Update to the William Messner-Loebs talk from last week (reminder: here’s his GoFundMe) — a couple of you noted that DC has announced a new omnibus reprint of his (and Greg LaRocque’s) run on The Flash.
I haven’t found an issue listing yet, but that’s definitely the cover from the first issue on that omnibus there. That has me wondering if they’re going to include the first 14 issues of this Flash series written by Mike Baron, or just pick up from #15, Messner-Loebs’ first. I mean, I presume not, I just see Loebs’ name there. It’s good stuff, regardless, and Loebs picks up from Baron’s run, fleshing out situations and characters and keeping things weird and exciting.
I would kind of preferred paperbacks, but as was noted in my comments, maybe those will come later. But so long as some money is getting to Loebs from this, it’s a welcome move from DC.
So every once in a while I take a look on the eBay for 1996’s Flex Mentallo #3:
…not because I need a copy (I bought mine way back when it was new), but out of perverse fascination with how the book gets listed. Specifically because of this cover detail:
…featuring the signatures of the book’s writer and artist, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Not actual signatures, mind you, but part of the actual cover image. If you look closely, you can see the comic book coloring details in the “penlines” of the signatures:
But if you only ever see the one copy of this comic, and didn’t, say, unbundle a giant pile of them after arrival from Diamond to put them on the shelf and seeing the dozens of copies with identical autographs on each one, then at first glance maybe, just maybe, you might thing you had some genuine hand-scribblings.
Such as the person who listed this item for sale:
Currently it’s just the one listing, which is unusual given that in the past I could usually find four or five at any given time. Maybe folks are learning, maybe I just caught eBay at a good/bad time, maybe enough buyers have complained in the past, I don’t know.
Which does have me thinking about buyers who did purchase one of these off eBay as a “signed” item, believing to this day that they have a rare collector’s item. Ah, well. I don’t remember anyone thinking this when they were buying the item new off the rack (because they could see with their own eyes that every copy had identical “inscriptions”). I do recall having to explain once or twice over the years when buying collections that these weren’t actually hand-signed.
To be fair, this isn’t a common cover design element, so I can’t blame people for being momentarily fooled. And I wouldn’t put it past Morrision and/or Quitely if that wasn’t a planed prank on their part, still playing out all these years later.
Sure, I know, everyone’s seen this, James Gunn’s announcement of DC’s movie/TV plans over the next couple or three years. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the announcement that we’re getting a Swamp Thing movie out of this. Maybe.
According to Gunn, this is the first stage (or most of the first stage) of their decade-long multimedia plan of, well, catching up to Marvel. (That Gunn repeatedly uses the word “marvelous” in this pitch is, as I’d said on Twitter, either a poor choice of words on his part, or entirely deliberate.) This “chapter” is titled “Gods and Monsters,” recycling a title previously used by DC, and so called because, like I said before, Swamp Thing is involved here, as are the Creature Commandos, in a move that I’m pretty sure no one predicted. The “Gods” part would be the new Superman film, a movie with the Authority (also a surprise, particularly to the original artist), and Supergirl, and so on. And then there’s the Green Lantern and Booster Gold TV shows coming to HBO Max, not sure which side those fall on. Or I’m just being too literal.
Of course, I’m like someone asked to watch a new Netflix show or pick up a new Marvel first issue…I’ve no confidence in any of this actually lasting. The way the new regime at Warner Bros. cuts/cancels/just outright buries things, like shelving the nearly-complete Batgirl movie and dropping a bunch of stuff off their HBO Max service, I feel like all it’s going to take is for one thing to underperform in this proposed slate of releases, and, poof, Gunn is gone, all the shows are cancelled, and we’re back to square one. And by “square one” I mean “a Batman movie of some kind.”
I mean, I don’t know, maybe Gunn and whatever that other guy’s name was have got some pretty solid contracts locked down allowing them the time to develop these properties. But with Swamp Thing the last in line here, I’m not holding my breath. I’m glad to see it’s on their minds, anyway.
So I was rereading the Grant Morrison/Charles Troug Animal Man series, because why wouldn’t I, when I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before…or paid so little attention to way back when because I didn’t have a blog at the time on which to mountainize this molehill.
I like spotting the seams of comics production in the finished product, sometimes. Like the occasional coloring note accidentally left in the margin of a page. Or, for an example I can actually show you, when an entire caption is added to a page to keep a story from entirely slagging a company’s bread-and-butter.
And then there’s just simple word replacement, like in Animal Man #1 (1988) where the word “ass” (presumably) is substituted with the word “butt.”
Here are a couple closer looks, where it’s easy to see the lettering mismatches with the rest of the book, along with the slightly-off spacing.
It’s just a little amusing, is all, not quite on the level of some very obviously (and frankly, sloppily) relettered dialogue on a splash page in Preacher where some purposefully vulgar content replaced something that must have been even more appalling. But even mentioning Preacher adds to the contrast between this early prudishness language versus the oh, the places they’d go once the Vertigo label gets slapped on the front cover.
It also somewhat brings to mind this bit from Mr. Show (please pardon the presence of a Jan. 6 participant):
I’m of two minds here, where either they could have changed it back, because really does it matter; or it’s fine as it is, a visible measure of restraint in a medium that often excessively goes in the opposite direction in the name of “mature content.”
Not to go all “I’m not a prude, but” on you here — I mean, I’ve been known to say “poop,” quietly, when no one else is in the room — but there have been times when it felt like someone on a “not for kids” comic book really wanted to test that freedom and give us wall-to-wall naughty words, which can get a tad wearying after a while. I mean, it’s fine, whatever, but reading “fuck” thirty times in the space of a couple of pages kinda undermines whatever impact it has. (Except in the Nick Fury comics by Garth Ennis, where somehow it’s hilarious.)
This is all just to say it was, in its way, quaint to see the word “butt” pasted into that Animal Man comic. Grant Morrison and editor Karen Berger, I appreciate your “butts!”
I’m going to jump ahead and address a comment from Monday’s post — DK’s, to be specific, in which he talks about the relative lack of motivation for DC’s various villains.
It’s funny, this topic had sort of crossed my mind the other day, but along the lines of “what makes a villain an arch-nemesis.” Superman is easy, as it’s Lex Luthor: world’s strongest man versus the world’s smartest man. Batman, it’s the Joker: a man trying to impose order on a chaotic world versus a man who creates chaos. Wonder Woman is a little more difficult, as while thematically it’s Ares (a woman representing peace versus the God of War), I don’t know that this pairing showed up a whole lot until the latter half of Princess Diana’s existence.
I mentioned the word “thematically,” and that’s what these match-ups are, battles of opposites. It doesn’t say much in terms of characterization so much as plot considerations. Why (aside from the hair thing) does Luthor hate Superman? What compels the Joker to spread chaos? …Wonder Woman and Ares I’m willing to give a pass on possible internal motivations, as, well, Ares is the God of War, there’s no real subtlety here.
I tried to spread this out to Marvel characters, like Spider-Man, but that’s harder to nail down. Like, why would it be the Green Goblin? Is an octopus the natural enemy of a spider? And so on. I came to the conclusion the Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis is the irresponsible use of power, especially that gained through scientific mishap. Yes, the ol’ “intangible quality” trick. But I think it fits…Peter Parker got his powers from science gone awry. and used them for good. Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, the Lizard gained theirs the same way and used them for eeeeeevil. Granted, not sure Venom fits into this entirely neatly, but I was just pondering, not laying down law here.
But again, like I said, this doesn’t dive into specific character motivations as opposed to the thematic/plot-oriented purposes to which these characters are utilized.
I am not even sure what Luthor’s exact deal is right now. Post-Crisis, he’s a power-hungry dude pissed that there’s someone more powerful around, who has also continually got the better of him. As time wore on, he became more of a mix of the Silver Age Luthor and the Byrne/Wolfman-era Luthor, a rich businessman who just freely uses advanced science to do…I don’t know, whatever. Join the Justice League, that sort of thing.
His modern motivation is still his hatred of Superman’s apparent superiority, but he couches it (as he does in this week’s Action, in fact) in his desire to remove “alien influence” on Earth. And that it would get rid of the guy who always makes him look bad, well, that’s just a happy coincidence.
“Joker: Murder clown, haven’t even given him a real name for 75+ years.”
I sort of go into it above…the Joker doesn’t really need a specific motivation beyond wanted to wreak a little havoc, and it just so happens it’s usually Batman there to stop him. As to a specific motivation as to why he would do that…well, I guess The Killing Joke is now just straight-up officially the origin of the Joker, all that built-in ambiguity in the original story just jettisoned for the purposes of current comic-booking.
As such, I suppose the Joker’s motivation is…well, basically what I said above, causing chaos And with Killing Joke now canon, the death of his wife, among other things, is what drove him to this point, lashing out at a world that destroyed his life.
Oh, and I did write a bit about DC finally, weirdly, giving the Joker an official real name, but frankly I won’t believe it ’til I see it in black and white in whatever the next iteration of Who’s Who in the DC Universe will be.
“Sinestro: Power corrupts (just this one dude, not the 10,000 others with rings)”
I mean, that’s good enough I think. Sinestro fell out with the Guardians like (here we go) Lucifer rebelling against God and being cast out of Heaven. Sinestro hates his former bosses and their Green Lantern force, and especially the face of that authority, their arguably greatest member after Ch’p, Hal Jordan. I know that (I think) Gerard Jones added emphasis to the whole “Sinestro is obsessed with maintaining order” element, which I think is still a part of the character’s drive.
“Reverse Flash: Admit it, lazy AF concept. Can’t even be bothered to give him a real supervillain name.”
Ah yes, the “bigger, badder version of the hero” trope we all know so well from most of the Marvel movies. But to be fair, his full moniker was “Professor Zoom, the Reverse-Flash,” which, c’mon, that’s pretty cool. Now I’m just talkin’ the original dude here, don’t get me started on all these other Reverse-Flashes that turned up.
What I do like about Reverse-Flash is that his deal was that he was a dude in the future who thought the 20th century Flash was awesome, replicated the accident that gave the Flash his powers, and then discovered he was going to come the Flash’s enemy, which drove him mad, turning him into the Flash’s enemy. It’s this weird, sci-fi time loop thing that I happen to like.
During Waid’s run on the Flash comic, he altered the origin slightly by having RF (sorry, tired of typing that out), still a big fan, go back in time and discover that not only was he going to be a villain, but that the Flash would kill him. Anyway, that’s a whole thing that I won’t get into here, but I think this provides a nice, unusual motivation for the character. Yes, it’s “he hates him because he hates him,” but the background is interesting enough to support it.
“Gorilla Grodd: Kill All Humans, as I am not a human and I am better than them.”
Look, evil telepathic superpowered intelligent gorilla has got to be motivation enough, right? I’m going entirely from memory here, but Grodd was trying to take over Gorilla City from its leader, Solovar, and Flash interfered, and now the Flash is also on Grodd’s shit list? I’m pretty sure that’s right. Anyway, c’mon, he’s a gorilla villain, let’s cut him some slack.
“Deathstroke: I get paid to be Evil. I have no idea why Bruce Wayne doesn’t just pay me to be good.”
I mean, assassin-for-hire who goes after superheroes, that’s good, I think. Admittedly he’s not very successful against them, which makes me wonder how he makes any money (“okay, sure, you haven’t killed any of the Titans yet, but maybe the 20th time’s the charm, do you take personal checks?”). I suppose in the Teen Titans’ case, it’s more “personal vendetta” as time went on, but I think being a hired gun who keeps getting hired despite being almost entirely ineffectual by necessity kinda works.
“Per Degaton: This secret dies with Roy Thomas.”
Ah, Per Degaton. The would-be dictator who used his boss’s time machine to rampage through history, screwing around with time, and also bother the Justice Society of America, all in his attempts to become, as I said, a dictator.
When he was reintroduced into DC Comics in the 1980s, DC also reprinted his (I believe) first appearance from the Golden Age in one of their reprint digests, so anyone new to the character (like I was) could get his deal. And his deal is that whenever his plans get undone, he’s thrown back into the normal timeline as a lab assistant:
I love that this seems to be his eternal fate (with one or two exceptions over the years)…just sent back to where he was, frustrated by the memory of what was undone.
“Brainiac: I am the smartest being in the universe but I want City Funko Pops for some reason.”
He collects cities either to study, to preserve them, to put on his own planet so he could rule them…he had a few reasons for doing what he did. End result of any of these reasons: he came to your planet to grab a city and take off. Kinda like Galactus, only he just stole a city instead of eating a planet.
I do like the animated series origin, where he’s an embodiment of Krypton’s artificial intelligence network that survives the planet’s explosion, and he goes on collecting data (i.e. planets) which puts him in conflict with Krypton’s last son. Whatever version seems to come down to “Brainiac does evil science stuff and Superman tries to stop him.” Plus, it’s nice to have a regular (and powerful) alien nemesis for Supes, in contrast to his vast array of Earthbound bad guys.
Anyway, those were my thoughts on those particular DC villains. Again, just some off-the-top-of-my-head ideas, so I’m sure I got a fact wrong here and there. You know where to correct me!
“Mike, the main reason Wonder Woman survived into the 50s has to do with the terms of the original contract between AA/National and Marston. If there came a period where she didn’t appear in a comic published for a certain length of time (I’ve heard two months), the rights would revert to the Marston estate. So, Wonder Woman might be the first comic that continued to be published solely for a rights issue!”
If I recall correctly, it was Kurt Busiek who first unleashed this knowledge onto the world…some kind of deal where he mentioned “oh yeah that post-Crisis, pre-Perez series mini I wrote was done else DC lose the Wonder Woman rights” and the rest of the funnybook resident was all “…wait, run that by me again?”
Now that’s entirely paraphrasing, but it was something along those lines. The Legend of Wonder Woman, scripted by Busiek and illustrated by Trina Robbins, was released in the year-long interim between the cancellation of the original Wonder Woman series and the George Perez/Greg Potter relaunch. Apparently, without that mini being rushed into production and released, that publishing gap would indeed have been enough to trigger whatever contractual clause existed to revert all Wonder Woman rights to the Marston estate. Last month’s issue of Back Issue, the ’80s DC Mini-Series issue, features a good interview with Busiek and Robbins about the series.
One of the details I believe I learned from that interview was that it had to be specifically a title starring Wonder Woman. Guest-appearances in other comics, or even just being a member of the Justice League, wasn’t enough to keep the shepherd’s crook at bay and yanking her offstage.
Now I’d assumed after that close call, as the series was rushed into production after someone realized that contractual issue, that DC/Warners went to the Marston estate, pulled out the checkbook, sighed and asked “…okay, how much?” I presume that was the situation when DC nailed down the Shazam!/Captain Marvel rights a couple/three decades back instead of just continuing to license the characters from Fawcett. Anyway, in that Back Issue interview Busiek said he wasn’t sure what the situation was regarding the Wonder Woman contract, and whether that clause was still in effect. If there’s been clarification on this since then, I’d like to know.
As I noted in the post upon which Cassandra was commenting, in that otherwise superhero-less gap between the Golden and Silver Ages, Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman continued to be published because they were still money-makers. In Wonder Woman’s case, yes, that title was still making money via all the toys and such DC was able to license, which certainly gave them incentive to keep the title going. Not just to encourage more licensing, but to keep their mitts on the property so they could continue making that toy-and-costume scratch.
Now as to whether or not any other titles continued on solely to retain the rights…well, technically, that’s the deal with pretty much any licensed property, but I know what you mean, Cassandra! There was that aforementioned licensing arrangement DC had with Fawcett over usage of the Shazam! family of characters, but I don’t believe that would’ve been a “use it or lose it” kind of deal. I don’t think there were too many long gaps with DC’s usage of Captain Marvel anyway, so I don’t believe that to be entirely analogous. But I can’t think of anything else that’s quite the same. Something to look into, perhaps!
Also, I should note that I’m filing this under the “Multiverse Talk” category not just to continue the conintuity of converssation, but also because the Legend of Wonder Woman mini includes a nicely appropriate send-off to the Earth-2 Wonder Woman!
So now that I’m getting my primary comic book shipments from three different distributors, the days I can expect the new titles can vary from week to week. Well, I mean, Diamond’s boxes still turn up the Tuesday morning before the Wednesday on-sale day. The DC Comics boxes will show up at any time between the Wednesday before the next Tuesday’s on-sale date (rare) to, generally, the Monday prior the big Tuesday release. Marvel shipments usually come Monday or Tuesday for Wednesday release.
My DCs for this week arrived last Thursday, and having nothing else better to do at that moment, aside from everything else I have to do, I went ahead and busted opened the boxes and got everything sorted and counted. And did I maybe abuse my evil retailer powers and read a couple of this week’s books way ahead of time?
Sure, of course I did. The Big Event Books, as weirdly frustrating as they usually are, are always must reads for me. Not so much for the fictional in-world changes they make, though I’m interested in those too, but why and how those changes are made, if they can be inferred from the story itself. And a lot of it is also “how far away from the relative simplicity of the original DC Comics Multiverse are they going to get themselves this time?”
Which is a long way of saying “I read Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths #4 and Flashpoint Rebirth Beyond #5 last week, before purt’near everyone else.”
Now I’m not going to discuss that issue of Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths here today, except to say I’ve rarely seen so obvious an example of a comic book’s name made entirely from flopsweat.
But what I am here to discuss, as hinted at by my mostly blind-itemed tweets, is that new issue of Flashpoint Beyond. And those tweets were purposefully vague because 1) I didn’t want to spoil anything from a book that most folks out there couldn’t possibly have had a chance to look at yet, and 2) mmmmm, DC’s distributor frowns on anyone doing stuff like that. So I kept my mouth mostly shut, though I did do a search or two online to see if anyone else was talkin’ about this stuff ahead of time, as mentioned in my linked tweets.
Now that the book is out in the wild, I’m gonna talk about this thing, even though I’m fully aware many of you, while theoretically able to read this book now, have not yet, either because you haven’t been to your local shop yet, or perhaps more wisely you decided to give a pass on anything that was called Flashpoint Beyond. As such
SPOILERS AHEAD
First off, it was kind of weird that DC would be doing two multiversal/self-referential/let’s talk about talking about parallel Earths again series at the same time, with Dark Crisis and Flashpoint sometimes, as with this week, releasing installments simultaneously. And in case you were wondering if everything in Dark Crisis, a series with a few issues to go, was going to turn out okay, don’t you worry kids because Flashpoint Beyond #5 has got you covered:
I realize realistically nobody thought the Justice League was really dead, nor did anyone have any doubt as to whether or not Dark Crisis would conclude with our heroes (presumably) victorious. But maybe some pretense at suspense through a little willing suspension of disbelief does go a long way in enjoying event stories like these, where you do want to wonder “how are our heroes gonna get out of this scrape?” without having it undermined by some other in-universe source telling you “yeah, it’s all fine, don’t sweat it, but enjoy the next, what, three issues of that series.”
Anyway, that’s kind of a minor annoyance, maybe sort of equivalent to the build-up to Iron Man’s new armor in issue #200 of his title, only whoops, here it is on the cover of an issue of Secret Wars II. But then Mr. Terrific, addressed in that panel there, does spend the next page or two describing the structure of DC’s multiverse and omniverse and how it gets messed with from time to time and that’s actually pretty interesting. Though, again, I think some of what he’s explaining is the result of the end of Dark Crisis, so, um.
Here is the big thing I wanted to talk about, however. The one I really wanted to discuss soon as I saw it, but knew I couldn’t until the ol’ distribution/release date embargo was lifted. The phrase that really surprised me when reading this book, just casually tossed out there with barely a “how d’you do” or a “Bob’s your uncle” — and it’s just a name:
That’s what I’d been searching on Twitter and Google with no results last week, and finally got some results Tuesday afternoon as people were equally puzzled about what was going on here.
Oh, to be clear, apparently that’s the Joker’s real name.
On the plus side, “Jack” is the first name, which I think sounds right. And there’s a slight hint of that from Legends of the Dark Knight #50, where the Joker’s cousin starts to use his real name:
…only to have Joker interrupt him and say “nope, we don’t use that name any more.”
Curiously, he’s given the middle name of “Oswald,” which is not only already the name of another Batman villain, the Penguin, but a version of that character is a regular in this series, and only goes by the name. Not that people can’t have the same names, I realize, but it feels weird when it happens in a work of fiction…like, writers avoid that sort of thing to keep confusion to a minimum. And “White” — I saw reference to “Jack White” being one of the Joker’s many alias over the years, and I haven’t done the research on that bit yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
We see “Jack” with his family in this alternate “Flashpoint” timeline/Earth/wherever we are, reflecting 1) the backstory as given in The Killing Joke, and the retrofit survival of his wife and child in Three Jokers. And the way the name is just offhandedly presented, we have no real reason to doubt that would be his name…could be a trick, could be an unreliable narrator, but it doesn’t feel that way, despite the source proffering the info.
It also feels weird to just have the name tossed out there after years of teasing, and a relatively recent mini-series where the upshot was “oh sure Batman knows his name but he ain’t gonna say.”
Not that this name is going to stick around longer than any other “real name” for the Joker. The longest lasting is “Jack Napier,” from the first Tim Burton film, which carried over into the ’90s animated series (but later downgraded to “alias” rather than a true name) and currently being used in the ongoing series of alternate timeline White Knight books. He got a real name in that Joker movie, which I’ve already forgotten, he got a backstory and another name in the Gotham TV show, there was a story in Gotham Knights, I believe, where he was given yet another name. I think I said before “Jack Napier” was my favorite because 1) it sounds a little like “jackanapes,” and 2) the fella what played Alfred in the ’66 TV show had the last name “Napier.”
And also, like I said, this is an alternate timeline/parallel Earth thing, and thus not in the regular DC universe. It’s possible whatever changes the whole Flashpoint thing forced onto the timeline somehow altered the Joker’s real name, too, or put some other failed comedian into the Joker’s place with his family. I mean, who knows…seems unlikely we’ll ever see this name again outside of this context.
So that’s what I was going on about on the Twitters, if you made the mistake of following me there. An odd reveal, countering the purpose of another Joker series, seemingly factual in-(a)-universe but easily done away with. Strange, and we’ll see if it stands by the next, and final, issue.
“My first real introduction to alternate universes was reading the classic ‘To Kill A Legend’ in a collection I had as a lad. The idea of Batman going to another universe with the chance to save the lives of his parents BLEW MY LITTLE BOY MIND.”
The comic that story originally appeared in was Detective Comics #500, released in late 1980/early 1981 when I was about 11 years old. Here’s the great jam cover that wrapped around this extra-sized funnybook:
Very early on here on this site, I did a series of posts about anniversary issues, including an entry on this very issue giving an overview of all the contents.
In “To Kill A Legend” by Alan Brennert and Dick Giordano, the Phantom Stranger shows up to lay all this on the Caped Crusader:
He’s obviously referring to the Earth-2 Batman as the Bruce Wayne whose parents were murdered 40 years ago (at then-press time), pictured there with an image evoking Batman’s first appearance on the cover of Detective Comics #27 back in 1939. The Bruce Wayne of “twenty years later” is Earth-1 Batman, the star of this particular show. (As an interesting side-note, assuming Bruce was somewhere between 5 to 10 years old at the time of the Waynes’ murders, that would put Earth-2 Batman at about 45-50 years old, and Earth-1 Bats at 25-30.)
The interesting implication of this story is not only that there is a new, apparently unnumbered parallel Earth in the DC Universe that may or may not have a Batman (not spoiling the story, you should read it!), but that there is a 20-year-cycle to these events duplicating in alternate universes. Going by that, we should’ve had another couple o’Batmans since then…and in a way, maybe we have, what with all the Crises and Rebirtheries, if perhaps not on a strict 20-year timeline.
It is a very good story, and one of the rare multiversal excursions in the DC Universe that doesn’t involve travel to one of the recognized Earths in the company’s established cosmology. To my knowledge this is the one and only trip to this particular Earth. There’s another parallel Earth that I think was only visisted once, in Justice League of America #38 where they go to…Earth-A? I haven’t read that yet, but I suspect I’ll be reporting on it here very soon.
Overall, this comic is excellent, so, Tim, and everyone else reading this, if you get a chance, give it a gander. I hope DC eventually releases a nice hardcover edition…there’s too much good material in this book as a whole for it to languish in back issue bins or be partially reprinted across trade paperbacks. But then, there are a lot of DC Comics of the past I wish they’d do that to.
I’m trying to put together this whole thing re: DC’s multiverse and it’s requiring me digging up scans left and right and frankly, I’m not the young, energetic blogger I used to be, staying up well past the witching hour with the hum of a scanner my only company. I’m still working on it, but in the meantime, let’s get back to your comments and questions and such:
Matthew Murray points out, in regards to the semi-fake out of Action #484 and the marriage of Earth-2 Lois and Supes
“The other tip off for that Action Comics cover is that it features the Daily Star newspaper.”
That’s fair enough, and it’s a fairly prominent background detail featured in the corner of the cover there. But — and this is a big but, I cannot lie about liking those — your average person not mired in DC’s parallel-Earth shenanigans isn’t going to recognize that as meaning anything. They might think, if they even notice it, “shouldn’t it be Daily Planet?” and if they think that represents any kind of in-story problem, there’s no natural way for them to expect the resolution to be “Superman from another universe, y’all.”
So my judgement remains “dick move,” at least as it stands in regards to the general public. And just slightly less of a dick move to folks more familiar with the milieu and observant enough to catch that detail. Plus, I don’t think DC itself ever emphasized that this was going to be not regular Superman taking a bride. Anyway, take that, 44-year-old Superman comic!
“The parallel universes were never confusing to me and my friends – they were explained in one, maybe two panels. I never got the references in COIE stories about them being a problem.”
Yes, exactly…it was solving a problem that, at least internally, in comic book fandom, didn’t really exist. It didn’t take much to explain, like in this panel from Justice League of America #219 (1983) by Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, Chuck Patton, and Romeo Tanghal:
…and it was just off to the races. But I think it was a problem of public perception and confusion, as per that Action #484, that egged along a desire to streamline and get rid of potentially confusing elements such as “two Wonder Women” and the like. (Oh, and that specific letter published in New Teen Titans that inspired Marv Wolfman, but that’s a whole ‘nother thing.)
Or as you say:
“The ONE thing I kind of liked about the consolidated world was that it did make it easier to team up or make groups like the Giffen JL. But the constant retelling of pre-Crisis stories (especially in the Superman titles) to basically reintroduce elements was tiring.”
It did spare DC having to jump through hoops (or, you know, run a panel like the one above) in order to have the original Captain Marvel on a team with Guy Gardner without having to explain that he has to commute from Earth-S via the Rock of Eternity so he can help the Justice League fight the Gray Man. (No, not thatGray Man.)
The problem DC ran into with this sudden overhauling of their multiverse into one universe is that the readership from one era carried over into a new era. It wasn’t like the gap between the Golden Age and the Silver Age, where DC could introduce a new version of Hawkman as a space cop, and a new version of Green Lantern as…er, a space cop, and there was enough readership turnover in the meantime that they didn’t have a bunch of fans writing in demanding this new Hawkman and GL be reconciled with the previous versions of the characters. I mean, I’m sure some did, but a lot of those eight year old kids who rode out the end of the initial Golden Age superhero era probably didn’t come back at 16, pick up that issue of Showcase and suddenly go on a tear on 1940s Twitter with #notmyflash.
Or maybe they did. I don’t know, I wasn’t there, but I suspect that publishing gap gave DC enough of a clean break that they could essentially start over again with a minimum of reader confusion. The Crisis on Infinite Earths rejiggering had no such gap, and the folks reading before were told “forget everything you knew” and were along for the ride as DC tried to figure out in real time how this new fictional set-up was going to work.
The original plan of just restarting everything from scratch at the conclusion of Crisis might have been sufficient enough of a firebreak between What Came Before and What We’ve Got Now (well, Then-Now, you know what I mean), since DC putting everything on hold for five or six years obviously isn’t practical. ‘Course, they chickened out on that, and now (real now, not Then-Now) we’ve got what we’ve got. They did eventually sort of try that out with their New 52 publishing initiative, but even, like, Green Lantern comics just kinda carried on as usual, so the break wasn’t as clean as it should have been.
Crisis on Infinite Earths (like New 52 later) did serve its purpose, which was “get more eyeballs on DC Comics,” at least for a while. People have said in my comments and elsewhere that Crisis goosed them into trying out DC’s other titles, which is the ultimate goal of any superhero universe crossover event, even more so than DC’s annual attempts at redefining what “DC Universe” actually means.
Next time: more question response or that parallel Earth post I’m gathering panels for. We’ll see!
Gonna start responding to some of your Multiverse Talk comments here, though I do have more multiverse content to come. Just thought I’d get a head start:
“DC would have been better served if their in-universe history had played out like it did in Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier, with it all taking place on the same Earth, and with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman bridging the gap between the JSA generation and the JLA generation.”
The big reason I like this idea is that it reflects what happened in the real world…DC’s 1940s heroes all went away, only starting to come back, what, five years later with the debut of Silver Age Flash. During that interim period Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman continued to be published, presumably as they were the biggest money-makers, perhaps in sales but certainly in licensing.
The one downside, perhaps, at least as far as the publisher’s desire to maintain an I’s status quo, is that this would age the Supes/Bats/WW trinity. Okay, maybe not Wonder Woman, who’s generally portrayed as immortal. And I know some would argue Superman is also immortal, but I think, in my wholly unverified opinion, that we’ve had enough “Old Supes” stories over the years that the idea of that character aging is probably generally accepted.
Regardless, having S/B/WW around for the Golden Age of Heroes, then a brief intermission, then being the Older Still Active Heroes once the Silver Agers start showing up, that would put their ages at…well, I guess it depends on 1) how long the Golden Age was in-story; and 2) how long the break between generations was. In the real world, Superman first appeared in 1938, and, let’s see, All-Star Comics #57 in late 1950 was the end of the Justice Society’s original run. The Silver Age launched with the arrival of the new Flash in Showcase #4. So with these examples, we have Supes active for 12 years until DC’s Golden Age ended, he hung around for 6 years, and then boom, the Silver Age.
Thus at the beginning of the Silver Age, Superman is however old he was in the original comics, let’s say 30, add 16 on top of that, so he’s about 46 as the Silver Age begins. NOW, for in-story purposes none of that matters, as it could be established the Golden Aqe was a whole year long, the break was a year long, and thus Superman’s still in his early 30s when the new cast of Silver Agers move in.
I mean, that’s all just playing with numbers trying to sort out that particular hypothetical circumstance. But then Daniel also sez
“I think the biggest mistake that DC made was to narratively tie the Earth-Two characters to a fixed point in history (e.g., World War II). Just as the Earth-One characters perpetually took place in “the present,” there’s no reason that the Earth-Two characters couldn’t have perpetually taken place ’20 years ago’ without being tied to a specific historical period.”
The two solutions would be, as you said, making their prime active years “twenty years ago,” which will still feel weird to us old fanboys (the JSA active circa 2002? egads) but that’s the only way to really do it, I guess. Though they could “Captain America”-it and establish they were “stuck in limbo staving off Ragnarok” or something. The other solution is to put them on a parallel Earth where the heroes did debut during WWII, and journeys to that Earth either bring you to that wartime era, or, if you want older heroes, to, like, that’s Earth’s “present” which would be set in the 1970s or thereabouts. That avoids messing with “main Earth” and its sliding-scale “our heroes first showed up 5/10/20 years ago” universe.
A long time ago on this site, somewhere, where I can’t find it now, I noted one (only one?) of the weird things about the Smallville TV show is how what is essentially the Superboy part of the Superman story is taking place “now.” We, The Comic Book Fans, are used to Superboy stories set “15 years before now,” and sometimes reflecting the world as it existed (like “Superboy’s Mission for President Kennedy!” or, in New Adventures of Superboy, seeing the occasional hippie). Moving the Adventures of Clark Kent as a Really Tall Boy in Smallville to current day just seems weird to those of us familiar with the source material, in the same way moving the JSA’s origins away from its WWII era would feel equally odd.
Again, just for the folks used to it. If DC insists on giving the JSA its own “20-30 years ago” sliding timescale, we old folks just have to get used to it, and assuming DC remains consistent with its application (and that’s a big assumption) it just becomes the norm for newer readers regardless of how many angry letters 50+ year JSA fans write to the Comic Buyers’ Guide, despite it being defunct.
Now that’s entirely paraphrasing, but it was something along those lines. 
