Background

Kingdom Come

The names Gog and Magog spring up time and again in the writing of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Whether they are people, nations, or monsters isn’t entirely clear and shifts from case to case. That hasn’t stopped people claiming them as the ancestors of the Goths, Irish, Finns, or a host of other ethnic groups. There are also English stories that claim the British Isles were settled by survivors of the Trojan Wars led by Brutus of Troy. Brutus had to pacify the giants that already lived on the islands and a particularly gnarly one called Gogmagog. Two wooden giants called Gog and Magog have been part of the parade of the Lord Mayor City of London for over six hundred years.

The name Magog was adopted by Mark Waid and Alex Ross for one of the protagonists in their Kingdom Come series. According to the Kingdom Come Companion the golden armour worn by Magog was designed to resemble the golden calf that the Israelites worshipped whilst Moses’ back was turned. Their Magog became the false god that a younger generation turned to during Superman’s absence. It is telling that Ross used same the person as the figure model for both Superman and Magog – the Christ and Anti-Christ figures.

When I came up with the design for Magog, I was only parodying Rob Liefeld and his design for Cable, and it wound up being a strangely attractive design despite my efforts to make it as ugly as possible. It felt like there was an element of Kirby in it, even thought it was this gross distortion of the history of superhero design.

Alex Ross, Kingdom Come Companion, page 243

The identity of Magog and the unseen Gog was not revealed in Kingdom Come. Magog was a cypher figure, a plot device that served to force Superman into retirement and then to bring him back again.

This is what a post-Liefeld Cable drawn by Leifeld looked like:

The resemblance between Cable and Magog now becomes quite obvious. However, Magog wasn’t even mentioned in Alex Ross’s original proposal for the Heroic Age (the project that became Kingdom Come). Ross told CBR that Magog was originally Mark Waid’s idea:

Now, wasn’t Magog a character created as a response to all those characters that were popping up in the early ’90s?

Yeah. That’s a character that Mark Waid invented that was really just put to me like come up with the most God awful, Rob Liefeld sort of design that you can. What I was stealing from was – really only two key designs of Rob’s – the design of Cable. I hated it. I felt like it looked like they just threw up everything on the character – the scars, the thing going on with his eye, the arm, and what’s with all the guns? But the thing is, when I put those elements together with the helmet of Shatterstar — I think that was his name — well, the ram horns and the gold, suddenly it held together as one of the designs that I felt happiest with in the entire series.

Really?

Yeah. I don’t think it ended up looking like a buffoonish character. In a way, that gold rams head affect took it to a new level of almost biblical metaphor that had a nice little touch to it. It’s the kind of thing I should have been striving, but it was much more accidental.

Waid’s Gog Vs Ross’s Gog

During the 90s a Kingdom Come spin-off series was planned called the Kingdom. It would have been set in the present day, but the ongoing series fell through leaving Waid and Ross with their own versions of Magog and Gog. Waid got to tell his version of the story first with a one-shot called New Years Evil: Gog #1. It introduced a mentally unstable survivor of the Kansas tragedy who was elevated to near godhood by a group of cosmic beings. This Gog came to see Superman as the anti-Christ and sought to turn the world against him.

Mark Waid described this Gog’s connection to Superman:

It [the first issue of the aborted Kindgom series] was the story of how Magog came to be, the story of how Gog showed up in the present-day DC Universe and transformed a young man – who was, as we would learn, the sidekick that Superman had for about six months during his first couple of years as a defender of truth, justice and the American way – the untold, forgotten story of a kid who used to be under Superman’s wing and was adopted by Gog.

Mark Waid, Kingdom Come Companion, page 226

However, the Kingdom became something different and they never got to the Magog part. Waid’s Gog later appeared a couple of times as a Superman villain.

Meanwhile, Alex Ross has meditated on his own vision of who Gog was. Even before Waid’s Kingdom mini-series was published Ross has a solid idea of connecting Magog back to the Kirby influence he had felt come through in his design. The battles in Kingdom Come have a parallel with the war of the Old Gods in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythology so Ross’s idea was that Gog was one of the Old Gods, a survivor of the world that split in two to become New Genesis and Apokolips.

And there will be a god, one of the old gods from that planet, who survived. He will be here on Earth, and he will be called Gog. [...] He winds up looking like this giant Kirbyesque character who has big, gold horns and a metallic body, and he in effect is this very large character who somewhat looks like the ancient ancestor of both Highfather and Darkseid mixed into one. He’s going to be foreshadowing, by his actions, the future of Kingdom Come, and Magog will be this young guy, a parody of a Rob Liefeld young superhero wanna-be, who somehow gets linked up with Gog. Gog would have been, as we were discussing when Mark and I finally got into conference over this, martyred to a degree by Magog; Magog would be driven to the point of killing him. We didn’t have a reason for why this happened, but we were taking every single thing that we could think of from Kingdom Come and trying to throw it into this to make it work.

Alex Ross, Kingdom Come Companion, page 243

That quote from Alex Ross was published in 1998 and is really close to the story that eventually showed up in Justice Society of America. The JSA title was relaunched after the Infinite Crisis and Alex Ross came on board as a cover artist and occasional co-plotter with Geoff Johns. An accident propelled the Kingdom Come Superman into the normal DC Universe where he was an observer of, and commenter on, events that led to the creation of this universe’s Magog.

The Magog Series

Johns’s JSA supplied the context of Gog’s arrival that had been missing in Ross’s original plotline. A long JSA arc dealt with the introduction of a list of new characters including Lance Corporal David Reid. Reid was the metahuman great-grandson of President Roosevelt. He was to be the “young superhero wanna-be” which Gog turned into his herald Magog.

The introduction of such an already well-known character to the DC Universe prompted DC to launch Magog in his own ongoing series written by Keith Giffen and with art by Howard Porter. Giffen told Newsarama on its launch that:

Like most comic fans, I had limited access to the character. I knew his role in Kingdom Come and the Gog story that Geoff told. But what struck me was that, underlying all the glitz and the armor and all, this guy is still a soldier. He’s David Reid, lance corporal. So I thought about how I could apply a real hardcore military mindset to a superhero and get into his head. Most, if not all, of the captions in the book are Magog’s narration, so you can really get into his head. And dealing with a hero whose moral parameters are much wider than, say, Superman’s kind of became fun.

It’s nice to play around with a hero who’s more protagonist than most heroes, maybe even antagonist. And he’s willing to do what needs to be done to get the job done. He’s not exactly Jack Bauer, and he doesn’t have that faux toughness that comes with Wolverine, but he’s definitely somebody who gets things done in his own unique and sometimes incredibly violent way. And I’ve been having a ball. I love this character. And honestly? No one is more surprised than I.

Unfortunately Magog’s series only lasted twelve issues. The series was to have been taken over by Scott Kollins with issue #10, but his multi-part arc entitled “Blown to Kingdom Come” had to be truncated to two-parts. Nevertheless, Kollins told CBR what he thought was Magog’s vital character:

I am a big fan of the “Kingdom Come” series. I felt very much the same way as the main characters and it was a great topic to put in a heroic story. I also think there were some basic concepts in that series that made Magog such an interesting character. It made him a character that we are still trying to tell stories about all these years later, similar to the recent story arc of Magog getting kicked out of the Justice Society of America. Magog works best if rubbing people the wrong way. It’s just his nature. Or his fate?

Even before Magog’s series had launched DC had been playing with the notion that he would eventually go bad and would need to be stopped. Brave and the Bold #23 featured a confrontation between Booster Gold and Magog which made the time travelling Booster aware that something about Magog’s future wasn’t right. Even his appearances in the Justice Society were bout foreshadowing how the main DC Universe was or was not diverging from the Kingdom Come possible future.

This approach was something that dated back to the original Kindgom series. In 1998 Alex Ross commented:

Truth be told, I was actually trying to lead the Kingdom storyline to the point where it actually nullified the future possibility of Kindgom Come; we’d see a glimpse of it and then we’d actually find out that it’s going to get circumvented so that it doesn’t happen.

Alex Ross, Kingdom Come Companion, page 243

That possibility has been picked up in Justice League: Generation Lost where it appears that Maxwell Lord is fated to kill Magog in order to prevent him from causing the war foreseen by Kingdom Come.

Related posts:

1. The White Lantern: Maxwell Lord and Magog
2. Alex Ross JLA News
3. Alex Ross’s Justice

Last week DC also released Ethan Van Sciver’s cover to Justice League of America (vol 2.) #50 showing the JLA fighting the Crime Syndicate from the Anti-Matter Earth. Ethan even manages to make Ultraman and Super Woman look more evil and unpleasant than normal.

That particular image caught Bleeding Cool’s attention as the letters from the shattered “Justice League of America” sign around Donna Troy seemed to spell S.T.F.U. However, Ethan posted to the BC message boards that there wasn’t anything deliberate about the positioning.

Another poster asked him about the reference he’d used for Donna Troy and he responded with,

I grabbed the most recent available reference on Donna Troy, by Mark Bagley, I think, from a JLA cover he did. Unless I’m actually drawing the book, I follow the lead of the current interior artist. What he/she says goes!

(You may spot that the cover contains a colouring mistake – the colour of Donna’s lasso is yellow in this preview, but has been established as blue in earlier issues to make it distinct from Diana’s lasso – but, one assume that’s nothing to do with Ethan).

Related posts:

1. New preview covers for JLA #42
2. Explosive variant covers for JL titles
3. Mark Bagley’s JLA/JSA Interlocking Covers

No related posts.

…back soon.

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Quotes

Kathy Sutton: I’ve been through this seven time since I first met him. Seven. People think it gets easier. They’re wrong. It always take a bit to collect the pieces. And even when there’s no League, the League does it. Hal helped this time. Last time it was Bruce. As a favor, we asked Magnus to put him together. He didn’t hesitate. He, of all people understands.

Vixen: I feel the birds first. Seagulls and terns. Danger’s coming. Then I feel the tiger. Anger overwhelms me. The place looks empty. Looks aren’t everything. They’re already here. Lion.

Credits

Synopsis “The Tornado’s Path – Chapter One: Life”

The Justice League has been out of action for over a year ever since it disintegrated during the Infinite Crisis. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have even been through their own soul searching and have come together to in the Batcave to plan the League’s reformation.

Sequestered within the Batcave Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman review the dossiers of potential candidates for the next iteration of the Justice League. Arsenal, Green Arrow’s former sidekick, is chosen for the new team. The news is delivered by Green Lantern and Black Canary. Another candidate Black Lightning (Jefferson Pierce) has discovered that somebody is kidnapping minor super villains. It started out with Plastique and the Electrocutioner, then Trident disappeared in an explosion which implicated Plastique. In turn Trident was linked with the disappearance of Doctor Impossible. Vixen, another strong League candidate, is lured to a trap in a Hub City bar by the missing villains.

Batman has been strongly arguing for the inclusion of the Red Tornado (John Smith), but he has yet to reanimate after his latest destruction/rebuild. Kathy Sutton waits next to his android body in Will Magnus’s workshop and is unaware that John’s spirit is watching her. John Smith has become increasingly aware of his own lack of humanity and has agreed to an audacious plan. Deadman transfers John’s spirit into one of the unliving, mindless bodies left by the villain Multiplex. For the first time in his life John Smith awakes as a flesh-and-blood man. Unknown to either John or Kathy the Deadman who helped them was the sorcerer Felix Faust. His manipulations have left the way open for Doctor Impossible to steal the inactive Red Tornado android.

Continuity

• Will Magnus’s lab is in Hoboken, New Jersey.
• The Red Tornado has been destroyed and rebuilt seven times.
• The Metal Men have been redesigned.

Commentary

The Cover Panorama

The two normal covers to issue #1 are either side of a group panorama originally released by DC as piece of promotional art. The original pencilled and coloured version appeared on the Ed Benes art site and in Wizard. The published version differs from the original version by including updated costume designs and a slightly different roster.

The published version

Cover A – Ed Benes, Mariah Benes, and Alex Sinclair (signed); (front row) Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Arsenal, Black Canary, and Red Tornado; (second row) GL (Guy Gardner), Power Girl, Captain Marvel, Supergirl, Huntress, and Captain Atom; (third row, only at the centre) Phantom Stranger, GL (John Stewart), and Cyborg; (back row) somebody’s shoulder, Batwoman, Fire, Nightwing, Firehawk, Ion (Kyle Rayner), Metamorpho, Mister Miracle, Hourman II, the Manhattan Guardian’s shoulder

Cover B – Ed Benes, Mariah Benes, and Alex Sinclair (signature on Cover A); (front row) Black Lightning, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman; (second row) Hawkman, Big Barda, Vixen, Hawkgirl, Flash (Bart Allen), Green Arrow, Zatanna; (back row) Manhattan Guardian, Mister Terrific, Blue Beetle, Doctor Fate, Donna Troy, Martian Manhunter, Firestorm, Doctor Light (Hoshi), Doctor Midnight

The Promotional Version

In the original version Black Lightning and GL John Stewart swap places, Red Tornado and Flash swap places; Guy Gardner who moves from the centre-back replaces Aquaman. Five 52 characters are dropped — Elongated Man, Booster Gold, Animal Man, Adam Strange and the Question are replaced by Green Arrow, Big Barda, Batwoman, Hourman and the Martian Manhunter. Arrow’s move is to allow Arsenal to drop down to the front row, his space at the back is filled by Nightwing. Karate Kid, surely a joke insertion, is dropped and isn’t replaced. Tempest is replaced by Mister Terrific. The two panoramas seem to be entirely separate pieces as there is different inking on the figures common to both.

Michael Turner Variant

Michael Turner had been the cover artist on Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis and that relationship was carried over for the variant covers on Meltzer’s JLA run. The cover is signed by Michael Turner and Peter Stiegerwald and features Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Black Lightning, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Black Canary, Arsenal, Red Tornado, Arsenal, Vixen, and Hawkgirl. Hawkgirl is shown on the Turner group cover, but does not appear in this issue.

Arsenal/Red Arrow

This is Arsenal’s first post-Infinite Crisis appearance. There had been some puzzlement among the fans as to where he would turn up as he was absent from Outsiders and Green Arrow. On the Word Balloon podcast Brad Meltzer noted that he had to clear Arsenal’s use with Outsider’s writer Judd Winick, his former college room-mate, and that in return for letting Arsenal go Winick got Nightwing back in Outsiders.

Opinion/Clippings

At the time this came out I was surprised by the number of Michael Turner variant covers left over in the local comics shop. It wasn’t that they weren’t selling, but there had been a mistake at Diamond resulting in a massive over send of the Turner cover – around here it was the Ed Benes covers that were the rare ones. Both artists have similar styles although Benes isn’t quite as stylised as Turner, which I personally think is a good thing. Benes has recently set up an official English language website and he’s posted up scans of the pencil pages for this issue.

One thing that did strike me whilst reading this issue is that its very easy to tell that its written by the same writer as Identity Crisis. Brad Meltzer uses the same camera angles, monologue boxes, and rapid cutting between scenes that he used there. The only thing that seems to be missing is Rags Morales and Benes comes very close, either by accident or design, to emulating him at times. On his blog Meltzer revealed some of his foreshadowing in “Archer’s Quest” and Identity Crisis, namely the early spotlighting of characters he’d later use for his League roster. He’s also been interviewed by Brain Bendis at Wizard Universe with the following quote getting picked up by those who think that Vixen and Black Lighting are perfect examples of ego characters.

Bendis: How does it feel assembling a team like this, though? It’s kind of a cool feeling and kind of unique?

Meltzer: Oh, it’s definitely the ultimate fanboy dream. If someone came to you and said, “You can pick the team of The Avengers, you can pick the team of The Justice League–or if I went back in time and I told the two of us that that’s what we’d be doing–I would basically die right there, even though we’ve been doing it in our heads since we were 10 years old. But again, the hardest part for me was not wanting to just do what I think is cool, but what actually is bigger than me. I think that there is just a history–even in the JLA, even in The Avengers–where you saw what can only be called “The Ego Character.” It’s the character that’s like, “I’m being put on the team so everyone remembers me.” I hate that character. It’s in just about every run of every Justice League and it’s in just about every run of every Avengers. There’s always one character that’s the ego character. I really wanted to not be that guy–and listen, I’m sure I’ll get called on that whether it’s for Black Lightning or someone else–but to me Black Lightning has total business being in that book.

Tom Bondurant’s Grumpy Old Fan Column at the Newsarama blog also picks up the same quote and does a nice run through of the various vanity and ego characters in the history of the Justice League.

Over at Monitor Duty Hutch raises the issue of Traya’s age. He starts off generally liking the issue,

Brad Meltzer’s story is off to a slow start, typical of the “write for the trade” style. Sure, once it’s all assembled, there will be action in the story, we just don’t get to see it in this installment. That said, it makes for an intense read with some touching moments and solid drama, and I’m especially pleased to see the attention paid to some second-string characters I’ve loved for years, namely The Metal Men and Red Tornado.

But he then goes into an analysis of what happens to neglected characters. For example, the last appearance of Traya that I can remember was in Young Justice where she’s shown as attending the same private school as Wonder Girl. Admittedly she was also shown as a kid genius who had been boosted up to the older classes, but she can’t have been much older than ten or twelve (I don’t buy the decompressed twenty year-plus timeline idea as it would put Superman and Batman in their late 40s). Yet, here she’s portrayed as not being much older than she was in her first appearance (issue #152, March 1978, of the old series) where she can’t have been much older than four years old. And is it my imagination or has Traya’s skin colour lightened since she was first introduced?

Brian Cronin’s review at Comics Should Be Good mirrored many reviews I’ve read. He channels the blogosphere by noting that:

The comic seemed ready to be a fun book, and it had quite a few nice character bits, but ultimately, for the debut issue of a major title, with thirty-eight pages to work with, the book had far too much sitting around and talking, and not nearly enough action.

Personally I didn’t mind the lack of action, but it is fairly obvious that this relaunch is going to be a different beast from the “widescreen” instant action of the previous relaunch. (A Todd Nauck-esque Doctor Impossible? I didn’t spot it to start with, but now that it’s been mentioned.)

Other People Opinions

Character Appearances

Feature Characters

The Justice League of America

• Arsenal (Roy Harper; formerly Green Arrow’s sidekick, the first Speedy)
• Batman (Bruce Wayne, appeared last issue)
• Black Lightning (Jefferson Pierce)
• Green Lantern Hal Jordan
• Red Tornado (John Smith; last appeared in 52 #52)
• Superman (appeared last issue)
• Vixen (Mari Jiwe McCabe; fashion model turned superhero)
• Wonder Woman (Diana Prince, appeared last issue)

Guest Stars

• Green Arrow (Oliver Queen)

Villains

• Felix Faust (An old magician foe of the League masquerading as Boston Brand, the Deadman)
• Mister Impossible (first appearance)
• Multiplex (that’s one of his deceased bodies the Tornado is inhabiting)
• Signalman (Phil Cobb; one of Batman’s lesser foes)

Supporting Cast

• Kathy Sutton (John Smith’s human partner; Traya’s adoptive mother; last appeared in Young Justice)
• Traya (a war orphan adopted by John Smith and Kathy Sutton; last appeared in Young Justice)

Guest Appearances

• Gold (one of the Metal Men)
• Platinium (“Tina”, one of the Metal Men)
• Will Magnus (Scientific genius; creator of the Metal Men; last appeared in 52)

Cameos Appearances

• Lian Harper (Roy Harper’s infant daughter; shown in a photograph)
• JLA Candidates – Atom II, Flash, Hawkman, Mister Terrific, Power Girl, and Supergirl

Annotations

Page 1: “My father tried to save the world,” is a reference to Jor-El and the destruction of the planet Krypton.

Page 2-3: Captain Marvel is a fifteen-year-old child who is transformed into the Worlds Mightiest Mortal by saying the name of his patron, the wizard Shazam. He is missing because after the wizard was killed in the run up to Infinite Crisis, Billy Baston was promoted to caretaker of the Rock of Eternity and chief sentinel of magic in the reordered DC Universe. His replacement as Captain Marvel, Freddy Freeman, has to yet earn access to the full scope of Captain Marvel’s powers and must under go the  Trials of Shazam to prove himself.

Page 4: Kathy Sutton and the Red Tornado. The Tornado is a powerful alien spirit that inhabits a robotic body. The body was originally was built by T.O. Morrow as a Trojan Horse intended to gain the trust of and then destroy the JSA and JLA. However, he rebelled and became a member of first the JSA and then the JLA. One downside of his perceived synthetic nature was that he had an almost suicidal urge to sacrifice himself. There was a flashback in issue #0 showing the reaction of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman to one of the Tornado’s suicides. Invariably the pieces are gathered together and reassembled. He was destroyed and rebuilt by in JLA #115-119 (Aug — Late Nov 2005) by Batman in a story that bridged the events of Meltzer’s Identity Crisis and the impending Infinite Crisis.

The post-Infinite Crisis fate of the Tornado was a major subplot in the weekly 52 series. He had been in space with Donna Troy’s team when they were forced to flee a spatial rift created by Alexander Luthor. The Tornado’s unique vibrational tuned technology recorded a map of the new Multiverse as it formed, but his body was shattered and scattered. His voice box became embedded in Mal Duncan and his last words that time were “fifty-two” (the number of new universes). It was Morrow who discovered the Tornado’s body in an Australian junkyard art-exhibit.

Morrow recovered the Tornado’s remains, but the head – and the map of the Multiverse – was stolen by Booster Gold and Rip Hunter. This dialogue tells us that sometime after 52 finished Hal Jordan recovered the rest of the Tornado’s body from Morrow’s lab (which shows up later in this arc) and the head from Rip Hunter. It was shown in 52 that Will Magnus was Morrow’s student so it makes sense that he’d be the one to recommission the Tornado and check for any booby traps.

Page 5: Will Magnus and the Metal Men: Magnus is the foremost authority on robotics in the DC Universe – well the foremost authority who isn’t a super villain at least. He designed a team of robots called the Metal Men who each possess the strengths and weakness of a particular metal. They share the Red Tornado’s sacrificial drive, but they lack his subtle humanity. The female android pictured here is Platinum, she’s in love with her creator, a “flaw” in her programming that he’s tried hard to eliminate. In 52 Magnus is shown regularly visiting Morrow in prison and Morrow has described Magnus as one of his students.

Page 6: The five retro-panels are a direct cut-and-paste from page 14 of Justice League of America (vol. 1) #105 (May 1973), the first appearance of Kathy Sutton. That sequence was originally written by Len Wein and illustrated by Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano.

Page 9: Traya is a young war orphan found and adopted by Red Tornado in Justice League of America (vol. 1) #152 (March 1978).

Page 11: The Deadman, Boston Brand, a circus aerialist who came back as a ghost to hunt those responsible for his death. The interesting part here is that his appearance proves that the Tornado actually has a soul. A complex part of the Tornado’s back story is that he is actually an elemental force of nature – an air elemental – housed in an android body. Many people forget the air elemental (his spirit) and assume that he is just an android. It’s the android that turns the disembodied entity into an real person.

Page 12:

• Hal Jordan, Green Lantern. He and Batman haven’t seen eye to eye for a while after Hal became the villain Parallax, then redeemed himself as the Spectre before being resurrected in Green Lantern: Rebirth.
• Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, Superman’s cousin. Wonder Woman and Batman have both taken a close interest in her career and she even stayed on Themyscira before she went public.
• The Flash, Bart Allen. There have been four Flashes — Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West, and Bart Allen (Barry’s grandson). At the time this was out Barry was dead and Wally’s location hadn’t been revealed. In their absence an artificially aged Bart took over the reigns of the Flash.
• Power Girl. A survivor of an extinct parallel universe; a more mature alternative version of Supergirl. She’s been a Leaguer before, but more recently has been working with the Justice Society.

Page 13-14: Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) and Arsenal (Roy Harper). During the 1970s Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams collaborated on the celebrated “Hard Travelling Heroes” team-up between Green Arrow (Oliver Queen) and Green Lantern. Dinah, Black Canary (Dinah Lance), was Green Arrow’s then girlfriend, and Harper, then called Speedy, was his sidekick. The quip about the truck is a reference to that story. Despite being rather dysfunctional they’ve become a family with Roy seeing Oliver as his father and Hal as his uncle. Both Jordan and Queen have died and come back to life. Lian Harper is Roy’s daughter, her mother is the super villain Cheshire.

This practise of breaking down the story into each chapter headed by the characters’ logos is a signature of the original Justice League book.

Page 15-17: Jefferson Pierce, Black Lightning. He’s  been a teacher in Metropolis and a member of Batman’s Outsiders. He memorably turned down League membership in Justice League of America (vol. 1) #173 (Dec 1979) and was ripped off as Black Vulcan for the Super Friends, but that’s another story. He was Secretary of Education in President Luthor’s cabinet and has appeared in recent issues of Green Arrow’s series.

Tatsu, Katana, was another member of the Outsiders. Katana and Black Lightning are shown talking together in Identity Crisis #1 (Aug 2004) when they got the news of Sue Dibny’s murder. On his blog Brad Meltzer commented that he’d had his eye on Black Lightning as a potential member of his Justice League for sometime and that the Identity Crisis appearance was part of the set up.

Most of these villains are obscure, heck most of them aren’t even in the Official DC Encyclopaedia.

• Plastique was a French-Canadian terrorist. She had reformed and was engaged to marry Captain Atom.
• The Silver Ghost was a foe of the old Freedom Fighters.

It appears that super villains are disappearing in a chain and are being implicated in the next disappearance in the chain. This is the first mention of the new character Doctor Impossible.

Page 18: Multiplex was an enemy of Firestorm who, as it says here, was able to make duplicates of himself. When he died it appears that his duplicate bodies died as well.

Page 20:

• Mister Terrific, Michael Holt. Chairman of the Justice Society.
• The Atom, Ray Palmer. Missing since the end of Identity Crisis when it was revealed that his wife was the murderer. It’s been implied in All-New Atom that he’s been leaving clues to guide Ray Choi into becoming the new Atom. It will later be revealed that Palmer is living on another world in the Multiverse.
• Vixen, Mari Jiwe McCabe. See below.
• Hawkman, Carter Hall. A member of the original Justice Society and the classic Justice League. He was with the same space task force as the Red Tornado, but didn’t return with the rest in 52. Calling the strongman of the team “the tank” is an old bit of jargon from superhero role-playing games.

Page 21-22: The Vixen, Mari Jiwe McCabe, is an African supermodel turned superhero. I’m beginning to wonder if she was based on the African supermodel Iman or one of the other African models who were rising to fame in the US during the 1970s and early 1980s. Her superpower comes from an amulet, the Tantu Totem, which allows her to duplicate specific animal abilities.

The quote is from Anais Nin, a French diarist and noted author of female erotica. It draws Vixen to Hub City, the Question’s old stomping groups, but you’re unlikely to see him as at the time of publication he’s appearing in 52 and there is a moratorium on using the core characters of that series in other books until it finishes. Note added in update: when I first wrote these annotations I noted about the Question that “we don’t even know if he’ll survive the [52] series.” We now know that Vic Sage, the original Question, died in 52 and was succeeded by Rene Montoya. The twist here is that Vixen thinks she’s being summoned on a date by the male Sage, when the current female Question is actually a lesbian. Of course neither of them sent the message as it’s a set up for a trap.

Page 23-26: This would be the first time we’ve seen Deadman performing magic. “Zwei seelen wohnen in meiner brust” is German and means “Two souls live in my chest”. It’s a quote from Faust. Which isn’t surprising considering it is later revealed that it is being said by Felix Faust, an old League villain inspired by the literary Faust, masquerading as Deadman.

Page 27-28: The part that puzzled me about this sequence is that are Lantern and Canary assembling their own League independent of the Trinity or are they acting under orders from them?

Page 29: “Mrs. Huckle” is Ma Huckle, the original Red Tornado vigilante from the 1940s. She’s now the caretaker of the Justice Society’s Headquarters.

Page 30: “Uncle Snapper” is Snapper Carr the League’s old teenage mascot.

Page 31: Beheading Metal Men shouldn’t work. Other depictions show then as essentially pure statues of metal animated by a tiny device called a responsometer. Showing them as having more mechanistic components is a revision. They’re shapeshifters – cutting off their head shouldn’t affect their ability to operate as they’d just form a new one. If you inspect the unfinished pencilled pages for this issue on Ed Benes’s website you can see that he started out drawing the Metal Men in their original designs, but by the time he comes to pencil this sequence the design has been updated to this current form.

Page 32: The comments about the Legion flight ring replies on Superman meeting the Legion of Super-Heroes. They are a team of superheroes from a thousand years into the future, but permutations in continuity means that they’ve taken quite a battering over the years with at least three major versions existing. A later story in this title by Brad Meltzer and Geoff Johns re-establishes the original Legion and Superman’s membership of it. Batman’s mention of the ring is the first hint at the Legion’s comeback.

Page 34: Doctor Impossible, a new character, this is his first appearance. The set-up and costume states that he is Mister Miracle’s brother from Apokolips, the assumption would be that he’s another of Granny Goodness’s students who escaped. His technology is reversed from Mister Miracles, i.e his has a Father Box that goes “Pok pok” rather than a Mother Box that goes “Ping ping” and he’s got a “Hush Tube” rather than a deafening Boom Tube.

Page 35: Note Red Tornado’s JLA membership certificate on the wall behind Kathy.

Related posts:

1. Justice League of America #1
2. Justice League of America (vol 2.) #42
3. Justice League of America (vol 2.) #11

I think, from an economic standpoint, we have to hit boys 6 – 14 for Cartoon Network to sell their ad space or whatever, so if you think of it as a bull’s eye with concentric circles, that’s the bull’s eye we have to hit – but I’m not satisfied with that and I don’t think Brandon is either. A, we want boys and girls, so there’s a lot of great relationship stuff in this, there’s humor in this show – I mean, it’s a serious show, but there’s a lot of humor in it, there’s a lot of eye candy for little kids. I think little kids could enjoy this show, and some stuff will go over their heads, but they won’t know it’s going over their heads. There are a lot of explosions and guys in costumes, big villains and big events that are eye candy for the youngest audience, but there’s a lot of sophisticated stories for a teen audience, a college age audience, an old fart audience like me – and I certainly think any fan of DC comics in general is going to find a lot of great stuff from the 75 year history of DC comics to enjoy in the show.

They also revealed that Nolan North would be providing the voice for both Superman and Superboy as one is the clone of the other.

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1. SDCC Panels: Young Justice transcript
2. Young Justice First Footage & Producer Interview
3. Peter David writing for Young Justice

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The Blue Beetle Companion
By Christopher Irving – Published by Two Morrow Publishing – ISBN 978-1-893905-70-2 – 128 pages

The Blue Beetle Companion is as odd a book as the characters it documents. You never lose the sense that its really a collection of magazine articles that have been reformatted and reworked as a book. The largest part of it focuses on an obscure golden age character who most people have only heard about because another character took over his identity. Even through Ted Kord or Jaime Reyes appear on the cover of this book it’s really about the Dan Garret/t Blue Beetle and his origins in the 1940s.

The greater share of this book goes to a biography of a gentleman called Victor Fox. There is a – probably apocryphal – story that Fox was DC Comics’ accountant at the time that Superman launched. He is said to have taken one look at home much money DC were making and promptly quit to start his own comic book company. The DC connection may have been apocryphal, but his get rich quick attitude to starting a comic book company wasn’t. His shenanigans and adventures sound like they’d fit right at home with the escapades of the JLI’s Blue Beetle and Booster Gold.

Fox would copy anything if he thought he could get away with it and make money at it. His comic book company produced a series of features that deliberate ripped-off other characters – the first one was so close to Superman that DC sued. Fox’s knock-off of the Green Hornet was called the Blue Beetle. Except that this Blue Beetle doesn’t have much in common with the more well-known technologist Ted Kord or high school student Jaime Reyes, or even for that matter the archeologist Dan Garrett. Fox’s Beetle was a rookie police man/detective/secret agent (they couldn’t decide) called Dan Garret (one t). He occasionally looked like the later Garrett, but there was no magical scarab or for that matter consistency.

Christopher Irving presents a story of how Fox would try almost every possible avenue to promote the Beetle with steadily decreasing results. Radio, newspaper strips, promotional days, having the character appear in your home town (so that’s where JMS got the idea). You name it Fox tried it. And in almost every case they were short-lived and not very good. Irving goes through each of these 1940s twists in detail and there is a descent amount of reproduced material – Fox never cared much for copyright so the early stuff is in the public domain.

What did surprise me was the weighting of the 1940s stuff versus the Silver Age and Modern material. The material on Charlton (from whom DC bought the character) starts on page 99 and this is a 125 page book – that’s 80% of the space. The brevity of the Charlton Comics section and the DC section really doesn’t do the later characters justice. Indeed, it would have been great as several chapters from a larger Charlton Comics companion or even a Fox Comics Companion. Don’t get me wrong, what is there is good, it’s just brief. This is a Two Morrow’s publication so you’d have thought they could have reproduced an interview or two from Comic Book Artist or some where similar. And the most surprising part was that Nite Owl – who was closely based on the Beetle – barely gets a paragraph.

The Blue Beetle Companion is a very good book in as far as it goes – I just wish it could have gone further.

Related posts:

1. Justice League Companion
2. Justice League Companion (Michael Eury)
3. A cornucopia of characters

Nrama: Well that brings us to the next question, which is the “scheduling” explanation we got from Judd Winick for why you’re not doing Justice League: Generation Lost. Can you tell us what happened with that?

Giffen: It’s basically what Judd said. Look, it came down to what do I want to do more? And the stuff I’m doing now is what I want to do. I couldn’t pencil the projects I have coming up, and I couldn’t do what I’m doing on the Doom Patrol and Outsiders, while doing breakdowns for a book that were going to keep hitting me in this white heat. So it came down to, “OK, if you have to give up something, what do you want to give up?”

I’m not going to give up Doom Patrol. They’ll have to pry that out of my cold, stiff fingers. And I’m having too much fun with Booster Gold. And I’ve been wanting to get back to penciling. I had stuff I wanted to do more, and I really had to make a choice. And seeing as how the JLI was heading in a new direction, I don’t think I was really needed on the JLI book. So it really came down to, OK, it’s a re-envisioned JLI, and characters are going to move in this direction whether I’m here or not. So maybe it’s time to say goodbye.

Related posts:

1. Judd Winick on Generation Lost (updated)
2. Judd Winick flies solo on Generation Lost.
3. Wizard speaks to Giffen

Related posts:

1. Justice League Companion
2. Alter Ego #30
3. JLA Solicitations for January 2010