Topics In Fantasy: Richard Dawson, Dave Bowman, White Zero, And Horselover Fat…

…All come together in the band.

Science fiction is a state of mind.

I’ve talked about this before, perhaps with greater perspicacity, but I’ll never be able to talk about it with any greater cogency than now.  This is really something.  This is a story we’ve all been following without really knowing what it is.  How many SF shows and stories have seized on the Reality TV phenomenon since it started becoming something actual instead of notional?  Many, many, many, many…and for quite some time now, maybe as much as thirteen, fourteen years?  I can’t remember, exactly;  each new era obscures the old, deforms time and space around it.  When the reality show suddenly at last WAS, after being postulated in SF since at least the Fifties, since it was salvaged from the flood of futures that never were and anyway couldn’t be, since it was weirdly brought to life out of the seed-bank of some other Present’s cultural exaggeration, some other present’s extreme cautionary tale…well, as soon as it made its Athene-like debut, then suddenly this was the new real thing of the moment that SF had to deal with and reflect, exaggerate so as to warn against…and that it had already existed as SF became a negligible fact.  Irrelevant, as the old stories and movies acquired a folkloric sheen.  There is a story about “Whiskey Jack” among the…is it the Cree?  I think it’s the Cree…Native readers please forgive me my dilettante ways…among the Cree (let’s say) folkloric archive, wherein WJ is transported to a strange, hard world full of bright roaring monsters, a land absent of earth and sky and reason:  he merely steps across an invisible line and there he is.  And he doesn’t know how to get back.

It takes little effort, these days, to see it as the earliest possible draft of 12 Monkeys.

Hauntology, again, perhaps:  in the Western imagination the future haunts the past as much as the past haunts the present.  Amy knocks it out of the park as naturally as we would assume any Poodle would, who’s been steeped like tea in the samovar of Western culture…Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dr. Manhattan wading up to his knees in the sand of the Bestiary, deserted Atom Cities and empty Ballardian swimming-pools, vine-covered gantries that launch nothing at noplace:  the spaceship always arriving at one’s own deserted front door, lights blinking on the message machine under a veil of dust.  Bomb light in faraway windows.  It really doesn’t take much, when you consider the social function of the shaman in pre-industrial cultures, to see a Western metatextual apocalypse in every visit of Coyote to the Underworld, a prediction every time Arthur’s knights interrogate a fish about the whereabouts of some possibly-unreal Mr. Big.  It’s very noir, really;  as every mystery implies a problem of philosophy.  Every locked-room murder puts Plato in a nutshell.  Every problem for every detective is a restating of the problem of the limits of knowledge.  So our life isn’t covered by the film of dust, it is the film of dust.  And everything is of the surface, and the depths are mysterious and unreachable.  The moving finger points, but never in that direction.

But every new era must obscure the old;  and so we miss something important of the old Cree tale when we see 12 Monkeys in it.  These things are actually not like each other, our god of the sea is not your god of the sea only wearing a different name.  The old shamanic duty is not to see our Western hauntings everywhere, as ubiquitous as starlight…but to imagine, precisely to imagine, all that is not an echo of fate rippling across the surface of possibility toward us.  Because that’s our hangup, not theirs.  Because not every revelation reveals the same thing, you know?

You know?

Or maybe you don’t know, because I’m being too damn obscure about it.  Okay, fine;  I only mean to say the new era obscures the old.  Once the American version of Survivor came along (in the almighty Year 2000, wasn’t it?  That number that was the master of my youth?) the warnings of Sheckley and Dick, never meant to be considered as anything but satiric exaggeration, those warnings that lost their force in direct proportion to how non-exaggerated they became…receded into the past, utterly.  And we just plain watched the Reality TV.  And spun up tales based on a Present where they were anything but imaginary or cautionary.

Yet they didn’t have a story.  They lacked a narrative.  Sheckley and Dick and all the others had their narrative, the only one that really applied, and this beggared the new SF a little, because…well, what was there to say about it all, that was actually new?  Reality TV is not a subtle thing, it contains no insights peculiarly appropriate to the 21st century:  all the insights pre-date the container by decades.  Maybe, maybe there is something to be found about culture in it:  the “social experiment” stuff they always paint these things with, it works differently in different places.  One can profitably compare Temptation Island UK to Temptation Island Australia.  Survivor reveals much about how deep certain national stereotypes can go, I mean I grew up knowing a lot about America and Americans, like h’all Canadien I’m a little bit of an America expert, but I learned stuff from watching Survivor…and if I can, anyone can.  There was a show about how blinkered and stupid businesspeople are when it comes to the knowledge of the larger culture, it wasn’t supposed to be about that but it was…though I can’t remember its name either, so I guess you’ll have to take my word for it…and there was that Gay Witch-Hunt show, whatever it was called, that with only a little tweaking could have told more about America than anybody really wanted to hear said out loud.  I myself came up with an idea of a reality show in which I would play the main part:  “which one of these corn-fed American beauties will have to date…THE LOSER?“  Cue the Neil Young riff.  Actually I always wanted to see a “find true love” show where the sooner you get booted off, the more money you get…

First girl out of the hot tub is a millionaire, ladies…!

And the second gets half of that, and the next a quarter, on and on right down the cost of a single sad red rose.  But to be honest (as the guys on Temptation Island UK were wont to say), as entertaining as this might have been, it would not actually have told much more that Survivor: Marquesas already had.  The Brits buy into the conceit so much that the reward systems become secondary, the Canadians do not buy into it enough for the game to ever be much more than a game, and the Americans exist in a strange dualistic arena between these two.  I speak very generally, but only because that’s the point:  it is possible to put people into an environment that is so fortuitously arranged that the stereotypes show themselves in whatever true shape they have.  And it is not un-illuminating.  The Apprentice showed how critically important it is to know how to talk to the boss;  the Celebrity Apprentice shows that sometimes it doesn’t matter how you talk to the boss, or even how you perform.  Well, we already knew that too, of course…and in the end no show featuring Donald Trump is going to teach us anything any better than Kafka already did.  Well…

Maybe one thing.  But it’s something we already know:  that Donald Trump is an  arch-vulgarian and that Marlee Matlin is deaf?

Everything — and I can’t escape the feeling I’ve talked about this before? — that can be extracted from the goddamn Celebrity Apprentice is implicit in those two entwined facts.  Trump is outraged that Marlee Matlin seems not to revere Dionne Warwick;  Ms. Matlin responds that she is DEAF, YOU KNOW?  And you see, then, why she’s really there…and why he is, too.  In the UK, mind you, these things are quite a bit easier to see:  in the States, the idea of satirizing Reality TV was passe almost as soon as the thing was born.  Meanwhile the Ninth Doctor still takes time to blow Big Brother up and call it madness, and Ricky Gervais still tweaks the viewer’s nose with unapologetic happy endings.  That actually ended up going past the script:  I’ll always treasure the memory of Leslie Stahl going up one side of Ricky and down the other when he dared to suggest on 60 Minutes that he sometimes feels a bit guilty about being paid so well.  His defence?  “Well, I grew up quite poor, you know…”

See, it is possible to arrange things so fortuitously as to reveal the truth behind stereotypes!  As on that day when 60 Minutes became a reality show in which Leslie Stahl played the part of the contestant…

But mostly, merely being observations of a passing kind, these are trivial illuminations.  Side-issues;  not at all what Reality TV is about.  Because we know already what it’s about.  Because we’ve been told.  But, the problem is…

That’s all in the past, now.  The narrative that turned it all around and related it to us as a story is dead, killed by Time, its meaning buried…never to rise again, only to be an empty shell whose soul has been evicted so the rents can be raised.  The ancient mythology of the 20th century, as much of the fossilized past as any mythology, no matter how mythological tropes continue to compel our interest by infecting it.  The Big Brother house is Purgatory, just like the island on Lost, but nobody bothers to say it because it doesn’t matter if it is or not.  Jeff Probst is a sickeningly smarmy colonialist Hades, your King Of The Dead is our King Of The Dead now, see?  Trump is an ugly, penny-obsessed Charon, but it’s all static.  There’s no life in it except a commercial life, ad space and product-placement.  It can’t really teach, because its narrative is the “teaching” part…when Arnie puts one over on Richard Dawson in The Running Man, when Dave dismantles HAL in 2001, when White Zero hits the world’s edge in Kirby’s…well, 2001 again!…and when anything happens to anyone in a Dick story and my God what was ever the name of the Sheckley protagonist I’m thinking of or for that matter the guy in The Shockwave Rider, well that’s where the teaching is supposed to happen, when the story ends that’s when you’re supposed to get your moral, but this Reality TV shit just goes on, and on, and on and on, and on and on and on and on…

And on…

…

…Or does it?

HA!

Actually, it doesn’t.

And if you were watching TV last month, then maybe you saw it come to an end.  Oh, and don’t make a mistake:  this is the end.  Even Rome fell, you know?  As so too has that Big Idea of Mark Burnett’s, that he had in that hazy crazy year of 2000.  Narrative, I honestly never expected to see it either, but lo and behold here it is…because all we really needed was a protagonist, right?  And that’s exactly what Reality TV does not want us to have, why it does everything in its power to hobble and frustrate and cage personality.  Admittedly it does this in the cleverest way it can, by pretending to care more than anything about personality, but if you’ve ever spent any time at all watching it you’ll know that its goal is to turn judgement into cruelty, its goal is to make punishment and reward the same movement, and keep that movement as purely gestural as possible…because it is the show that’s the true protagonist here, and the show has an avatar but the avatar is still just an avatar…because the nature of the show is that it does not permit you to invest any person with importance.  People are adornments to the show, and thus personality is strictly controlled by the editing process.  I used to know people who complained that Survivor was fake…I used to reply that I wished to God it was fake, because if I was running it something would bloody well happen in it…!  But you see this is just what The Man doesn’t want.  To just script it, to manipulate it to that degree…well, human hands being driven by human souls, who could avoid throwing a hero up to the public if they were given the task of scripting it?  Watch the edits:  they edit away from any genuine personal meanings.  Watch the times when they realize they have to introduce an element of “scriptedness”, or people will stop watching:  they couldn’t do it in a more half-baked way.  You’re told it’s “real”, and its most evil pretension is that it is real…the belief in the “reality” of it afflicts the producers of said shows far more than it does you or I.  They need it to be real, they are committed to it being real.  If you don’t think Jeff Probst was un-roped hanging on to the side of that helicopter in 2001 as he held the vote-basket in one hand and saluted the Statue Of Liberty with the other…then you don’t know the kind of sheer balls-out Anti-Life commitment that Survivor operates on.  It doesn’t matter what anyone sees or thinks, or thinks they see:  this is true to the core, this stuff.  Has to be true to the core.  Because it doesn’t want your love;  it wants your allegiance.  A schoolyard Big Brother, it doesn’t tell you that you must love it — it doesn’t want you to love it! — but that you must love something else that’s bigger than both of you.  A false history, a fake tradition, a sense of nobility and transient character-truth that is total bullshit, but if you both agree to need it then it isn’t!  How many times have both Trump and Probst brutally beaten down all that have declared the emperor’s nakedness?  “This is not my truth.”  Well then we’ve got to shame your ass, missy!  Pure enlistment, pure conformity…pure agreement that there’s nothing more you need, that this! is! human! drama!  Even if it plainly, almost palpably, isn’t.  Because it is meant to sublimate every possible human story to its own eternally-frustrated narrative closure.  The death of narrative, the death of closure, the death of what is real about the personality.  And it’s gotta be enforced by any means necessary.  And it’s what Trump fails at — so dismally! — with Marlee Matlin.

And, if you think about it…

…It’s what Jeff Probst, not to mention the larger Survivor machine, fails at so dismally with that Rob Mariano guy.  You may not like him.  You may be right to not like him.

But he, finally, is our hero here.  Just like it was written in a book.  Taking two kicks at the can, he beats the system once (though they do stream that victory into their non-narrative quite effectively at the time, and so perhaps don’t know they’ve been beaten), and then he beats it twice…and even a third time, more forcefully, by stealing its thunder at the big Round-Up they have after every “season”!  And then they do get one over on him, but then he shows up again and takes away the only prize they’ve got to offer:  not the million dollars, but their artificial dignity.  This is a big Machine, this Reality TV stuff:  it can afford to part with a million dollars.  Heck, it can afford to give a million dollars away, to keep its viewers lulled-slash-stimulated.  But it can’t afford any person getting done with it, and leaving its un-story behind.  All that coerced investment, and bogus belonging…once it’s been busted out from, how can it continue to go on?

So this is the end.  They tried to keep it from having an end, but it got one anyway.  Why watch Survivor, eh?  Now that somebody’s run the table?  In hindsight, wasn’t that always the story:  who would run the table?  When this shit would sputter out and get thrown down the disposal chute?  Whether or not Luke would hit that access port?  Is it not the story?  Is it not science fiction?

Is it not over, now?

So the new SF, now, is the fiction of what happens after.  What if this show kept going, only they asked Mariano to host it instead?  If you want to pretend it’s some sort of gladitorial combat or sport, eventually you have to start doing the things that identify it as such.  Eventually you either have to make it realer than it has been, or not.  Either you accept the final emergence of the narrative you tried to suppress, or you don’t.  Ah, but the fun thing about that is…

…Who’s to say the show wouldn’t change itself out of all recognition, if you once allow change through the door?

We used to have these reality shows everywhere.  Remember?  There were hundreds of them.  Once, not too long ago, reality shows filled the skies…

Not unlike the passenger pigeon.  We just haven’t noticed that they’re disappearing, and that soon they’ll be extinct.  But we’re way more than halfway there, folks!  Because here’s the fact:  reality shows are all about artificial enclosure.  They’re all about control.  They may not hold up as genuine psychological experiments, but they mimic the form.  Psychodramatic crises, one and all, is what they aimed to be:  casually-generated, easily disposed-of, ultra-transient tension-generators.  They were built on making a beast without a heart, then defying their contestants to find the heart buried somewhere in the jungle, and climb up and put it back in.  “Winning” the game…that was never the real task at hand.  Getting your hands on the million was never the true prize, the true achievement.  You don’t have to look back a thousand years to see it, to see what that myth looks like and what it’s rising and falling action must inevitably consist of.

You only have to look back to the science fiction of the 20th century.

Which — I am prepared to declare — we are now officially out of.

And thus we’re perhaps ready to welcome a new kind of ghost into our parlours.

And a better one this time, eh?

Well, let’s hope so.

Fifty-Two Redux!

Then again, colouring inside the lines is kinda boring…

So here’s my REAL New 52 Wish List!

***

1.  Tarzan Quarterly, by Chris Ware, Joe Kubert, Matt Wagner, and Various Guests (“various guests” always includes Kate Beaton)

2.  Me Am Bizarro!, by David Hine and Shaky Kane

3.  The New Adventures Of Wonder Woman, by Mike Mignola

4.  Batman & Robin, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

5.  Seaguy, by Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart

6.  Batman Inc. 80-Page Giant f. Grant Morrison & Various

7.  SHAZAM! by Jeff Smith

8.  SHAZAM! ANNUAL 80-Page Giant, by Jeff Smith, Kyle Baker, Jaime Hernandez, Darwyn Cooke, and Various Guests

9.  Action Comics Weekly, by Kurt Busiek and Adam Kubert

10.  Red Lanterns, by Peter Milligan and Ed Benes (and no, I’m not even joking, it’s clearly DC’s X-Statix)

11.  Stelliferous, by Doeg Moench and Rich Buckler (no, I’ve never heard of it either, but it’s PAID FOR and it’s damn well going ahead)

12.  Vimanarama, by Grant Morrison and Philip Bond

13.  Whatever Happened to FORAGER? by James Stokoe

14.  Supergirl, by Julie Doucet

15.  JLA, by Adam Warren

16.  Birds Of Prey, by Gail Simone and Marcos Martin

17.  The World According To Dr. Occult, by Paul Pope

18.  Batgirl:  Year One, by the Original Cast

19.  Challengers Of The Unknown, by Eric Powell

20.  Frankenstein & Klarion The Witch-Boy, by Ben Caldwell

21.  Bulleteer, by me

22.  S.H.A.D.E., by Justin

23.  Shining Knight, by Justin

24.  The Brave And The Bold, f. Hawkman and Aquaman, by Kyle Baker and Darwyn Cooke

25.  Strange Adventures, f. Adam Strange by William Messner-Loebs and J.H. Williams, Jr., and The Atom by William Messner-Loebs and Ulises Farinas

26.  Kamandi, by Eric Powell

27.  Suicide Squad, by Harvey Jerkwater

28.  Batman, by Grant and Breyfogle

29.  Dr. Fate, by Brendan McCarthy

30.  Starman, by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli

31.  Manhattan Guardian, by Cameron Stewart

32.  Green Arrow by William Messner-Loebs (he’s the only one who can turn it around at this point, I swear to God)

33.  Flash, by Kevin Huizenga and Gabriel Ba

34.  Green Lantern, by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred

35.  Legion Of Super-Heroes, by Kurt Busiek and Ryan Ottley

36.  Superman, by Steve Rude

37.  Northlanders, by the Original Cast

38.  Weird War, by a bunch of talented people — David Aja, Chris Weston, Sean Phillips, name your poison, just scoop ‘em all up!

39.  A Man Called Kev, by You-Know-Who

40.  DC Universe Showcase, by Various.  This is what it sounds like it should be:  try-out space for new ideas.

41.  All-Star Western Quarterly

42.  All-Star Science Fiction & Fantasy Quarterly

43.  Army@Love, by Rick Veitch

44.  Adventure Comics, your Human Target and Manhunter and suchlike…more talented people, as Weird War.

45.  Batwoman, by JHW3

46.  The Question, by Greg Rucka and Cully Hamner

47.  Omega Men, by Milligan and Bachalo

48.  Wonder Woman Forever!, pretty much as previously outlined. Caldwell and Open-Source

49.  Vertigo Quarterly, by Various

50.  Sgt. Rock & The Losers, by the Kuberts and Darwyn Cooke

51.  The Metal Men, by Palmiotti and Conner

52.  Metamorpho, by Mike Allred

***

And as for editorial direction, well you’ve just seen all there is.

Now wouldn’t that be nicer?  Mark Waid says audiences don’t know what they want, which is…you know, not really a true statement unless you append the words “ahead of time” to it.  But most everybody does at least think about “what the audience wants” at some level — nobody operates in a vacuum, and I guess that even extends to the dubious art of making wish lists.  So this is not all just stuff that would please me, although I would read every one of those books…

(Imagine that, I’d read every one…!)

…But it’s also got to do with things I think would be fit, or meet, or wanted by others, or needed for a sense of balance across the whole line, or useful as a corrective to some things in the past which I think haven’t worked well.  There is also, I’m sure the astute reader will detect, a certain level of constraint in the exercise:  not just that I’m still stuck with fifty-two titles, but that I don’t get to really have my dream wish-list (and in a few cases I know I’m kinda pushing the limits of reason anyway!) because of availability, not to mention implausibility, and also I have to leave out some things that might even be easier to swing than that, that I’d like to see.  And some of it just doesn’t make sense anyway — I mean I imagine Rich Buckler wants to do a space-based DC comic that doesn’t even have anything more than a name behind it, that doesn’t actually exist! — and then other parts of it are more like “what comics bloggers would think is cool” and “what would pleasantly surprise my friends”, rather than anything that would truly knock doors down and blow walls out and maybe even succeed in the marketplace…where, it should be noted, your audience may not know what it wants, but it sure as hell knows what it likes!

Eh?

So as to constraints, I’ve had a few, though maybe the worst of all is that I actually don’t know many of the great artists out there who are not currently getting a whole lot of work!  Or forget their names as I bash out lists and winnow possibilities.  Colleen Coover?  Eric Canete?  The whole Internet lies undiscovered around me, while I merely toy with a well-known pebble or shell that already has reputation to spare, and even the people I forget are in the public eye to some degree, though admittedly not as much as they probably should be.  So it’s a wish list, but it probably isn’t THE wish list…

…However I gotta admit, it was pretty fun to make!  Even though I absolutely suck at list-making.  Didja notice me cheating a bit by throwing something called “Vertigo Quarterly” in there?  I don’t know how you even fill something like this out, without cheating like that!

Makes me wish DC would cheat a little more, I’ve gotta say.  I mean, all kidding aside…do we really have to have a Teen Titans book?

Are marketing ideas, like Mickey Mouse, now eternal?

I can’t answer those questions, but a question I can answer is if I should go have myself a drink.  So…

I guess that’ll have to do for now!

In Full Measure Do I Enjoin Thee To Stay Frosty Mine Brah

And so after all the theorizing, here it is: my Fifty-Two Pick up. Those of you who are not interested in seeing me doing a bit of a faceplant, you may go. The rest of you: make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be wheeling the thing out shortly…

But first, if you don’t mind: the Rules.

(Not that I’m suggesting anyone should play along with me — but hey, that’d be fun, wouldn’t it? — just that I’m going to try to keep this in line with the whole thesis in the last post…)

1. Continuity is downgraded to Yellow, but only to Yellow because crossovers of some characters will still be necessary, because people like that.

2. Similarly, there are people like some sense of larger storylines and historicity, but this can’t be allowed to become something that every title depends on, or even most titles. Historicity isn’t something you pour on sales numbers when they’re on fire; its prevalence should be proportionate to new sales it can reliably supply on an ongoing basis, not to old sales previously lost. After all, superheroes are primarily about costumes, not contexts; if you need a billion years of backstory to explain why Character X is punching Character Y, you need to get yourself a new toolkit. Even where historicity is part of a title’s core appeal, characters have to be integration-ready for presentations in other media, and capable of grabbing the interest of potential readers crossing over from those other media. Like, not the way people have been saying it for a decade or so now, but FOR REAL.

3. That being said, art and story are actually more important than ever, and covers doubly so. Current editorial “culture” is gone, and it isn’t coming back; notionally, the Nineties strategy can be presumed to have failed, here, so something different’s going to be tried. Something more in line with the new realities of the situation. DC and Marvel are still nominally in competition, that hasn’t changed, but the days of desperate seesawing are over — with Bigger Fish in charge, it isn’t all about fighting for control of a gun with ever-more-baroque and exclusionary Events, or sucking up to momentary whims of the readership so you don’t go bankrupt. We don’t try to guess what people will like in their Batman and Superman comics, and dance around at the end of that chain — short-term fixes for long-term goals are out, and the flywheeling of movie and merchandising receipts is in. So these things have to be good enough to interest an Average Person as a first priority, even if that causes sales to suffer. Mind you, if sales suffer too much, changes will be made to ensure that gets corrected. FROM ON HIGH, get me? But really, how hard can it be to intrigue comics fans? If it’s that hard, we might as well shut this place down anyway…

4. And in light of these new priorities, consistency of tone on any given title is likewise more important than ever, and as a result the willy-nilly changing of creative teams in order to goose sales is now a distinct NO-NO. Writers and artists can certainly be replaced if conditions warrant a change, but this eventuality should be managed with maximum caution in order to preserve the loyalty of already-existing readerships: where possible, long-term creator runs should be encouraged.

5. All of which makes inter-title navigability a key editorial issue in this New DCU — since the line must not only have something for everybody, treating individual titles as separate compartments even if those compartments occasionally come equipped with communicating doors, but also encouraging readers in one compartment to try out other compartments similar to the ones they already like. This will be a bit tricky, considering that the maintenance of brand recognition is absolutely paramount to the management of the company…characters have to look like what they’re expected to look like…so a way must be found, without the creation of too many sub-imprints, to guide any given potential new reader of a title, to at least one other title, that has a chance of guiding them to another title still. Yes: this is about to become a comics publishing line that aims at getting a minimum three kicks at every can it comes across…and if there remain some cans that don’t get kicked, well at least we can say it was because of their reluctance to buy, and not our reluctance to sell.

6. And other than all that, feel free to do whatever.

And that’s all the rules there are, folks! So without further ado…

Here’s my New Fifty-Two.

***

SUPER-COMICS

1. SUPERMAN is the main Superman comic, set in the “main time”, wherein he semi-regularly fights super-scientific genius Lex Luthor and his plans for world domination/ruination/just plain crime. A couple of important things to know about Superman (besides the fact that he was the first “superhero” anyone ever heard of) is that he grew up on a farm in Smallville in the latter half of the twentieth century, and combined with the lessons of his Kryptonian heritage this has made him (for want of a better word) something of an environmentalist. His people all died because they refused to see what was happening to their world; growing up working on your family’s farm in the waning days of the twentieth century is a great place to see that it can happen here too. Believe me. So Superman eventually goes to work at the Daily Planet as mild-mannered Clark Kent because he has something to say to the world; he’s a very interdisciplinary sort of guy, and strives to get hold of the big picture. It’s a much bigger deal than shutting down crime bosses. Imagine being interested in ecological systems in the crazy world of the comic books, with its bizarre energy-sources and innumerable lost civilizations, some of which only super-people can ever discover! If you’re not Superman, the big picture is going to be very hard to see, there…to get a grasp of all the issues you’d have to have picked up a very good scientific education somewhere, and probably you’d have to be able to read at super-speed just to keep abreast of developments, too…and so as a reporter you might never hit the really big time, you might wind up primarily a science writer or something. Or an excellent editor, really, and that’s exactly what Perry White is secretly (as in: don’t tell Lois) grooming Clark Kent to be. Young Kal-El, with his supergenius parents, would’ve been an intellectual prodigy even by Kryptonian standards — as smart as Lex Luthor even if he can’t match Luthor’s fecund inventiveness, or his obsessive focus on solving impossible problems — but Clark Kent isn’t interested in thinking outside the box, so much as he lives in a bigger box, and seeks to understand it more completely. So Superman’s character is one that invariably couples action with insight, and he’s always alert to the consequences of exercising power: not a Boy Scout by the time he gets to Metropolis, but a GROWN-UP…which is essentially the nature of his philosophical difference with Luthor, mirrored in his philosophical differences with everyone from Batman on down to Jimmy Olsen. And in a sense this philosophical divide colours (albeit faintly and tastefully) a whole lot of the new DCU: there are superpeople with global understandings, and superpeople with local motivations, and superpeople balanced in-between. Basically it’s an ethical universe, just like ours, and Superman is the paragon of ethical behaviour in it. He never has a physical adventure that isn’t also a mental one, and just like it was in the Fifties and Sixties it’s always his understanding of what’s really going on, that secures his success.

2. LOIS LANE (“…Star Reporter”; “…Gets The Scoop”; “…Is In Over Her Head”; etc. etc for cover copy) is a book about the finest investigative reporter of her generation, a bit of a throwback to the old days of journalism as a calling…set in what we might call the Main Time -1, shortly after Clark Kent comes to work for the Daily Planet, that most unusual of daily broadsheets: thriving in an Internet age, because it’s good enough to do so. Must-read stuff, absolutely unmissable; and Lois is a big part of that. Sometimes, she thinks, the only part that’s doing what it’s really supposed to, in the good old way that works. Everyone else around her (except her EIC) is new, new, new…and already so set in the modern way of doing things that to her eyes they’ve gotten uselessly decrepit before their time. Out of the whole lot of them, the only one she’s got any hope for is Jimmy Olsen, her favourite photographer. The new guy at the Planet, Clark Kent, is actually a very promising writer, with a good grasp of language (sometimes he corrects her diction) and superior researching skills (sometimes he also does Lois favours), but he’s stuck running Perry’s dues-paying gauntlet, fashion file and human interest and odd spot and stats…and besides, he hasn’t got the focus to do what she does: too abstract. And he hasn’t got the guts: too retiring. And he’s too damn clumsy to get in and out of any tight spots. When he arrived, Perry gave him a challenge: “get me an interview with Superman, Kent, and you’re in!” But of course he didn’t get it…she caught him daydreaming on the roof that week, asked him what he was doing, after a pause he said he was thinking about jumping off it, maybe Superman would fly by and…I mean really. The guy’s all wet. GOD does it suck when Perry makes her depend on him for background, he’s always all “no, no, that sounds good but it’s too much of an oversimplification…” Get with the program, Kent! You’re supposed to be a reporter, not a professor! And so who else is there? Steve Lombard? Cat Grant? Please…they sell papers, but that’s about it. So Jimmy’s the only bright light, he’s got a terrific eye and good instincts, and he seems to lead a bit of a charmed life on top of it. How many times, for example, has Superman accidentally come along just when she and Jimmy have been jammed into some corner or other? And, Superman, hmm…for a good idea of Lois’ main antagonists, you can think Lex Luthor and Intergang, but her biggest irritant has always been Superman, whom she regards as skeptically as she would any other powerful public figure (hence the mocking nickname they throw at her sometimes: “well, well, if it isn’t Superman’s Girlfriend”). Not that she’s anti-Superman — though it distresses her when younger people (like Jimmy for example) seem to accept him uncritically, even superficially, as a natural part of their world — you’d have to be crazy, not to mention ungrateful, to be anti-Superman…but it’s ridiculous to think everybody knows all they need to know about Superman. Great that he fetches kittens out of trees, you know? Prevents airline disasters. All that stuff’s good. But for God’s sake let’s look a little deeper, people…! You kind of want John Byrne for this one, for a retro look…this is the first place we encounter the use of art styles to suggest a placement in time, and/or continuity-connectedness, and/or genre, said use of art styles to also be one of those threads running through the whole New DCU.

3. SUPERGIRL is the story of how Kara Zor-El, the sister of Superman’s great-great-multi-great-grandfather — and so not really all that related to him at all — raised on Krypton ’til she was a teenager and then lost somehow in space for untold millenia, adapts to the different culture of Earth once she gets here. She is not like her “cousin”, is not naturalized, doesn’t have a “secret identity” as such — is straight-up a strange visitor from another planet. She’s not even from the same Krypton as Superman is, in objective terms she is a time-traveller as well…at least, in regard to him. She was born five hundred years before Jor-El, into an earlier culture. She’s going to have trouble figuring things out…until eventually Superman decides what she really needs is a deeper immersion in the culture. After all, Krypton’s gone — she’s got nowhere else to call home, and though right now she’s living a teenager’s dream of total freedom, eventually her loss is going to catch up with her and she’s going to need a sense of belonging to support her grief. Superman was adopted; Supergirl’s an orphan, and that’s a big difference. And perhaps also a subtle philosophical through-line of this new DCU…? It’s in Main Time, of course…which I guess I’ll slowly start designating by a simple “MT”, now…

BAT-COMICS

4. BATMAN is the regular Batman title featuring Bruce Wayne. Batman is Batman. MT.

5. BATMAN & ROBIN is the regular Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne title, which is absolutely too good to contemplate losing. MT.

6. BATWOMAN, written and drawn by J.H. Williams, Jr…is the Batwoman comic written and drawn by J.H. Williams, Jr. MT.

7. BATGIRL: YEAR ONE is my favouritest ever Batgirl comic, and it deserves to be ongoing. Just get Beatty, Dixon, Martin and Lopez back on it, and keep the thing running forever. This, too, is something we might call Main Time -1.

ANTHOLOGY COMICS

8. ACTION COMICS is a triple-sized title that comes out bimonthly. I know, I know, but how can it come out any less frequently? Two-thirds of it is a Superman comic where he teams up with some other DC hero. One-third of it is a solo Supergirl story that will eventually introduce her to the Legion. MT.

9. DETECTIVE COMICS is a triple-sized title that comes out bimonthly when Action is resting, and contains two stories and a back-up feature. The first story always features a Bruce Wayne Batman story in which he usually teams up with another DC hero (in MT as team-ups ordinarily are, since “having team-ups” is the main reason we have any sort of Time in these books at all); the second story is always a Dick Grayson/Damian Wayne Batman & Robin story in which they usually interact with another member of the Extended Batman Family such as Batwoman, the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, Oracle, Batman Inc. characters, etc., but infrequently also with some other “detective” character traditional and/or appropriate to the title; and the back-up story rotates through many of these other “detective” characters, most notably the Vic Sage version of The Question from the JLI cartoon, with guest appearances by Huntress in something of the character of the old Green Arrow/Black Canary strip (you guessed it, this one’s MT -1)…and another notable recurring feature is our old friend Harvey Jerkwater’s own “Monsieur Mallah And The Brain: Consulting Detectives” miniseries, about a murder in Gorilla City that can only be solved by the two Doom Patrol villains. Because I said so, that’s why. And of course, occasionally Detective will simply be a Batman Family All-Play. But whatever it is, this book must be punchy and exciting, as it’s the transition-point from “liking Batman” — which is a common affliction in our society — to “liking Batman-related things” which is NOT. (By the way, this is the first time we encounter the use of art styles to establish different connections with Time, at least in different stories under the same cover. It won’t just be Lois Lane.)

10. ALL-STAR WESTERN is a prestige project that attempts to cash in on the “new Western” Hollywood movie of recent years, the home of the taciturn, morally-occluded, and intensively-researched character. This is for big-name artists with triple-shelf toolboxes, this is a serious new IP farm, and obviously it is NOT IN “TIME” AT ALL. There is a small amount of Jonah Hex in the back of this book, a “supernatural Western” teaser, about the size of a very expensive ad, which is Time’s only concession here…and it’s definitely going to live its whole life on the bubble. Double-sized, and bimonthly, in-house ads tastefully attempt to redirect readers to the other All-Star title, Sgt. Rock, and Adventure Comics, if we can possibly get them to go.

11. ALL-STAR SF & FANTASY is a prestige project for licensed properties and big-name artists, to cycle old IP and cater to movie tie-ins. Money could be spent on this. Think Paul Pope’s Dune…that sort of thing. Obviously also completely Time-Free, it’s double-sized and bimonthly as well, coming out in months where All-Star Western is in the shop. In-house ads hopefully aim at redirecting readers to books like Showcase, Omega Men, Shade, Tales Of The Unexpected, Global Guardians, LSH, etc.

12. DC UNIVERSE SHOWCASE is for the zippy SF superhero stuff: the (All-New) Atom, Adam Strange, the Challengers of the Unknown, etc. Bit clean-n’-retro in style, or if not a bit retro then a bit adventurous, this is reasonably firmly in Time. One feature that also shows up from time to time is Martian Manhunter, secret alien inhabitant of Earth who tracks down other secret alien inhabitants; you’d be surprised how many there are. So if you ever wanted him in Action, for example, you could show him hunting Clark Kent. Double-sized, this is bimonthly.

13. DC PRESENTS is for whatever’s up-and-coming, whatever secondary strip is popular enough to warrant extra exposure. We start off with something fairly safe: a Tim Drake solo series that puts him into conflict with Jason Todd, in MT. Not sure of what to call that, actually…tempted to rename Jason “Deathstroke” just to get rid of the guy currently holding that name, also knits the classic ex-Robin/Deathstroke antipathy a bit tighter. Sure, let’s do that. And since this particular starting-block one’s drawn for the young people, let it also be drawn by the young people…fair warning, we are going to be going to the Internet a lot for young artists at the New DC…there is going to be a full-time position with a title like “Person Who Looks At Online Portfolios”…

14. ADVENTURE COMICS is headlined by Green Arrow, with two back-up strips making a place for “non-super” action in the other rotating features: the Human Target, the Peacemaker, Manhunter, etc. Despite Green Arrow’s presence as headliner, this is less firmly “in continuity” than Showcase…The Peacemaker, for example, will not be making a guest appearance in Detective Comics, and the design of his strip would (again) suggest a tonal distinction from the “main line”: call it Main Time -0, if you like, as Showcase is basically Main Time +0: as previously noted, we’re not getting rid of continuity altogether, but we’re going to streamline it, turn it into intuitive ordinal measurements. If you can’t figure out “when” or “where” something’s happening, you can ask a kid…outside of that, as I guess I’ve already said, the way things look should tell you pretty much what’s going on. If you thought “Jim Aparo” for this, for example, you wouldn’t be thinking far wrong. Double-sized and bimonthly, alternating with DC Universe Showcase.

15. THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD is a double feature: Hawkman up front, Aquaman out the back. This is a book more than usually heavy on art and mood, for the “fun comics” crowd. Perhaps you might bear Kyle Baker in mind for the look of this one. And notice the “thematic” stuff about global and local, orphans and adoptees…? Okay I won’t hit that thing on the head too much, but you can keep your eyes peeled for it if you like…

16. TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED is an intercommunicating double feature with a back-up: the first feature is the Phantom Stranger, the second is Cassandra Craft (they are totally doing it, you guys), and why would you not imagine Ryan Sook for this? When he was so good with these characters before, in Zatanna…a point to remember here, even though this book’s main features will only have about as much issue-to-issue continuity as episodes of the Emma Peel Avengers, is that magic characters and supercharacters will cross over very infrequently in the New DCU. We can build up a pretty decent “magic universe” if we keep it parallel to the chest-symbol set instead of intersecting with it, and let there be no doubt that in the age of Harry Potter and Twilight we definitely want to build up a “magic universe”, so even though this title can be regarded as a sort of “-0″ deal, it is NOT in Main Time, but if it’s in any sort of time at all it’s in something we’ll call Time-2…the time relating primarily to magic, which has its own secret rules and hierarchies. Sometimes the odd person tears away from T2 into MT, but they never stay there long unless they’re renegades…and if they are renegades then they’d better hope they’re good at hiding. Magic is like a family, like a kingdom, like a world all its own…and it’s a jealous one. The back-up feature is The Spectre, here.

17. WORLD’S FINEST is a superhero team-up book that looks just like an excellent superhero team-up book. We’re selling some soap, here. The real DC gave Steve Rude a pass (!) but I’ll correct that absurd mistake here. Unusually for team-ups, this title doesn’t have to be in any sort of Time.

18. WEIRD WAR is basically bait for Garth Ennis; the Non-Time anthology stuff is all up front — people into war comics and ghost stories both are not interested in absorbing continuity — think whoever you like! Rick Veitch! Brendan McCarthy! Goran Parlov! — but the MT +0 feature in the back could so easily be a long-running “Kev” strip, which would be our only access-point to the Wildstorm universe since it’s bloody useless now…hey, if people were to like the Midnighter’s guest appearances here he could always get a story in DC Presents. Of course we are not necessarily going to force Mr. Ennis to shoehorn Midnighter in there, but we’ll try to persuade him by sending flowers and boxes of chocolates every so often…

19. WONDER WOMAN FOREVER! is that strangest of all things, a book for kids. A triple-sized quarterly, it features Ben Caldwell reprising his Wednesday Comics performance up front, then in the back there is “open-source” Wonder Woman, many of the online artists with engaging alter-WW stories to tell that we’ve seen over the past few years, promoted to semi-regular DC contributors. This one has a large (maybe four-page?) letters section in the print edition, and an official online forum password — the two are integrated. This one’s intended to push readers online; to normalize and perhaps even make preferential the online comics experience. Time is an irrelevant concept here.

20. BATMAN, INC. is the continuing story of the Batmen of other nations. Main Time.

TEAM COMICS

21. JLA is pretty self-explanatory, I think. It should be, right? Main Time, but this is going to be the closest thing we have to a real reboot — although we’re not interested in re-hashing the history of the JLA, don’t care about its formation or anything like that, where classic JLA villains are used they will be reintroduced, as though for the first time. Starro and Amazo and the Shaggy Man are all too cool not to use, but this isn’t a book about nostalgia and legacy and in-jokes, it’s a book about superhero action.

22. BIRDS OF PREY is Barbara Gordon as Oracle, along with Black Canary, Huntress, the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, Zinda and you know the drill I hope. It’s also a potentially very lucrative property, so it gets protected in much the same manner as a prestige project — we will dance with the woman who brung us.

23. SUICIDE SQUAD is actually something Harvey has a dandy idea for, so I’ll say no more about it than: yep, Suicide Squad.

24. LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES is another one I don’t feel the need to lay out in detail — LSH bloggers will forgive me for saying “if it ain’t broke…!” — but just for clarification, though there was a Superboy and he was a member of the Legion, we know about him but we don’t see him: Supergirl’s the only crossover here, and she’s an infrequent guest-star at best. Many people do like that “legacy” flavour, so even though we won’t have much of that stuff in the New DCU (we will have it maybe just in one or two places, maybe about as many places as we even hint at the existence of a 52-world multiverse that all these titles may be situated in — and it is definitely not going to go any further than that, if that stuff gets in there at all it’s going to be monumentally oblique, only existing to facilitate the alternate readings of a few diehard obsessives), in a small way we will have it here: Supergirl herself is following the “legacy” of Superboy in her Legion adventures — she has more in common with him than with Superman! — you can read a little Peter Pan or Narnia or A Game Of You or something in there if you want — and the current Legionnaires do have a history of their own, which basically extends to classic LSH villains being available for use without needing official reintroductions. Forget any decades-long intrigues or plot twists, though: we are rebooted to the extent that whatever happened happened, but whatever it was it’s finished now.

25. SHINING KNIGHT is our old pal Justin’s brilliant idea — do go check it out if you haven’t already! Time-free, this operates in its own tiny little bubble.

26. SGT. ROCK & THE LOSERS is a double feature that’s just what it sounds like, and is all on its own. We’re not updating a thing, and we’re keeping Rock in the Kubert family if they’ll have us…in part because this must be damn good, and from the very beginning.

27. THE METAL MEN is a lighthearted adventure series within which a peculiarly melancholy and even ominous undertone can at times be detected. I love The Metal Men, there’s so much room to move in it, it truly is a beautiful design. You could analyze it or leave it be, but if you analyzed it I think you would find unusual things. Don’t really know what else to say about it, it’s a perfect little multi-genre diamond, pure comics. I can’t really explain it, but somehow in my head Metal Men always has more of the flavour of Watchmen than any other strip…MT +0, if you like supercharacters with a hint of conspiracies and dark secrets in their backgrounds this is where you’ll find all that stuff, but don’t expect it to directly cross over with anything outside of Metamorpho. Impressionistic, intelligent crap for people like me who like Neil Gaiman comics — if I could get Neil to write it, I would.

28. OMEGA MEN is a scattered mess of people who were once important but now are not, bouncing from pillar to post in DC’s outer space milieu. There’s a whole range of them, and they’re not living large. But they do supply a “ground-level” view of galactic events, and they have the advantage of being invisible…not to mention still somewhat hooked-in to a pretty big covert intelligence and communications network that was established (out of tangible devices and people and contacts and codes and so forth — not just fancy green light) back when they served an important interstellar policing role. Contacts. Favours. Connections. Hardware, even if it’s sitting in hock someplace. Intel. If you want to know the gory details, here they are: years ago there was a brief period when the Green Lantern Corps mysteriously contracted its jurisdiction, we don’t know if it was fighting some sort of war or undergoing some sort of reorganization or what, but it resulted in a large power vacuum that an organization known as the “Omega Network” stepped into…but when the GLC returned to its old duties that all fell apart, got deactivated…or went underground. This one’s as mixed-up and ad-hoc as it can be, a real jumble of lots and lots of stuff from various DC “space” titles, and it’s wildly unnecessary…but maybe a bit of that would be useful, as useful as tales of space espionage? MT +0, this is set very firmly in space, and there won’t be many crossovers with characters who spend much of their time on Earth…an admittedly low-percentage route for readers of All-Star SF & Fantasy to travel on their way to sampling some of the more SF-flavoured titles that exist more prominently in Time, but I think it’s important for there to be such a route even if it is low-percentage…and I have a personal feeling that the outer-space milieu should be big enough to include anything that anyone might want to put in it, without running out of storytelling elbow-room. To convey the impression that space is in fact quite a big stage, is basically the aim of this book…and a good way to get to that goal is to invoke a little bit of “shared-universe” vibe.

29. TALES OF THE GREEN LANTERN CORPS is a place to put excess Green Lantern characters that people may have grown fond of over the years, and is also something of a Continuity Trap for those who like that sort of thing — the New DCU is only very lightly salted with hints and suggestions of a stronger overall continuity, and such saltings are restricted to places where they’ll do the most good: the outer space milieu, and the “magic-universe”. And basically the GLC title is ground zero for “secret history” insofar as matters in this vein that are non-multiversal go. Basically as long as you stay away from “emotional spectrum” Lanterns — which are to be scrupulously ignored because they do not exist — you’ll be fine. Something happened in the time where the Guardians retracted their jurisdiction, and it could be a lot of things, it could be Millenium (in the sense of New Guardians being discovered on Earth) if you want, it could be a war with other cosmic-scale powers, it could be some mysterious interaction with the magic side of the DCU, it could be all of these or none, but it doesn’t matter too much because it’s just the McGuffin…it’s just to say that there is history, here. The history’s actual content is up to the talent of the writer in charge, and of course the editor in charge of all the space-based books who will be making sure things don’t get out of hand. MT +0.

30. GLOBAL GUARDIANS is a semi-satirical book, heavy on the gallows humour, about a very ad-hoc group of international superpeople attempting to cobble together an “independent” and cosmopolitan urgent-action network…but setting it up and keeping it going is easier said than done. Where do you get the money from? How do you get governments to invite you into their country if (say) you want to aid in disaster relief? How do you establish and maintain your political neutrality? The JLA is great, but there are only a few of them, and all they do is fight world-destroyers. Superpowers are a resource that can be used for more things than that, if they can only be marshalled and deployed effectively…but man, you’d think it’d be easier than this…! MT -0: if anyone even says “JLA” past the second issue I’ll be surprised. If you’re looking for Captain Atom, you might find him here…and if you’re thinking of art styles, you might think Keith Giffen and Klaus Janson.

31. TEEN TITANS is set firmly in an MT -1 space: the team doesn’t exist anymore, but when it did it consisted of Dick Grayson’s Robin, Wally West’s Kid Flash, Beast-Boy, Raven, Wonder Girl, and Cyborg, and they had high-spirited and not-at-all-depressing adventures, which this book chronicles. There was briefly a second Teen Titans team made up of Tim Drake’s Robin, Starfire, Speedy (Connor Hawke), Airwave, Terra, and Static…but it didn’t last long. Their main antagonist was Jason Todd, calling himself Deathstroke after having been resurrected by R’as Al-Ghul (bet you always wondered why Deathstroke was such a badass, huh?), whose identity was discovered at the end of their last adventure…but you don’t hear about that Teen Titans very often. If you’re wondering about Doom Patrol, by the way, the short answer is that I don’t have any ideas about it that are good enough to stick — it may well show up in DC Presents at some point, and it’s possible there could be an MT -1 crossover in Teen Titans as well.

SOLO COMICS

32. GREEN LANTERN is Hal Jordan. Sorry. On the bright side, his ring doesn’t work on anything coloured yellow. One of his enemies is this guy named Sinestro, a former Green Lantern turned bad, who has a yellow ring. His boss is Carol Ferris, who is not Star Sapphire…we’ve never heard of Star Sapphire, at least not yet, and I personally hope we never do. This is as close to a real reboot as JLA, or indeed the immediate post-Crisis GL.

33. FLASH is Wally West; his uncle Barry Allen, a friend of Hal Jordan’s, died heroically some time ago. You’re welcome. Wally is unmarried. You’re welcome again. Jay and Joan Garrick are supporting characters — Jay was the Flash of the 1940s but no one really seems to remember that…it’s a mystery! Also Jay and Joan should be in their nineties, just like all their old friends ought to be, but instead all these old folks seem to be hovering in the spry mid-sixties/early seventies range, so…it’s a mystery again! There are actually quite a few mysteries in the Flash’s life, but, you know…it’s comic books, right? And time is funny around the Flash, always has been: no, we don’t need any Speed Forces, if you think about it the nature of the Flash’s power is simply that time is funny around him, and that’s where the whole thing starts and stops…and, if you like, begins again. It’s never quite MT where the Flash is, not exactly — after all, what the Flash does is impossible, haven’t you heard? — but as a top-tier superhero he crosses over into the MT world effortlessly. In case you’re curious, Barry died saving the universe from being annihilated by an intersection/collision with its anti-matter opposite, and I could tell you the whole big story of that (I really could!) but I won’t bother because hardly anyone remembers it and it doesn’t really come up in a “what exactly happened there?” sense. EVER. Though structurally important to a certain type of reading, if you’re interested in experiencing that reading you’ll pretty much have to follow more than a dozen books in order to put together the extremely slight clues they drop into a theory of your own. Not that this won’t be rewarding, if you’re the sort of person who likes doing things like that! But it’s just an Easter egg, when all’s said and done. All it means is that the New DCU had a Crisis…it doesn’t mean that the New DCU had the Crisis. Because it didn’t. Well, how could it?

34. STATIC is a character I never knew much about, but we could stand to have more of him in the Main Time, couldn’t we? So here’s our designated Marvel-style Peter Parker/Firestorm new young superhero who doesn’t quite know how to do it yet, controlling “electromagnetic energy” (that’s the crackly kind, not the light kind), and trying to make a difference.

35. JONAH HEX is the main-universe Wild West guy, and as far back in time as Main Time is going to go…call it MT -2, and thank goodness for Return Of Bruce Wayne!

36. DR. FATE is about to become a giant problem for Zatanna Zatara, the far-too-public sorceress who’s always on the verge of being censured by the “Immortal Seven” who sit on the board of the Invisible College of Magic, and always seems to just escape it because she is not technically operating completely in the open and not technically wielding magic just as she pleases, but instead following the letter of the Atlantis Convention by which everyone with her special talent is supposed to be circumscribed. She’s no tearaway, and she’s proved it a dozen times at official Seven hearings: her own ancestor a signatory to the original document, mere days after the Golden Kingdom fell into the sea, she’s got no problem going toe-to-toe against Arion’s Ghost itself, in defence of her rights. And she’s got people on her side, too: old Vandal Savage, for one, has always supported her both publicly and privately (I trust you are all getting the picture okay). And as long as she’s been doing this, has she once seen (touch wood) the Spectre? Which surely she would have, if she’d been breaking the rules as much as all that. But now something really messy has come down around her ears, and that’s the reappearance of Dr. Fate, in the form of some apparently extremely naive guy named Kent Nelson who showed up at her door with the Helmet Of Nabu in a bag…and then put it on, and so there you go. Nabu’s idea for this Nelson character to come to her, oh thank you very much, person-she-thought-was-just-a-story-until-now, yeah thanks a ton…because what’s so messy about this is that Dr. Fate is the only person from Magicland who’s permitted to cross over freely into MT under any circumstances he likes (the Phantom Stranger being beyond permission, naturally) and do pretty much as he likes there…wield any old sort of magic, of whatever form or degree…because for uncounted millenia he was basically the magical version of Superman, older rules still apply to him, even if he’s not really “Nabu” now, but really this Kent Nelson guy instead: the Convention wouldn’t even have been valid if his name had not been invoked within it, even though he was at that time thought gone and dissipated for good…which explains why he is specifically named as not being bound by it, the one and only person to be so named…and so Fate is powerful, shows up on all kinds of magical GPSes, standing next to him is like shinnying up a lightning rod in a storm. And “Nabu” tells her that Kent Nelson needs protection and guidance, cannot go before the Seven immediately, has hidden enemies, has not yet learned what he needs to learn in order to fully bond with Nabu’s power and complete his return…”well just tell me what he needs to learn and I’ll teach it to him, I’ll leave him a note“, Zatanna says, but of course it just can’t be that easy, can it…? And besides that the guy’s muttering this name in his sleep, Zatanna knows how this shit works, whoever “Inza” is she’s probably going to have to find her for him…so YES NEW DCU WRITERS WE ARE PREPARED TO “BORROW” FROM WHATEVER WE HAVE TO, BECAUSE YOU’D BETTER BELIEVE WE ARE GOING TO SNARE THOSE TOLKIEN AND HARRY POTTER FANS, so if you wouldn’t mind providing something approximately like that for us that’d be great.

37. PETER CANNON, THUNDERBOLT is a time-free book about a walking stereotype, and its hero knows it: the white Western guy who turns out to be better at Eastern Mystic Secrets than the people who were born to them? It’s unfortunate stuff, but he can’t help being who he is. Iron Fist? The Shadow? It’s quite a chore to walk in the shadow of Iron Fist. Peter Cannon is a rich man who lives in a fabulous high-tech mansion on the California coast and occasionally leaves it in a helicopter to dive into the sea and swim to a boat full of smugglers lying offshore who are stealing precious artifacts sacred to somebody-or-other…Peter Cannon is big on the dignity of other cultures, he’s the other side of the Indiana Jones coin. And just like Indy, in his world the mythological is always becoming not just immanent but imminent. We’re not rebooting Planetary, but we’ll do something a lot like it in this title…the perfect man known as the Thunderbolt, what is he supposed to do? Well first he has to find out where he came from…and then if he sees a castle floating in the air, I suppose he’s got to grab onto it somehow…and then he’s going to go pinballing through time and space like a man out of control. Yes: him. He’s the world-crosser. Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?

38. STARMAN is Jack Knight, legacy hero from Opal City, whose weapon is the most advanced piece of super-technology ever to come out of any of the various star-spanning races’ scientific inventory…and nobody ever knew how it worked but his father Ted, who invented it. Jack doesn’t know how it works either, but he can do tricks with it that the old man never imagined. Hardly anybody else can even make the thing glow, but he can almost make it talk…in the grand tradition of toy-tie-in shows from Japan, there’s always more power in toys than their makers suspect, but only kids know how to use them…only kids can discover their secret properties and potentials. Which is appropriate for Jack Knight, since his story is all about how to preserve optimism, learn how to grow up without losing youth’s enthusiasm and wonder. Adult inheritance is a tricky thing, it can be weight or wings…but it’s non-transferable, and it’s inescapable…anyway, Jack’s MT, and he can go into space anytime he wants.

39. METAMORPHO is another MT +0 book that could well be described as impressionistic, intelligent crap…only this time written for people (like me!) who like Grant Morrison comics. Like The Metal Men, it exudes a sort of dark playfulness, impossible to take as anything but gaudy, careening adventure stories on the surface, yet with a slightly disturbing undertow. This is for the smart set; this is Vertigo.

40. MISTER MIRACLE is Shilo Norman, going around the world doing stuff as he performs his act. Need more be said? Well, maybe one thing more: Shilo is the only person in MT who remembers the Fourth World.

41. SHADE, THE CHANGING MAN is an old Ditko book I loved, but most people seem to be more fond of the Peter Milligan version at Vertigo. Fine, let’s have that back, then! Cosmologically, Shade might be the scariest of all these titles — who the hell is Shade, what the hell is a “Meta-Zone” anyway, and what in God’s name is going on here? Shade doesn’t seem to relate to the ordinary Time structure AT ALL, he seems to have a foot in MT and a foot in T2, and another foot in…something else. A forgotten world, perhaps: a Third Order of things, to which he’s the only remaining door, but the door’s locked and he can’t get out. Outside of that, for Mr. Milligan we remove every limit, trusting in his judgement.

42. KAMANDI is a book that is 100% time-free, and 100% only for absolute top-shelf old-guy talent…because there’s no other way to make it work, in either case.

43. BULLETEER is just what you (hopefully!) think it is, with omniscient narrative-captioning provided by the ghost of Sky-High Helligan. This is your self-aware postmodern superhero-commentary book that plays with allegory and touches nerves, and by God I’d write this one myself…sorry, Justin. MT +0.

44. FRANKENSTEIN & KLARION THE WITCH-BOY is a cock-eyed Rip Hunter replacement, seasoned with a slightly-menacing/gleefully-anarchic dash of Doctor Who. Castle Revolving takes Klarion and his semi-controlled companion hopscotching through time and space, usually on Earth but sometimes not, and if there’s one thing they don’t do, it’s “safeguard the timestream”. Out of Justin’s playbook once again? Yes, it is…and it can cross over with anything, anytime, anyplace, except for the places only Shade may go: which is to say, except only the places that acknowledge any pre-New DCU reality. Oh, and of course except for Sgt. Rock…still, guaranteed you’ll never miss Booster Gold once you see Frankenstein in Weird War! Klarion in Kamandi! Forget about the continuity you once knew, it’s gone! And good riddance to it.

45. WONDER WOMAN is the movie-convertible story of Diana of Themyscira, and so it can be just about anything…it doesn’t really matter what adornments are made to her story in the comics, so long as the basic through-line of her curiosity about Man’s World is preserved. In the movie, there will be some romance; but in the comics we’ll try something else, and steer clear of that. So we’ll say she was here once before, when she was young, as “Wonder Girl”…and she wasn’t supposed to be, did not actually have the “Wonder” status that made her an official ambassador, with a kind of divine diplomatic immunity, she just said she had it…and thus, she was always working without a net. Of course since she was not dealing with spiritually-informed people (little nod to Darwyn Cooke there) they just thought it was a “super-” name…and when she got forcibly yanked back to Paradise Island they were all splitting up anyway, Robin to be Nightwing, Beast-Boy back to his “family” the Doom Patrol, etc., so it never occurred to anybody that “Donna” (that’s “Diana” with a thick accent) didn’t want to go back home. Or that she got in trouble when she did. They only send out these ambassadors every so often, you see; once in a long, long time, and between those times nobody’s supposed to leave the island. But Diana couldn’t wait ’til she was old enough to get into the contest, she found a way of running away from home so she up and ran, keen for adventure and novelty. However now she’s gone through the trials and gotten the official sanction, and so she’s got a right to be in MT as well as T2; Themiscyra is not a signatory to the Atlantis Convention because it didn’t have to be, it is held under the hand of the Gods, and Hippolyta is the representative of a Higher Power. Diana can converse with the Spectre if she wants to. She’s a wild card. Think Mike Mignola, because Hellboy is exactly what we’re going for here: like the Flash, Diana doesn’t exactly belong in MT, but she’s there anyway, because this is comics.

46. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FORAGER? is a book set in the inner city, about the last refugee of the Fourth World — the man raised by the insects crawling under the skin of New Genesis, their best and most daring food-gatherer, who hid his human features under a mask. Now he hides by taking the mask off, working and living in hard conditions that are nevertheless more favourable than any he’s ever known. Not a New God and not an Apokoliptian, he was a person in the forgotten middle between them, and now both of those poles are gone and the middle remains, as forgotten as ever…something happened to the Gods when the skies turned red, and something happened to all the worlds, too: they’re different now, if indeed they’re even still out there. Is that a fast-moving dot against the sky? Orion may have encountered Superman, but Forager never did, and he’s not going to now. We don’t know where he is, we don’t even know what kind of map we’d need to try to find him…there’s nothing that can be done about that question, so there’s no point asking it. That dot may simply be a bird, or a plane. But here at last, at least, is the faint suggestion that maybe there are (or have been) other worlds…even if the suggestion doesn’t make any practical difference. For Forager what’s much more important is the freedom to make a completely new life, to wipe away what came before and immerse himself in the here-and-now…especially since the here and the now have no particular context. Or, do they? To go from life in an insect colony to life on Earth is strange two ways: strange through being eerily similar, and strange through being eerily different. In the Hill one relied on hierarchy above all, and here there are hierarchies as “natural”, as organically-developed as that…and for that matter there are higher powers too, but the most curious thing about this new and abandoned world is that the hierarchies aren’t rigid: the niches are responsive to the desires and emotions — to the passions — of individuals, and he finds that new dynamic not only confusing, but inspiring. In the Hill he experienced absolute fellowship until the moment he experienced absolute condemnation: it was all about the way power flowed, and it couldn’t be resisted. But here, each individual has a say in what their environment is to be like. So — you know this already — at night Forager goes out and cleans up the streets, unable to abide injustice, and by day he pursues his relationships with his neighbours. It’s hardly rocket science, though it’s bound to be a somewhat lugubrious book — think of it as Swamp Thing, think of it as Machine Man, think of it as Hero For Hire, it’s in that ballpark and I gotta confess I’d read the bejeezus out of it…so in it goes! If I had my pick of artists, it’d be James Stokoe.

47. THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DR. OCCULT is about the one and only successful renegade from the world of magic — the blended being known alternately as Dr. Occult and Rose Psychic (but man, we gotta do something about that name, don’t we? I see from Wikipedia that “Rose Spiritus” is available, but honestly that ain’t much better, is it?) that was saved by the Seven from a human sacrifice, and raised in the Invisible College itself. Then one day, after stealing the College’s most potent token…pffft! Out into nowhere, unfindable. Never seen since. This is time-free stuff, as the good Doc and his lady fair wander the highways and the byways…think of it as a Phantom Stranger story from the Phantom Stranger’s own perspective, and most importantly think of it as looking trippy…I’ll have to come back and plug in some artists’ names here, and…uh…actually now that I think of it plug in a bunch of artists’ names throughout this misbegotten thing, holy crap this has taken a lot more time than I thought it would…of course the reason Dr. Occult is invisible to all the people who would dearly love to find him is because he’s not a him at all, but a hir…the male and female principles being unified within one person, that person is operating on a whole different level of magic…a family of one, you might say, and that’s the only reason they can make that totem work. Anybody remember Steve Gerber’s old Starhawk character, before it was misunderstood? This is the next step from that, the Promethea move…only climbing down the ladder to solid ground, this time. It’s also got more than just a finger in J.M. DeMatties’ Dr. Fate, and Messner-Loebs’ Dr. Fate too…well, romance is really the best magic, isn’t it? So this is a DCU picaresque, also a magic story where it’s all adventure all the time, and lots of action…not hemmed in by the barbed-wire fence of plot nor pinned down by the searchlight of spooky implication, but free to go anywhere and mix things up in an exciting way. Why don’t we just say that any door Dr. Occult comes to could just as well be magically turned into the inner door of hir office, eh? So we don’t lose that Sam Spade thing. Dr. Occult could draw a picture of a door in the sand with a stick, and reach down and open the thing onto that office. Let’s not get too concerned with the whys and the wherefores, just make an entertaining book about the dream of freedom — what if you were magic and could do anything? That would be cool…

48. BLUE BEETLE is just like that Blue Beetle book everyone remembers and liked so much, except it isn’t in Main Time…or rather it’s right on the borderline of Main Time’s expanse, barely MT -0, honestly quite far from all the other goings-on, instead in a world not unlike Forager’s, where if Superman exists he’s just a fast-moving dot in the sky. I swear to God that was the worst thing about that book, all the fan-service guest-star Mary-Sue stuff. No. Let Jaime Reyes be off on his own, doing some world-building. This is sort of the Static spot, really: we’re swapping the relative positions of these two. One day Dr. Fate may show up here, and say “AHA! SO THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SACRED SCARAB!”, but if it ever does happen it’s not going to be before this title cracks #150, or dies a lonely death, or both.

49. THE QUESTION is the story of Renee Montoya, friend of Batwoman and successor to Vic Sage, who gradually gets to know Huntress. MT, and if there’s any justice also awesome.

50. AZTEK is in here because the city of Vanity is just too good to lose, and I never thought the character got a really fair shake. MT, and he’ll join the JLA soon enough.

51. MANHATTAN GUARDIAN is something everybody under the sun wants to write, isn’t it? I’d tell you how I’d write it, but that’d make this post twice as long as it already is…

HUMOUR COMICS

52. PLOP! is…why are you looking at me like that?

…

Listen, do you know how long I’ve been doing this thing? THIS WAS JUST SUPPOSED TO BE A JOKE POST, GODDAMNIT…!

Sigh.

Well, maybe it’s time we both got some sleep, eh Bloggers?

Goin’ On Up To The Skateboard In The Sky

Ai ya, Bloggers. This is doing my head in.

I’ve had to rewrite this, a bunch of times. I was going to start out talking about the big problem with the Big Two, and where it all went wrong for them, and how that critical moment eventually landed us with this weird DC relaunch thing. And then I was going to give “my” 52-issue relaunch, the titles I’d reboot at a New Number One if it was all up to me. And I’ll still be laying those out in a while, don’t worry, but…while I was doing them, polishing off this great big post about the thing we’re all busily discussing, something occurred to me.

It doesn’t work.

You see, I’m still thinking about it like an Event, like the in-story manifestation of a new editorial direction, full of timelines and rationales and old associations either severed, altered, or maintained. But it isn’t like that at all, as I discovered when cobbling together that little wish-list of mine — to treat the relaunch as though it was the result of a multiversal reconfiguration of some kind just exposes a million little faultlines in it, things you can’t make add up. So this isn’t Crisis. It isn’t even Zero Hour. It isn’t even Elseworlds. It’s Amalgam, only without the Marvel component. Our idea of a hard reboot, as comics fans, is something that does something to a character: changes them according to some scheme, to achieve some new desired in-story effect. A new origin, a new timeline, a new set of interactions. A new feel, in a familiar touch?

Actually, I don’t think this is about that, anymore.

But let’s talk about the Crisis, first — I mean, the real-life one. You see, for me nothing really happens in or around the Big Two that isn’t connected to history, causality, continuity if you like…so for me the “secret origin” of this whole mess — and that’s how I interpret it, as a mess! — business-wise and otherwise! — is in Jack Kirby’s dissatisfaction with Marvel Comics. Of course, that is maybe a little bit arbitrary of me, to put it back in the 1960s instead of about twenty-five years earlier with Siegel and Shuster…which is the true Big Bang origin of all of it, but then again I could’ve moved it up, too, and kicked it off with Steve Gerber.

You might wonder what I think employee dissatisfaction at Marvel Comics in the Sixties and Seventies has to do with DC’s big gamble of 2011 — the rebooting, the aggressive entry into the digital marketplace and the inferences about the Direct Market that we’re all so busy drawing from that, these days. Well, you see, it’s like this…for me all that just speaks to the conservative, reactionary culture of the Big Two: which of course is the same everywhere you find it. Kind of like noise, and kind of like the point. I mean, this reboot just has such a Nineties feel to it, doesn’t it? An amazingly Nineties feel, really…All-New All-Edgy Teen Titans? Characters reinvented as mercenaries? Sexy, dangerous women…you know I always wonder: is it that they’re dangerous, that makes ‘em so goshdarn sexy?

Or is it the other way around?

And even Rob Liefeld on Hawk & Dove, why will wonders never cease. I guess all we need to really complete the picture is somebody on a skateboard, and somebody else sent back in time to save the future…and hey, what if they were on some kind of futuristic skateboard? And okay, okay…I may sound a bit snarky, but you can’t tell me we haven’t been here before. Sometimes I think we never do leave, you know?

So what’s it all got to do with Kirby and Gerber. Well, they both had ambitious ideas about new markets for comics: Jack with his graphic novels sold in bookstores, Steve with his magazine formats and brand-new characters. It doesn’t really matter if these guys are only standing in for all the other people who groaned under the same conservative system, or if we stand ‘em up exactly as themselves and leave the rest alone…because the thing is, their ideas weren’t just business ideas, but creative ones, and that combination goes real deep in any case. But they didn’t know how deep it went, so they didn’t see that the ideas just weren’t going to fly…they were missing part of the picture, because they never had a business idea that wasn’t also a creative idea, so to them the two things were one and the same.

And hence: failure. Not to mention: history. Mind you, we can forgive anyone for not grabbing hold of the tail-fin of Jack’s rocketship at the time, because let’s face it…he was ahead of his time, and that shit must’ve sounded crazy. And maybe Steve’s ideas, too, sounded like a big risk to take. But the third thing, the thing that would’ve blocked those ideas even if Stan had been willing to jump on board and shoot the moon…that thing actually was not a particularly ambitious thing, and it could’ve been done at the time. But it wasn’t done, and so here we are.

To have a more progressive workplace. That’s all it was, really.

Such a small thing!

But at the Big Two, it seems as though it’ll always be the old 1940s attitude of “who knows how long this ride’s gonna last, let’s get our money out of it the simplest way we can, and keep a parachute handy.” Sure, things are better today than they once were, but…it was really too late once it didn’t work the first time. That’s when the first wave of talent started to go, and through all the ups and downs and ebbs and flows of the decades since, the writing was still on the wall even in the good times, and the writing said: this wall isn’t going anywhere, and neither is that ceiling.

That’s how I read it, anyhow. Reboot? Relaunch? Same-day digital? None of it adds up to a bigger market than was around last year, does it? None of it’s any riskier than it absolutely has to be, and so no wonder this looks like the Nineties, because it is the Nineties — because that’s the last time they were looking for a way to frantically rearrange these deck chairs. And, so okay, there’s actually no real need for that kind of frenzy these days…because this is all big business now, and deep pockets, and each of the Big Two are owned by a BIGGER Two, who’ve learned over time that you can afford to throw away that parachute, if the ride can be kept from ending…and then in fact you can hardly afford not to throw it away…

But having once learned a habit, unless one is a person like a Kirby or a Gerber — or many others I could name, that these two could stand in for or not! — it’s pretty hard to unlearn it. Oh, the Nineties. They’re all that so many of us have to fall back on, aren’t they? Kewl stuff. Edgy stuff. Reinventing-oneself-out-of-sheer-desperation stuff, asking-the-kid-in-the-mailroom-what’s-awesome-in-his-opinion stuff, flop-sweat stuff, Christ-I-gotta-get-an-idea-soon stuff. In a way that’s where your Nineties comics guy is most comfortable, I think, and where he does his best work: on the bubble, spinning up pre-existing elements and using them to re-inform one another, once the crazy visionaries are all gone. This whole business is a bubble. So anyway when your innovators have flown the coop, anyway you gotta come up with some stuff, am I right…?

And there’s no doubt you can do it; but for today’s world, sometimes it’s actually very very inappropriate stuff. I ask you, Bloggers, can you really even have a mercenary mystique in a world where Iraq and Afghanistan are always the biggest topics nobody’s bringing up at a cocktail party? Where 60 Minutes interviews the head honcho of Blackwater and it turns out he’s your crazy Uncle Phil, only with power? In the Nineties, it was so much easier: white male models in cushy black ops telling each other to stay frosty…surface stuff, informed by other surfaces, just there for the lifting. God, but we were so goddamned ignorant back then, weren’t we? That fucking rocked, didn’t it? Couple kids on skateboards and we were ready to go; that was all the aesthetic we needed to think about. Getcher shoulder-pads on, dude. Let’s ride this puppy. You know sometimes I dream that I’m a twelfth-level half-elven magic-user/thief…

What?

“Uh…nothing, man…just thinking about something the kid in the mail-room said…come on, let’s ride, stay frosty…”

I don’t want to be mean. Honestly, I’m not a mean man. And I don’t want to imply that no one’s got any ideas over at DC. I mean…they hired Peter Milligan to write Red Lanterns, didn’t they? And this speaks of a truly wonderful self-awareness to me, a sense of proportion about things that I mean to emulate if I possibly can. War comics? Pshaw, well maybe Ennis was busy, and Veitch laughed at us over the phone, and Chaykin threatened to come down here with a baseball bat…but comics about weird space rangers who get so mad at you they magically puke lava vomit because they’re wearing these stupid fucking rings? Dude, we got Milligan. I swear to God, Bloggers, if we’re lucky this is going to be DC’s own X-Statix. Such a stodgy universe, everybody’s always giving an Academy Awards speech about their super-powered grandma up in Heaven…the super-sentiment builds just like it was being built by an expert bell-ringer…round and round and round, the tone rising higher…and then at the moment of supreme noble multiversal sacrifice…just as somebody strikes the Pieta pose…

…Your superpower makes you puke cosmic lava into the lap of Power Girl, or Amethyst, or Dr. Mid-Nite, or whoever’s sitting next to you. “WASSSSSSAAAAAAP…!” “AIIIIIIIEEEEEEE…!“ Now that sort of thing cries out to be put to use, that’s the sort of thing that speaks to that distinction between sentiment and sentimentality: sentiment is when you swerve to avoid hitting a dog with your car; sentimentality is when the swerve takes you up onto the sidewalk and straight into a bus stop full of people. And true, as sentimental as it is, on the surface this does not seem to be a universe that would welcome that sort of satire…

…But surely if the Red Lanterns stand for anything, they stand for hope?

Hope that it might go over a lot of heads, on its way to me. I swear to God, I have the highest hopes for this comic. And it is not the only comic I have high hopes for, even though it’s the the one I have the most highest hopes for…

…But let’s face it, a lot of the rest of them look like shit. Strap your snowboard on! Grab a stick of Juicy Fruit! Stay frosty, brah. Honestly we were always going to end up here, though. The early Sixties was the tipping point. That’s the thing that made the Nineties. And that’s the thing that made this. Sorry, did I not mention I was going to ramble on aimlessly…?

Fair warning: I may ramble on a bit, and the rambling may not have a particular aim.

Or , then again, it may not not have one. Bloggers, I am not saying I’m against change. Even if it’s stupid change. Because in fact I’d like to try a little of it on myself! Since, you know…the low bar, and everything. Think of it this way: if this really is the age of the IP farm instead of the comics company, then it doesn’t have to be the Nineties, does it? It can be just as stupid without the Nineties, in fact it doesn’t even really have to be stupid at all. It doesn’t have to be any particular sort of thing at all. Because all of a sudden — if we can only see it — there’s a freedom in here, again: the freedom of having nothing special to lose by experimentation. The impetus for change may not come from anything so unambiguous as a bankruptcy, but arguably there’s as little to lose, so you could change it even a little bit more, if you wanted to…

And so since I didn’t particularly like the Nineties myself, this is how I’d change it. Which is not how Kirby might have changed it, nor Gerber either…but as long as we’re only talking about rearranging chairs…

WASSSSSAAAAAAAAP…!

So okay: here’s the continuity you need to have in hand for this.

In the beginning, there was Superman. And then there was Batman. And then they met on a boat this one time.

Thus was born the Shared-Universe Concept of superhero comics. Of course it wasn’t much at the time, and as far as many professional people were concerned it came with the drawback known as Slightly Stupid Fans. “These are just books, okay sonny? WE PRINT BOOKS, f’r Chrissakes what’s wrong with you? So something in one book doesn’t match up in another book, who cares, THEY’RE DIFFERENT BOOKS…!” But then one company took the Shared-Universe Concept’s dull-ish pebble and began to shine it up into something special: and lo, they perpetrated a massive SCREWING ‘pon their competitors, because the fans ate it right up. So in the twinkling of an eye (that only took about twenty years to complete), the company of Superman and Batman decided that they, too, would shine up their shared universe into something special…in large part thanks to the availability of people who used to work for the other company. And much money was made, and back and forth they seesawed, each always trying to get the better of the other, each trying to get the biggest slice of pie on their plate….especially since the pie was shrinking all the time. And it was the Shared-Universe Concept that proved to be the knife that cut it all up, so the Shared-Universe Concept was what they used…in large part, it seemed it was the Shared-Universe Concept that drove all the money around. And after a time this became such a habit of thought that no one bothered to consciously think it anymore: shared universes were what these things were, and that was that.

But then the Big Fish came along, and swallowed up the small fry, and perhaps (perhaps!) took a good look at this shared-universe business and decided it was past its prime as far as making money went. That it was no longer the primary driver of comic-related sales, even if the still-shrinking pie was largely made from the stuff…

And so here we are. (Perhaps!) In a world where the Shared-Universe Concept is, if not obsolete exactly (shared universes still fascinate lovers of serial fiction everywhere, of course), at least ready to be downgraded: identified as the least important part of overall brand-maintenance. And what’s the most important? Recognition. And I guess we think we know what that is, but we should also consider that maybe we don’t! What is, for example, Birds Of Prey all about? Primarily it is about “a superhero girl group run by a computer nerd, kind of like Charlie’s Angels.” That’s all; and that’s enough. What’s important to know about the “historical” tale of the adventures of Superman? It’s important to know what average people know about it, and whatever’s left over after that is not important.

It’s a tougher discipline than it looks. To let BoP have nothing in particular to do with Barbara Gordon, to have Babs’ story not really, for want of a better word, count? And yet it doesn’t count; we may like that character as much as we like any of our favourite characters, in any medium, but the story of Barbara Gordon is not in and of itself a brand. And this is about brands. I mean…again, I’m not saying that out of all this we will lose the characters we love, in fact as far as I can see this will all be a lot less disruptive than previous character-brand-switcheroos…didn’t you ever wonder at that, anyway? What does it matter if they want to get rid of Kent and Inza Nelson, why on earth would they care to get rid of them, what exactly was broken there that required new names, to fix it? What did that ever aim to prove, except that the names weren’t all that necessary to the brand either…?

Except of course a) they actually kind of were, a little…and b) there’s absolutely zero reasons to care about “proving” anything one way or the other, because this is not a philosophy term paper. No one needs it to be proven that you can have Batman without Bruce Wayne, because it is in no way necessary to have Batman without Bruce Wayne, and people know who Bruce Wayne is, so…exactly how hard are we trying to make this for ourselves, anyway? Strongman-from-another-planet Superman’s secret identity is Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter…evil lawyering aside, at a certain point that’s who he is, that’s the brand…and the brand is more important that what can be done with it even while the writer is wearing handcuffs. So in the end all the New Number Ones must be obedient to the dictates of marketing, as far as I can make out…and not editorial direction, which means they just sort of, er, kind of START, at some point, somewhere, as whatever it is they’re probably going to be. And that’s not necessarily a recipe for disaster, in fact for a guy like me who loved the post-Crisis cosmological ferment it could actually seem sort of promising…

…If it weren’t so damned NINETIES-LOOKIN’, but forgive me, I’ve gotten off-track, and I should really get back on. Basically what I’m saying is that I had to tinker with “my” 52 a LOT, to get past my own ingrained prejudice…to come to grips with the (apparent, at least for the moment) fact that there simply are no antecedents to these new Number Ones in story terms, merely brand attributes in publishing ones. All because history is no longer the driver. The map of continuity has been burned up in the fire. None of that stuff is real. Of course, it never really was real: Captain America is a two-fisted guy in a flag suit, not a member of the Avengers; Batman’s a millionaire with a cool car and a pointy-eared mask, not a man driven to avenge the death of his parents. These things matter to us. But they don’t really matter to the property-owners. Batman may be better with Thomas and Martha Wayne, but he can survive without them too; no one is going to take Thomas and Martha away from us, but it’s just that they’re not essential.

Because none of this is essential. No detail of the shared universe or its history is essential, no principle of the shared universe or its history is essential. Flashpoint will be no more essential than Crisis, by the time it’s concluded. Flashpoint isn’t about anything, and nothing’s going to come from it; this relaunch will not “come from” it, will not have had “come from” it…at the very point it is over, it’ll be irrelevant-ized. Hey, I’d be willing to bet it’s just not going to be capable of furnishing any kind of explanation, in an in-story sense, for the relaunch anyway. I mean, how could it? Crisis had a “story goal” that was pretty much co-extensive with its marketing goal: let’s make this place make a bit more sense, and hang together a bit less loosely, like Marvel’s universe does! And Zero Hour had an editorial goal, too: let’s stop all this improvisational stuff people are doing, before what happens in the books stops matching up! And then there was Infinite Crisis, which as far as I can tell had as its goal the checking off of items from a laundry list no one ever got to see…but what on earth could Flashpoint’s story goal be, or its editorial goal for that matter? If I’m proven wrong then I suppose I’ll be happy, but right now I don’t think we’ll see anything much in the way of a road going from A to B, down which the DC universe will travel…I think it’s just going to happen. And then it’ll have happened. And then that’ll be all there is to say about it. So…

Tinkering, yeah: I had to do a bit of that. And maybe it was even a little bit fun to do as an exercise, but of course I would rather have put it all together in a neat cosmological bow for you…because I’m a guy who grew up in the days of King Canon…

And then if I recall right, he abdicated in favour of Queen Meta…

But I’m starting to think now that maybe there’s been a bit of a revolution, that went on right under my nose. President Synergy? Did I ever really think he wouldn’t make changes, once he came to power?

…And honestly, they could be changes I could live with, if it weren’t for all this pathetic frost-free edginess and sexiness. So, might I still try my hand at a little change, I wonder? After all this adjustment and confusion, is there any point in me imagining that this really is the way it’s going to be, and trying to think of a 52 Pick-Up I’d like to play, within these new parameters? This was going to be a Meme, but I’m afraid it isn’t going to look much like one, now…

And maybe it won’t look like anything much at all! But I guess we can both make that determination for ourselves, when I finally get around to the damn thing…

…In the next post.

O tempora! O mores! This is not my beautiful house…!

But I guess if I knocked out that wall, I might have a bit more space to play with.

For All Those People Up In Minnesota…

…Will muttonchop sideburns get me the sack?

My birthday yesterday, I ate a pound of prawns, picked up my little nephew and kissed his weird orange head, saw a dead body and moved straight ahead, came home to weird psychic claws and edged them out as usual.  I don’t care about your politics but if you don’t think this is a good song you’re fuckin’ CRAY-ZEE…!  And belong in the blues you make for yourself…that’s what me and modern music got to say.

Right?

Okay, music for y’all:

Hey, don’t thank me all at once…

But form a line.