JLA Weblog (page 5)

Blackest Night JLA Bodycount

It’s no great secret that the Blackest Night event focuses on the revolving door policy to death and resurrection in the DC Universe. After reading BN#1 its rather obvious that it is as much a JLA event as a Green Lantern event.

Consider that every single founding member of the Justice League has died at least once and has been resurrected at least once. Admittedly Batman (had his heart stopped), the Martian Manhunter (shifted his mind into a severed limb), and Aquaman (went off to fight gods) were killed off and then resurrected as part of storylines in their own titles, but they were still dead and now are dead again. This doesn’t even include the storyline from Joe Kelly’s run where an Atlantean Queen killed the entire JLA roster for a dozen of so issues.

Who's been dead in the Silver Age JLA - click to enlarge
Who's been dead in the Silver Age JLA - click to enlarge

The above picture shows the roll call of the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Justice League with a mark over a character if he/she has died at least once. There appears to be an inverse refrigerator effect at work. Out of the six female Leaguers only two (33%) have been killed off where as of the fourteen male League thirteen (93%) have been killed off.

What will be interesting to see is how those characters who have never died, never been in death’s clutches, fare in the Blackest Night compared to those characters who have previously escaped death.

Mark Waid’s AN ODE TO BAT-HOUND

I’m still searching for a particular article, but I have found an interesting gem in Amazing Heroes #102 (September 1, 1986). Ladies and gentlemen, Mark Waid’s “An Ode To Bat-Hound”

an-ode-to-bathound

Longboxes and imaginary articles

I hate longboxes. I love comics, but I really hate the damn boxes we store the things in. I was looking for just a single paragraph in an old magazine, but to hunt for it I’ve had to shift dozens of longboxes to reach the one at the bottom, right at the back of the stack. I’m blooming knackered.

I was looking for an old Amazing Heroes article that I now think I may had imagined – some sort of comment by a writer like Frank Miller or someone of his status in the late-1980s about a follow up to the original Crisis. Sound familiar to anybody?

Finally answered – why Superman needs the Justice League

Over at Ecocomics John Perich has finally answered the question of why Superman hangs around with a bunch of heroes that are blatantly less powerful that he is…

Superman’s slower than Flash (only just), but his super-strength and invulnerability make him better at dispatching minions. He’s more capable of dealing with aliens than Green Lantern. And with his X-ray vision and super-hearing, you could make the case that he’s a better detective than Batman.

So why does Superman need the rest of the Justice League?

For that, we turn the pages back to 1817 and the principle of comparative advantage, as publicized (though not first documented) by economist David Ricardo. Comparative advantage dictates that, even if one agent can produce two types of goods more efficiently than another agent, it benefits both parties for the efficient agent to specialize and trade for the other.

Basically, Superman acts as the super all-rounder who fills in where he’s needed most, thus giving the others space to do what each of them does best.

Trinity confession

There is a nice in depth interview with Kurt Busiek at Wizard conducted by Jerry Whitworth (a some time commenter on this blog and a contributer on other parts of this site). Go read it, contibute to their unique visitor numbers. And thank you Jerry for inspiring the topic of this post.

Now I have a confession to make after that plug. I’ve stopped buying Trinity and I can’t even remember when I stopped. I was reading it and liking it. Reading Jerry’s interview make is clear that there is still interesting stuff going on and coming up. I was digging Kurt Busiek’s revival of Gangbuster and his Anti-Matter Universe stuff. I remember everything with the build up of Enigma, Le Fay, and their reverse Trinity, but then my memory goes blank. I’m slightly troubled by this, because Busiek has been/is one of my favourite writers. I still think his Justice League, Aquaman, and Superman books should have been allowed to run and run. And the quality of Astro City speaks for itself. So it wasn’t a problem with the quality of Trinity.

The local comics shop that I normally go to has moved out of the city centre as their rent was just too high. They were brilliantly placed on my commute home their new store is several miles in the opposite direction. They’ve now become a destination store rather than some where you’d visit when passing. Which is a pity. The other local comics shop isn’t as handy and quite frankly isn’t as good, but its almost on my commute home.

So my weekly comics shop trips have dropped to once every two to four weeks. Which isn’t so bad for monthly books, but one month I must have forgotten to pick up Trinity and never remembered to pick it up again. And if you miss a weekly book for a month you miss four issues. Everybody else is now off in some weird parallel world and I’ve got no idea what is going on. I guess I’ll have to get the trades.

I’ve noticed a couple of other things about not having a pull list. The first thing is that I’m actually buying fewer books and the second thing is that I’m more appreciate of the ones I do buy. They’re both related. When I had a pull list I’d add any thing that appeared remotely interesting to it, because I was safe in the knowledge that it’ll be there waiting for me when I went into the store. Conversely, I now have to make the effort to go into a store to pick up a hot title before it sells out.

I’m lazy I know, but I’ll make the extra effort for Final Crisis #7 and then take pot luck on whether Batman Confidential #25 or whatever is still in stock. The upshot is that my attention is now focused on a smaller number of higher quality titles. I suppose that’s not a bad thing really.

SuperManChu

Smashing Magazine has a run down of 50 Stunning Asian Movie Posters. My favourite, just in terms of outlandishness, has to be:

As a play on the name Superman goes SuperManchu has got to be one of the stranger. A Chinese film subtitled “Cooler than Bond! Quicker than Fly! – Deadlier than Shaft!” sounds too good to be true. After all, nobody is cooler than Bond…

Amazon FAIL?

I usually don’t mind Amazon’s “other people who have bought what you bought” e-mails as I buy a lot of stuff from them, in fact I rarely go anywhere else just because I trust Amazon and have already paid for their Prime service. The advertising system works by matching patterns between something you’ve bought and something that other people who have also bought that item have bought. For instance, it might notice that you’ve bought a new printer. It will know on average that people who bought that same printer have also bought ink and paper. Therefore it will offer to sell you the same ink and paper. There isn’t much artificial intelligence behind it – more just basic pattern matching. However, sometimes it fails spectacularly.

It began simply enough when I received the following e-mail:

It starts:

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Justice League Unlimited – Season One (DC Comics Classic Collection) or other films in the Cartoon Network > General AAS category…

“Fine,” I think, “I have indeed bought JLU Season One from them”. So I read on.

…have also purchased CandyGirl Video: Sugar Rush.

At which point alarm bells should have been ringing. However, my brain wasn’t quite expecting to associate an adult entertainment video with Justice League Unlimited so I was left trying to remember if CandyGirl is some sort of The Life and Times of Juniper Lee Cartoon Network show or if its some part of the DC Comics’s MINX line I haven’t heard of. I’ll save you the details of what Candy Girl: Sugar Rush video actually is (you can Google them as well as anybody else), but its the automated computer logic that equates purchasing Justice League Unlimited to purchasing an adult film that I find interesting.

I blogged about JLU’s audience demographic a few years ago and its no secret that JLU skewed towards an older demographic than The Batman or Brave and the Bold. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Amazon’s computer brain makes the association. But I’m still undecided whether this is an epic fail on Amazon’s part or a deeply damning psychological assessment of adults who still watch cartoons.

Are you a completist?

The owner of a comics store in Illinois I once frequented use to compare comic book fans to drug addicts. Like an addict we’ll follow a book for years after whatever storyline, writer, or character first attracted us to the book has left. We’ll bitch and moan about the product, but that doesn’t stop us from craving our latest fix. When I come to think about it there are about a half-dozen to a dozen titles (DC and Marvel) that I could drop and I don’t think I’d miss them. I buy them because I want to see everything that going on in a particular Universe or Franchise rather than any particular interest in the specific storyline or creative team. More the fool me I know, but I never seem to get around to pruning them out of my pull list.

I was just reading Checkmate #30 by Bruce Jones. It’s a fine issue, the writing is okay, the characters are recognizable, the art is great, but somewhere along the line I was left with the feeling that it wasn’t written by Greg Rucka. That’s not meant to be an indictment against Bruce Jones, he is a very capable writer, but the modern Checkmate was/is a very specialised comic. It was brilliant under Greg Rucka’s tenure and suited his strengths, but I don’t think there are that many writers who are suitable to follow him. It was too much like Manhunter where the interest, at least for me, was in a specific writer, with a particular voice, applied to a particular niche. A different writer in that niche never reads right.

The extreme examples are Robinson’s Starman or Gaiman’s Sandman which are cases where the management acknowledges the implicit draw of the writer and cancels the book when he leaves. However, there are other cases where the financial draw or the sense of corporate ownership is too great and new writers are called in to prolong the product. This is ultimately how we arrive at non-Siegel and Shuster Superman or non-Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four. However, it doesn’t always work that way. Just look at the books like Hawkman or Teen Titans that Geoff Johns has resurrected, but are then never quite as good again after he leaves.

I should have dropped Checkmate, Hawkman, and Teen Titans when the creative teams that drew me in left, but I just kept trucking along. I will admit that it occasionally pays off (Peter Tomasi on Nightwing is fantastic), but that feels like its getting rarer and rarer. I sometimes wonder how much of the comics industry is supported by guys like me who buy books just because they’re collectors of a series (the aim is collect all the issues) rather than fans (who are fanatical about the book). We started out as pure comicbook fans, but somewhere along the line we became completists. Really and truly we should be the aberrant minority, but I have a sinking feeling that we may be the only people left.

Well I never knew that: Snapper Carr is named after George Lucas

How do readers relate to beings with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men? Well, the recieved wisdom prior to the Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) was that you couldn’t! Ergo, the hero could need some sort of whitty teenage sidekick that the young reader could identify with. That was the thinking that gave us Robin the Boy Wonder, Jimmy Olsen, Speedy, Bucky, and a slew of other Golden Age hostage fodder. 

Stan Lee changed all that with Spider-Man – or at least duplicated Billy Baston’s magic – when he realised that the relatiable teen character could actually be the alter ego of the hero and didn’t have to be religated to the supporting case role. However, that was 1962 and a full two years after the first appearance of the Justice League. The management at Lee’s Distinguish Competition still thought that they needed an anchor character in the League – somebody for the kids to identify with. 

[Julius] Schwartz [the JLA Editor] was told to pattern the JLA’s mascot after Edd Byrnes‘ finger-snapping character from TV’s 77 Sunset Strip: “And [Schwartz's boss] Whit Ellsworth said, ‘his name is Snapper Carr.’” [Michael Eury, Justice League Companion v1, pg 14]

Thus we were introduced to the oddly named Snapper Carr — a young “hipster” from Happy Harbour whose inadvertently clued the Flash into Starro’s weakness and was rewarded with honorary League membership for his troubles. (As a random aside: one of the leads in 77 Sunset Strip was Efrem Zimbalist, the voice of Batman’s butler Alfred Pennyworth in Batman: The Animated Series. )

Gardner Fox may have been mandated to include Snapper, but he didn’t exactly do much to flesh him out. In fact Fox didn’t really do much in the way of characterisation at all (it wasn’t really his thing). However, it’s ironic that Snapper probably recieved the most characterisation of any character in the early League adventures. That’s if you can call snapping your fingers characterisation.

Why this digression on Snapper Carr? Well Brian Cronin’s Comic Book Urban Legends #127 has answered a question I never knew I didn’t know – the origin of Snapper Carr’s first name. Ya’ see he didn’t have one at the start – Snapper is just a nickname – and it wasn’t until the 1970s that it was sorted out. By that time Snapper had been ignominously dumped from the League for betraying them. Brian then takes up the story…

For the next decade plus, Snapper made extremely rare appearances in DC Comics, but in one of them, they finally addressed something odd – no one had ever actually given Snapper’s real name!!

So in Superman Family #195, in the Supergirl story in the issue (where Snapper had been appearing for a few issues), Jack C. Harris was tasked by Julie Schwartz to come up with a name for Snapper.

This being the late 70s and Harris being a comic book writer, he decided to pay homage to George Lucas, of Star Wars fame.

So from then on, it was Lucas “Snapper” Carr.

Since then Snapper’s become something like the DC Universe’s version of Will Wheaton – a fellow who is a hell of a lot cooler outside of the team that gave him fame than he was in it.  Snapper was the best friend of the android Hourman, he was Young Justice’s mentor, and even went travelling around space with his own group called the Blasters for a while before the Khund’s cut his hands off – something I’m sure some fans have wanted to go for years!