{"id":3343,"date":"2010-05-12T14:37:37","date_gmt":"2010-05-12T21:37:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=3343"},"modified":"2010-05-12T14:37:37","modified_gmt":"2010-05-12T21:37:37","slug":"life-in-ivy-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=3343","title":{"rendered":"Life In Ivy Town"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the beginning of Justice League: Cry For Justice<\/em>, 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\u00c2\u00a0 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<\/em>). 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.<\/p>\n

Apparently, Ray Palmer was mistaken. Less than a month after the official announcement of an Atom<\/em> backup feature in Adventure Comics<\/em> 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, it wasn’t exactly Ryan’s call. It was Eric Wallace’s. Or Dan Didio’s.<\/p>\n

DC should not surprise me anymore, and yet it does.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>) – 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).\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> – 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.<\/p>\n

Comics have never not had their creativity driven by short-impact sales goals, but to see it done so wastefully is saddening.<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 Ryan Choi’s stint as the Atom was the first time I cared about the Atom name in at least 20 years.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I urge you to do the same.<\/p>\n

*my professional opinion is that sentiment analysis is important in marketing; DC Comics clearly disagrees with me.<\/p>\n

** 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<\/em> had an ongoing and<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At 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\u00c2\u00a0 as the emotional payoff for said villain leaving a star-shaped crater in the middle of the DCU’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,69],"tags":[254,39,11],"class_list":["post-3343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics","category-fandom","tag-atom","tag-dc","tag-dc-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}