nineties. So you have Sue Dinby raped, Elongated Man devastated because of it, Max Lord as an evil genius, Fire becoming a stone-cold secret agent (in the One Year Later title Checkpoint), and Blue Beetle biting the big one.

Which is, y’know, a weird thing for DC Exec Editor Dan Didio to dodio…I mean, to DO. Sorry. I certainly don’t understand it, especially since the party line over at DC is that the post-IC universe won’t be as “dark” as the pre-IC one. In other words, no more splattered brains and twisted necks.

So killing Blue Beetle is senseless from a “Didio hates KooeyKooeyKooey” angle. But in and of itself, is it a BAD thing?

That puts us right square in the dark ‘n’ gritty versus light ‘n’ airy comics debate wheelhouse, and the ancillary question of whether things like rape, graphic death, and other “mature” storylines have any place in superhero comics.

At the end of the day, here’s my take: Tell a good story, and I will forgive all. Blue Beetle died, and it was a bit of a bummer. But it was a really good comic, or at least, I thought so. A bit shameless in building up the decency and worthiness of Beetle as a character before putting the bullet in his head, but it was the GOOD kind of shameless, gripping and readable. So the death, by itself, wasn’t bothersome.

Here’s what bothers me about comic book death, though (and I say this knowing full well it can be about as permanent as a henna tattoo): It deprives others of telling their own gripping, readable yarns with those same characters.

Even as I read Countdown, knowing full well Beetle would bite it, I wanted more. I wanted a Beetle and Booster miniseries or ongoing, chronicling their relationship, which struck me as really interesting and almost poignant. There was more than a whiff of Beetle as the former wild and crazy guy who has started to grow out of his younger days, and Booster as that life of the party from college who then leaves campus and has a hard time finding his way in the world.

I can see this series. I can imagine reading it every month. Think about it–it’s the ideal follow-up to the Giffen/DeMatteis era, one that doesn’t shy away from it, but that takes a look at these same characters a few years down the line. I mean, it was a pretty infamous iteration of the League, and they were central to it. What does that do to someone once they’re a couple years removed? Regrets? Are Beetle and Booster sort of the laughing stock of the DCU, and if so (they certainly seemed kinda like it), how does THAT affect their lives?

Anyway, no point speculating, because barring a Superboy Retcon Punch (TM), Ted Kord has breathed his last.

Comic book death is like a magic trick–if it’s done right, you don’t notice the results, only the illusion. And if the magician walks off with your wallet, you’re pissed, but still–great fucking trick.