DC Comics General

Though he did use some tech like the dart that expelled Menegarie's parasites from her body.

Yeah. He put a lot of thought into how he was going to put the Elite down, but to be fair, that's probably because he was trying to do it without killing them, while also making it look like he did kill them.

Even for Superman, that probably takes a lot of effort and planning.

Let me get back to Blue Beetle for a sec: Has Jamie ever used the Scarab's knowledge to build stuff.

Like, it must be able to help he create some pretty advanced machines if it wanted considering it has all the knowledge of the Reach and can probably easily study and copy most other alien tech barring New Genesis/Apokolips tech.

Of course, it can create most of what he needs anyway but I'd bet the knowledge is still there.

He'd probably have to stop since the info he gets gets turned into a doomsday device pretty quickly.

Shit.

That makes sense.

Well, if they ever need a Doomsday device, they got Jamie.

As touched on the last page, Wonder Woman fans can get touchy when it comes to the bondage roots, but as someone who kind of knows Wonder Woman comics, something seems to be missing. Have there been any references to bondage culture in the comics beyond the 1940s? DC Bombshells kind of went back to that by turning everyone into a pinup model, but specifically 1940s pinups. I know Poison Ivy was originally evil Bettie Page, so that's kind of a 1950s bondage, but she's also a Batman character. There was Wonder Woman Earth One too, but that was again, going back to Marston's ideas(1940s). It'd be fun to look at bondage culture over the decades, and have at least one Wonder Woman character who represented each time period as the culture changed. You can at least say the comic does have spy characters of multiple decades, showing how much views on that has changed.

You could do the same for Superman. There's this back and forth struggle with artists since New 52 on whether or not to keep his outdated Modesty Shorts or whether to just accept them them as part of who Superman is. I think the shorts would be easier to accept for the non believers if again, one looked at strongman culture throughout the decades and had at least one Superman character for each decade of strongmen. Clark Kent Superman obviously being the strongman of the 1930s, the modesty shorts stay, and that's that.

Batman's also a circus strongman in his initial design, but since Superman would be hogging that niche, assuming such characters don't already exist in Superman comics, for Batman it would be fun to present the history of the circus in general. Besides Batman, the strongman, there's Robin, the acrobat, Joker, the clown, and...Copperhead the contortionist? Who is the lion tamer? The sword swallower(perhaps an Azreal foe or a man with a vendetta against Ra's Al Guld?). Where's the human cannon ball? The elephants are missing!("Olympian" was a member of The Outsiders Post Crisis, but the elephants seem to be MIA since New 52) Maybe a fire breather would be redundant with Firefly around, but since Jace Fox and Dick Grayson have their own cities you could just put the fire breather in one of them. Plus other kinds of clowns would take away some of Joker/Harley Quinn's spotlight(not much of it, let's be realistic, but some)

Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on Apr 20th 2024 at 3:37:15 AM

Killer Croc fits the old circus freaks motifs, an episode of BTAS plays with that.

Random question but, given the obvious Robin Hood angle, has Green Arrow ever stolen from Wayne Enterprises? XD

No, because Green Arrow ain't in the business of stealing, given he doesn't exactly need to.

Some new previews

Flash issue 8 preview

So Circuit Breaker the new trans hero is finally in Flash. His first non event special book so good for him.

Green Arrow issue 11 preview

Arrow Family all together to fight off simulations of the JL in the remains of Sanctuary

He'd probably wreck as much of Lex Corp as he could if given half a chance, though.

I thought Killer Croc was a carnival attraction, not a circus performer.

But I guess when you're just going for visuals it wouldn't matter either way. So we've got a freak show! Is Killer Croc stronger than Batman, is the freak show stronger than the strong man? I remember Bane breaking or dislocating Killer Croc's arm was supposed to be the big deal before he broke Batman's back.

Pre Crisis, Croc was responsible for the death of Jason Todd's parents. That's back when Jason had been a circus acrobat, too.

@Indirect Active Transport Again, there are multiple acclaimed Wonder Woman stories that don't reference the bondage. Historia is just one such example from three years ago.What's missing from Wonder Woman is a consistent supporting cast and a stronger media presence of solo adventures outside of comics.

Showing women getting tied up isn't going to fix her problems and if people are that desperate for bdsm in comics, they have Sunstone, Emma Frost, Catwoman and Lady Death.

The point wouldn't be to accurately depict the various bondage activities of every decade in depth, much less form entire plots around them. It wouldn't require every character female or otherwise, to have some visual reference to bondage either. I stand corrected, Killer Croc did start as a circus performer, but Joker did not. He still references the circus in being a clown, he's got strong performance artist references in general(ironically I think Wonder Woman was the first to have an evil Gwynplaine before Joker/Batman Who Laughs became one) but at most Joker is a failed comedian, not a circus act. Harley Quinn isn't a circus clown either, or a harlequin of any sort for that matter, but they're still clearly clowns to Batman's strongman and Robin's acrobat. Robin actually performed his role in story but most Batman examples are just references. Not all Batman characters fit the circus theme either. Deadshot, Black Mask, Hush and Firefly all fit the masked criminal with a gun for the detective to figure out theme, but don't have any "circus" trappings. Hugo Strange and Scarecrow do the fear induction theme, Manbat...well you get the point. I'm fine with not every Superman, Batman character being a strongman or circus type. The circus is an undeniable inspiration on both characters and a theme that has not yet been used to its full potential in their comic books(as far as I know).

Superman and Batman wear "underwear" outside of their pants...no, those are modesty shorts from an age when textile technology was less advanced. I don't know as much about S&M, BDSM, or whatnot as I do about athletes, carnivals and circuses, but I'm pretty sure wearing unlinked shackles at all times as a sign lovingly dominating one while willingly submitting to another is something people in those circles haven't done for seventy years, something that sticks to Wonder Woman because of the iconic "bullets and bracelets" scene. We've seen the "bracelets"(shackles) redesigned into everything from gauntlets, to wrist guards, to bracers to vambraces. Artists/CCOs/art directors seem to have a bigger problem with them than any other part of Wonder Woman's appearance. But what if there was another recurring character who wore something equally outdated, but by fifty years instead of seventy, or even by ninety years, something already out of favor by the time Marston got into it? I'm not adamant about keeping the shackle design for the "bracelets" as I am for keeping the modesty shorts on Superman; Turning them into actual pieces of armor would increase their In-Universe effectiveness as such, but the fact all amazons of Themyscira wear them as signs of devotion to Aphrodite is an undeniable reference to 1940s bondage culture, even when the stories themselves don't actually go on to show any bondage. That love god Eros crafts them for Yara Flor in preparation to become is bridge is another, whether Joelle Jones even intended it to be or not. To take it out is akin to picking chocolate chips out of cookies. It'd be cool to sprinkle in other such references to other eras, much cooler than acting like the culture that so heavily influenced the ongoing serial just stopped existing after 1930s/40s.

Personally, I like the fact that Wonder Woman's supporting cast, setting, and general status quo is always changing, because I've come to think of that as a character trait of Diana's.

After all, Diana is someone who chose to leave Paradise in favor of journeying through the wider world. It makes a certain kind of sense, then, that Diana isn't someone who can be content with a single set of circumstances for very long, but will instead always be moving to new places, making new sets of friends, trying on new roles and new ways of doing things.

Plus, it pairs well with Wonder Woman's status as a feminist aspirational figure. You want to emphasize that women don't have to be constrained to certain roles, that they can choose to be whatever they want. So you show Wonder Woman as being free to take on many different roles and ways of life, none of which makes the character any less Wonder Woman.

And that way she has many roles, friends, and family to fall back on in a crisis or when they need help. They even did a call-back to her Mod era recently.

I don't mind her immediate lodgings and surrounding supporting characters rotating. Especially not when she's an ambassador. Got an issue to discuss in Sydney? Makes sense she'd staying in Nagasaki, Seoul or Shanghai before and after. There could be some plot involving natural disaster in East Timor, extracting a super villain from Myanmar, dealing with some Yokai, etc. Is Gundra, Loki or Sigurd the issue this month? That might lead to sticking to London, Munich, Paris, Naples or Tyumen, with Perun being in focus next. Alexandria, Ankara, Khartoum, Juba, Addis Ababa...whatever cities exist in Qurac...those would always be points of interest because of the Bana Mighdall alone, the relative volatility of the region even without them, not to mention Egyptian themed rogues like Mikra and Osira. Let's just throw in Athens because Julia Kapatelis and Jason are Greek. The Esquecida give us reason to put São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Santiago on the table, and since Tezcatlipoca is a somewhat recurring rogue, since Marya is a character worth bringing back, let's add Guadalajara as a place for Diana to bed in too! Boston, LA, DC, they all make enough sense as places to shack up in the US.

My issue is how she has moved, rather than moving in of itself. Didn't she just go to Gateway because she was tired of Boston out of the blue or something?(genuine question) Didn't she basically run into younger expies of all her supporting cast from Boston in Gateway?(yes) Didn't the Circe/Ares/White Magician plots of Boston mostly repeat in Gateway with Darkseid and Morgan Le Faye?(yes) For all the good John Byrne did, I completely understand why fans dislike his run, cause he just arbitrarily disregarded stuff because he thought he could redo it better. We get it, it worked for Wolverine, it kinda worked for Superman if you ignore the whole Legion issue, but Post Crisis Wonder Woman was well established and decently popular at the time. Don't think she needed the abrupt upending and added convolution after she had finally had a decade of relative consistency, stability even. Perez and Loebs managed to take her all over without in much more logical manners.

Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on Apr 21st 2024 at 4:36:37 AM

The Messner-Loebs run may have stayed in Boston, but it blew up the status quo of the Perez run in a lot of other ways (including literally blowing up Themyscira - sure, they also brought the island back, but it definitely felt like its destruction was meant to be permanent, and un-blowing it up was a course correction).

I would have agreed without, but discussion on this very forum lead me to believe it was supposed to be a mystery plot and more than that, one of many excuses to have her work at Taco Whiz.

I guess experiencing it in real time I would definitely assume it was nothing other than status quo disruption and course correction.

It doesn't feel like it was meant to be a mystery to me, because (a) we're shown how the island was supposedly destroyed, who was responsible, and had said villain (seemingly) killed off, and (b) Diana barely seems to care.

My theory is that Messner-Loebs's political views (which they weren't shy about in their Wonder Woman run, or in their earlier run on The Flash) weren't compatible with the idea of a utopian monarchy. So they tried writing Themyscira out of the story - and, when bringing it back, made it a much less of a paradise, and portrayed Hippolyta as a far shadier figure, in line with the view their comics usually had of old money and those in power.

I'm trying to catch up on years of Green Lantern books and I'm currently going through the 2014 Sinestro series. I just realized something: Characters with good, memorable designs always die. I think it has to do with because they're expendable the artist goes all out or maybe it's the opposite and because they're so complex they don't want to draw them too much.

Either with it's weird, once you notice it you can't unnotice it.

Considering he retconned Hippolyta from a rape victim into a willing accomplice of enslavement of her people, not to mention the absurdly sexualized art, I'd say his political views might have made him the wrong choice for a female-led superhero like Wonder Woman.

Wait, what?

Also retconned Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor into being siblings, which I don't think any subsequent writer has ever referenced.

I only read as far in as the Taco Whiz arc and some of Artemis' introduction, i don't think I read those parts of their run.