Sacrifice

Here's something that's tumbling around in my brain. God knows what it will look like if I try to let it out. But still, let's see if I can at least pry open a window or two and get a clean look at it --

One of the memes I keep coming across in reference to the 'War on Terror' is sacrifice... namely, the stunning lack of it that the American public has been asked for by our leadership. We're told this is a Clash of Civilizations, that it's World War Something (the actual number seems to change in an almost hallucinatory fashion depending on who's throwing the phrase around this particular second), that this is the epochal battle that will determine the way of life for all future generations on Earth, that we are fighting for our freedoms and our values and our very lives -- and yet, we're being asked to contribute... nothing. To do... nothing. To give up... nothing.

Nothing tangible, that is. Unlike in World War II, we're not subject to rationing, we're not being asked to buy bonds or take part in various material drives, we aren't told we need to keep our bomb shelters well stocked or put up black out curtains, we aren't being called on to volunteer for any of a hundred vital but unpaid civilian posts, or... well... we aren't being told we need to do ANYthing out of the ordinary. Hundreds of thousands of our troops are fighting overseas in what we are told is perhaps the most monumental battle of good vs. evil in human history, and we just go on watching TV, eating fried food, and buying seasons of our favorite TV shows on DVD. It's business as usual. No sacrifice required.

I've been wondering lately just why this is. With military recruitment at an all time low, our armed forces are strained to the breaking point, and the folks in charge just keep adding names to the roster of Countries We're Invading Real Soon. Yet nobody in power will even whisper the word 'conscription' out loud. With our armies deeply entrenched in a conflict we apparently cannot possibly win, and the American people fairly obviously yearning to take a larger part and do whatever they can to help out, still... nobody in a position of leadership stands up and says "this is what you can do". We support the troops with magnetic ribbons on our SUVs, and by kicking a few bucks into various charities, when someone makes us aware of one.

In other words, we do pretty much what we always do to assuage our guilt for being fat, lazy and comfortable in a world where so many suffer so much -- we make a token gesture (the modern equivalent of the ancient custom of pouring a splash of wine onto the ground as a libation to the gods) and then we get on with stuffing our faces some more.

Yet many pundits have stated that the Bush Administration completely squandered the opportunities they had, in the crazy days just after 9/11, to harness the massive American fighting spirit to some sort of mass constructive effort against the enemy. Back in those days, we all WANTED to do something. People drove hundreds or thousands of miles to help dig in the WTC wreckage for survivors. They stood in line for days to give blood. They sent clothing, food, and money to anyone they could find who might need it. They wanted to enlist, and were turned away.

Suppose the President had gone on national television on, say, September 12, 2006, and stated that the best way everyday average Americans could help fight terrorism was to conserve energy? Turn down their thermostats. Carpool. Take the bus, the subway, the train. Limit recreational driving. Unplug the extra TV sets, put the electronic luxuries in the closet for the duration. Spend less money on unnecessary extravagances, put more money in the bank. Would people have done it? I suspect they'd have done it happily, cheerfully, enthusiastically. Had the President sounded that patriotic call, most of us would have eagerly responded. We WANTED to do something.

So why wouldn't he ask? Why hasn't he ever asked? Why is it that we, the American people, caught up in this vast, near-mythical, transcendental, existential, almost Wagnerian conflict... have never been asked to do anything... except, you know, vote Republican every couple of years?

I think the answer is somewhat complicated, with a couple of factors feeding into it. First, if the American people make substantial sacrifices, it's going to impact our lifestyles. If our lifestyles change significantly, it will impact our economy. The people pulling our strings (and the people pulling theirs) have made a huge effort to build up our current (insane) economic structure, and our current economy keeps them fat and happy and powerful and above the law, by putting literally billions of dollars into their numbered, anonymous offshore accounts. Nobody in authority wants to fuck with that.

In other words, when Dick Cheney says 'the American Way of Life is not negotiable', he means it, because the American Way of Life keeps his stock portfolio afloat and his stock portfolio allows him to shoot people right in the fucking face if he feels like it, and then give interviews on 60 MINUTES about it. So... no sacrifices; they might drive corporate profits down.

That's a fairly straightforward reason. A more subtle one is that when a people or a culture or a population come together as one and make huge collective efforts and work hard and give stuff up in order to accomplish a goal, certain consequences ensue. One is that those people feel empowered. Those currently in charge do not want us to feel empowered, they want us to be scared. They want us to rely on them to take care of us. They do not want us to feel even remotely like we are capable of doing anything to make a difference or take care of ourselves. That's their job, and while they require our support to do it, the support they require is passive. They want us to sit there like big dumb sheep and let them walk all over us, tear up our Constitution, erode our civil liberties, repeal the Bill of Rights... and, every couple of years, pull the lever in the Republican column. But they do not want us to feel like we can go outside, organize ourselves into groups and communities, and Get Something Done. If we were to do that, well, then, we might at some point decide to flex our newfound muscles in ways that our masters would find inconvenient. And they sure as shit don't want that.

Another potentially unsavory side effect of people pulling together and working towards a specific goal, sacrificing their own comfort and personal desires to do so, is that they expect to see results. The American people... well, any people, humanity in general, actually... will sacrifice for a cause they think is worthy. But if that shit goes on for any length of time, they want to see that they're getting somewhere. And while it's now obvious that the War on Terror, specifically, the war in Iraq, isn't getting anywhere, in terms of even the vague goals and objectives that were announced during its run up... I honestly think that the shadowy planners of this war knew from the start that it wasn't going to achieve anything. At least, not anything they could sell to the American public.

My personal suspicion is that the people in charge of the people in charge sent our troops over to Iraq for reasons that could never be publicly justified or defended, and thus, can never be publicly admitted to. I don't understand it fully myself, but I don't believe the war in Iraq is really a failure to those who actually planned and initiated it. I think they are getting exactly what they wanted from the start -- growing chaos in certain specific regions of the Middle East. I suspect that what is going on is very much a drug war; a vast interglobal gang rumble between shadowy cartels, one of which has so much power over our government that they can basically use the United States military as unwitting thugs in their own particular street fight.

And I suspect that to these people (and to American interests, also) a civilized, secular, modernized Middle East is vastly undesirable. These people want the average Arabic person to remain short sighted, savage, haplessly divided by sectarian fanaticism, and imprisoned by pre-medieval superstition. That kind of Arab will never wise up and start to use the enormous clout their vast petroleum resources could potentially give them in any manner that really threatens the powers that be, and that is exactly the way the powers that be want the Middle East to remain.

And to people who think that way, the war in Iraq is an enormously successful operation... one that they want to keep going exactly as it is right now, forever. The last thing these people want is peace, or civility, or law & order, to break out in the Middle East. They operate much more comfortably in a chaotic vacuum, and a chaotic vacuum is exactly what we've managed to create... in what was formerly one of the very few high tech, secular, socially advanced nation-states in the entire Middle East.

The general consensus I keep hearing seems to be that Bush wants us to 'stay the course' simply because he plans to dump the unpleasant job of declaring defeat and pulling out of Iraq on whoever his successor is. I think that's a hopelessly optimistic daydream. I see absolutely no evidence that Bush & Co have any intention of voluntarily surrendering power in two years... or ever. I think Bush wants to 'stay the course' because the people who issue him his marching orders every day have no desire to see the Middle East return to anything like a peaceful, orderly status. They like things exactly the way they are, and they couldn't care less how many American soldiers need to be continually shoveled into the engine to keep it going. This is a war without end. I can't believe otherwise, because the war not only doesn't hurt the global elite in any discernible way, but it provides so many benefits to them. They are making trillions of dollars off of it, and it gives them all the justification they need to do anything they want to us, all in the name of national security. And we sit still for it... because it doesn't seem to be costing us anything.

The grim reality is, it's costing us everything... every existential value that we, as Americans, are supposed to cherish... every liberty, every freedom, every personal choice, every individual empowerment and so called inalienable right, that our forefathers fought so hard to carve out for themselves and their descendents, and that have long been seen as the hope of all humanity for a future in which all people are free to see, hear, speak, act, work, and live as they choose. Yet we've become so deliberately, obdurately foolish that we refuse to see this; we willfully turn our collective gaze away from everything they are stealing from us, because we can still go out to McDonald's and get chicken McNuggets any time we want.

For a while, anyway.

I truly believe that this is another very large reason why Bush & Co have been very very careful not to ask the American people to sacrifice much of anything, or make any real effort at all, to help prosecute the War on Terror. If we were visibly bleeding, we'd want to know when it was going to stop, and if we didn't see a tourniquet in our very short term future, we'd demand an end to the bullshit pretty fucking quick. Now, the American people are finally getting to a point where a majority of us are opposed to the War and we want it ended... but the fact that it isn't actually costing us much of anything tangible on a day to day basis certainly keeps our personal urgency level down. Yeah, we want our guys out of there. Yeah, we want to stop blowing up Iraqi civilians. Yeah... but what the hell, there's still a football game on every Sunday, and gas prices are low again, and the AC works fine. So it's not like this is important, or anything.

All of these are the reasons why I think our current political leadership has never asked us to make much of an effort, or any real sacrifices at all, to help prosecute our current global conflict. I think they understand that one of the most essential keys to taking and keeping power over the American electorate is a very simple one -- keep us comfortable. As long as we're comfortable, we'll put up with damn near anything.

Until it's too late to do anything about it.

There it is

Ragnell:

I want to see both genders face the same trials, not inequality. I'm fucking tired of fucking inequality.

I'd be happy to shut the fuck up about rape in comic books if two conditions were fulfilled:

1) It must suddenly and immediately become as overtly present a threat in the lives of male superheroes as it is for female superheroes. If both Green Lantern and Black Canary are captured by a group of supervillains, and the writer chooses to have the villains leer and make sexualized threats -- they would be levied at both characters, not just Dinah.

2) A sexual assault scene for a female victim is drawn in exactly the same mood and manner as a sexual assault scene for the male victim. Meaning panel angles, point of view, emotions, and reasoning behind writing this.

(Please note: If you find these two options absurd because this treatment "emasculates" i.e. weakens a male character, do consider what it tells us about your attitudes towards women as a gender when it is perfectly acceptable for female superheroes.)

I keep hoping she's going to smarten up. Wise up. Grow up.

Apparently, I hope in vain.

First, I could very well be way out of touch, but if there's a mad frenzy of female characters being raped in superhero comics lately, or, y'know, ever, I've missed out on it. To the best of my knowledge, the only rape of a female character that has ever occurred in a superhero comic was the infamous Dr. Light/Sue Dibney rape that took place in IDENTITY CRISIS -- a rape which so shocked superhero comics as a gestalt that I have to believe it was at the time, and probably remains, a singular event. (Hold on -- the second Ms. Marvel, from back in the 1990s, was raped -- gang raped, apparently -- by some of the Power Broker's goons, I believe. So that's two I can remember. And, oddly, that's one that didn't get a lot of coverage at the time... although it took place in a fairly obscure title, I believe, and of course, the Internet wasn't the presence back then that it is now.)

But I admit, I could be wrong about that. Maybe female characters in superhero comics, powered and non-powered, have been getting raped right, left and sideways lately. If so, well, then, I shouldn't immediately point in appalled incredulity at just how amazingly fucking retarded the assertion that rape is 'an immediate and overtly present threat' in the lives of superheroines actually is.

But I'm going to anyway, because, well, I think it's an astonishingly dumb ass statement. Just how often do superheroines get raped, anyway? In the two examples of female characters being raped in superhero comics that I've been able to dredge up out of memory, Sue Dibney wasn't a superheroine, and the second Ms. Marvel was not, at that point, as far as I can recall, a superheroine yet. (I believe she was a professional wrestler, and I'm not sure, but I think the rape happened before she gained her super powers.)

I could go on to wonder just what kind of supervillain is going to be powerful enough to make characters like Supergirl, She-Hulk, Binary, Wonder Woman, Phoenix, Mary Marvel, Valkyrie, or Isis even worry about the possibility of rape, but it would be disingenous. There are many superheroines in the comics genre who are considerably less powerful than those particular women, and I suppose, if rape were a looming, ever-present shadow over the lives of all superheroines, then, yeah, Huntress and Black Canary and Storm and Tigra and Mockingbird and the Wasp would really be sweating it out every time they left home base to fight crime.

But, well... this simply doesn't seem to me to be the case. Any more than it seems to me to be the case that rape is 'an overtly present threat' to the average woman here in America. Is it something that can happen? Sure. Is it something that does happen? Absolutely, and it's a horror that it does. But I'm reasonably sure that the vast majority of women still get through their day to day lives from birth to death without being sexually assaulted, and as a comics fan of some vintage and reasonable expertise, I'm equally sure that most superheroines get through even very lengthy careers in superhero comics similarly.

But let's move on from that. Apparently, Ragnell is of the opinion that rape is this terrifying sword of Damocles hangin' over the head of all costumed superwomen, and while I think she's nuts, still, let's try to look at this through the deranged framework she oh so earnestly posits. What is it she demands? Not a cessation of the apparently incessant onslaught of ignominious erotic assualts against ultra-Eves being enacted every second in every panel of every superhero comic being published in the contemporary era... no. Ragnell thinks that's just peachy-keen, and will happily shut the fuck up about it immediately (yeah, I snorted at that, too) if only... if only... all the male superheroes were placed in exactly equal peril of sexual assault as the women are.

It's... I... ::staring at the wall gibbering::

Okay. Let me collect my thoughts, here:

Well. First, the only way I can make this work is if suddenly at least half of the male supervillains in comics become gay, or at least, bisexual. Well, no, more than half. Because some of them, regardless of orientation, just aren't groaty enough to rape anyone, male or female. So, yeah, more than half of the supervillains out there must now become just as enamored of the taut rippling buttocks of their potential superhuman male captives as they necessarily must be (being, you know, evil men) of the ripe jiggling boobies, delectable flat tummies, and luscious tight assglobes of the superhuman females they may well at some point have helpless in chains before them.

Um. Wait. Now, the relatively few FEMALE baddies in comics could step up to the plate here, I guess. I suppose they could all start capturing and raping every superhero within a thousand mile radius of their secret lairs, just to make Ragnell happy. Forced cunnilingus from and vehement dildoings for every penisized member of the Avengers, JLA, Teen Titans, Defenders, and Legion should amply redress any perceived inequities in the super sexual assault columns, and by God, if anything is going to make the boys club respect & fear the bad girls in comics, it's the sight of Circe, Cheetah, Poison Ivy, or the Enchantress coming at them with a three foot strap on jutting menacingly from between their shapely thighs. It's enough to make super-strong men shudder and caped boys weep. And that, by God, will teach them.

Okay. No. I'm sorry, it's all just retarded. Here's the haps:

Here in the real world, which Ragnell and her fangirl coterie seem to so resolutely want to see superhero comics reflect more accurately, until, you know, they get offended by it, in which case, they don't, women tend to be sexualized more often than men are. (In fact, that's pretty much what they are bitching about.) An unfortunate effect of this is that women tend to be raped more often than men are. It's an awful truth, but it is indeed a truth. Now, women aren't raped so often that they dasn't stir outside their own home, as Ragnell seems to think they must be, but, the fact remains, when rape occurs, it happens more often to women than it does to men.

Therefore, demanding that male superheroes (or male firefighters, or male chicken pluckers, for that matter) immediately and from this point forward be placed in just as much danger of being raped as female superheroines are (however much danger that may be; until and unless Garth Ennis or Warren Ellis start writing every mainstream superhero comic, I doubt it adds up to much) is pretty goddam stupid. It's not even remotely reflective of reality as it exists around us, or as feminist fangirls claim they want it to exist in superhero comics, when it comes to things like how superwomen are portrayed.

I'll close this by noting that I've thought of two more rape sequences in comics as I typed all this -- the infamous arc in the 1970s when Ms. Marvel was mind controlled into being sexual playtoy to some dweeb named Marcus off in Limbo (it was in some truly horrible AVENGERS ANNUAL that I wish to God Kurt Busiek had expunged from comics history during his run on the team), and an obscure, barely noticed sequence, also in AVENGERS, in the early 1980s, where Moondragon similarly mind controlled Thor into enthusiastic sexual submission.

So, that's three instances in superhero comics where women have been raped by men, one where a man was raped by a woman... which, yeah, seems unbalanced. But, I'd have to say, it also seems reflective of actual reality.

Personally, I liked the Silver Age, where nobody was raping nobody. But I'm an old fuddy duddy, I frankly admit it. The Modern Age has been about many, many things, most of them having to do with money, but at least a few of them have been about breaking down the artificial taboos that kept superhero comics from being 'realistic'. Thus and so, we've seen drug addiction, divorce, torture, vampirism, Satanism, the word 'zombie', and, yes, rape, all become part of superhero metarealities... or, at least, we've seen them portrayed in mainstream superhero comics; those of us who think about such things must presume that these elements were, however regrettably, always a part of those worlds, we simply didn't see them prior to recently.

But if rape has to be part of a 'realistic' superhero universe, then, you know, it should be realistically portrayed. And if it's realistically portrayed, then, well, awful though it is, it happens to women much much more than it happens to men.

Is this the end of Little Nell?

Nah. I got stuff. Posts to write on YOUNG AVENGERS (Christ, it's bad), our recent vacation (a good time was had by all, or, at least, by all the wimmenfolk in my life, which is what counts, and I scored some new Magic cards, so, overall, it was cool, although I wish to God I could now take a vacation to recover from my vacation), and, of course, the latest Republican/conservative horseshit (the murderous idiots are willing to accept that the war in Iraq has killed five or ten thousand innocent civilians, but they absolutely balk at SIX HUNDRED thousand, and here I thought moral relatavism was supposed to be a liberal disease), a whip around of the blogs I regularly read, few of whom care whether I exist or not but what the fuck, perhaps something about the TV I'm watching (that would be HEROES, and nothing else, at this juncture) and, I dunno, maybe some clix nonsense that only Mike Norton will read (got me a STILT-MAN, baby!).

What I ain't got at this particular node in space/time is, well, time. The SuperKids are all running around screaming while simultaneously leaping up and down and setting things on fire, the Asshole Ex is taking us back to court to waste even MORE of the money we ain't got and he's refusing to pay us, SuperFiancee and I are back at work full time, the house is a wreck... it's Life As Usual, just with more of it piled up in four story stacks due to taking five days out for a road trip to Florida.

But bear with me. I'll probably throw a great deal of shit against this h'yar wall sometime this weekend.

Oh, and mad thanks to Mike 'Miraclo' Norton and Opus de Penguin for recent plugs on their respective blogs. They're both on my sidebar, go check 'em out.

Oh, yeah... I love you, Tammy.

Laterz.

Going Supernova, again

ADDENDUM: Scans of the Inquest spoiler are up here. Mike Norton must not hit that link! NOOOOOOO!

This write up was written before I saw those scans. It contains NO spoilers! It is thoroughly Mike Norton safe! But I could totally go back and write a whole buncha spoilers NOW if I wanted to.

Okay. Mike Norton did his reaction to the recently spoiled SUPERNOVA list. I may as well do mine, since I'm trapped at work and bored between calls (calls today have been pretty uniformly hellish, so I’m not bored DURING them, I’m generally just wishing whoever is on the other end of the phone in hell pretty vehemently, if silently… but between calls, the minutes drag):

CONFIRMED CHARACTERS:

Aleta/Starhawk (Defender) (One-Who-Knows LE)

It’s an element of long standing annoyance with me that WizKids seems to have made a decision some time in the last few years – “This many Team Abilities, and no more”. So every couple of sets, they tell us “Oh, yeah, and we’re going to come out with some new Team Abilities!” and then we get crap like this – yeah, they’re introducing characters who are members of previously unrepresented TEAMS, but they’re giving those characters one of the previously established Team Ability emblems on their bases.

It’s aggravating as crap to me for several reasons. First, the Guardians of the Galaxy, or the Shi’Ar, or the Doom Patrol, or the Exiles, or whoever the hell it is that WK has decided to include in their latest expansion that don’t have their own TA yet, certainly deserve one. If they’re a distinct team, they deserve their own logo and their own specific group ability. It can be a little bit hard to come up with new, interesting, and effective TAs, I grant you, but I’ve done it several times and nobody is even paying me for it. If they’re going to give me Starjammers characters, then they can put a Starjammers logo on the base.

The second reason it annoys me is that, if they’re going to declare they can only have a certain number of Team Abilities in the game, for whatever asinine reason, it just galls me to have some of those finite slots wasted on garbage like Kingdom Come, or the Ultimates. These aren’t even teams; they’re groupings of characters that live in a particular (and particularly bad) alternate universe or near future. Instead of wasting space on crap like that, I’d be much happier if WK had just given us a Doom Patrol and a Guardians of the Galaxy, or even New Warriors, if it must be, TA from the very start of the game.

Now, WK does effectively provide new Team Abilities by issuing feat cards allowing, for example, the Avengers TA to have an alternate Team Ability for a few extra points. The problem with this is that it allows, in my mind, too much flexibility – for example, the Alpha Flight alternate TA is not restricted simply to actual members of Alpha Flight, but can, in fact, be used by anyone with an Avengers TA – a Team Ability which now encompasses not only the Avengers (a large line up in and of itself) but also Alpha Flight and the Thunderbolts.

Assuming that the Defenders get a Feat Card creating an alternate Guardians of the Galaxy TA, and assuming further it’s any good, then from this point on, for a few points extra, people will be able to have Valkyrie and Nighthawk go into battle with a Guardians of the Galaxy TA rather than a Defenders TA. Which may be a good idea, since the Defenders TA pretty much sucks… but it offends the purist in me.

#48-50 Ant-Man (Avenger) (Hank Pym LE)

Unlike Mike Norton, I’ve seen the sculpt and I’ve seen the dials, and while it annoys me that the dial on the Atom hockey puck is still significantly superior to any version of Ant-Man we’ve seen, still, this will be a welcome addition to the Avengers roster. And the sculpt looks gorgeous.

Badoon Commander/Warrior/ Guard (Skrull)

Badoons shouldn’t be Skrulls; it’s one of the most useless TAs the game has. However, on the other hand, if there is an alternate TA for Badoon, and it’s useful, then maybe we can use it for our Skrull teams as well…

Binary (X-Man) (unique)

Another version of Carol Danvers, who has one of the most tortured personal histories in all of comics. It will be interesting to see what kind of dial they give her. She should be mad powerful, but I’m going to guess she ends up as a flying blaster, pretty much exactly the same as her Warbird figure, with maybe slightly higher Speed and Damage, and a lot of Energy Explosion or Pulse Wave instead of Super Strength.

Bulldozer (Masters of Evil) (Joe Camp LE)

Should have Charge, Impervious, maybe some Close Combat Expert, and Super Strength. I’d imagine the Vet will have a 10 Attack Value, and maybe one click of a 4 Damage augmented by the previously mentioned CCE. All we need is Piledriver now for a complete Wrecking Crew, although who beyond a real glutton for punishment would ever field the team is beyond me. The lack of range and any non-physical powers would doom them in pretty much any competitive environment.

Captain Mar-Vell (unique)

Happy to see the real CM back for another go round. Hard to imagine how they’ll improve on the previous version, though. Maybe some Probability Control to simulate the Cosmic Awareness.

#79-81 Captain Marvel/Photon/Legacy (Genis-Vell LE)

I’ve seen the sculpts, they all look good, with a nice level of variation from one version to another. The dial on the Experienced version (without going into details that will cause Mike Norton, my only reader for these entries, to run screaming for the hinterlands) is varied and interesting enough that it may well become the most popular version of the character.

Doctor Spectrum (Joe Ledger LE)

I’ll be much happier if this is the classic costume, but have little hope it’s anything but the guy from the new Ultimates-esque SUPREME series.

Drax (Arthur Douglas LE)

My comments on Drax were in a previous post. Mainly, the sculpt looks good, still haven’t seen a dial, and I hope, as he’s a REV, that at least one version of him flies.

Graviton (unique) Mike Norton says “Could easily be a disappointing dial, as localized control over gravity is a vague and slippery power to define in clix.” My guess? He’ll have a lot of WK’s catch all object manipulation power, Telekinesis. He’ll probably fly, and may have some Energy Shield/Deflection. I’m going to guess he’ll have an Attack Value of 10 as a max, and probably a Defense Value of around 15 or 16, which, with the ES/D, will make him hard to hit at range, but not all that hard. Probably a 7 or 8 click dial.

Hyperion (King Hyperion LE)

I don’t know who ‘King Hyperion’ is. However, I’ve seen Hyperion’s sculpt and dial (his REV was the extremely niggardly and frustrating ‘sneak peek’ from last week, which was goddam late being posted and then, well, ONE FIGURE???? Fuck you, WizKids) and all I can say is, I hope he isn’t wearing those frickin’ goofy… um… never mind, no details for Mike… anyway, I hope only one of his sculpts has a certain wardrobe malfunction. Other than that, his dial is pretty much straight up flying brick – he hits hard, he’s tough to hurt, yaddity yaddity.

Jack of Hearts (Avenger) (unique)

I like the Jack of Hearts, although I didn’t appreciate Johns blowing him up, or Bendis doing it again. I could nearly forgive Bendis a great many sins for blowing up the Scott Lang Ant-Man, though. In terms of the plastic version of the character, well, if WK gets the costume right, and does the sculpt with the level of competence we’ve grown used to over the past few sets, this should be a striking figure. As to powers, I assume he’ll fly and blow shit up at range – some Pulse Wave, some Energy Explosion, a decent range, Running Shot, probably some Ranged Combat Expert.

Jubilee (X-Men)

Well, she don’t bother me; the X-Men TV cartoon is among the few versions of the non Silver Age X-Men I actually enjoyed. I don’t understand what she’s doing in a cosmic themed set, but I know from the boards that a vocal minority has been screaming for her for years, so, whatever. Hopefully she’ll be a more effective piece than Boom Boom.


Justice/Marvel Boy (Avenger)

I’m going to be interested to see how they do this REV along with the adult version of the figure, Vance Astro/Major Victory. Beyond that, I’ve wanted a Justice to put alongside my Firestar in the Avengers line up for quite awhile, so this works for me.

Kang the Conquerer (Nathaniel Richards LE)

Happy to see another version, although I should note that the much maligned Infinity Challenge version is nowhere near as unwieldy under my House Rules as he is under normal WK parameters. I’m hoping the new sculpt won’t have a gigantic blaster cannon over one shoulder, as Kang should have all the weaponry he needs built into his armor… but I realize fully that’s most likely a forlorn hope, as this Kang will almost certainly be drawn from more recent visualizations. And when was it established that he’s really someone named Nathaniel Richards? I am so far behind on Modern Age Marvel continuity…

Karnak (unique)

Always good to see another Inhuman. Karnak is one of the most specialized characters in the world; as with his teammate Gorgon, WizKids has one particular power that will entirely sum up his abilities. In his case, it’s Exploit Weakness, while when they give us a Gorgon finally, he’ll be nothing but Quake Quake Quake. I’m actually more anxious to see a Triton figure; he could be interesting.

Korvac (Power Cosmic) (unique)

Interesting choice. As Korvac was defined as being able to do pretty much ANYthing, and in fact, he killed the entire Avengers line up and was only brought down because his equally powerful girlfriend doubted him for a crucial instant, breaking his heart (it was a particularly dumb ass moment in Jim Shooter scripting, what do you want from me), it’s hard for me to see how they can put him in fig form. My guess is that he’ll be a long range, Impervious blaster without flying with a high attack and a shitload of damage.

Kree Warrior/Captain/Colonel (Shield)

I have to hope these Kree are more useful than the last batch o’ Kree hosers, whose only purpose in appearing on any team was to use their TA to amp up Ronan the Accuser’s Energy Explosion.

Machine Man (Avenger) (unique)

Happy to see him. Baffled as to how they’ll do his dial, though. Incapacitate, Perplex, and Plasticity are my guesses at the moment, with maybe some TK and some Toughness. Perhaps some Regenerate; he was always being smashed to pieces and then putting himself back together.

Majestrix Lilandra (Avenger) (unique)

If she’s getting an Avengers TA, it seems safe to assume that the Shi’Ar will get the Avengers TA, too. Meaning Shi’Ar will be able to be Thunderbolted to any TA in the game. I guess that’s okay; as they’re supposed to be a star spanning, high tech, galactic empire ruling race, which you’d think would indicate they’re pretty versatile.

Overall, I’d rather see plastic wasted on nearly anything besides some crappy Claremont bird alien figs, but, well, we already got a Deathbird, so I guess Lilandra is okay. Those inclined to do so can either team them up with, or field them against, a Starfire/Blackfire team, I guess.

Major Victory/Vance Astro (Defender) (Vance Astronovik LE)

Hmmm. Looks like Vance gets two separate REVs, one for his modern day teenage version, and one for the adult in the far flung future. Interesting.

Mantis (Avenger) (Celestial Madonna LE)

A character I honestly never expected to see in plastic form. I don’t know why; she just seems to be so much a Steve Englehart proprietary fig that I guess I just never figured anyone at WK would even know who she is. If I were designing the character, I’d give her some Exploit Weakness, some Charge, some Super Senses, a high Attack Value, Combat Reflexes, maybe some Close Combat Expert and some Incapacitate. Seth, on the other hand, will no doubt give her an Attack Value of 9, Psychic Blast, and Blades/Claws/Fangs. Well, at least I’ll have the sculpt…


Night Thrasher (Dumbass Dipshit)

One of the few character choices in this set that I really dislike. But who knows, if he’s cheap enough, he might see some play. God knows I never would have expected Mockingbird to be as popular with the tournament weenies as she’s turned out to be. Or the rookie Green Fire, for that matter.

Nocturne (X-Men)

All I know about this character is what I’ve read on the boards. Apparently she is some otherdimensional daughter of Nightcrawler from a parallel timeline who is now in Marvel’s mainstream continuity. I honestly don’t much care.

Nova (Super Nova LE)

An old favorite character, although I must admit, he's NEVER been written well. Should be a simple, straightforward dial – Charge, Invulnerability, Super Strength. I will bet good money Seth ends up doing something completely inexplicable with it, like giving the character Steal Energy and a Range Strike, or some goddam thing.

Power Princess (unique)

Yeah, whatever.

Raza

I’m actually fond of the Starjammers. I shouldn’t be; they’re Claremont characters and they pretty much suck. But it’s a vestige of my childhood that I haven’t seen bludgeoned into the ground since, I guess. Anyway, happy to see another Starjammer. Still waiting for Ch’od.

Red Ghost (Doom) (unique)

Red Ghost and his Super Apes are a big reason I’m loving this set, although, I have to admit, I’m baffled as to what they’re doing in a cosmic themed expansion. And I have to admit, if the dials are accurate, they won’t be all that useful. I mean, the Red Ghost has, you know, Phasing/Teleport and that’s pretty much IT. Still, with a new Vision in this set, I’m hoping for a Feat Card that will finally make Intangible characters at least a little more difficult to damage, as that’s really the Red Ghost’s main schtick… although I recall he had some spiffy Mind Control powers for a while, too, now that I think of it. Anyway, regardless of the dial, it will be fab to have him and his monkeys in my FF villains group.

Sage (X-Men) (Tessa LE)

I… don’t know who this is.

She-Hulk (Avenger) (Jennifer Walters Esq. LE)

Excuse me while I vomit.

Shi'ar Borderer/Admiral/Warrior (Shield)

It’s weird that they’re giving the Shi’ar generics a SHIELD TA, while giving their Empress an Avengers TA. I’m wondering if that’s not a mistake.

#76-78 Silver Surfer (Norrin Radd LE)

I’ve seen the dials. WK’s Silver Surfer isn’t as cool as MY Silver Surfer, but he’s a lot closer to what he should be than his previous (very expensive) clix versions.

Skrull Infiltrator/Warrior/General (Skrull)

Could be cool. Probably won’t be, though. If they end up giving the Skrull Infiltrator Shape Change on top of the Skrull TA, it’s pretty much an admission of how horribly badly the Skrull TA sucks.

Sunspot (Brotherhood/X-Men)

Another X-Baby. I never cared about this particular offshoot. I feel much the same way about this fig as I will when they start bringing out Young Avengers. Which they will. Unless I stop them. I need more power, Scottie.

Super Ape Igor/Mikhlo/Pedtor (Doom)

Yay! Super Apes! Seth will screw up their dials, though. I’m thinking he’ll give them all Psionic Blast.

Super Skrull (Skrull) (unique)

The original version really only lacked any powers that reflected Sue Storm’s abilities (Stealth, Barrier) and I’d like to see him pick up some of those in this retread. But, again, I’m figuring he gets Psychic Blast and, I don’t know, Probability Control, or something.

Thanos (Power Cosmic) (unique)

The apparent big gun of the set. I’ve never been wild about this blatant Darkseid rip off, but I know a great huge slavering fan base is avidly awaiting this version. And certainly, he can’t help but be improved over his Infinity Challenge incarnation… although I suspect his fans are going to miss the stats on that earlier dial badly.

Thor (Avenger) (Dr. Donald Blake LE)

Hopefully he’s a true beast, someone comparable to Icons Superman. I’m looking for a 12 Attack Value (he’s an ancient warrior deity, c’mon, now), a 5 Damage with Ranged Combat Expert, Running Shot, Super Strength, and Invulnerability on at least a 17 Defense. Seth is awfully stingy with 11 slot dials, but if Thor gets anything less, he’d better be nearly solid all the way down with high defense values and/or damage abatement. This is a character who should not be easy to knock out of the game.

Weapon Alpha/Vindicator/Guardian (Avenger) (James MacDonald Hudson LE)

Yeah, okay. I hope he’s not as big a gumby in clix form as his wife is.

#61-63 Vision (Avenger) (Victor Shade LE)

Early rumors had it that the LE of this REV was going to be Iron Lad, a particularly noxious member of that particularly noxious creative abortion of a teenage superteam, the Young Avengers. It’s nice to see that THAT didn’t happen. Having seen the sculpts and dials for the REVs, I can say that this is a very good version of the Vision, and will be more useful than the previous Unique. Nicer looking, too.

Overall, this is a set I’m looking forward to, and, yeah, from the dials I’ve seen, Seth seems to be getting better at the design. It only took him, what, four expansions, to figure out the difference between his ass and a hole in the ground. Still, there are a lot of dials I haven’t seen yet; Seth has plenty of room to continue justifying my enormous and well deserved distrust of him. Time will tell.

Taboos

Over here, the Carpetbagger Report provides a partial list of all the Republicans and conservatives currently piling on Speaker of the House Denny Hastert over the Foley Pretty Pages scandal.

Over here, a commenter on Roy Edroso’s blog named KPatrick laments:

”What's sick is that this -- not stealing an election in 2000, not fucking up pre-9/11, not fucking up post-9/11, not the colossal waste of life and limb entialed in the War To Re-Elect The President (sometimes called Operation Iraqi Freedom), not needless abrogations of civil rights, not the manipulation of science, not the bullying of weaker kids that we see on cultural issues -- THIS might be what finally persuades the moderates, or Reagan Democrats or soccer moms or security moms or whoeverthefuck that the Republican party isn't helping right now. Thank God we finally caught one with his pants down, even if only metaphorically; experience has shown that however great overt mendacity and incompetence might be as issues in an election, you can't really persuade America against someone until they do something untoward with their wing-wang.

KPatrick, like most people regardless of their position on the political spectrum, misses the point. Yeah, to one of his tribe (my tribe, too) it does seem ‘sick’ that the conservative base has pretty consistently ignored the current Administration’s ongoing assault on American civil liberties, their persecution of science and aggrandizement of superstitious ignorance in its place, and a completely unnecessary and immoral war of aggression.

What he is failing to grasp, however, is that those conservatives are all in a different tribe from him (and me). And tribes only get upset when they catch someone violating the taboos of their tribe. They couldn’t care less about violations of another’s tribes’ taboos.

This is one of the biggest disconnects between right and left wing. And it works both ways. The left wing honestly does not understand the very real, very sincere, very vehement outrage that their opposite numbers felt when Bill Clinton was caught having sex with an intern in the Oval Office, lied about it under oath, and somehow, managed to remain President despite all that. As far as the conservatives in our country were concerned, this was an egregious violation of the trust of office, and, yes, certainly, the leadership of the opposing party pushed the issue as far as they possibly could for political gain, but, still… the firestorm of outrage on the right over Clinton’s misbehavior, and especially, at the lack of outrage on the left over a President being caught committing adultery in the Oval Office, was very real.

What I said at the time is still true – had Clinton been a Republican President, the Lewinsky scandal would have destroyed him. But as Clinton was (nominally) a Democrat, and therefore, of the left, he managed to survive, because a sex scandal did not alienate his base.

In a country as exactly divided as America is between left and right, the only way an elected incumbent will lose their job over a scandal is if the scandal infuriates or enrages their base in such a way as to cause that base to withdraw their support.

Or, to put it another way, a politician in our country has to do something that violates the taboos of his or her tribe. If he or she loses the support of their tribe, they are done, because certainly, they aren’t going to get any support from the opposing tribe.

This is what most people just don’t get – that behavior which offends one ‘tribe’ will not necessarily offend another. For example, Republican politicians can pretty much be as authoritarian as they want to, as long as they say they have a reason for doing so that is acceptable to their conservative base. Conservative people strongly believe in duty and sacrifice and that the good of the many (in this case, the nation) outweighs the good of the few (or the one). Tell them that you’re creating free speech zones and setting up detainment camps on American soil for the indefinite incarceration and vigorous interrogation of terrorists and enemy combatants, and they’re fine with it, because they’ve been told that this is wartime, and in times of war, you have to do things you wouldn’t do in peacetime. Conservatives want to trust their leaders at all times, and tend to let ‘political’ issues pass on over them. Politics is something for wiser heads to worry about.

The liberal tribe, on the other hand, tends to care deeply about political issues and regard moral transgressions as being private and personal, as long as those transgressions do not effect the surrounding social matrix.

This essential dichotomy derives from a difference in the basis of the two tribes’ morality. Where liberals tend to be, for the most part, secular humanists, conservatives regard codes of right and wrong to be something handed down from on high. Or, to put it another way, liberals tend to judge actions by the consequences that those actions have on other human beings. Conservatives, on the other hand, judge individual behavior on the basis of whether or not they believe this behavior offends the Deity they worship.

Obviously, this is an essential difference in cultural viewpoints that is largely irreconcilable. Actions that will seem completely unacceptable to a liberal, due to their consequent price in human misery, may seem perfectly proper to a conservative, if they are convinced that God either doesn’t care, or, in fact, approves of these actions. Similarly, behavior which will mortally offend a conservative, such as a politician committing adultery and then lying about it when confronted on the issue, may well get little more than a collective shrug from a liberal.

So it is that while one ‘tribe’ looks at what the Bush Administration has done to date in the last four years and sees an unending authoritarian nightmare of corruption and ineptness, the other tribe sees an earnest campaign to restore honor to a badly besmirched Presidential office, and to place the United States back amongst the forefront of nations on Earth using military force, while restoring America’s status as a decent God fearing nation of basic, eternal Christian values.

Once again, for an American politician in today’s very polarized political climate to be in danger of losing his job, he or she has to alienate his base. Pretty much anyone elected to office in America today will, by necessity, be disliked by the opposite voter base; as long as he or she keeps their core supporters intact, though, they can ride out any scandals they may get involved in. When they lose their base, though, they’re in trouble.

This is why left wing politicians have to largely avoid breaking the law and committing acts that do great harm to others for no valid reason that their left wing base can accept. Right wing politicians largely have to adhere to the strict, Old Testament codes of right and wrong, and especially, sexual propriety, that their supporters believe are mandated by God.

And this is why the Foley Pretty Pages scandal is something that the Republicans are desperately trying to distance themselves from. It’s a catastrophe of epic proportion for them, a Biblical cataclysm, if you will, because it is exactly the kind of truly horrific sexual scandal that offends the conservative core support base the most – in fact, it’s hard to sort out just what is going to offend the hard core Republican rank and file more; the fact that Foley was a sexual predator targeting teenagers under his supervision, or that the teenagers he targeted were male. Either is repugnant to his support base, though.

Worse than this, though, is that this is a scandal that offends everyone; nobody can simply shrug off the idea that a powerful member of the House of Representatives has been using his position to stalk and seduce teenagers, regardless of what gender they are, for over a decade. Worst of all, it’s simply inconceivable that such a person could operate for so long without the knowing connivance of his own party’s leadership, and in fact, given that it’s now known that succeeding classes of pages have been explicitly but selectively warned about Foley’s predations for the past ten years by that leadership, well, it’s simply impossible to cover this up. For a decade, the Republican Party has known about a sexual predator stalking teenagers while actively serving in Congress, and has done nothing about it, for fear of the scandal that might lessen their own political power.

This isn’t acceptable to anyone – in fact, it’s horrifying – but it is especially disgusting to the core conservative base the Republican Party relies on for its continuing mandate.

This is why now, finally and at long last, a scandal has emerged that threatens to actually take down this strongly entrenched Republican political machine. This is a scandal that their base deeply cares about, that they cannot somehow spin to blame the Democrats for (although they’re trying desperately). This is a spectacular failure on the part of their leadership to safeguard the children of America, which is something that conservatives not only claim to care about, but that they actually do care about, deeply. In fact, it’s something that everybody cares about, so, again, it’s not something that can be played off against the Democrats. There is simply no way this can be spun as anything but a Republican scandal, and it’s one that involves the entire Republican leadership of the House of Representatives.

Now, what I’m worried about is, having handed the Democrats this kind of gift, exactly what sort of October Surprise are Rove and Cheney, et al, going to have to come up with to push this off the national political radar scope?

Suffer the little children to come unto him

Here's my buddy SuperPatriot, on the recent mess with Congressman Foley and his pretty page boys:

* * * * *

This is ridiculous. First, the Bible tells us that we should fear no evil, for the Lord's rod and His staff, they shall comfort us. Congressman Foley is simply following this injunction and walking in the footsteps of Jesus. He is asking himself, what would Jesus do? Well, Jesus would comfort this poor 16 year old sinner with His rod and His staff, and that was all that Congressman Foley was trying to do. He is a good decent Christian public servant and all of you should be ashamed of yourselves for condeming him.

Besides, this is all just liberal gay bashing. You liberals hate the gays and you take every opportunity to persecute them. The Republican Party welcomed this good Christian gay public servant and gave him acceptance and protection and now that the liberal MSM has invaded his privacy and callously revealed his personal lifestyle choices for public ridicule you revile him. When he is simply asking himself what would Jesus do, and anyway, it is none of your business. Liberals are the first people to hate on the FBI for using its programs to eavesdrop on everyone's emails, until it is a Republican whose privacy rights are tossed on the trash heap, and then you all dance a jig. You are all despicable hypocrites.

And everyone is now comparing this to Republican prosecutions of Bill Clinton. Well, let's all remember what you godless liberals always forget — Bill Clinton committed ADULTERY. That is specifically forbidden by God in the Ten Commandments. And that is a little bit more serious than doing a little bit of typing over the Internet.

You people make me sick. God will judge Congressman Foley if judgement is necessary. All of you should be strung up from the nearest lamp post and now that we have a godly Supreme Court I look forward to it happening very soon.

* * * *

Thanks, SuperPatriot. As always, you're a breath of fresh air and a keen, lucid point of view in a world full of fuzzy headedness.

Comics comments

I bought five comics this week. Let's see what I think of them:

Secret Six #4 -- vs. the Doom Patrol! Apparently in the post Infinite Crisis DCU, the Doom Patrol never sacrificed themselves to save that small town in New England from the Brotherhood of Evil. I guess that's nice. But wait -- where's Ironsides? Okay, I don't know who some of these guys are. I guess that's okay. Oh, look, the Secret Six won because they're sneaky. I guess that's cool. Oh, the chick from Apokolips is screwing Deadshot behind her lesbian lover's back. I guess this is written by Gail Simone. Hey, they need to do a new Mad Hatter HeroClix fig, if he's THIS powerful. That would be cool.

Teen Titans #39 -- Kid Zatara? Zatanna has a cousin? Who're his parents? Why is Robin wearing that stupid ass red costume? There's a teen age Martian Manhunter? Why is Vic Stone's bicep bigger than his head? Isn't Cassie evil? No? Isn't Deathstroke's daughter evil? No? Crazy, then? Who the fuck is Kid Devil? Who the fuck is Bombshell? Where did all these idiotic teenage characters come from? The dumbass Superboy is still dead, though, right? He is? Whew.

Justice League of America #3 -- They stole Vixen's magic totem! Yay! Oooh, Black Lightning's gonna die. Yay! Hal, Dinah, and Roy are in big trouble... bummer. (Still, one EMP arrow and they should be fine.) Just how long are the Big Three going to sit around in a cave looking at pictures, anyway? OhmyGod, it's the Parasite. Shoulda seen THAT coming. Red Tornado's new human body is falling to pieces... I did see THAT coming. Who are they going to give Booster Gold's costume to? Me? That would be cool.

52 #21 -- Wow. Lex Luthor is a dick. I mean, I knew that. But... Lex Luthor is a dick. Makes perfect sense he'd never come up with a way to give people super powers if he couldn't turn them off too, though. And I really like the fact that his new team of super toadies are calling themselves Infinity Inc., because he bought the rights from the Pemberton estate. But I acknowledge, actual fans of Infinity Inc. will probably hate that. But I don't care.

Birds of Prey #97 -- Hey, there's no new Batgirl! That's totally cool. Who's this Blackhawk chick? Okay, I don't care. Wasn't Black Alice the little girl in Shadowpact? I don't care. Why is she dressed up like Dark Wonder Woman? I don't care. Oooh, the dad punched Talia right in the mouth! R'as al Ghul is gonna kick his ass. Hey, the little girl threw them all out of Dayton. They shouldn't care.

Oh, yeah, and we saw The Black Dahlia last night. Without a doubt the most misogynist film I have ever seen -- the climactic moment of heroism for the film's protagonist comes when he shoots down an unarmed woman. There isn't a single likable character in the entire movie -- it is, in fact, completely populated with emotional grotesques. But by far the most demeaning, degraded, despicable characters are the women. Two of them exist only to be victimized by the despicable men around them; the other two are sociopathic killers. Yay, women!

I enjoyed it, more or less absently, since I generally do like film noir period pieces. About halfway through, though, I abruptly realized that all the potential the various characters had was simply going to remain as potential, and they were never going to go through any kind of arc more profound than 'yay, my best friend died, now I can schtupp Scarlett Johanssen', and that, indeed, as Brian dePalma has become more and more competent at exactly recreating various scenes from various Alfred Hitchcock movies, he has sacrificed on that altar every other iota of directorial acumen he ever had, including any ability he may have once had for establishing and then developing characterization.

Dreadful, dreadful film. I really should learn. I mean, when was the last time DePalma did anything worth watching? Was it THE UNTOUCHABLES? Was it that long ago?

Anyway. That's my week in entertainment.

Meanwhile, back at the shithead...

Here's an interesting exchange:

SUPERFIANCEE: And who's stepped up, to support YOUR children, while due only to your pigheaded, monumentally selfish decisions we've gotten deeper and deeper into a financial hole and you haven't done a thing to help them or offered an extra cent for their upkeep? The man you and your girlfriend spend all your time insulting, that's who.

BIG CHIEF GINORMOUS FATHEAD: Well... well... that doesn't make me respect him any more.

Solipsism is officially disproved as a theory. I couldn't possibly make stuff like this up.

One fanboy's reaction

It's been an education. It really has.

Thanks to Ragnell, and Kalinara, and Willow, and lately, shilohmm (no link, I don't know if she has a blog) I've learned so much about what comic book fangirls want, nay, True Believer, demand, from the superhero comics they read. They want normal looking women, women who act like women they themselves can recognize from their own experiences, women who understand the necessities of the lives they choose to lead and dress appropriately, in apparel made from fabrics that actually exist in the real world.

They want women who talk like real women, who look like real women, who dress like real women, who are not constantly drawn to look as if they're posing for MAXIM. They want powerful, competent, independent women who are not simply there as whack off material for perpetually-adolescent-at-every-age male comics fanboys.

In short, they don't want THIS:



They want THIS:



Speaking only for myself, as a 44-soon-to-be-45 year old fanboy --

AUUUUGGGGHHHHH!!!!

Can't I have just a little peril?

Okay. Look. Yeah, that panel of Dinah's ass is... well, it's an eye opener, for sure. A few weeks ago I'd have gone right on by it without even noticing just how frickin' ridiculous it is that Black Canary -- BLACK CANARY, THIRD BEST MARTIAL ARTIST IN THE GODDAM DC UNIVERSE -- is wearing a costume that bares her entire ass to the whole wide world. I mean, doesn't she get cold? This chick leaps around on rooftops and gives people like Bane flying high kicks to the head while balanced on top of speeding dirigibles and shit! And she does it with her ass hanging out? Unless she's spinning around a pole and Bane is about to stuff a twenty into her cleavage, this outfit is pretty goddam stupid, yeah.

And I certainly wouldn't have pondered just how it would have struck me if, say, Batman, or Captain America, were wearing a similar costume... say, a black or blue thong over leggings that came up only to mid thigh, baring their no doubt very taut, rippling, manly buttocks to the gazes of their readership. (Although the thought is enough to make me want to hurl.)

So, yeah... the fangirls have a point, which I have already acknowledged.

But if the new Batgirl is what happens to superhuman women in superhero comics when the Revolution comes, well... please God, let me be the first fanboy up against the wall to be shot.

Please GOD.

I mean, suddenly you realize, maybe idealized bodies and sexualized poses ain't really all that bad.

The new Batgirl, in case you didn't know, debuted in Birds of Prey #98. I suspect she is writer Gail Simone's idea of a wry joke; a sort of "Okay, if this is what the women in my audience want, let's see how much they like it when I give it to them". I don't know that for sure, it's just, well, she seems like SUCH a parody that I have to assume Ms. Simone put the humor there on purpose.

This new Batgirl talks a great deal like a parody of a teenage superhero comics fan (the kind you'd expect to be an avid reader of WIZARD), and can apparently outfight all the main characters effortlessly. She can apport herself from place to place, and, in addition, she also seems to know the real names of all the superheroines in the book, and to be able to teleport into Oracle's super secret Oracle-lair with frightening nonchalance. My guess? She really is a comics fan, someone from our world who reads Birds of Prey and who has somehow found a way to manifest herself physically in what is, to her, the imaginary world of her favorite fictional heroines. She's clearly getting a huge kick out of hanging out with them, while, at the same time, she just as obviously doesn't take any of it (not even being gutshot) remotely seriously.

I don't know. Maybe some fangirl somewhere has really annoyed Gail Simone, and this is the classic writer's revenge. Or maybe Simone is making a sly, meta-commentary on how seriously her female fans seem to take her work, simply because she is one of the very few (if not only) female writers currently working in superhero comics.

Whatever the case, while I can certainly intellectually agree that female comics fans have a right to be outraged over the constant sexual portrayal of nearly every female character in superhero comics... having seen what happens when you stop doing that, well... okay. I'm a guy. I'm a horn dog. I like tits, and I like ass. Make the costumes a little more sensible if you need to. Make the women a little more realistic in their appearances. But... please... let's not see the new Batgirl become the norm.

Braiiiiiins....

Thanks to recent linkage from When Fangirls Attack!, I've picked up a few new comments from a new reader, shilohmm, one of which is in the thread over at Chick Fight!. I responded to her comments at my usual tiresome length in that thread, but still, I find I want to respond further where more people may have a chance to take part in the debate, if they want to:

shilohmm sez:

OTOH, under certain conditions ("the mama bear response" is not the technical term but gives you the general idea), women on average are more aggressive than men. Women can be much more aggressive than men when protecting someone they value. The idea that men are inherantly violent and women aren't is cultural, not one based in reality. Other cultures have characterized women as the violent and out-of-control gender.

I believe men in this culture think women are not as aggressive as men are for two reasons - first, because women don't defend "territory" the way a man would, and so may not respond aggressively to stimulus that would set most men off; and second, because women are not stupid, and obvious aggression is rarely the best response when dealing with a guy who outweighs you by fifty pounds or more. This says nothing about what women would like to do, and nothing about what women would do if they were suddenly more powerful than the average male, which is why the "aggressive powerful superheroines are chicks-with-dicks" argument irritates me.

Women are less likely to show their aggression, because being obviously aggressive when you can't physically defend yourself is dangerous. When you're 5'3" in a world where male height averages 5'9", physical force isn't usually a valid option. OTOH, if you're suddenly given superpowers the average male doesn't have access to, physical force would be mighty tempting.

I used to deliberately take on bullies in grade school and on into junior high (even though by junior high I was smaller than those I challenged). Obviously superheroines resonated with me. While I collected and enjoyed Lois Lane: Superman's Girlfriend and stories of Linda Danvers/Supergirl at the orphanage (I started reading comics in the 1960's), I also loved She Hulk and Ms. Marvel once they came along - although I do admit that early on there was tiresome "men are weak" stuff sometimes. Still, I loved them because they enjoyed the power to act the way I would - they gleefully thunked the bad guys. ;)

I don't know what to say about this.

Is it true? Do women only use reason because, as a general rule, they've found violence isn't an effective problem solving tool for them? If women were able to 'thunk the bad guys', would they? Would they immediately jettison all non-violent, non confrontational problem solving techniques, the minute they become capable of picking up a Buick station wagon and hitting someone they don't like in the teeth with it?

If so, this fills me with despair for the human race, as the implication seems to be, our default setting is violence. Or, at least, unreasoning physicality. If shilohmm's assertions here are accurate, then we are a race to which cognition does not come naturally, a race whose instincts and nature run towards a brute force solution to any problem we may encounter.

I hope this isn't true. I hope that humans, regardless of gender or race or age or other subdivision, have a capacity to think about things, not only after we've tried hitting them with a rock and that hasn't worked, but even before we reach for the rock.

I hope this especially, because in our here and now, our 'rocks' include poison gas, tailored bacterium, and nuclear weapons.

And, yeah, I have to admit, the people within arms reach of the GO buttons on all that shit do certainly seem to bear out the assertion "hit first, think afterwards".

I hope we're better than that, I really do. And to bring it back around to the much more narrow subject the article and comment thread was originally discussing -- I would hope that superpowered women, in general, would still be more likely than superpowered men to apply their powers with intelligence, after reasoned, lucid analysis of whatevere problem it is they are trying to resolve. (I'd like to see more superpowered men apply their powers with intelligence, too, but there's certainly little hope of this in contemporary superhero comics, where even the Sorcerer Supreme has recently been reimagined as a martial arts asskicker who essentially fires energy blasts out of his hands at every opponent until the opponent is charred into submission.)

Are we just brutes? Is that what superhero comics ultimately reflects? Male or female, are all humans...or fictional artifacts representing humans... simply thugs? Worse, is that what we WANT to be?

In a culture that lionizes Forrest Gump (to a point where we've even elected him to be our President) while quaking in terror before Hannibal Lecter, what other conclusion is there? We, apparently, WANT to be morons. We find it comforting, and admirable, just as we find intelligence to be threatening, and frightening, and loathsome.

Ah, maybe it's just me. I'm sure if I were to take up drinking, or going to church on Sunday, I'd find this all much less worrisome.

Heaven can wait

Jesus Christ. With fucktards like this in the Democratic Party, it's no wonder the nation of Franklin and Jefferson is turning into such a shit hole, and nobody is doing a goddam thing about it:

Even if one were to grant that the only values that matter in this world involve abortion, gays, and school prayer -- which we don't -- surely, there were plenty of Democrats to invite. What about the pro-life Bob Casey, who is running for Senate against Rick Santorum in PA? What about the anti-gay marriage Harold Ford Jr., another Senate candidate, from TN? Our own co-chair Sen. Roy Herron could have talked about all three. None of them got the call.

We don't need this big a tent. We just fucking don't. When people can run for office on platforms that include denying fundamental access to due process of law to American citizens simply because we don't like who they want to marry, and still call themselves Democrats, I say the Democrats just suck. Similarly, when some dipshit can stand up in public and say "No, ma'am, you should not have any legal right to choose which medical procedures you will or won't have on your own person", and still be a Democrat, it's time to find another goddam party.

It bothers me. I mean, in some reality somewhere, sure, being willing to admit that there are other values in this world that matter besides abortion, gays and school prayer is the very essence of reason and tolerance. Sadly, that reality is probably this one. But I don't want these idiots in any group I'm identified with.

Straight up -- you want to make it illegal for people to choose which medical procedures they can have, for any reason? You want to tell one pair of American citizens they can get married, and another pair they can't, because you think one of them is kinda yucky? You want to introduce religious ceremony into the publicly funded education process? And you want to do it because GOD told you it's the right thing to do? Fuck you, bitch. Get off my planet, or at least, out of my political party. You are a dangerous repressive intolerant bigoted loon, and I want nothing to do with you.

Sorry. Yeah. I know. We need their votes. We wouldn't, though, if we simply made everyone take and pass the same test to vote, as we make immigrants pass to earn citizenship.

Everybody rock n roll the place

Yesterday was sludging along as a perfectly normal Monday until around 3:39 pm (a little earlier for SuperFiancee; that's when her emergency email hit my Google account, though). From there, it turned into a rapidly accelerating emotional avalanche. We all came through it more or less intact... and that's all I'm going to say about that at the moment, for various reasons.

I will note, however, that SuperFiancee continues to astonish me with just how fabulous a parent she actually is... especially given how thoroughly her 17 year partner in parenting continues to astound us all with his contrasting and entirely disparate displays of parental acumen. She's carried a gigantic load entirely by herself for a very long time, and she's done it with enormous facility, competence, and success. Any of you who have enjoyed the company of the SuperKids -- it's all thanks to SuperFiancee, AKA, SuperMom. All props to her.

SuperFiancee/SuperMom also called in late at work just so she could drive me to work this morning, letting me get a crucial extra hour and a half of sleep (we didn't get back in from the Nexus of the Crisis until 1:30 a.m. last night). Had she not been that considerate, I'd be considerably worse off today than I am. Once again, I am the luckiest man in the known universe, to have this woman, and these kids, in my life. I honest to God do not know what I did to merit this -- in fact, short of saving the entire universe from malevolent evil, there's little I could have done to earn such spectacular good fortune. I'm just going to try to continue to appreciate it, and, you know, do my inadequate best to deserve it.

Back into the world of sweet, sweet trivia that eases the pain -- Mike Norton has new stuff up at both his blogs today. Over at Miraclo Miles, there's a link to an interesting overview of Gail Simone's career. It's mentioned in passing that apparently Gail cares little for Brian Michael Bendis, which would endear her to me even if I didn't already dig on her writing. I guess she's also made a minor career as an internet columnist mocking many, many male writers who badly need to be mocked, like Frank Miller and Warren Ellis. I also gather she's been writing BIRDS OF PREY for four years now, which makes me sad at all the back issues (or graphic collections, anyway) I need to go out and buy. I certainly don't need to buy her old DEADPOOL issues, though, so that's a relief.

Over at Turn This Bus Around, Mike has some very interesting political material. I'm still the only commenter he's got over there, so come on, folks... help me out a little, okay?

WizKids resolutely won't give me shit that's new on Supernova, although I noted on Sunday that they seem to have modified the Team Alliances icons grid to allow them to put in a bunch of new ones -- so I'm hoping that will comprise at least part of the next update, hopefully due tomorrow. The aforementioned Mike Norton will continue to duck out on all details, but I'm a greedy pig for this stuff and they can't throw it at me fast enough. Of course, I'm still nowhere near getting all the SINISTER I want, so being this obsessed with SUPERNOVA is kind of dumb. But it seems in every way other than character choice, it's a better set.

On the SINISTER front, I picked up three boosters on Sunday while SuperFiancee and I were out runnin' about (and oh, how long ago that seems now). In addition to all the usual suspects, I picked up a few new things -- namely, a Vet Madrox, a HYDRA technician (the first of the new HYDRA generics I'd gotten my hands on) and a Purple Man Unique. The power gamers will continue to sneer at the Purple Man, since the Ultimates Professor X still remains the Mind Controller of choice for that ilk, on the basis of points vs. effect -- but I kinda like having ol' Kilgraves for my DD villains set. Still looking for that Stilt-Man, though. And about a bazillion other Vets and Uniques from SINISTER. (I suppose I should probably sit down and put together an actual list of what I am still looking for from SINISTER... yeah, I guess that wouldn't hurt anything at all.)

So, let's see --

Arkon U
Bullseye V
Black Bolt U
Daredevil V
Deathlok V
Electro V
Falcon V
Hydra generics, R, V
INDOMITABLE feat
Jack O'Lantern V
KNOCKDOWN feat
MACH-1, 3, 4 (r, e, v)
PUMMEL feat
Radioactive Man V
Rhino V
Scarlet Spider U
Shadowcat V
Spider-Man U
Spider-Man E, V
Stilt-Man U

Interestingly, I'm noticing that the Avengers TA gets a big boost with this expansion in terms of the Perplex power. Prior to this, you pretty much had to put the Beast into an Avengers team to get any Perplex at all, and then you got one lousy click of it, and the Beast doesn't even have a single version with the Avengers TA, anyway. However, SINISTER gives us several Bendis Avengers who have Perplex -- Jessica Jones, Spider-Man, at least one more. To which I can only say, yeah, I find the entire Bendis run on AVENGERS completely fucking perplexing, too.

Further updates, maybe, as I get the time and think of inane crap to add on here.

Lights out

This pretty much says it all... which won't keep me from running my keyboard about it, naturally.

The Bucs season seems to be pretty much over. How many teams have ever gotten to the playoffs after dropping their first three games? I don't know. But it can't be many. And for a Bucs team that has been playing as crappy as this year's has, well, it doesn't seem very likely they're going to surprise anyone.

The first two games were dreadful. I watched them both at a nearby sports bar; or, rather, I watched the first halves, and then, unable to bear watching any longer, I went home, and checked in a few hours later to confirm that yes, indeed, no thermodynamic miracles had occurred; yes, indeed, the huge leads the Bucs opponents had piled up in the first half hadn't been whittled down... in fact, in the first game of the season, against the Ravens, the Bucs didn't manage to score at all.

In the second game, against the Falcons, the Bucs managed a field goal.

Chris Simms, the Bucs young quarterback whom I've admired for several seasons now, and whose presence at the helm was the big reason I was looking forward to this season so much, wasn't showing me a goddam thing. None of the rest of the team had distinguished themselves, either. I'd been telling myself all summer that with Williams, Clayton, Pittman, Simms, Galloway, and Alstott all on defense, the Bucs had as good a chance as anyone to make a play off run... but they sure weren't backing me up.

The third game... well, in many ways, it seems like this could well be the last game of the Bucs season, this season. And the best. Although the Bucs lost, for much of the game, they actually looked like a division champion (which they are) and Chris Simms actually looked like a champion quarterback (which he is).

Naturally, this was the game I didn't get to see, because the local sports bar didn't schedule it. Hard to blame them. Both teams coming in, the Panthers and the Bucs, were 0-2... not exactly a barn burner.

As it turns out, many commenters seem to feel this was the best game played yesterday. For many reasons. I wish I'd seen it.

After a dismal first quarter, in which the Bucs were buried under a 17-0 Panthers lead, Simms led the offense into a turn around. Throwing for one touchdown and running for a second, Simms took some hard shots, but got the Bucs back into the game. When the defense forced three turnovers in the second and third quarters, the Bucs capitalized on them with three scores -- another touchdown and two field goals.

The whole time, nobody knew it, but Chris Simms was playing with a busted spleen. That touchdown he ran in? A gigantic Panthers defender hit him like a freight train at the end of it. This is what defenders like to do in football; when an offensive player dares to put his hands on the ball, has the temerity to try to do anything against the defense, much less succeed -- the defender punishes him for it. They train in it. It's their attitude. You go up against me, they say, I'm gonna hurt you for it, and I'm gonna hurt you worse if you actually score on me. In the insanely mana-a-mano, testosterone poisoned world of the National Football League, this attitude -- which at best one would have to call unsportsmanlike, at worst, actively homicidal -- is not only common, it is encouraged, and taught by defensive mentors to young defensive players.

So a Panthers defender punished Chris Simms for running the football over the goal line, and Simms wound up with a broken spleen, although nobody knew it, not even Simms himself.

Let's look at the game just through the lens of what the stats-keepers call the quarterback rating. I have no clear idea how they come up with a quarterback rating; it has something to do with the number of passes attempted, the number completed, the number of first downs gained, the number of yards gained by passes, the number of passes dropped, the number intercepted, the number of sacks the quarterback takes. In Simms first quarter against the Panthers yesterday, his quarterback rating was zero. Life don' ged much worse than that.

Simms had a rating of 111.9 in the second quarter. He had an 88.2 in the third, and a 106.7 in the fourth.

He left the huddle late in the game. Took two shaky steps towards the sidelines. Went to one knee, then down on his face in the chewed up turf. Got helped to the locker room, where they gave him an IV, because they thought he was cramping due to dehydration.

He missed two plays, total. Came back in. Led the Bucs to another score; a field goal that put them in the lead by 1 point, with a little over two minutes left on the game.

The Bucs vaunted defense, last year's League best, blew it. They couldn't hold. They let the Panthers drive all the way up the field and kick a game winning field goal with 2 seconds on the clock.

Chris Simms got into an ambulance, went to the hospital, had his spleen removed. He's out for at least six weeks, although if you read between the lines of Jon Gruden's statements since, he's never coming back. Gruden has never liked Simms, and now, he's got an excuse to get rid of Simms for good. He'll put in rookie QB Bruce Gradkowski, until he can trade for another veteran, and when Gradkowski can't produce, he'll put up whatever sorry ass third string ten year man he's managed to pull off waivers, and the sorry ass third string guy won't do shit either. But Gruden dislikes rookies, and likes experienced quarterbacks, and now, he's got the chance to get one.

I'd like to think that Bruce Gradkowski has a shot, that he can turn the season around, that he can be a star. But it isn't very likely... in fact, given how little and how grudging the support is that a rookie quarterback can expect from the Bucs head coach, I'd say it's virtually impossible.

Chris Simms will almost certainly be playing for another team next season... maybe as a starting QB, maybe as a back up.

Maybe I'll be rooting for another team next season, too.

Okay, now I'm going to puke

Check this out:

President Bush visits Bucs, plays catch with Simms
By FRED GOODALL, AP Sports Writer
September 21, 2006

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- It seems like everyone has some advice these days for the winless Tampa Bay Buccaneers and struggling quarterback Chris Simms.

Even President Bush tossed the football with the former University of Texas quarterback Thursday, and offered some advice.

"Never give up," Bush said Thursday when asked what he told the Bucs during a half-hour visit to the team's training facility near Raymond James Stadium, where the president delivered a fundraising speech to about 400 people in a VIP club area.

Coach Jon Gruden wouldn't disclose what additional wisdom the president might have imparted to Simms.

"It's great, though, to get some advice from the president of the United States. It's a little different when the coach is telling you to do this or do that. You have the president come and give you some advice, that's something you gotta listen to," Gruden said.

"Hopefully it works. If it doesn't work out this week, he can call the president to see what happened."

Bush accepted an invitation to stop by practice and was greeted on the field by Simms and teammates Derrick Brooks, Ronde Barber and Mike Alstott and Ryan Nece, as well as an appreciative Gruden.

"The president has a lot to do. For him to show up here with the SWAT team on the roof and the Secret Service guys, that's awesome," Gruden said.

The Bucs (0-2) are preparing for Sunday's game against Carolina, another winless team. Simms has been the target of criticism following subpar performances the first two weeks of the season.

Bush addressed the entire squad, coaching staff and other team officials and personnel in the middle of the field. The president mingled with players, coaches and officials, posing for pictures and signing autographs before playing catch with Simms, son of New York Giants Super Bowl-winning quarterback Phil Simms.

Once again, I am eternally grateful to SuperFiancee for getting me the fuck out of Florida.

We went up to our usual sports bar, the Dundee Tavern, only to find that all the day's games had already been set on the TVs, and the Bucs were nowhere to be found on the posted list. A quick query elicited the information that the list was, alas, not subject to negotiations, so I come home and see if by some chance the Bucs game may be telecast locally (not likely, but weirder things have happened) and, well, a quick look for TV info on Yahoo turns up the above nonsense, and...

Jesus.

I think it may be time to become a Chicago Bears fan.

Canary in a timeline

ADDENDUM, way up here: If you're one of the hundreds (well, dozens, anyway) coming over here from When Fangirls Attack!, welcome to the blog. Wipe your feet on the mat, throw your coats on the bed, get a Pepsi out of the fridge. We're not formal here. Be careful where you put your feet, we have a hyperactive six year old with the apparent power to teleport. She'll dance for you if you ask her too, though.

Yeah, my comments are moderated. Go ahead and leave a comment anyway... as long as you're not a troll, I'll let it through, even if you disagree with me. Hopefully, you'll disagree with me in an interesting and/or entertaining way, giving me some food for thought, and I'll try to respond in the same way.

Oh, and feel free to check out the rest of my stuff, too, if you feel like it. ;) Of special note to you may be my previous entries Chick Fight! and the subsequent semi-apologia, Boys And Girls Together.

Now, on with the show!

* * * *

As I've noted here, the official editorial technique for keeping comic book characters 'contemporary' with the world outside the comics is to, essentially, 'roll up' history behind the characters as the present continues to advance. This is for, essentially, two intertwined reasons -- comic book companies perceive that their audience wants to mostly read comics books that are set in a reasonable approximation of the world they see around them every day, and, that same audience will not welcome characters that are elderly.

This means the monthly (or less regular) titles must continue to be written as if the stories are taking place in the contemporary world of their audience... a fancy way of saying, if a comic book appears on the racks for initial purchase in 1986, the background, characters, and plot elements should all be consistent with that particular year in the particular social setting that the target audience is part of. A comic appearing this month, in late 2006, should exhibit characteristics consistent with the world the readers know.

There should be nothing anachronistic in it; the characters should not be inexplicably driving around in 1920s Model Ts, nor should they be speaking to each other on hologram-projecting wrist devices (unless some explanation is offered as to why such jarringly out of place devices are present). The characters should not speak or behave in any manner that belies the contemporary setting, their clothing should fit the time, as should the details of the background presented.

Comic book characters continue to exist as long as their publication is profitable, though, and some of the most profitable comics characters have now been in more or less continuous publication since the 1940s. In the year 2006, this would mean such characters are at least 60 years old, plus however many years they may have seemed to be of age in their first appearances (generally, at least 10 to 20).

Nobody wants to buy the adventures of an 85 year old Superman or Batman, though. Therefore, comics companies have to somehow reconcile this. They tend to do this one of two ways:

(a) somehow, the character retains extended youth to all appearances and functional requirements, despite the fact that he or she is actually established, within the fictional context, to be of a very advanced age

(b) the character, and the established events of the character's past, are continually repositioned in space-time so as to remain credibly close to the ever advancing present day.

An example of the first is, well, pretty much all of the members of the original Justice Society of America, and specifically, the Golden Age Green Lantern. The JSA are all date-stamped; their early crime fighting careers took place in or around WWII, and WWII is an event of such overwhelmingly charismatic and heroic social significance to our culture that DC does not want to give it up, by redefining the members of the JSA as having had early careers that took place during, say, the Vietnam War, instead.

Thus, the Golden Age Green Lantern is known to have been a young man in the 1940s. We can jigger with his age a bit within those somewhat loose parameters, as suits us, but still, we can't plausibly make his date of birth be much later than 1925 (in which case, he would have been in his late teens for much of WWII, and even that seems somewhat difficult to believe). Assume he was actually born in a rather more likely 1920, or even 1918, and he's closing in on being 90 years old as of this year... and he'll continue to age year for year, as long as he remains in publication, and the character isn't revised to eliminate his involvement in historical events with specific date stamps that cannot be modified for the emotional convenience of the character's target audience.

The JSA is also date stamped by the well established historical fact that the team originally disbanded in response to HUAC hearings – and while you can play with this timeline to some extent, also, as HUAC was effectively blacklisting Hollywood personnel from 1947 to 1954 here in the real world, that 1954 date remains solid as being the last year that McCarthyism could have been reasonably expected to be powerful enough to force the JSA to retire en masse, rather than publicly unmask.

In point of fact, it was Roy Thomas who first came up with the idea that the JSA could have been forced to disband due to investigation by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee on Earth-2. Here in the real world, HUAC mostly limited itself to ruining the careers of suspect film stars and other workers in the film industry, due to its members' fanatical insistence that Hollywood had been 'infiltrated by the Reds' and was therefore making 'subversive movies' that were undermining American values. However, on Earth-2, Joe McCarthy apparently decided to flex his muscles against the post WWII 'mystery men' community as well, with the result that the JSA disbanded... in 1951, the actual year that All Star Comics originally discontinued publishing the JSA's adventures. Thus, all the original members of the JSA, from the Golden Age of comics, are 'date stamped' with the year 1951, as well.

When a character that is still appearing in contemporary adventures has been portrayed as being present, and involved, in two such prominent historical episodes as World War II and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings, there is no real way you can ‘roll up’ the timeline behind them to keep them young. They have to be the age they would logically be, if they were involved with such events and are still alive today; which means, you have to find some way to keep them cosmetically and functionally youthful – otherwise, pragmatically, they are too old to reasonably fight crime, and even more pragmatically, your target demographic won’t buy their adventures, because they're 'geezers'.

This is true of the Golden Age Green Lantern, Wildcat, Dr. Fate, the Spectre, the Golden Age Flash, Hawkman, and other DC characters, as well as Marvel’s Captain America and Sub-Mariner. With all of these characters, the various editors and writers in charge have contrived various different mechanisms to retard their apparent aging – GL is a mystic entity whose physical body is composed entirely of some sort of unknown energy; Dr. Fate and the Spectre are pretty much the same, in addition to which, both represent a sort of cosmic office that keeps being passed down from one generation to the next, and, anyway, each of them are nearly all powerful supernatural beings, so their physical bodies need not age if it’s not convenient; the Golden Age Flash ages more slowly than normal humans due to a serendepitious accident that occurred to the entire JLA back in the 1940s, Hawkman… don’t even get me started on Hawkman.

Over at Marvel, the Sub-Mariner simply has a mutant metabolism granting him vastly extended youthful vigor, and Captain America was frozen in an ice floe for a period that keeps growing longer and longer with each passing year, measured from the end of WWII up to about ten years prior to whatever the current present day in the Marvel Universe may be.

But what about Black Canary?

An obviously youthful female martial artist and costumed crimebuster, Dinah “Black Canary” Drake first appeared in FLASH COMICS #86 in 1947. As with most comics characters, and especially female comics characters, no definitive age was established for her at that time, but it seems safe to assume she couldn’t have been younger than, say, 17, at the outset. This would give her a birthyear of 1930.

Black Canary joined the Justice Society within a year or so of her first appearance, in ALL STAR COMICS #38, which is noted to have taken place on or around October 25, 1947. The JSA ceased appearing in ALL STAR COMICS in 1951, so let’s say that this was the year HUAC forced them to disband rather than publicly unmask. This would mean Black Canary was only active for four years during the Golden Age of comics before retiring. Again, if we assume a birthyear of 1930, she would have reached a ripe old age of 21 at the point she hung up her fishnets and blonde wig alongside the hoods, capes, helmets, cowls, and nth metal wings of her comrades in arms.

In real time, Black Canary stayed out of the limelight, presumably, in retirement, until Justice League of America issues 21, August-September 1963, and 22, October-December 1963. When her husband, Larry Lance, was killed in JLA #74, (September, 1969), Black Canary switched universes and teams, joining the JLA at the age of, by this particular timeline, 39 or thereabouts.

Various ret-cons over the years have established that when Canary went into retirement, she married Larry Lance, her long time paramour, and had one daughter, also named Dinah, at some point in this interval. Prior to Crisis on Infinite Earths removing multiple timelines from DC continuity, it was established that this daughter grew to physical maturity while in a mystically induced coma, and when her mother was dying of radiation poisoning from the same event that had killed her father, Johnny Thunder’s Badenisian Thunderbolt transferred the original Dinah Drake-Lance’s memories and persona into the daughter’s physically mature, but otherwise mindless, body.

Keeping to the established timeline, this story primarily requires that Dinah the Younger be physically mature – let’s say, at least 16 years old – prior to the story in which it was later ret-conned her mother’s original body died of radiation poisoning. If we continue to set this story in its original appearance year (1969), then young Dinah needs to have been born in 1953 – which works, since it’s two years into her mother’s initial retirement.

All of this is simply by way of finding a place to put our feet. The whole Earth 1/Earth 2 dichotomy, and all such subsequent ret-conning based on it, was wiped out by 1985’s Crisis On Infinite Earths. In Secret Origins #50, Alan Brennert established what has remained as the template for the Black Canary’s history and origins in the new, post Crisis, single timeline – namely, that the modern day Black Canary, currently fighting crime in the Birds of Prey series along with teammates Huntress and Oracle, is the daughter of the original Black Canary, who fought crime during or just after WWII, and retired from her brief career as a masked mystery woman in 1951.

My mighty Google powers are, at this moment, inadequate to pin down exactly what year Secret Origins #50 appeared in. However, it couldn’t have been any later than 1988. In 1988, a contemporary female martial artist/member of the JLA born in 1953 would have been 35 – and if we assume that Brennert didn’t feel bound to the timeline I’m laying out here (as he most likely didn’t) he could very well have pushed all the Justice League Black Canary appearances to much later along (to, say, the early 80s) and could have set the birthyear of the second Canary as late as, say, 1963. This would have given us a Black Canary, in 1988, in her mid 20s, which would have been perfectly acceptable.

We should also understand that, by dividing the events of Black Canary’s life up into two separate lifetimes – those of the mother, and those of the daughter – we have to decide which events (stories) happened to (featured) which version of the character. The easiest way to do it is to accept the original, pre Crisis division point (which is why I’ve been at such pains to establish it) – the Golden Age stuff happened to the mother, Dinah Drake, prior to 1951; the Silver Age stuff, and onward, happened to the daughter, Dinah Drake Lance… sometime well after 1951.

There are a few problems evolving out of all this, and I’m sure you can see the shape of them… but let’s toss into the mix this… a little comic called Green Arrow – 1975 – The Wonder Year.

While a quick Googling shows that all actual references to the year ‘1975’ have since been removed, at least, on all the cover reproductions of reprint editions currently available, I remember this series distinctly from when it came out, mostly because of editor Mike Gold’s obnoxious assertion, in a first issue editorial, that ‘ignoring continuity is always a pretty cool idea, when the fans will let you get away with it’. In this particular issue, the Green Arrow/Black Canary romance, a staple of the Silver Age all through my formative years, is going strong. Therefore, I'm throwing the date out there as yet another marker in the Black Canary timeline, this one labeled 'period when Dinah and Ollie were involved as a couple'.

Various other Black Canary fans have done hero's work trying to reconcile all of this with the current Canary appearing in current DC Comics -- a pretty good attempt at which can be found here. However, when you get to a certain point, well, most people just have to give up, as you can see from these passages I’ve excerpted:

At this point, the history of the Black Canary becomes particularly tortuous. Pre-Crisis, Black Canary decided to move to Earth-1 to overcome her grief over her lost husband. En route, she was revealed to be dying of radiation poisoning and transferred her memories to her comatose recently recalled daughter. The daughter then spent many years under the assumption that she was her mother and moved onto Earth-1 (revealed in Justice League of America #219-220).

Post-Crisis, Black Canary did not die shortly after her exposure to the radiation that killed her husband, and her daughter was neither comatose nor unrevealed. At some point in the past, both Black Canaries had active crime-fighting careers simultaneously. After the death of Larry Lance, Black Canary became less active and eventually retired altogether. She developed cancer as a result of her exposure to Aquarius's radiation in later years and died while her JSA comrades were in limbo (revealed in Secret Origins vol. 2 #50 and Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #3).

Post-Zero Hour, the history of the Black Canary is uncertain. The JLA was formed in 1986, nearly 40 years after the Black Canary joined the JSA; therefore, the tale of Larry Lance's death must be greatly altered. Also, since Black Canary was not among those who received the long-prolonging effects of Ian Karkull's radiation, there is some question as to the relation of ages between mother and daughter Black Canary; the original must have been in her 40s or 50s when the second was born. These and other questions will need to be answered before Black Canary's revised history can be fully understood.

Yeah. To say the least.

So, here’s the problem – the original Black Canary was born in or around 1930, started fighting crime in or around 1947, retired as a crimefighter in 1951. She had a daughter, who is currently in her mid 20s (she can’t be any older than that; for one thing, she doesn’t seem to be, and for another, her fan base won’t accept it).

That daughter is currently fighting crime in a contemporary setting in the DC Universe on a monthly basis. This means that (right now) the current Black Canary can’t have been born any earlier than 1982. Which means her mother, the original Black Canary, was around 52 years old when she was born.

Not impossible, but, well, hardly very likely.

If we stick to the date stamps we’ve been thrown like bones over the years, then we also have to factor in here that the current Black Canary was having a well established, long term monogamous relationship with Green Arrow in 1975 or thereabouts. Which is hard, since this would have had to take place around seven years before she was born. (The fact that Green Arrow stated that he was 50 years old in the original Wonder Year miniseries, which would make him 81 now, doesn’t much matter, as he’s died and been mystically resurrected at least once during this time period, and I have no difficulty believing that his resurrection had the beneficial side effect of rejuvenating him to a more youthful physical state, as well.)

Now, obviously, we can just accept what DC has done in abstracting the date stamp from the “Wonder Year” Green Arrow arc, and assume that it actually took place much, much later on in the timeline… probably in the late 80s or early 90s. Still, to fit in a romace with Dinah that lasted at least a few years, and that doesn’t end up giving us a Green Arrow our contemporary society would be forced to revile as a child molester, and to keep Black Canary young enough to suit her fans, well, she and Ollie must have started dating maybe six years ago and broken up maybe four years ago… meaning ‘the Wonder Year’ was 2000. And will continue to be shifted forward, as our own calendar continues to roll inexorably onward.

Here’s what I’m going to propose – let’s add another Canary to the mix.

We keep the original, Golden Age Black Canary. She retires in 1951, has a child in 1953 – which is all in accord with the original, pre Crisis timeline. Her daughter grows up and, against her mother’s wishes, takes up the Black Canary mantle in, say, 1971, at the age of 18. She fights crime in the 1970s, and while I know the contemporary DC Universe timeline will never allow the Justice League to have appeared this early on, still, I find it pleasant to contemplate that the whole ‘Satellite Era’ actually took place when I remember it taking place, in the late 60s to late 70s, and there was a Black Canary who was a part of it.

Even leaving the JLA out, we can keep the Black Canary/Green Arrow romance, and allow Green Arrow to be 50 years old in 1975, which would mean he was born in 1925, and could very well have had a Golden Age career with the original Seven Soldiers of Victory, and had all those goofy Golden Age adventures (or something vaguely like them).

Again, this is all made possible for GA by the fact that he’s died and come back to life at least once, and thus, his contemporary biological age doesn’t have to reflect the reality that it should.

Hal Jordan has recently had a similar mystical resurrection, so, under this theory, the classic O’Neil/Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories could still have taken place in the 1970s, and Black Canary could very much have been a part of them. Of course, if Roy Harper was a teenage sidekick hooked on heroin during this time period, then he himself has to be getting rather longer in the tooth by now than his own fan base is going to want to accept – in fact, he’d be just about my age (nearing 45). But, you know, one ongoing timeline problem at a time. Maybe the current Roy is the son of the first Speedy. (In fact, if we assume that the current Green Arrow is the original Green Arrow as well, he must have had several sidekicks named Speedy over the past several decades… hmmm… food for thought, there.)

Anyway, so we have the second Black Canary, born in 1953, taking on her heroic role in 1971, fighting crime throughout the 1970s and perhaps into the 1980s. Sometime prior to 1988, she retires, for some as yet unknown reason – maybe because she’s pregnant? And has a daughter she names Dinah, also. Who is the current, contemporary Black Canary appearing in JSA and Birds of Prey.

I like the idea for a lot of reasons. One, it preserves a lot of the continuity I am familiar with, in the era where that continuity originally took place. Second, it gives us an entirely new Black Canary to speculate about. We know the details of many of her adventures, but – why did she retire? Who is the current Black Canary’s father? The obvious guess would be Green Arrow, but what if the obvious guess is incorrect? What if the reason she and Green Arrow broke up is that the current BC’s father was someone else? If so, who could it be?

Obviously, this would require some quickly ret-conned explanations – any Black Canary who has appeared in the last decade or so and been romantically linked to Green Arrow would have had to have been the second BC, not the current one. The current one may well have some kind of relationship with GA – but does he think he’s her father? Or is he angry with her because he knows he’s not? Is the current BC angry with him, because she assumes he is, and he abandoned her mother?

There are, I have no doubt, endless reasons from endless Black Canary, Green Arrow, and related character appearances over the past three decades that this couldn’t work, but I suspect worse continuity implants have been put into place before.
Me, I really like the idea of ‘Black Canary’ being a generational identity, rather like The Phantom, with each Black Canary raising a successor to the role.

Hey, nearly time for the Bucs game. Better go.