It's Sad I Was Right.

Back in 2013 I posted about seeing a piece of fanart for the DC Comics character Starfire on Deviantart.  I thought the artist made her look African American, and speculated what might happen if someone like Beyoncé was cast in the role.  5 years later a live action TV version of Teen Titans is on the way, with Anna Diop cast as Starfire.  The result?  A bunch of racist dumbasses complaining Starfire isn't black.  Well, yeah, but she's an alien.  So if you're going to go in that direction no Earth woman should be playing her period.  Which would make it damn difficult to have a live action Starfire at all.

Not My Choice.

It's been announced that Ben Affleck will play Batman in the upcoming sequel to the recent Superman film.  I don't know who I'd get to play Batman, but Affleck wouldn't be my choice.  He just doesn't strike me as the right guy to play Bruce Wayne.

Apparently the folks behind the franchise aren't superstitious.  After all Affleck played Daredevil in the 2003 big screen film, which failed to spawn an ongoing franchise.  I suppose some might argue that was just as much the fault of the failure of Jennifer Gardner's solo outing as Elektra.  And in this case neither Affleck, nor Batman, will be carrying the film alone.  But he'll still have to deal with Christian Bale's brooding portrayal of the Dark Knight in the successful trilogy.

The Inspiration For Stewie Griffin?

If your only exposure to Superman was a carefully put together selection of some of his comic stories from the '50s to the early '70s you'd be forgiven for thinking that the various Superman titles were intended as some sort of surrealist commentary on society rather than superhero comic books. A typical example from 1970 can be found in a post to Scans Daily by Doop. (And of course I shamelessly stole a bit of Doop's scan for the picture above.) In the "imaginary story"(as a lot of the crackiest offenders were) "Beware the Super-Genius Baby!" Superman and Lois Lane have married, and soon Lois is pregnant. But a supervillain, Professor Ulvo, uses a ray to make the fetus develop into a superbaby, and within a week of his birth he has adult level intelligence. He also has an evil streak, and Supes eventually has to fight his own son to keep him from taking over the world.

The story is bizarre enough, and the little details don't help. Note for example that Lois is married to Superman, and not his secret identity Clark Kent, and they live togetber as Mr. and Mrs. Superman in a typical suburban neighbourhood. I wonder how much the property values dropped given the potential for supervillain attacks and so forth. And the poor kid has no name, simply being refered to as "Superman's baby." No wonder he goes villainous so easily!

Regular Scans Daily poster icon_uk notes that the baby in this story is very much like Stewie Griffin from the cartoon Family Guy. As I'm sure most readers will know Stewie is basically the mind of a crotchety adult in the body of a one year old, and has tried and failed at such schemes as doing in his mother Lois and taking over the world. So the obvious question is whether Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane was inspired by this old Superman story when he created Stewie. The answer is most certainly no. Stewie was obviously intended to be a play on/inversion of the typical TV and cartoon baby, who generally is there simply to be cute and do cute baby things. Still, the similarities, including both nasty tikes having a mother named Lois, are interesting.

If you find the material in the post I linked to interesting there's a lot more to be found on Scans Daily. You might also want to check out Superdickery for various bizarre comic covers, Superman and otherwise.

Luck Of The Irish?

I'd been thinking of putting up this panel for a bit just because I like her expression. Bridget Clancy has previously appeared on this blog, but given my Oracle post this week I decided to do a post specifically dealing with Clancy.

Clancy(she prefers to be refered to by her last name) first appeared way back in the fall of 1996 in issue two of DC Comics' Nightwing. Nightwing is the current superhero identity of Dick Grayson, the original Robin. If you haven't read comics since the 1970s or are only familiar with Batman from the 1960s TV series, cartoons or the feature films you may not have realised he isn't Robin anymore. He took up the Nightwing identity way back in 1984, deciding it was time to move on from being Robin. This was chronicled during "The Judas Contract" storyline of The New Teen Titans comic series, which you can read in the trade paperback of the same name.

(There have been three Robins since:

-Dick's original replacement Jason Todd, who proved unpopular enough that a 1988 phone in poll of fans saw them vote for his demise by a narrow margin, and he was subsequently killed by the Joker. He has recently been brought back from the dead, to some derision.

-Tim Drake, the current Robin, who got the role in part because he figured out that Dick was the original Robin, and through that revelation deterimined that Bruce Wayne was Batman.

-Stephanie Brown, who briefly replaced Drake, although she had already been active as a superhero under the name Spoiler. The presentation of her brief tenure as Robin, role in starting a disastrous gang war in Gotham, and torture at the hands of the villain Black Mask, causing her death, has been considered by some to be an obvious example of the "Women in Refrigerators" problem. )

Nightwing starts with Dick being sent to Bludhaven, a city located a bit downriver from Gotham, by Batman to investigate the murder of 21 gang members found in Gotham harbour. He decides to set up shop in Bludhaven and finds an apartment in a building managed by Clancy. In her first few appearances he, and the readers, don't see her face, but he finds her Irish accent attractive. It's only in the sixth issue that we finally see her face. We soon learn that she was born in Hong Kong and adopted by an Irish couple as a baby.

An attraction soon develops between them and they casually date. Or rather, try to. As is often the case with superheros Dick's secret life gets in the way. For example in the sequence that the panel above is taken from(seen in issue thirty) Dick and Clancy are headed out to a movie when a phonecall from Oracle leads to Dick having to run off to rescue a street kid turned vigilante who is about to be murdered because he calls himself Nite-Wing and hence has been mistaken for Nightwing. Clancy of course knows none of this and is rather annoyed, especially since this isn't the first time Dick has run off without warning.

Unfortunately for Clancy her interest in Dick proves to be stronger than her interest in him. He redevelops a romantic interest in Oracle, who he had dated back when Barbara Gordon was Batgirl. With the demise of their romance Clancy pretty much disappears from Nightwing, making only a couple of brief appearances afterward. In issue 55 Chuck Dixon, original writer on the series and creator of Clancy, effectively wrote her out of the story when she's taken to hospital after an accidental electrocution. Whether he intended to use her again or not Dixon was soon replaced by writer Devon Grayson, who would go on to disassemble much of what Dixon had created, to much controversy.

People talk of the luck of the Irish, and perhaps Clancy caught some of that luck. Being written out of the story saved her life, as Blockbuster, the would be kingpin of crime in Bludhaven who has been repeatedly foiled by Dick, eventually figures out Nightwing's secret identity and blows up his apartment in revenge, killing most of the residents. Fortunately for Clancy she is no longer manager of the apartment, having gone off to medical school after receiving a scholarship from the Wayne Foundation, allowing her to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a doctor.

Clancy probably also got lucky that her romance with Dick didn't go very far. His long term romantic relationships haven't worked out too well. His wedding to Princess Koriand'r of Tamaran, better known to the people of Earth as the superheroine Starfire, was literally stopped at the altar due to a crisis involving their fellow Titan Raven, and their relationship subsequently dissolved. In more recent years he and Barbara Gordon became engaged, only for Oracle to decide they weren't ready to be married. And of course there's the general problem that the romantic interests of male superheros tend to be the victims of the attentions of their enemies. Not to mention the aversion some comic book professionals seem to have towards permanent relationships, as seen with Marvel's recent magic dissolution of Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane in the "One More Day" storyline.

After the events of DC's controversial 2005 crossover event (aren't they all these days?) Infinite Crisis Nightwing, after a year travelling the world with Batman and Robin, settles down in New York. There he encounters Clancy, who has a psychiatric residency at New York's Bellevue Hospital. Readers end up having to engage in a good bit of suspension of disbelief when Nightwing first saves Clancy from being choked by one of her patients, then asks her for possible insight into why the resurrected Jason Todd is trying to blacken his name by killing criminals while pretending to be Nightwing. Strangely Clancy shows no signs of recognising that Nightwing and Dick Grayson, who she shared a building with and dated for an extended period, are the same person. One would think the small mask he wears and whatever efforts he goes to in disguising his voice wouldn't be enough with someone who knows him well.

Compare this with what happened with Mia Dearden. A teenage runaway who became a prostitute to survive Mia's life takes a turn for the better after encountering Green Arrow. He tells her to seek out Oliver Queen, in reality his secret identity, for help in getting off the street. She does so, and when they meet it takes her mere seconds to recognise they're the same person, despite meeting Green Arrow only briefly under stressful circumstances. You'd think Clancy would do so equally as quickly.

Of all the artists I've seen draw Clancy I favour the original, Scott McDaniel. His take on her looks most like an actual, specific person, while some other artists strike me, if I may be sarcastic, as more "generic attractive young Asian woman #2." One interesting thing about the character is that her eye colour has varied. When we first see her, and in many subsequent appearances, her eyes are green. In others they're brown. Lazy colouring, or are we supposed to think she wears green contacts?

And to end, if anyone is wondering despite some of the pictures I've posted on here no, I don't have a fetish for Asian women with short hair. No more than I have one for Asian women with long hair.

Oracle=Lifeguard?

In 1988 DC Comics published The Killing Joke, a oneshot comic story written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland. In it Batman's arch enemy the Joker, as part of his plan to try and drive Gotham Police Commissioner Jim Gordon insane, shoots Gordon's daughter Barbara. Barbara Gordon had been Batgirl since the character's debut in 1966, but was pretty much retired when she was shot by the Joker. She survived, but ended up as a parapelegic.

Surprisingly she was not cured by one of the expected comic book methods, like high tech intervention or magic. Rather she has remained in her chair since. However the character didn't fade away due to the work of writer Kim Yale and her husband writer John Ostrander. Unhappy with the way Barbara was treated Yale and Ostrander decided to have her continue to aid the fight against crime despite her disabilities. Building on her backstory as having a doctorate in library sciences and having been Chief Librarian in Gotham they developed a new role for her as Oracle, expert hacker and information source to various DC characters and groups such as Batman and the Justice League. This role was further amplified in Birds of Prey, a comic series based around the idea of Oracle as the brains behinds the field activities of superheroine Black Canary, joined by various other characters. Although some people feel that in a world like DC's she should have been healed by now the character has proven very popular, perhaps even more popular than when she was Batgirl.

The timing of Barbara Gordon's transformation, and the concept Yale and Ostrander came up with, makes me wonder if they weren't inspired by another fictional character. In 1987 the television series Wiseguy first hit the air. The series starred Ken Wahl as Vinnie Terranova, an undercover operative for the fictional Organized Crime Bureau of the US Justice Department. Along with his boss Frank McPike Vinnie had support from Lifeguard, played by Vancouver actor Jim Byrnes. The character, like Byrnes, was a double amputee, and normally seen working in a secure location while sitting in a wheelchair. His role was providing information and emergency aid to Vinnie, making his role very similar to that of Oracle. Given the timing it's not hard to suspect that Yale and Ostrander were influenced by the TV series.

His Wiseguy role certainly helped Byrnes' acting career, leading to his long running role as Joe Dawson on the successful TV spinoff of the Highlander films.

I should also note a bit more of a long shot for the inspiration of Oracle, the character Aaron Kurtzman from the long running The Executioner "post modern pulp" book series and it's spinoffs. Chief of computers for the ultrasecret Stony Man antiterrorist group Kurtzman ended up confined to a wheelchair after being shot during a KGB backed attack on Stony Man Farm, the unit's base. The events that put Kurtzman in the chair predate The Killing Joke and Barbara Gordon's transformation by several years, but Wiseguy as a source for the idea seems more likely.

Poor Donna.

In the early 1980s, back when I was a young comic fan, DC Comics revived the Teen Titans, a superhero team that when created back in the mid '60s was comprised of several teen sidekicks of popular heroes. The New Titans, as they were frequently refered to, carried over several members of the old team including Wonder Girl, the teen sidekick of Wonder Woman. I was a fan of the series for several years, reading the series regularly until just after Wonder Girl, in her civilian guise of Donna Troy, got married. So when I saw the collection Who Is Donna Troy? in the library today I thumbed through it. The title story, which dealt with Robin's efforts to find out the truth of Donna's personal history, and the story detailing her marriage I was quite familiar with. I may even still have those issues stored away in a box. But having stopped reading the series after that point I was unfamiliar with the other material reprinted within.

The details are too complicated to relate here. But I have to say, poor girl! In 1985 DC had a megacrossover amongst its titles called Crisis On Infinite Earths. It was intended to simplify the continuity of the DC "universe," as considerable baggage had built up over the years. Unfortunately this retcon resulted in a bunch of problems replacing the old problems. This included Wonder Girl's connection with Wonder Woman being at odds with the new continuity that had Wonder Woman as a recent arrival on the scene. So Titans creative team Marv Wolfman and George Perez came up with a new origin story for Donna Troy, who also took on a new superhero name, Troia. This story line is reprinted in Who Is Donna Troy? and frankly its rather a mess. Big surprise, as its an attempt to reconcile a character's old continuity with a comic universe's new continuity.

Bad as this was, the folks at DC couldn't leave well enough alone. As time went on they screwed around with the new continuity, trying to patch over holes they made with the 1985 changes. And now they've changed a lot back to the way it was with the series/crossover event Infinite Crisis. No doubt current comics fans will be debating the effects of the new changes for years to come, and wondering how long it will take for the powers that be at DC to decide its time to screw around with things again.

Superman, Confused?

Probably not. But there are some contradictory ideas about the Man of Steel floating about right now. On the one hand you have Stephen Skelton, whose book The Gospel According to the World's Greatest Superhero claims that Jerry Siegel and Toronto born Joe Shuster deliberately fashioned the character after the story of Jesus Christ. Given that Siegel and Shuster were Jews this seems a bit unlikely. New York Rabbi Simcha Weinstein thinks that the Old Testament inspired them, not the New. Others have suggested that Supes was Siegel and Shuster's response to a world in which facism and Nazism were on the rise, which as Jews they may have found especially threatening.

On the other hand you have speculation about Superman as gay icon. Along with this we have debate over whether the new movie Superman Returns is macho enough to appeal to teenage boys, and tittilating talk about the efforts apparently taken to make sure no one is offended by Superman's crotch, including rumours of computer graphics being used to make it look less prominent. The idea of a gay Superman is a bit amusing given his romantic relationship with Lois Lane, long at the core of the Superman mythos. In recent years Superman has actually been married to Lois, although last I heard their marriage was on the rocks. I think it might have had something to do with mind control, but don't quote me on that.

As for Superman and matters of faith it seems to me that Superman might just as easily be an agnostic or even an atheist as anything else. After all he came from a world destroyed by a horrible catastrophy. He himself has what could be considered godlike powers, yet knows his own personal flaws, fears, and limitations. And he's had encounters with godlike beings who use their powers to commit acts of evil. So he might be a little skeptical of the idea of a Supreme Being being a proper figure for veneration. On the other hand Frank Miller, in his classic Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, has a scene that implies Supes might worship the Earth, given that he refers to it as mother.

I've seen more than a few people claim comic book artist and writer Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns Batman series of the mid '80s was an ultimately negative influence on the character, that it lead to a Batman who in recent years has become increasingly dark and paranoid, going so far as to make elaborate plans on how to beat his fellow superheroes if they "go rogue." The opinion of many comic fans of Miller isn't likely to be helped by his new project Holy Terror, Batman. Batman's new foe? Osama bin Laden. Batman goes after bin Laden after al Qaeda attacks Gotham City. Personally this sounds like a recipe for disaster, especially since Miller himself refers to it as "a piece of propaganda." Its true that they did this kind of things during WW2, but tastes, and the sophistication of comic book readers, has changed. At the very least you risk making yourself look silly, writing a piece of wish fullment fantasy. Certainly that was my reaction when reading that in one of the 1980s editions of Don Pendleton's The Executioner action series Mack Bolan actually kills Ayatollah Khomeini.