MAX LORD

likes butter pecan.







Oh wait. Actually, now he totally hates it.

The only character from Kingdom Come I really want to see more of

I enjoyed Mark Waid and Alex Ross' series Kingdom Come immensely when it was originally released, and it's a pretty rewarding book to re-read every now and then, as each time reveals additional Easter eggs and metaphorical elbows to the ribs regarding obscure bits of DC history.

I know a lot of people have kind of fallen out of love with it over the years, or never really thought it was all it was cracked up to be in the first place, but setting the story itself aside for a moment, at the very least, it was a character design tour de force. Ross did an all-around incredible job costuming his players, and in many cases his versions of decades-old DC heroes looked much better than any previous versions (His Dr. Mid-Nite, Hourman, Starman, Red Tornado I and Dr. Fate in particular).

Ross' version of the DCU was enormously influential, and it seemed like there was a period in which the DCU was consciously adopting elements of it in an almost systematic way (Roy Harper adopted a costume closer to his Kingdom Come one, Cyborg went all liquid gold-skinned, Nuklon changed his name and started dressing more Atom-esque, etc.).

After the Infinite Crisis/52 continuity rejiggering, the Kingdom Come continuity seemed to have been merged with the new DCU. We got a were-cat version of Wildcat, a girl who looked like Red Tornado II and the Kingdom Come Starman in the JSA. A Batman/Talia kid popped up, as did a new Zatara and Plastic Man's son Offspring (From The Kingdom, not Kingdom Come, but close enough). There was a new, female Judomaster in Birds of Prey. Oh, and a bunch of super-Nazis seen in the pages of KC rampaged through the early issues of the relaunched JSoA

What's going on exactly?

Geoff Johns, who wrote the rejiggering, seems to finally be getting around to explaining that with this past week's issue of JSoA, the first chapter of a story entitled "Thy Kingdom Come," which is co-plotted by and featuring some art by Ross. Now we've got Kingdom Come Superman on the main DCU Earth, and, from the looks of upcoming covers and solicits, more Kingdom Come-ers are yet to come throughout this story arc. (At the very least, we can expect to see the KC Thunder, no relation to the Thunder Judd Winick invented in Outsiders).

But there's only one character from Kingdom Come I really want to see much more of at this point, however, and that's this guy, about to impale Whiz Kid:


I think that's his only appearance (I'd have to go through again with a magnifying glasses in the crowd scenes to be sure), but I've always been intrigued by that guy who looks to be a super-strong, humanoid church who talks in a peculiar font of his own.

According to the key in the collected trade version of the series, his name is "The Cathedral," and he's "a holy terror to the underworld." And that's literally all I know about him.

Well, that, and that I'd love to learn more about him.

Here's a headshot, pulled from the key in the back:



Man, I hope he makes an appearance in "Thy Kingdom Come."

My legal obligation as a comics blogger: A post about Stephanie "Spoiler" Brown

So I had kind of an unusual experience Friday afternoon. I was sitting in my wingback armchair, enjoying a pipe and a good book, which is how I usually spend my leisure time, when I heard a thunderous knock on my front door.

Standing on my porch were two clean-cut looking people in their mid-thirties, one male and one female, each wearing dark suits with ties and carrying expensive-looking briefcases. When I cracked the door and asked if I could help them, they said they were from the Comics Blogosphere Bureau of Regulation and asked if they could speak with me for a few minutes.

I was naturally skeptical, and told them I’d never even heard of any such an organization, but they quickly produced badges, as well as I.D.’s and some very convincing paper work.

So I welcomed them in, offered them seats and asked what they took in their tea, when they abruptly cut me off and asked me to have a seat.

From their briefcases they produced a manila folder with my name of it, full of print-outs of my past posts, a few unflattering headshots of me, and other information pertaining to Every Day Is Like Wednesday. They curtly informed me that I had yet to broach the subject of Stephanie Brown in any great detail.

For those of you who don’t know, Brown was a minor heroine in DC Comics n the 1990s and early aughts who went by the name Spoiler, was Robin IV for about fifteen minutes, and then died a violent death in one the stupidest Batman stories ever written, a distinction which would immediately be surpassed by the story that immediately followed it.

She’s also, somewhat surprisingly, become incredibly popular online (Particularly for a character who never carried her own title…or miniseries…or one shot. Or, um, solo story. Anywhere. Ever). She’s also become emblematic of online comics feminist criticism, a popular Exhibit A in the case arguing rampant sexism in Big Two comics. Mostly because Batman hasn’t erected a glass case with her uniform in it, as he did for Robin II when Robin II died.

Anyway, the two agents in my parlor this afternoon informed me that I was legally obligated to post at least 1,000 words about Stephanie Brown on my blog a year, or else risk losing my comics blogger’s license. I could appeal of course, but there was no guarantee the judge would side with me, and in the mean time they would be able to seize my blog.

All in all, it seemed far easier to comply, so here we are: A rather lomg post about Stephanie Brown.

As it turns out, the timing couldn’t be better, as it’s Stephanie Brown week at Project Rooftop, the website where talented artists redesign superhero costumes, often coming up with designs that are one hundred to one thousand times better than what DC and Marvel had previously designed for the characters.

As usual, Dean Trippe came up with the best. That’s it at the top of the post. He mixes Brown’s Spoiler costume with her Robin costume, and comes up with a look that’s better than both. If I ran DC Comics, I would have long ago put Trippe on the payroll and given him some fancy title like Senior Vice President of Teen Aesthetics and Fashion Consultant, and a one-sentence job description: “Redesign all of our teen heroes so they don’t look quite as stupid as they do at the moment.”

Trippe’s previously drawn the best Supergirl ever, the best t-shirt version of Superb*y, and a not-so-bad version of Batgirl (although I couldn’t see the Cassandra Cain version wearing either of his designs; the cape and skirt one being cooler than the Catwoman-like one).

I like Trippe’s Spoiler costume so much that it actually makes me wish DC would bring Spoiler back to life and start putting her in their comics again. Of course, that’s a popular position among people who write about DC comics on the Internet, what gives this declaration weight here? Well because, in all honestly, I never cared about Stephanie Brown one way or the other.

In fact, I find the strong emotions swirling around the Internet about her rather fascinating, as I can’t quite figure out what makes her so special. Certainly there are plenty of other Tim Drake love interests, dead or in limbo, whom no one seems to insist on seeing more of.

Just as there are plenty of other Gotham vigilantes, female or otherwise, dead or in limbo, whom no one seems to care about.

And God knows there are plenty of female supporting characters in comics who were killed in stupid stories that were, at worst, offensive and, at best, tone deaf. What makes Brown so special? Is it that she’s a little bit of each?

Trippe offers a nice, evenly toned overview of the character’s history in his intro the Project Rooftop entry.

I personally found her intriguing in her first appearances, in some of Chuck Dixon’s earliest Bat-writings, when he was still transitioning from the series of Robin miniseries to Detective Comics.


If I remember my Bat-history correctly, Brown made her first appearance in a three-part story that ran from TEC #647-#649. Dixon reintroduced second-rate Riddler The Cluemaster to Gotham (previously he had fallen far enough into joke status that he was part of the Injustice League/Justice League Antartica in the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice titles).

In addition to Batman and Robin, someone else kept spoiling Cluemaster’s schemes, and the big reveal was that it was his daughter in disguise.

It’s a neat origin for a heroine, playing off the teenagers rebelling against their parents idea, although Dixon played it straight and soap opera-y, instead of going for the inherent fun and laughs in the situation.

I’m sure in a black and white drawing, the original costume didn’t look too bad: A body suit with a hood and a full-face mask (to completely conceal her identity). But for the first few years of her existence, the costume was often hideously colored a sort of fuchsia. Sometimes it would be straight purple, sometimes more of a lavender, but more often than not, it looked fuchsia, and the sleek bodysuit was full of 90’s style ornamentation—shoulder pads, pockets, belts and straps that didn’t seem to do anything but make the costume less appealing. Additionally, the gloves, boots and mask were often more of a navy than black.

Brown began appearing in Dixon’s ongoing Robin almost immediately, and I dropped the title around that time (Not because of Spoiler; it was honestly just a coincidence).

See, Dixon is a great pop comic book writer, but he’s far better at coming up with cool action movie-like plots than character work (For a good example of this quirk of Dixon’s writing, think of just about any Dixon-written DC story of the 1990s. Okay, now change the protagonist, from Robin or whoever stars in the one you’ve chosen to Batman or Nightwing or Green Arrow or Catwoman or Black Canary. Okay, now how does the change in protagonist change the plot? Exactly).

Having seemingly abandoned the far more interesting King Snake and Lynx as Robin archenemy and love interest, Dixon started using Cluemaster and Spoiler in pretty the same roles and, well, if heroes are defined by their villains, and Cluemaster’s your main villain…

Dixon cultivated a romance between Robin and Spoiler, which seemed rather unconvincing to me (Did Tim Drake really have time for girls? As a reader his age at the time, I had a hard time suspending my disbelief enough to buy a 14-year-old high schooler who was popular, serving as Robin, keeping his secret life from his family, and had an active love life. Still, Brown was better than Tim’s previous girlfriend, Arianna, since she was actually a vigilante, giving her a leg up on people who weren’t vigilantes).


Let the record show: This costume is pretty sucky

Over the years, all kinds of questionable things would happen with the character, including her getting knocked up (not by Tim, who’s totally still a virgin I bet*.), having the baby and giving it up to adoption. It was all very after school special-y.

For a brief time, when Batman was being an especially antisocial dick, Spoiler was the only Gotham vigilante he was talking to, but her presence in Bat- stories really betrays the fact that DC wasn’t quite sure what to do with her.

One month she was blacklisted by Batman, the next he was personally training her, the next she’s retired. Then she’s Black Canary’s apprentice, then she’s blacklisted again, then she’s Robin, then she’s blacklisted again.

I never cared for her as an ongoing component in Robin, or in the Bat-books in general, where she seemed to occupy a weird space between accepted agent of the Bat Family (like Azrael, Robin, Nightwing, Oracle and Batgirl), black sheep (like Huntress) and just some random vigilante who only appeared in stories written by writers who loved her (like Anarky).

I personally only warmed to her in the pages of Batgirl, a title I came to too late. The introduction of a new Batgirl struck me as a bit random in No Man’s Land, but when I actually tried an issue of Scott Peterson, Kelley Puckett and Damion Scott’s Batgirl, I realized what I was missing.


Same costume, suddenly pretty awesome-looking

I still can’t speak highly enough of that series, particularly the first 25 issues, which comprised one big complete story. Cassandra Cain was a heroine unlike no other in the DCU, and was the closest thing to either a martial arts hero and a manga protagonist that DC Comics was publishing at the time.

That first 25 issues of Batgirl essentially comprised an ongoing conflict between father figure Batman and mother figure Oracle over how best to raise a teen vigilante, one which, interestingly enough, was pretty much the Dark Knight version of Batman if he happened to be a mute, illiterate teenaged girl. Batman treated Cain like his ultimate weapon, and Oracle wanted to convince Cain to be a real, normal human being in addition to dressing up like a bat to beat people up. Cain herself leaned toward the Batman side of the debate.

Spoiler began popping up occasionally, and the girls formed a sort of friendship based on mutual need-fulfillment. Batgirl didn’t really have any friends (Robin was the only person her own age she knew, and he was kind of terrified of her), and Spoiler gave her someone to play rooftop tag with and have the occasional brief, clipped, reluctant talk with. Spoiler, meanwhile, still wanted to be a hero, but Batman had shut her out almost completely at that point, and she looked to Batgirl for training and a bit of Bat-approval.

If Spoiler didn’t work quite as Gotham Vigilante #8, or as Robin’s girlfriend, or as an ongoing Very Special Message in the pages of Robin, she worked quite well as a supporting cast member in Batgirl.




Spoiler walks in on Batgirl during a typical destroy all mannequins training session

And damn, did Damion Scott make that costume work. Check out those huge Spider-Man-sized eyes on her mask! I love Scott’s version of Spoiler’s costume, and I suppose the fact that she stopped looking stupid went a long way towards helping me to enjoy comic book stories about her.

And then things went to hell.

During that dark period between Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, during which the quality of DC’s line of super-books began to slide, and so many of the “rules” of the fictional universe just seemed to fall apart, Bill Willingham was writing Robin. He was writing a pretty intense arc about Tim’s dad Jack Drake finally discovering his son’s secret identity, and understandably being a little pissed off that the weird millionaire he knew was secretly dressing his teenaged son up in tights and sending him against mass murderers every night.

So Drake did the responsible thing, respected his father’s wishes and quit the Dynamic Duo. So Batman turned to Brown and made her Robin. This wasn’t out of necessity. Batman’s gone thorough most of his career saying how he doesn’t need anyone else to anyone who will listen, and in cases where he needs to bounce ideas off some one or help kicking ass, it’s not like he didn’t have Nightwing and Batgirl on speed dial. No, he made Spoiler the new Robin basically as a classic Batman dick move, to shame Drake into returning.

This new status quo lasted three issues of Robin. Stephanie-Brown-as-Robin appeared in an issue of Batgirl and Teen Titans and maybe elsewhere during those months, but she was Robin far less time than Jean-Paul Valley or Dick Grayson were Batman. Or Huntress was Batgirl.

And this is why the frustration at Batman’s failure to memoralize these three months (Or, more specifically, DC’s failure to memoralize these three months through Batman) confuses me.

I don’t think anyone suspected for a moment that Stephanie Brown was ever going to be Robin for longer than a story arc, did they? Certainly it didn’t seem any more permanent than Jean-Paul Valley or Dick Grayson permanently being Batman. In fact, JPV got to be Batman for three rather sizeable story arcs.

Batman quickly fired Brown as Robin for some dumb-ass reason. Maybe because she just wasn’t as properly trained as Tim was, despite the fact that every two months or so Batman would forbid her to be a vigilante and would force her to quit training.

And then things get really stupid, because from there we get into “War Games,” one of the very worst Batman stories ever told. What makes the story so bad is its Countdownian transparency—you could almost see through the panels of art and dialogue bubbles a poorly thought-out memo listing plot points to get the various Bat-characters from Point A to Point B, no matter what. The result was a story in which all of the characters seemed to be either hysterical or stupid (or both), the events driving the plot don’t make any sense if you stop and think about them, and everyone’s actions seem to contradict their own fictional histories.

Stripped of her “R” blouse, Brown goes back to being Spoiler, and initiates a war game of Batman’s in an attempt to win his love or whatever.

The game assumes every crime boss in Gotham is stupid enough to answer an anonymous invitation in person with one body guard, and then that they would all somehow simultaneously kill each other by accident.

This somehow leads to a gang war so big that not even the combined forces of Oracle, Batman, Orpheus, Obsidian (Is that her name? The bald chick?), Batgirl, Nightwing, Catwoman, Robin and Tranatula II (Or III?) can possibly stop it.

It also hinges on Black Mask being able to go hand-to-hand with Batman, Barbara Gordon forgetting that she knows martial arts too and thinking that Black Mask could actually take Batman in a fight, and a were-scarecrow.

The centerpiece of it all? Black Mask torturing Spoiler to death with drill bits. Well, she escapes, but dies from the injuries sustained in the battle. It’s a cruel, depressing, relentlessly negative story, one which makes all of its heroes seem not only highly incompetent, but to be pretty bad people.

But as stupid as it was for DC to willingly engage in such an exploitive story with the cloud of women-in-refrigerator-ism still hanging like a thick, black cloud above them, and hard to refute claims of outright misogyny stemming from Identity Crisis leveled at them, it was also just a really, really badly told story.

The end result? Robin and Batgirl are sent to Bludhaven, Nightwing is sent to New York to go undercover as a gangster or some such shit, Batman is labeled a wanted vigilante by the GCPD like back in the old Year One days, Oracle moves to Metropolis and refuses to speak to Batman anymore, Orpheus is dead, Spoiler is dead, and, oh yeah, Leslie Thompkins, pascifist lifelong friend of Bruce Wayne, is a killer. Point B looks a lot different form Point A, and the story was just the most direct line between them, quality be damned.

That radical shift in the status quo was revealed to be little more than poorly-planned random change for change’s sake a few months (our time, a year Batman’s time) later, however, when the various Bat-characters would get another radical shift, for the most part, in the direction of their pre-“War Games” status.

One Year Later, Batman had adopted Robin, and the pair of them were in Gotham and on better terms with the police than ever before. Nightwing was back in the fold, although sent to New York to star in some exceptionally shitty stories (even by Nightwing standards). Batgirl was suddenly the Totally Evil Leader of the League of Assassins (I’m still waiting for the reveal that that’s the Earth-3 Cassandra Cain we’ve been seeing…the various “fixes” to the original shitty Robin arc don’t match up at all). Oracle seems to be speaking with Batman, but she’s still steering clear of Gotham City. Leslie Thompkins is simply not spoken of. Spoiler and Orpheus are still dead.

And there’s no memorial case in the Batcave for Robin/Spoiler.

Is this a big deal? I don’t think so. And I don’t think there ever will be one there, either.

If fans didn’t start asking about it, I doubt anyone at DC would ever have even entertained the thought. The fact that Robin II still has a case likely has more to do with the fact that artists drawing the Batcave know from experience that the five things that signify a drawing of a cave as a drawing of the Batcave are a dinosaur, a giant penny, a computer, a parked Batmobile and a glass case with an old-school Robin costume in it.

I assume any Bat-artist drawing the cave could have drawn a Stephanie Brown-related memorial case in if they wanted to**, especially since clearly DC’s not real big on editing art to make sure characters are on model or that long dead people don’t accidentally cameo these days.

But of course, once fans started asking about a second, Stephanie Brown-specific case, then editors had to start thinking about one, and the obvious answer is that, “Good God, memoralize one of our greatest mistakes?! Why would we want to do that?”

I’m assuming DC wants to simply forget “War Games” and “War Crimes” ever happened (they’ve undone almost all of the changes effected by them already) and a memorial to the fallen Stephanie Brown would double as a memorial to those stories, just as the memorial to Robin II has always served as a memorial to “A Death in the Family.”

So I don’t think we’ll be seeing a case there ever, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.

Will we ever see Stephanie Brown again? That’s a more interesting question, I think.


Like I said near the beginning of this post, she was never really that popular a character. She was popular enough to guest-star here and there, but never carried a title of her own (Hell, Anarky got a mini and a monthly). So I don’t think there’s any kind of financial impetus to bring her back to life. And creatively, I think resurrection stories are to be avoided at all costs, because they simply erode the drama of death in your fictional universe.

But then, there was no real financial impetus to bring Jason Todd*** back to life, or Ice, and DC resurrected them both since Brown died. And both of those were accomplished in the most pedestrian, random ways (A character in another comic punching the walls of continuity in the case of the former, magic herbs in the case of the latter).

Hell, Spoiler’s fellow minor Bat-characters have had even more goofy resurrections.

Lynx, who, like Spoiler, died in “War Games,” simply appeared alive again in Robin…at least long enough to be killed by Batgirl a few panels later. Killer Moth, who was torn apart in Infinite Crisis, similarly just appeared alive again in “Face The Face.”

Next month, totally dead forever Ra’s al Ghul is expected to return to life in a storyline called “The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul.”

So maybe Stephanie Brown did come back to life along with Lynx and Killer Moth in the Infinite Crisis/52 rejiggering, and she just hasn’t made the scene yet.

Or maybe she’ll come out of a Lazarus Pit like Ra’s in the next issue of Robin.

Or a Spoiler from one of the other 51 Earths will immigrate to the main one.

Or maybe the upcoming Final Crisis will involve some sort of final continuity rejiggering, which will essentially undo all of the stupid things that were done between Identity Crisis and Final Crisis, including all of “War Games.”

If and when she does return, however, I hope she’s wearing that outfit Trippe designed for her.






* Although I bet if we wonder if Robin’s gay enough, Dixon will be sure to write a story in which Robin totally bangs a bunch of chicks.


**Does Batgirl I have a memorial in the cave? In some stories there’s a glass case containing Barbara Gordon’s costume right next to Jason Todd’s. In others, there’s a glass case containing it elsewhere in the cave. In plenty of stories, there’s no sign of one, but then, in plenty of stories there’s no sign of a penguin statue, an assortment of penguin umbrellas, or Batman costumes either, but in other stories there are.


***Oh sure, it probably boosted sales on Batman for exactly one arc, and helped get Judd Winick more royalties off a short run on the title than he otherwise would have, but it’s not like we’re going to be getting a Red Hood miniseries or monthly. Or a Red Hood/Jason Todd movie. Or even DC Direct toys. Jason Todd doesn’t even have a marketable name or look at the moment; he’s just a secret identity of a former superhero.

Same old complaining, brand new example

While flipping through some Green Lantern comics in a search for images to illustrate some silly post or another, I was a little surprised to see this:


You know what that is? It's part of an extensive two-page timeline chronicling every significant event in the history of the Green Lantern franchise, going all the way back to the dawn of the Oan race (ten billion years ago) and stretching all the way into the 58th Century. It's from 1998’s Green Lantern Secret Files and Origins #1, and compiled and written by Scott Beatty, a very talented comics writer who’s pulled a ton of this sort of research-oriented duty, and is currently providing the back-up origins in Countdown.

I knew JLA Secret Files and Origins #1 had a League-specific timeline (written by Phil Jimenez), as did New Gods Secret Files and Origins #1 (John Byrne). I'm not sure, but is it possible that these timelines were included in each of the first round of Secret Files and Origins specials? I don’t have ‘em, but Superman, Batman, Flash and Wonder Woman also had specials that year.

Either way, even if it's just those three, when coupled with the timeline at the end of Zero Hour, the post-Crisis history of the DC Universe is pretty rigorously laid out, in easily accessible books. (Certainly if my own longboxes have them, these timelines have to be floating around DC HQ too, right?)

As I've ranted and raved about pretty much non-stop since, I found the continuity rejiggering of Infinite Crisis* kind of galling because having a second continuity house cleaning Crisis is counterproductive (essentially de-streamlining the original, making the fictional universe unfriendly to newcomers and diehards alike) but, more so, because the specific changes didn’t seem particularly well thought out, or even agreed upon.

Over a year later, what they are exactly, and how they effect the characters and settings and stories is largely still up in the air. Certainly next to nothing has been done with those changes, which would have at least made the case for the changes. But, say, it didn’t give us Wonder Woman: Year One or a new Secret Origin of the Justice League or anything.

The big changes were trumpeted in IC itself—Wonder Woman founded the League again, Batman caught his parents’ murderer again, Clark Kent was Superboy again (despite the fact that DC apparently can’t use that name).

But I've yet to see any of these either explored or exploited for the sake of new stories.

Wonder Woman being a founder has only been touched on as background noise in Brad Metlzer's JLoA, where he stuck her in some flashbacks she otherwise wouldn’t have been in.

The Batman collar of Joe Chill hasn't been mentioned again since IC. Unless resolving that issue was supposed to be part of the motivation for Batman being slightly less of a paranoid psychotic asshole now, which lets some of the steam out of the character development he received previously in IC.

The tweaks of the Superman origin has just been hinted at, again as background noise in a Metlzer story and in coy musings over whether or not Superman would ever execute someone in Superman #666. What’s demonstrably changed has been laughingly minor—Jor-El had a beard now, maybe?

Beyond those changes, exactly as I've phrased them, as broad and unspecific as "Wonder Woman was a founder" may sound, nothing's been done to hammer out any of the details, or even seemingly agreed upon. Even a simple matter, like whether Wonder Woman found the League instead of Black Canary, or in addition to her.

This 52 back-up origin implies that Wonder Woman was there but Canary was not. According to this 52 back-up origin of the League, the First Five were still the First Five, and Trinity were said to come later, though they’re also called “co-founders.” Brad Meltzer’s JLoA has Wonder Woman there instead of Canary, but then it also mistakes Aquaman II for Aquaman I, and perpetrated the conclusion of “The Lightning Saga.” Black Canary implies the two women were both there at the beinning, while the most recent JLA Classified issue, the one kicking off “The Ghosts of Mars” story, has Wonder Woman present for a cameo by the heroes that would form the League, but not Canary.

The overall impression is that no one at DC really knows what the history of their universe is anymore, and that the canonical history of what stories “count” and which do not, which was carefully managed, at times maniacally so, over a course of decades isn't really important anymore. As an editorial and creative entity, the company seems to be just thrashing and flailing about out of sheer desperation, flying by the seat of its collective, metaphorical pants.

Now, when I argue about this with myself, as I've done here in front of you guys, like, dozens of times already, I like to point out to myself that, "Hey, maybe continuity doesn't matter. Maybe great stories is all that matters, and DC editorial has made a conscious decision to emphasize individual stories over collective history."

That’s a legitimate worldview, or “universeview,” I guess, for DC editorial to take.

But DC's storytelling doesn't reflect that decision at all, and not just because the quality is so often lacking. Take a look at just at Countdown, and a few of stars of DC’s biggest, best-selling and, for better or worse, line-defining series.

When talking about Countdown: Arena earlier this month, I mentioned that Countdown player Captain Atom-as-Monarch is a character and story arc that's 16 years old, and has been spread out over the course of five miniseries and an ongoing during that time.

Eclipso? See 1992'sEclipso: The Darkness WIthin, the short-lived Eclipso monthly, the second-to-last volume of The Spectre ongoing, Identity Crisis, Day of Vengeance (and it's godawful Judd Winick/Ian Churchill lead-in story from the Super-titles) and now Countdown To Mystery.

Jimmy Olsen? He's exhibiting powers, knowledge and relationships from before Crisis On Infinite Earths, so we're talking the Jimmy Olsen adventures of the 1950's through early '80s here.

Donna Troy? See dozens of stories spread through several Titans titles, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, DC Presents: The Return of Donna Troy, and Crisis.

Jason Todd? There's seminal Batman arc "A Death in the Family” from the 1980s, yearlong Batman story arc "Under the Hood," and maybe "Hush" and an arc of Nightwing (Or are we all just pretending the Bruce Jones-written Nightwing run never happened?)

That’s just some of the main players in a single DC ongoing. Clearly the company hasn’t chucked the idea that their stories need to continue from previous stories, only that they need to agree amongst themselves and with their readers as to what previous stories there are, as the rejiggerings constantly shift what’s part of the DCU’s canonical history and what isn’t.

Essentially, the company wants to tell continuity-dense stories based on trivia spread across decades, but they don’t want to define and master that trivia.

And, to get back to my point, that’s what made seeing these old Secret Files & Origins timelines so frustrating.

It would have been so easy for Dan Didio and some high muckety-muck editors to meet with some of their bigger, world-building writers and talk about the direction of the fictional universe, in the process busting out photocopied versions of all these timelines and simply crossing out a line here, writing a character name in there.

If they weren’t completely overhauling continuity in their rejiggering, but simply tweaking some details (More of a Zero Hour than a Crisis on Infinite Earths), then this wouldn’t even take much work. After the changes were decided on, Scott Beatty or Phil Jimenez or a freaking intern could take a red pen to these timelines and retype them for future reference.

For example, Jimenez’s JLA timeline covers the ten years of DCU time that passed from the formation of the League to the reformation as the Big Seven, dream team line-up under Grant Morrison and company. It’s a damn thorough two pages, slotting every line-up change and seminal event—death, marriage, new HQ, company-wide crossover—along the time line, squeezing at least a brief mention every single JLA story in there.

Updating it would mean merely adding two or three years (“One Year Later” and the year or so that probably passed since The Watchtower was built on the moon), summarizing the last volume of JLA, and then making whatever changes to history occurred.

The first sentence that says, “Justice League of America forms (with Martian Manhunter, Flash [Barry Allen], Green Lantern [Hal Jordan]…)” could either have “Black Canary II” replaced with “Wonder Woman,” or “Wonder Woman” added. There. Question solved, problem resolved.

DC didn’t even have to publish these updates, so long as the editors and writers were all apprised of them. Although, publishing them in Secret Files and Origins specials or annuals or something would have been smart. Imagine a JLoA Secret Files and Origins #1, with a new time line, a Meltzer written ten-page story, lots of filler material, and pin-ups by Meltzer’s buddies and admirers in the industry, with text letting new readers know things like who the hell “Jeckie” from the future is, or why anyone should give a shit about Geo-Force or whatever. Looking at how every other comic with the words “Justice” and “Meltzer” on it sold over the course of the last year, I’m pretty sure a SF&O special, even one with precious little Meltzer-created content, would have done pretty well for DC. And, if it included an updated timeline, a lot of fan rage would be quelled, and a lot of future errors by writers and editors would have been prevented at the outset.




* Well, in actuality, the rejiggering wasn't even a single, clean, definable event in a single book, but a slow, agonizing process spread over several books over the course of several years. There were the Superboy punches leading up to it, which rejiggered a few isolated aspects, like whether Max Lord was an evil human being or a decent cyborg, and whether Jason Todd was dead or alive, there was the creation of “New Earth” in ICand the alterations of the time lines of all 52 Earths in the new, unknown multiverse that was revealed in 52 #52.

(Anecdotal) evidence against the existence of DC's "Trinity"

Since around the time of Kingdom Come or so, DC has been pushing the idea that Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman comprise “The Trinity” of the DC Universe’s superheroes.

According to this Trinity theory, they’re the three greatest heroes in the DCU, the ones all other heroes look up to, and are in essence the caretakers of that fictional universe. Together they form the points on the triangle of DC superherodom, three sides of the same coin.

I’ve never really bought into it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Wonder Woman, and think she’s great and all, but making the World’s Finest duo into a trio has always struck me as a little forced and awkward. Maybe she is one of the DC’s longest lived heroes (along with Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Green Arrow, and I don’t know if you want to count Robin, The Flash, Green Lantern and the other Golden Age legacies or not), and maybe she is by far one of the most iconic and best known, but there’s still a huge gap between Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman.

I think that among DC’s superheroes, there is basically Superman and Batman, and Everyone Else, with Wonder Woman firmly in the Everyone Else category, even if she’s at the top of that particular heap.

That’s looking at the characters here in the real world, of course. Wonder Woman’s place on a trinity makes even less within the context of the DCU, if we imagine ourselves living in that fictional setting, and the characters that share it as real.

Post-Crisis (on Infinite Earths), her continuity was rebooted to make her a newcomer to the DCU, years after Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, Black Canary, Elongated Man, Changeling, Cyborg, Black Lightning, um, Wonder Girl and others debuted. Even taking into account her natural leadership, her impressive powers and undeniable skills, it seems hard to swallow that in that short time she’d shoot up the hero hierarchy into the top three, while Aquaman and J’onn were still having to justify whether or not they belong to be counted as part of a “Big Seven” or not.

Now, the Infinite Crisis/52 rejiggering “restored” Wonder Woman to founder status, but not in any tangible way. We’ve just been told that she’s a founder again, we don’t really have any stories about Wonder Woman in the early years of the League, or debuting around the same time as the other two points of the Trinity. There’s been nothing done in the way of nailing down or delineating Wonder Woman’s new history or timeline, which makes the rejiggering of it even more confusing.

As far as I can tell from what DC’s published since, the sole reason Wonder Woman’s entire history was retconned was so that Brad Meltzer could write the first few issues of the JLoA relaunch however he wanted, whether they contradicted prior stories or not.

(Must…resist…urge…to talk about…Meltzer…!)

So, the Trinity—I’ll buy the concept, there are certainly arguments to be made that those three heroes do indeed belong together as the co-monarchs of the DCU, but I never see anything in the way of evidence to support that theory, while I do see evidence to suggest otherwise.

Evidence like this.

Now, this is completely anecdotal, and not exactly the best criteria by which to judge whether or not Wonder Woman (or Superman or Batman) is worthy of her (their) place in the Trinity, but it’s a criteria, so let’ see how they stack up.

This then, is the popularity contest…or at least, the popularity within the direct market contest. (And it should be noted that this doesn’t have any bearing as to whether or not the Trinity would be looked at as a Trinity within the fictional DCU; good universe comic writing has to be done under the belief that the characters are all “real,” and thus what happens in the real world shouldn’t really have any impact what happens on their “real” world).

First, let’s look at the number of books the various DC heroes move each month. Looking at the numbers available here for the DC books sold in the direct market in the month of July, and removing all of the books that exist outside the DCU continuitiverse (the All-Stars and the like) or feature teams or ensembles instead of individuals (JLoA, JSoA, Countdown), here are the rankings of the individual DC superheroes in order of popularity:

1.) Batman

2.) Green Lantern

3.) Flash

4.) Wonder Woman

5.) Superman

6.) Supergirl

7.) Green Arrow

8.) Black Canary

9.) Nightwing

Okay, I admit, this reallllly caught me off guard. I expected Wonder Woman not to be in the top three, but I certainly didn’t expect her to be beaten out by GL and Flash, or for all three of them to be out-selling Superman.

Of course, this is just one particular month, and there are factors that could account for the rankings here—Flash going through that weird death of one Flash, return of another thing and its accompanying solicit fake-out returnability scam thing in July, Green Lantern seeing a Sinestro Corps spike, Superman suffering from a never-ending string of fill-ins, etc.

But just going by this month’s chart, Wonder Woman is DC’s fourth most popular character, not one of it’s top three. And Superman’s it’s fifth. So if we were to pick a trinity by the number of books being sold in July, well, it looks like Batman, Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Flash Dead Bart Allen would be our Trinity.

The other, and perhaps more accurate way, to test a characters' current popularity would be to look at how many books they’re able to support in the current market place. And by that standard, Superman shoots back up to the top of the heap, and Wonder Woman still can’t break the top three.

If we eliminate Justice League of America (which, if one wanted to argue the point, is kinda sorta a Wonder Woman book…but not any more so than it is a Batman or Superman or Hal Jordan or Black Canary or Red Tornado book), and the books from different continuitiverses (although it’s telling that Superman and Batman are the only characters with ongoing monthlies set in the DCU and set outside of it), here’s how the heroes stack up:


1.) Batman (Batman, Detective Comics, Batman Classified and co-stars in Superman/Batman. The argument could also be made that Robin, Nightwing and Catwoman are all Batman books too, in that they star Batman’s supporting cast. No other hero in the DCU has a supporting cast popular enough to support spin-offs featuring them, save the next two, who have one spin-off each).


2.) Superman (Superman, Action Comics, Superman Classified, and co-stars in Superman/Batman. Supergirl is a sort of spin-off, and that spin-off has it’s own spin-off in Supergirl and the Legion of Superheroes…the Legion also being, at least historically, a spin-off of another Superman spin-off, Superboy).

3.) Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) (Green Lantern, and various elements of the Green Lantern franchise currently appear in Green Lantern Corps)

4.) Flash and Wonder Woman (Flash, and Wonder Woman. It’s worth noting too perhaps that Blue Beetle, like Flash and Wonder Woman, has his own solo ongoing and appears in a super-team book now).

So based on this also not terribly scientific method, Wonder Woman is vying with the Flash for fourth place on the Trinity, which is made up of Batman, Superman and Green Lantern Hal Jordan.




A third way to measure the DC heroes’ popularity is to look at the numbers of trades featuring each of their heroes that DC has published.

In the past, DC generally only collected well-received, in-demand comics that had become too hard to find as singles into the trade paperback form. Increasingly, original graphic novels started appearing, as did collections of books that were perceived to have some sort of historical importance (within the history of the medium, or the history of the fictional universe).

Of course, these days, when the direct market is slowly lumbering toward a straight-to-trade business model (whether it admits it to itself or not), DC seems to collect just about everything they publish in trade, whether the series are widely reviled (Flash: The Fastest Man Alive), or sells extremely poorly in singles (Manhunter, Blue Beetle).

Still, if we look at dccomics.com for available trades, will find lists compiling trades that fit each of these criteria. Going back to my original statement that DC superheroes are actually separated into Batman, Superman and Everybody Else, DC’s DCU books are broken up the exact same way on their home page. Batman and Superman each have their own pages to hold the huge list of trades featuring them and their supporting casts and villains, while Wonder Woman’s books appear on a page simply marked “DC Comics”, which features the rest of the DCU books—team books, crossovers, those of individual heroes.

Doing a quick count, (and just of the page that says "DC Comics," it looks like this is how the heroes stack up, if we assume Batman and Superman are #1 and #2 on this particular list:

3.) Green Lantern (25)

4.) Wonder Woman (21)

5.) Flash (16)

6.) Green Arrow (11)

7.) Hitman (5)

8.) Hawkman and Aquaman (4 each)

9.) Lobo and Manhunter (Kate Spencer) (3)

10.) Martian Manhunter, Hawkgirl, Plastic Man and Blue Beetle (2 each)

By this not terribly scientific (and questionably accurate) criteria, Green Lantern would appear to be the third most popular…until you realize a few of those are Green Lantern Kyle Rayner books, which may be enough to push Wonder Woman back up into third place (How to separate the GL books is kind of tricky though…Is Emerald Knights a Kyle story or a Hal story? What about Emerald Twilight/New Dawn?)

So by this criteria, Wonder Woman probably does deserve the third spot on the Trinity, but man, what a huge difference there is between her and Superman and Batman, in terms of trade paperbacks published.

EDILW Presents: Wonder Woman Wednesdays!

Wonder Woman’s had a rough time of things lately.

She’s the First Lady of Superheroes, a position she’s earned by, um, being the first lady superhero. She’s one of only three Golden Age comic book characters whose adventures have been in continuous publication from the time she was created to the present (You know the other two). She’s one of the most widely recognized comic book characters in the world, even among the “civilian” population.

The lady deserves some respect, you know?

But what does she get instead? I don’t know—what’s the exact opposite of respect?

The rejiggeirng of DC’s fictional universe that occurred in Infinite Crisis drastically changed Wonder Woman’s status quo in the company’s shared setting, so that the decades-old rejiggering of Crisis On Infinite Earths was de-rejiggered, apparently knocking George Perez’s run on her title out of continuity/canon (And here’s a dispiriting thought: This is apparently no longer canon, but this is).

At the same time, her series, which was experiencing one of it’s rare peaks in quality thanks to writer Greg Rucka’s acclaimed run on the title, was cancelled to make room for a brand-new Wonder Woman series, to be written by relative newcomer Allan Heinberg (Whose previous comics credits included maxiseries Young Avengers and co-writing a JLA arc with Geoff Johns).

In relaunching the title, Heinberg took his clues from the 1970s TV show, introducing a new, nostalgic/retro status quo that was more in keeping with the Wonder Woman of the ‘60s and ‘70s then the one readers have followed the last 20 years in comics (and, in the past few years, on the Justice League cartoon).

This Wonder Woman had a Clark Kent-like secret identity (Diana Prince, an Amazonian secret agent who wore her hair up and a pair of shaded glasses) and worked for the U.S. government’s Department of Meta-Human Affairs. She’d stepped down from her role as ambassador, thus leaving the world stage to be a secret agent and fight supervillains. Heinberg delivered the first four-issues of an intended five-issue run over the course of a year before DC removed him from the schedule due to missed deadlines.

Next up was a not-very-good one-issue fill-in story, making way for best-selling author Jodi Picoult. Rather than giving Picoult the sort of carte blanche they’d given best-selling author Brad Meltzer with the Justice League characters in Identity Crisis and Justice League of America or Heinberg on Wonder Woman, Picoult was assigned to write a six-issue arc that built on Heinberg’s new version of the character. (Imagine instead a Picoult-written miniseries or original graphic novel, in or out of continuity).

If Heinberg’s Wonder Woman was mediocre, Picoult’s was actually terrible.

Like Heinberg, she ignored much of the last 20 years or so worth of Wonder Woman stories (Perhaps rightly so, perhaps not, depending on Wondy’s continuity, which no one knows the status of post-Infinite Crisis). In addition to keeping Heinberg’s innovations of a secret identitied-up ex-Goddess of Truth who’s trying to learn what it’s like to be an ordinary human buy hunting superhumans as a secret agent, Picoult played Wonder Woman as a fish out of water character who can’t order coffee, pump gas or work turnstiles, all of which seems…off. (If she’s a founding Justice Leaguer again post-Infinite Crisis, as IC and JLoA have made clear, that means she’s spent at least the last 11 years living in the United States, on more than one occasion living with normal American families and even working in a fast food joint).

It’s hard to say just how much of the title’s current suckiness is Picoult’s fault and how much is editorial’s. At any rate, the results have been a story featuring the dense continuity that keeps new readers from easily getting into a comic (at the least, you'll have to have read about Max Lord's killing and the previous story arc of the title, and Manhunter sure wouldn' hurt) accompanied (ironically) by the sort of continuity errors that keep hardcore fans from supporting the book.

Picoult on Wonder Woman should have been a creative, public relations and sales slam dunk for DC (and were she writing a miniseries or original graphic novel, it probably would have been), but instead it’s simply turned into strike two on their Wonder Woman relaunch.

DC’s already announced the next writer: Gail Simone. Simone is a very good comic book writer (in addition to being a woman), a writer who at her absolute worst is still guaranteed to be able to deliver stories at least as good as Heinberg’s, but on a monthly rather than quarterly schedule. Which is great news.

The bad news? Simone’s Newsarama interview intimates that she’ll be working with the post-Infinite Crisis status quo, and, of course, there’s still four more issues of Picoult’s run, and another two-issue fill-in stint, before Simone takes over.

But not all is bleak for the Amazing Amazon! We at EDILW are planning to do our part to make things a little less grim for our favorite star-spangled shorts rocking heroine, which is why we’re launching a new feature this week—Wonder Woman Wednesdays. Each Wednesday we’ll have a Wondy-centric post, and the plan is to keep ‘em up coming at least until Simone begins her run on Wonder Woman or we run out of funny Golden Age panels to post out of context and make bad jokes about, whichever comes first.

Twelve Things That Kinda Bugged Me About Justice League of America #7

1.) The Semi-Mandatory Variant Covers: Every single issue of JLoA has featured variant covers, which seems counterintuitive to me (If Brad Meltzer is such a draw that DC thinks he’ll be bringing “civilian” readers into their universe, why set up one of the direct market’s most peculiar stumbling blocks between them and the story in the book?), but at this point, I’ve come to accept that I’ll have to put up with a Michael Turner cover each month, or, if I want to shell out $5 extra bucks my local comic shop charges for a variant, I can get a Marvel-style “iconic” image of a random Justice Leaguer posing in an image created by the likes of the incredibly talented Arthur Adams or Adam Hughes.

This issue, however, featured three variants, and, as with JLoA #1, the standard edition features one half of an image. It’s a really nice image (that's it above; you can see it better here), featuring the current League line-up drawn by regular penciller Ed Benes, with five background panels by different artists featuring characters from past line-ups. (Or for $8.25, I coulda got an image of Wonder Woman flying kicking empty space, while two dinosaurs stalked her in the background, courtesy of Michael Turner).

Sure, I could quibble about that image (J’onn and Batman should be reversed, and Plastic Man’s wearing a turtleneck for some reason), but it’s a fairly nicely composed image (particularly for Benes) which acknowledges Justice League history and some of the artists that made it great. But, like I said, each variant has half of the image, so if you want a complete cover, you have to buy two copies of the damn comic book. I like the image, but I don’t like it enough to pay and extra $2.99 to possess the other half of it. (I don’t know how many others feel this way; if a lot of people do buy two issues to get the whole cover, well, that might explain why JLoA sells over 90,000 copies a month, making it one of DC’s biggest sellers).



2.) Inconsitent “Datelines”: Okay this is a seriously small nit, but I’m going to go ahead and pick it because that is just how anal I am. It's either complain about this shit online, or disnfect all my doorknobs twice a day people.

The first page of the story opens with the words “Gotham” and “The Cave” in yellow, scroll-shaped boxes. This is to tell us where we are, apparently. (The fact that it’s a cave containing Batman and a few bats flitting about would probably clue us in that this is the Batcave, but never mind that).

But when we shift scenes to Vixen, Hawkgirl and Arsenal accepting, there’s no dateline. Why tell us where one scene is, but not these three (Additionally, while the first setting is easily recognizable to anyone who’s ever heard of Batman, where the hell is this long scene featuring Arsenal, Hal Jordan and Black Canary occurring? A house or apartment or hotel room? Whose? Does it matter? Does it matter less than what cave full of bats Batman was in?).

The scene will similarly change several times, as we check in with Vixen on a city street, Red Tornado in his house, the new JLA HQs, and with Professor Ivo and Doc Magnus and Green Arrow. About half of the setting changes have “datelines,” and half don’t.

Like I said, it’s not a terribly big deal, but I mention it for two reasons. First, JLoA has an awful lot of verbal information in boxes in its panels; much of it a touch unclear. So anywhere it can be cut back on, why not cut it back?

Secondly, one of the key components of goodness in a work of art, according to that Aristotle fellow, is consistency and uniformity within the whole toward a single purpose. This is (one minor) example of inconsistency in this book. It’s not just this one, either; 52, the other DC book I’m tremendously excited about, is very inconsistent in it’s use of datelines, and, even worse, in the point-of-view. I mention this almost every time Montoya appears, but she first-person narrates most of her scenes, while the rest of 52 is unnarrated, told from an omniscient point-of-view, as most comics with sizable casts are. In 52, it’s a huge flaw that will keep a very, very good comic from being a great one.

At the risk of getting off-topic so early in my list, comics don’t really need narration at all. It took the mainstream of the medium an awful long time to learn that lesson (Seriously, pick up any Archive, Essential or Showcase and see how often the characters explain in their thoughts to themselves what they’re doing). Obviously, they can and sometimes should have narration—it’s hard to imagine Frank Miller’s Batman without it, for example—but it’s not needed, and unless it’s adding something, it’s just a waste and a distraction.

In the comic book we're discussing at the moment, for example, you could probably tell Red Tornado is going through a kinda hard time by now in the curt way he accepts League membership and walks briskly away from his wife. Hearing Black Canary narrate that "Just because you can't fly-- --doesn't mean you're not in a cage" doesn't really make that any more clear, does it?



3.) Production Inconsistencies: And speaking of inconsistencies and unnecessary narration, the latter is a problem with Meltzer’s comics writing in general, and makes reading (and, I assume, coloring, lettering and editing) his books a bit more difficult.

For example, on page four Roy Harper has blue eyes. On page five, his mask makes his eyes appear pupil-less. On page six, he has green eyes.

Not a big deal, really. But the color-coded narration boxes, which are also sometimes color-coded dialogue boxes, when there are quotes in them (I think), can suffer similar mistakes and, thus, confuse things. The jump between page six and seven has Hal’s spoken dialogue appear in a Black Canary-colored dialogue carry-over box. When we get to the fold-out, some of Hal’s dialogue is continued from a Hal-colored box into a pure white one, and with another scene between the elipses. I’ve looked over the section of the book a few times, and I can’t tell if there were pages put in the wrong place, or if the fold-out folds out in the wrong direction, or if I just can’t figure out how to read the comic (And this is another problem from “civilians,” I think; I’m pretty much a semi-professional comic book reader, and I get totally lost reading JLoA occasionally. How difficult to read will it be if it’s one of your very first comic book?).

(Update: Below in Weekly Haul's comments section, Jason says Meltzer says some pages were out of order)



4.) Roy Harper Becomes Red Arrow: After Robin became Nightwing, the rest of the first generation of sidekicks gradually adopted new costumes and codenames, becoming not just kid versions of their mentors, but superheroes in their own right with their own codenames and powers. Donna “Wonder Girl” Troy became Troia, Garth/Aqualad became Tempest and Roy “Speedy” Harper became Arsenal, using the sharp eye he gained from years as an archer to become an expert in other projectile weapons, from firearms and crossbows to shuriken and bolos. During Devin Grayson and Rick Mays’ 1998 four-issue Arsenal miniseries, this developed into something of a superpower, in which he could make just about anything a deadly weapon, since he could throw it so accurately.

Roy, like Donna Troy, was a character that DC couldn’t seem to stop futzing with, and new directions and costumes came fast and furious over the past two decades or so. Some directions worked better than others, just as some costumes looked better than others, but Arsenal became a dependable ensemble player, from the end of Marv Wolfman’s New Titans to first Dan Jurgens’ and then Grayson’s and her successors Titans titles to Judd Winick’s The Outsiders and, less frequently, Green Arrow.


(Above: The first and worst of the Arsenal costumes. It's very...purple)

During the last seven issues of JLoA, Meltzer has done a pretty great job with Harper (he’d previously wrote a hell of Harper story in Archer’s Quest), acknowledging the “Hard-Travelling Heroes” era of Green Arrow and Green Lantern Hal Jordan’s respective careers while seemingly moving it forward.

Now, I love Roy Harper (despite having read relatively few genuinely good Harper/Arsenal stories, I find myself really liking the character), and am thrilled to see him on the JLoA, even if he seemed like the third most likely archer to join (to Meltzer’s credit however, this final chapter makes sense of why Harper would beat out former Leaguer Oliver Queen and former Leaguer Connor Hawke for a spot on the new League).

And a costume change is well past due; his Outsiders look was simply an appropriation of Ultimate Hawkeye from Marvel’s The Ultimates look, perhaps justified by the fact that Ultimate Hawkeye appropriated Harper’s “power,” but not cool nonetheless.

Even putting him in his “Red Arrow” duds would have been fine. Alex Ross first dressed him in that costume in out-of-continuity Kingdom Come, but Dan Jurgens gave Roy a similar costume during his “Then and Now” arc of Teen Titans, and he wore it right up until it was shredded in a fight during his miniseries. The Jurgens version is a nice looking costume (the Ross version featured a goatee and hat), and probably the best of all of those worn by Roy.

But why does he have to change his name to “Red Arrow” to go along with it?

Arsenal is a better name. First, it matches his “power” better (the best superheroes, Grant Morrison has said repeatedly in interviews, are those iconic ones who’s name tells you everything you need to know about them and their powers…contrast The Flash with Bishop, for example). And secondly (and more importantly), it’s not derivative of Green Arrow, allowing Harper to stand on his own better as a character and avoiding a redundancy in the DCU, which is something Dna Didio talked a lot about getting rid of around the time of Infinite Crisis (which is why the Bat-Family was whittle down and, presumably, why Kyle Rayner became Ion and Nighwing was temporarily on the theoretical chopping block…at least in Didio’s head).

But “Red Arrow” doesn’t make sense from a character standpoint, either. Roy simply says “Family business. Family name.” But why now all of a sudden? He’s the first first-generation sidekick to re-embrace his sidekick-hood in such a manner; it’s a little like Nightwing deciding to dress up in a blue Batman costume and change his name to Batwing all of a sudden.

(All of that said, it was a pretty touching scene in which Hal and Dinah offer Roy membership, and, later, when Ollie talks about trying to make up for being such a shitty mentor and father figure to Roy back in the day).




5.) “Door Slideways”: Props for trying to think of a new way for the Leaguers to get from their various homebases to their new HQ. Metlzer abandons the old transporter tubes or other forms of teleport technology for a sort of portal, which appears to be a glowing, flat energy field. Which Batman refers to with the word “door” on its first appearance. You know, like those glowing, flat energy fields that The Authority use to travel. What do they call ‘em? Oh yeah, “doors.”



6.) The “New” HQ: Seriously? The fucking Hall of Justice? Sigh. Yes, I watched Superfriends. It was my first introduction to DC superheroes, and I thought it was fucking awesome. Of course, I was in gradeschool, and that was over 25 years ago. When they re-used the design of the old Superfriends hall in the JLU cartoon I thought it was awesome, and when Joe Kelly had Manitou Raven shout “Inukchuk!” and grow giant in “The Obsidian Age,” I squealed with delight.

I’m totally down with this inside joke stuff. But let’s at least be mildly clever about it, huh? On Justice League, they at least borrowed the Hall design for a skyscraper penthouse; they didn’t just swipe it wholesale from Superfriends, name and all. (Likewise, Kelly didn’t try introducing “Apache Chief"; he just gave a Native American superhero a similar word of power).

The new League headquarters seems to have two different levels. On the ground, in Washington D.C., there’s “The Hall,” which looks almost exactly like the Hall of Justice from Superfriends . Like the news JSA headquarters over in Justice Society of America, this super-team HQ is thus based in a major U.S. city, and, also like it, this one is designed by John Stewart and will feature guided tours.

But that’s not all! By moving “slideways,” you can also access a huge satellite orbiting earth at a distance of 22,300 miles (with two smaller satellites orbiting it). This HQ looks just like the second satellite headquarters form the JLU cartoon and, of course, is a satellite, just like the one the “Satellite Era” Justice League that Meltzer is so enamored with was based in. It's even the exact number of miles "above" the earth that the old Satellite Era satellite was. This will, in the long run, create some problems with talking about the Justice League (“Satellite Era” could refer to two different eras now), and I haven’t even gotten over the loss of the words pre-Crisis and post-Crisis after the Infinite Crisis rejiggering.

From a readers’ standpoint, two things bug me about this, aside from the forced aspect of making the comic book reality conform to the memory of the writer’s first encounters with the Justice League. Firstly, the base seems a little too much like the JSA base, and secondly it’s never really explained what’s going on with this “door slideways” business. The nerd in me wants to know what kind of technology it is, what adavanced alien race it was co-opted from (Kryptoninan? Thanagarian? Martian? New Genesian?) and what super-scientist that put it together for them (Palmer’s missing and Kord’s dead; did Steel build this for them? Did Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman build it? Cause they're all scientists; even if Wonder Woman forgot how to order a cup of coffee).

From a story standpoint, however, it makes less sense than a rebuilt lunar Watchtower. Basing themselves on the moon as a first line of defense for Earth certainly reflected the last volume’s focus as a team that staves off global apocalypse, but it also put them somewhere they’d never been before and gave their enemies a target far away from civilians. Considering how often their bases get attacked, you’d think that the people of Washington D.C. wouldn’t be very eager to have the League's Hall in the same zip code, and that the Leaguers would be leery of endangering a city full of people (and the seat of the U.S. government) by being there the next time Mongul, Despero, Superboy-Prime, Kobra, the Injustice Gang, Prometheus or the Key attack them.



7.) “That’s a Dangerous Room”: Okay, so they have a training facility which Superman and Wonder Woman call “The Kitchen” because, as Wondy says, “If you can’t stand the heat…” I had not realized what an incredible lame-o Wonder Woman is until this moment, but whatever. If a holographic training facility seems to be an idea totally stolen from another best-stelling super-team book published by a rival company, the thought occurred to Meltzer as well, and he has Black Lighting say, “That’s a dangerous room.”

Get it?

But wait, there’s more! Who designed it? Why, none other than Niles Caulder, DC’s equivalent to Professor Charles Xavier (Both are wheelchair-bound eggheads who lead teams of outcast superheroes who fight to protect a society that rejects them, often from groups of villains with the words “Brotherhood,” “Evil” and “Of” in their names). It’s a clever little in-joke that acknowledges the theft and laughs it off, which is admirable. But it’s still a theft, you know? Petty theft, sure, but still.



8.) I Have No Idea What’s Up With Starro Anymore: Seriously, no idea. DC’s totally lost me. I was cool up until the Star Conquerers, but man, since then, there’s the little Starro in Son of Vulcan, the Starros in Gail Simone’s JLA: Classified arc, the little Starro’s on the spines earlier in this arc, and now a man-sized Starro, calling itself Star-Ro in this issue and, Jesus, I just can’t keep up anymore—just give me a fucking new, definitive Secret Origins and Files page on this guy, huh?



9.) The New Chairperson: Black Canary? Seriously? You’ve got master strategist, former leader of the JLI and Outsiders and all around take-charge know-it-all Batman there, and you pass him over. You’ve got born leader, tower of virtue whom everyone automatically looks to Superman there, and you pass him over. You’ve got diplomat, princess, battlefield strategist and former leader of the Justice League Wonder Woman there, and you pass her over. For whom? Black Canary?

Now, if Infinite Crisis hadn’t bumped her out as a founder of the League, she would have had that going for her, as well as the fact that she kinda sorta lead the team in JLA: Year One (also erased by Infinite Crisis…presumably; DC’s yet to answer whether Wonder Woman replaced her post-Crisis on Infinite Earths replacement or simply joined her). But if that’s out, then she’s only been a Leaguer about as long as Hal Jordan, maybe a little less, and never lead any incarnation of the team (Even Hal lead the post-Justice League Spectacular version of Justice League Europe).

But let’s think about the really shitty things that Black Canary has done while a member of the Justice League, in a story written by the same guy who’s writing this story. Let’s see, she voted to magically “clean up” Dr. Light, which resulted in his accidental magical lobotomy. Then, she allowed Zatanna and the rest of the so-called “Power Pact” to erase part of fellow Leaguer Batman’s memory. And then she kept it secret for, what, six or seven years, DCU time? Additionally, according to Geoff Johns’ stories spinning out of Identity Crisis, Black Canary also went along with her League-within-a-League’s plan to magically alter the mind of Flash villain The Top. And to magically block J’onn J’onnz’s ability to read their minds pertaining to any of the other mind-tampering.

Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman seem to have forgotten and forgiven the abuses of the “Power Pact,” and the rest of their League has been absent for much of the last year (Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, Wally West, Kyle Rayner, John Stewart, Plastic Man). I would think (hope) that a basic requirement for League membership would be that the nominee has never attempted to alter the mind and/or personality of anyone before, particularly the mind and/or personality of a fellow teammate. (And, on that score, Hawkgirl, Black Lightning and Arsenal are all better suited, ethically, to lead the Justice League than Black Canary is).



10.) The Chairs: Wait a second. Look at that meeting table on page 22. You see something missing? That’s right, the chairs are just plain old chairs. Undecorated chairs, devoid of the little symbols on the backs of the chairs like in the old Happy Harbor base, or the Watchtower. (Hell, even the JSA has super-cool patriotic easy chairs). I want chairs with little symbols for each hero on the back of them, damn it! Just like my DC Direct Pocket Heroes JLA table:


I think the Chair Test is the perfect way to determine if a hero belongs on the League or not. Do they have a little symbol or icon which can be put on the back of a silver chair around a big, round meeting table? Yes? Then they’re League material (Oh, and for the newbies: a black bolt of lighting for B.L., the old Red Tornado symbol from “Reddy’s” original look for him, Hawkman’s hawk-head symbol for Hawkgirl, a red arrow for the newly-dubbed “Red Arrow,” and a vixen head/totem symbol for Vixen). Metlzer gave us those Satellite Era plaques and a fucking engraved gavel, but no chair symbols? What the hell?



11.) Sooooo... The Other Leaguers?: Meltzer wraps up the whole Looking At Glamour Shots plotline involving the Trinity by having them accept the fact that fate through this team together. That works just fine for me, personally. It’s a rather elegant solution to basically give us the team that Brad Meltzer wants to write while having the bare minimum amount of fictional universe justification. Looking down at their choices (Nighwing, Powergirl, Firehawk, Ray Palmer, The Flash, Captain Marvel, Cyborg, Green Arrow, Hawkman, Mr. Terriffic, Aquaman and Supergirl), Superman says simply “Everyone’s reachable if we need them.”

Yes. Everyone except Ray Palmer. And Wally West. And Aquaman.

One thing that’s been bugging me all along about the relaunch is how it never really dispensed with the rest of the pre-JLoA Justice Leaguers. Where are they? Why aren’t they on the team? It's really not too hard to imagine reasons why Plastic Man, Kyle Rayner and John Stewart might not want to re-up (Plas has a son thanks to the multiversal rejiggering whom he might want to spend some time with and keep off of Dr. Light’s rape list, and maybe Kyle and John want to give the newly returned from the dead Hal some time with his old teammates).

But what about J’onn J’onnz, who has no friends or family outside of the Justice League? He’s a founder, the longest-serving member and the most likely leader. Where the hell is he? He hasn’t even been mentioned in the series yet. Do the rest of the Leaguers not like him now that he’s got that Skrull chin thing going on? Is he still going through his pissy “I hate Earthlings” post-Infinite Crisis midlife crisis phase? Did he turn them down? Can we at least get a line about why he of all heroes isn't there (Even Zatanna got a line, and she’s, like, the last person they should want hanging around after Identity Crisis).

Or how about Aquaman? At no point was anyone like, “Hey, what’s Arthur up to? Has anyone heard from him since The Spectre ground his home city into the ocean floor over a year ago? No? Oh well, let’s get that team photo taken, huh?”

I can understand Meltzer not wanting to fool around with all of this paper-shuffling; certainly Morrison didn’t, and would introduce new line-ups between issues (even his original line-up only took five issues to become perfectly solidified). But DC would at least handle this elsewhere, in Secret Files and Origins specials, for example. Like when the expanded Morrison line-up (featuring Huntress, Zauriel, Steel and the New Gods) debuted, Morrison didn’t explain it within the book, and DC had Christopher Priest write a story about the newcomers in a Secret Files and Origins special. Why not do the same for this new line-up? Considering how greatly JLoA outsells pretty much everything else DC publishes, that would seem like a wise business move. Or it could also make a fine arc for JLA: Classified, which has dissolved into a place to use up old inventory stories. Why not feature a one-shot or two-parter dealing with why J’onn J’onnz isn’t on the Justice League?

The absence of this sort of business in the JLoA #0-#7 sort of bugs me simply because eight issues were devoted to building this line-up, including a metric ton of narration and verbiage, and it’s frustrating that instead of hearing something like “Is J’onn still refusing to put the team back together?” or “Once we settle on a line-up, we have to prioritize finding Aquaman,” we get lines like “But just because you can fly-- --doesn’t mean you’re not in a cage,” and panels of things we don’t really need to see at all, like this.



12) Team Picture Day: Finally, there’s the three-page pull-out section, which I was kinda thinking would maybe feature a splash page of the new base, or maybe one of those awesome Phil Jimenz-type splashes of every Justice Leaguer ever.

You know, something like this:

(Above: As much of Jimenez’s two-page splash featuring every single Justice Leaguer ever from JLA Secret Files and Origins #1, which featured every member up until the first few arcs of Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell’s launch of JLA, as would fit on my local public library's scanner)



Instead, what we got was a three-page fold-out of this:


(Above: A badly scanned, poorly cropped version of the too-big-for-the-scanner JLoA #7 fold-out, drawn by Benes and Sandra Hope)

Which filled me with a deep sense of embarrassment, accompanied by a vague feeling of déjà vu. Like I’d seen something similar somewhere before. It wasn’t just that a blood-flecked image of a similar League photo in a shattered frame was featured on the cover of an Identity Crisis reprint (and, later, a trade), a symbol of a more innocent time in Justice League history which Brad Meltzer seemed to be telling us never really existed.

No, that’s not what the image reminded me of.

Oh yeah, now I remember; it reminds me of this:


(Above: The 1995 St. John High School Varsity Track Team)