Category Archives: Opinion

Cobalt Blue, Classic Rogue?

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“Chain Lightning” (Flash #143–150, including the lead-in) is a polarizing Flash storyline. Some fans love the look into the future of the Flash legacy. Others can’t stand that it hinges on Barry having an evil twin. (I’ve never been entirely sure how much of the objection is to the evil twin trope in general, or to the fact that Cobalt Blue is Barry’s evil twin.) Even Mark Waid admits that it didn’t work, though he maintains in The Flash Companion that the idea was sound, he just screwed up on the execution.

But then I had a thought: What if Cobalt Blue had appeared during the Silver Age instead of the late 1990s?

The evil twin trope hadn’t been discredited yet, so there would have been few objections on that basis. And with Barry as the new, current Flash rather than a fond memory, there would be no sense that DC was tarnishing a cherished hero’s legacy.

Consider: The Flash’s opposite number, who could have had his life but for a twist of fate, who fights against the law instead of for it, who uses magic instead of science. There’s some solid appeal there. And being a conceptual opposite makes him fill a different role than the Reverse-Flash, who is basically the Flash, but evil. (Sort of like Savitar vs. Zoom)

Obviously the big 6-issue epics didn’t exist back then, but I can imagine Chain Lightning as a recurring type of story, where once a year or so, the Flash has to go into the future to help another future Flash fight that generation’s Cobalt Blue.

So…

Is Cobalt Blue that much worse a name than Captain Cold, Professor Zoom, Pied Piper or Abra Kadabra? (Admittedly, Waid says in the same interview that he wanted to use the name Wildfire, but DC nixed it.)

Is a literal evil twin that much harder to swallow than a clone (Inertia), a mimic who has been known to alter his appearance to match the original (Professor Zoom), the product of an imperfect duplicator ray (Bizarro), or an alternate universe version (Ultraman)?

Is the concept that much more hokey than a gang boss who dresses as a clown (Joker), a talking telepathic gorilla (Grodd), a villain who spins (The Top), runs around in a parka and snow goggles in the heat of summer (Captain Cold), or throws trick boomerangs (Captain Boomerang, of course)? Look at the reactions to Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge from people who don’t read The Flash. They were surprised to find that the Rogues were compelling characters. Readers outside the Flash fanbase look at the Rogues’ names, costumes, and powers and figure that they’re nothing but lame jokes, but when used properly, they transcend the cheese factor.

What do you think? Am I totally off-base here, or could Cobalt Blue have worked as a classic Silver-Age villain?

(Originally posted October 2008. Expanded from a remark I posted on Twitter earlier, itself condensed from a post on Comic Bloc in response to Heatwave the Rogue’s assertion that Cobalt Blue is the Mopee of the modern era.)

On the Value of Relaunches

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More importantly, the more DC has to promote the next Flash , the less it has [available] to devote to (let’s just say) hyping a new Icon series. If DC would put some of its series on hiatus, as opposed to cancelling one volume so a new one can begin a few months later, it would acknowledge the reality of cancellation-proof series and let more attention linger on the stragglers. Who knows — given time, maybe some of them could become cancellation-proof too.

— Robot 6’s Tom Bondurant in his Grumpy Old Fan column.

As he points out, The Flash is one of DC’s “foundational” series, which have been in almost continuous publication since the Silver Age. We all know it’s coming back.

Cataloging a Multiverse

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How important is it to label fictional universes? Does it matter that Young Justice takes place on “Earth-16,” while the universe of Batman: The Brave and the Bold doesn’t have a number? Is Earth One a good label for a self-contained Superman or Batman series? If an editor writes “Earth-1” instead of “New Earth” in Tangent: Superman’s Reign, should it overshadow discussion of the actual story? Do they need to be precisely separated, with each story identified clearly as belonging to one universe or another, or is a more general classification enough?

And once you’ve decided to catalog them, how do you label them?

A few multiverses that come to mind are DC Comics’, Marvel Comics’, and Michael Moorcock’s.

The multiverse of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cycle is extremely fluid, with details changing whenever he wants to tell a different story. Just looking at the Elric stories, there are three or four origins for Stormbringer, and as many for the Melnibonéans and their pact with Arioch. There are several versions of the 20th-century Count Ulrich Von Bek (depending on whether you include Count Zodiac). Worlds are less like parallel lines and more like streams that can run together, mingle, and separate again (kind of like the briefly-used Hypertime as used by DC).

DC and Marvel, on the other hand, favor a discrete structure in which each universe can be precisely identified. This may have something to do with the focus on continuity as a key element of comic-book storytelling, and would explain why, for instance, Marvel has made an effort to number what seems to be every single alternate reality they’ve ever published.

Approaches to numbering:

  • Sequential. DC started out like this, with Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-3, etc.
  • Random. Current DC multiverse, except for the first few we saw at the end of 52 which were based on worlds from the original DC multiverse (Earth-2, Earth-3, Earth-5 from Earth-S, Earth-10 from Earth-X). Marvel’s main continuity, Earth-616, was reportedly picked at random (though there is some disagreement on this point).
  • Referential. Things like choosing Earth-S for the worlds of Shazam or Squadron Supreme, or Earth-C for Captain Carrot. Earth-97 for Tangent (which appeared in 1997) and Earth-96 for Kingdom Come (which appeared in 1996) would also fall into this category (but see the next point).
  • Systematic. Taking referential labels a step further, using a consistent scheme. Marvel derives most of its designations from publication dates.

Personally, I prefer to just name them. “The Tangent Universe” or “New Frontier” or “Supremeverse” gets the idea across more directly than, say, Earth-9.

What do you think is the best way to identify alternate universes?

Originally posted at K-Squared Ramblings.

My issues with Geoff Johns’ treatment of the Golden Glider

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Today’s guest post is by Lia and was originally posted at The Rogues Kick Ass.

There are a number of reasons why I dislike Geoff Johns’ treatment of the Golden Glider (Lisa Snart), and it’s primarily because he makes her weak. Originally, she was an angry, vengeful character — a woman so angry about her boyfriend’s untimely death that she sought revenge on the Flash for purportedly killing him. It was her sole reason for becoming a villain, as she’d had no criminal record prior to the Top’s death and originally wasn’t interested in theft. For example, in Flash v1 #250 she vowed “No more skating for me…not until Roscoe’s death is avenged! And that means — get the Flash where it hurts the most!”

All her early appearances depicted her as viciously obsessed with making the Flash suffer just as she had, to the point of being defiantly willing to kill herself to fulfill this revenge. When the Flash bluffed about killing her to save his family from her scheme in Flash v1 #257, she declared “Then I’ll die — gladly! Without my beloved Roscoe, I have only one thing to live for anyway — vengeance! And with that accomplished, I’ll perish in peace — knowing you will be mourning as I have mourned — three times over!” There were in fact quite a few instances of her declaring hate for the Flash and her intent to get revenge. She was a strong and forceful person, if not a particularly pleasant one.

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If You Could Only Buy Three Comics (Revisited)

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A couple of years ago, I wrote about cutting down the pull list by figuring out what I really liked reading, as opposed to what I just bought out of habit. This was followed up by a harsher test: if you could only buy three comics, what would you choose? At the time, I picked The Unwritten, Madame Xanadu, and The Unknown. Yes, at the time, The Flash wasn’t in my top three.

I found myself thinking about this again. Two of those series are gone, and I’m enjoying The Flash a lot more than I used to. What would my choices be today?

  • The Flash, definitely. While I didn’t care much for Flash: Rebirth, the ongoing series has proved to be a fun adventure.
  • The Unwritten. I think we’re approaching the half-way point with this series, which continues to be fascinating, thought-provoking, entertaining, and occasionally downright creepy as it explores the way stories shape the world. This book was one of my picks for the Read This Too! recommendation.

Those two are easy. The third one? That’s the hard part. The two contenders are:

  • Velocity. In the strictest sense of the question, I’d have to go with this one. It’s been a great story, and I want to see how it ends. But once that last issue comes out, I’d go with…
  • Lady Mechanika, which is shaping up to be a good steampunk mystery/adventure.

Actually, since Lady Mechanika is bimonthly and Velocity’s finale will probably come out between its issues, I could probably make a case for them sharing the third slot!

So what missed the cut, and why?

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No Halcyon Days for this Speedster

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It took me a while to really get on board Halcyon, the Image Comics–published miniseries about a world in which all crime stops, leaving the super-heroes with nothing to do. Issue has one of those “wham!” moments where it feels like the story sneaks up behind you and hits you with a two-by-four, though, so I’m following this one through to the end.

But there’s something that really bothers me about the premise.

All crime and aggression has stopped, worldwide. Criminals stop attacking people, nations stop fighting wars, terrorists dismantle their own networks, and the world’s most dangerous supervillain not only turns himself in, but devotes his intellect to medical science.

The world’s super-heroes find themselves obsolete, except for one: their speedster, who is the only one fast enough to respond to natural disasters. So while they’re all longing for the bad old days, he’s running himself ragged helping out in the way that only he can.

Except…

It doesn’t take a speedster to respond to an earthquake if you’re near the earthquake. It doesn’t take a speedster to help evacuate the coastline ahead of a hurricane or (given proper warning) tsunami, or to divert a flooding river away from populated areas. It certainly doesn’t take a speedster to help out in relief efforts after a disaster hits.

A hero with super-strength or X-ray vision can hop on a plane and arrive within hours to help search for survivors in the rubble left behind by a major earthquake, or industrial explosion, or meteor strike. They can respond even faster to something that hits near their base of operations. If something happens in your city, you don’t necessarily need super-speed to deal with it.

There’s nothing stopping the rest of the world’s heroes from finding something to contribute…unless all they want to do is find someone to punch. This is probably true of Sabre, the Batman equivalent, but the rest of them seem to think he’s a psychopath.

I could overlook it as a form of genre blindness, except that Transom is right there, in each issue, pushing himself to the brink as the world’s only remaining active hero.