Live Fast...

There's not much to say about today's "big news" beyond what Graeme McMillan says at the Savage Critics, but there was one thing I wanted to add. But even I think that talking about the "shocking" events in a comics that came out today deserves a SPOILERS warning and jump cut, so here it is:

SPOILERS!







Flash: the Fastest Man Alive #13 features the death of Bart Allen, a.k.a. the Flash, a.k.a. Impulse, and it's pretty unenjoyable, for all the reasons Graeme mentions: all the announcements this weekend about fake-out solicitations and relaunching the book made it pretty clear that Bart was not making it to the end of this book, making his death feel inevitable rather than surprising, and ending with his death makes the 12 previous issues seem pretty pointless.

All I wanted to add is that killing Impulse, of all characters, demonstrates that some people at DC just aren't interested in fun. Impulse was one of the more fun characters DC had. Thanks to a couple of accelerated bouts of aging, Bart may have looked like a teenager, but he was actually, roughly, six, and acted like it:

He saw the world in black and white morality, he thought in images not words, he wasn't that interested in girls, he had an incredibly short attention span, but he also truly loved his friends and family, when he wasn't annoying the hell out of them, and wanted to be a hero like his grandfather more than anything.

He could make you laugh, he could make you cry, and, occasionally, he could make you do both and save the universe at the same time. (Seriously, pick up Bart Saves the Universe for one of the cleverest and heart breaking time travel stories ever.)

I thought having him "grow up" in Teen Titans was a mistake that took away Bart's most charming feature, that he actually had difficulty taking superheroing seriously. Artificially aging him (again) into a whiny adult made him even less fun and further unrecognizable, and this made it all the more pointless. I mean, why seemingly kill Bart Allen in issue #4 of Infinite Crisis, only to bring him back in issue #7, if they just kill him again a little more than a year later? Couldn't he have stayed dead the first time?

Instead of just seeing Bart go out like a champ, taking out a monstrously powerful opponent, surrounded by his friends and family, we have to watch all the fun sucked out of him for a year before witnessing yet another member of Young Justice beaten to death for saving the world (Empress better watch her back, all I'm saying).

It's like they* weren't killing Bart Allen but the concept of fun itself: like the point of the story is that superheroes can't be kids pretending to be adults, saving the world with a laugh and occasionally learning lessons. No, superheroes have to be humorless mopes who are afraid of their own powers. And then they die.


*Not that I know who "they" are. I doubt it was issue scribe Mark Guggenheim, who was only recently added to the title. Dan Didio's interviews indicates that DC Editorial had planned on killing Bart Allen for a year now, so whose idea was it back then to have a humorless mini-series ending in Bart's death? Geoff Johns, who aged Bart and made Wally disappear? (apparently not) Mark Waid, who knew he was returning to The Flash, but for some reason didn't want to write Bart Allen, his own creation? or Dan "Enemy of Fun" Didio, who personally wants to ruin your childhood?

I Think More Superheroes Should Die

(huh, I can already hear Dr. Polaris agreeing. Anyway...)

Superheroing is an inherently dangerous activity. Let's face it, the guys in the capes aren't just the police. A superhero is cop, fire fighter, and soldier in one, and what these professions have in common is that each is a person who saves lives by risking and sometimes losing his own. Add to that mortal enemies with world shaking power, and you're looking at people whose day to day living is very precarious.

But if you want me to believe that, at any moment, a superhero could die, then every now and then, one of them has to actually die. The stronger possibility of an unhappy ending is one of the major advantages of on-going, episodic fiction that comics should exploit better. Because when the bad guy puts the hero in his unescapable death trap and looks like he's going to get away, there's a chance he really IS going to get away, if only for someone else to capture him three or four issues later. That's the way to ramp up the DRAMA.*

Now, I don't mean to be morbid about it. I'm not in the "kill 'em, kill 'em all" camp. The deaths should be rare, if only so superheroes don't look like complete incompetants. And while they don't all need to be heroic sacrifices, like Barry Allen--they could be fatal mistakes, like Booster's recent demise, or victims of effective villains, like Vibe's or Blue Beetle's, or even the truly tragic cannon fodder, like Pantha--the deaths need to have an impact, on the plot and on the surviving characters. And because I like deaths to have impact, I'd prefer the dead remain dead, but I understand that any fantasy genre in which The Spectre is one of the oldest characters will have a looser definition of what death means.

And the deaths certainly shouldn't be advertised in advance. One, it's kind of creepy. Two, it robs tension from issues in which a death isn't advertised. I know everyone is going to make it out of an issue if it's not solicited "Someone makes the ultimate sacrifice." Three, it robs tension from issues in which a death IS advertised. Even if it's obvious Captain Lamb is going down with the ship, the death has a lot more impact if you thought there was a chance he could have made it.

And some characters, of course, can't be killed. The editorially protected icons, of course, are practically immortal. No reader would really want Batman (or even the Joker) dead, and more importantly, no one would ever believe he was really dead anyway, no matter how graphic the death. I would have said protagonists of on-going books were safe as well, but blowing up Oliver Queen to make way for Conner Hawke was one of the best moves Chuck Dixon made on his run of Green Arrow.

I though Peter Milligan and Mike Allred's X-Statics nee X-Force handled death brilliantly. Killing off 90% of the team (including the narrator) in the first issue served notice that neither the characters nor the readers could take the success of any mission for granted, and then played out the emotional effect of such a highly dangerous life would have, and then what the effect would be if some people, but only certain people, came back.

Now, I can already hear some objections, notably "comics are supposed to be escapist fantasy and I don't want to be reminded about things I find upsetting, like death." To which I say, "Stop reading superhero comics."

Seriously.

Batman watched a mugger shoot his parents. That's the basics. If you want to remove violent death from superheroes, you have to give up Batman. And Spider-Man. And Superman. And Captain America. Heck, get rid of World War II and all those nasty Nazis.

Superheroes is NOT an escapist genre, not if by "escapist" you mean "a genre in which you don't have to deal with anything in the real world you don't like." Superheroes is kind of the opposite of that, a genre in which VERY REAL PROBLEMS are exaggerated and distorted to be scarier, which somehow allows the reader to deal with these problems through metaphor and analogy. A superhero universe is a worse place to live, where everything we have to deal with exists, but with superpowers. (Cue President Lex joke)

The danger, the very real danger to their lives, the fact that just by signing up for the Justice League a hero puts a target on his back, the fact that they might die alone, or suddenly, and possibly in a painful, undignified way, and they DO IT ANYWAY...

well, to me, that's what makes them a hero.

*One of the reasons I didn't like Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Earth 2 was the idea that on "our" Earth, good can't lose. Well, that sucks all the tension out of the story.

Top 5 Overlooked Comics of the Nineties #1

Over at the Comics Bin, they listed the The Ten Most Important Comic Books of the 1990s. You can read the list for yourself but all you need to know is that Valiant Comics and Harbingers grab the number one spot.

Reading his reasoning, you can see he judged comics only on their collectability (and even that is questionable). Whereas I would have looked at their influence, experimentation, and effect on the comics that followed.

It's easy to look at first issues and claim they made a change, either the first issue of new team or a new character being introduced, the kind of stuff that shoots up in price, but I wanted to look at the comics that CHANGED (superhero) COMICS, but could still be found for cover price in the back issue bins.

(I'm also a DC fanboy, so these are just DC titles. If someone wants to do the Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, or COMPLETE list, please let me know).

Today's entry:

Flash #53 (1991): The Pied Piper comes out! In 1991, Hartley Rathaway, who had been committing crimes since 1959 as the Pied Piper but had recently reformed, casually informed his friend, Wally West, the Flash, that he was gay. Wally's reaction? He ran away.

Since that time, Piper has been through a lot. The last hero standing against Kobra in Terminal Velocity, falling in love with his partner James, fighting a gay-baiting conservative presidential candidate, framed for the murder of his own parents, and exonerating himself in a Rogue War. And through it all he's been one of Wally West's closest and most trusted friends.

No, he wasn't DC's first gay superhero. And he didn't get as much press as Northstar would one year later. But he was neither an atrocious gay stereotype nor was his sexuality quickly buried and forgotten. His orientation was always present, but rarely the focus. Instead, he was one of the first gay characters who was a fully developed human being with complex motivations and background, of which being gay was only one part (less important, in the long run, than his being born deaf and rich).

But getting back to the issue at hand: yes, as a supporting character, Hartley's coming out isn't really about Hartley. It's about Wally's reaction, which is running away. This was of course a perfectly in character reaction, both childish and conservative. But Wally eventually comes to accept that his friend is still the same guy he always was, and the audience, through Wally, learns to accept homosexuality as well.

Compare this to the Brother's Keeper storyline by Judd Winick. (note: I have met Judd Winick and I enjoy a LOT of his work). In a slightly similar plot, Terry Berg, a co-worker of Kyle Rayner, Green Lantern, comes out to him. Kyle helps him adjust to being out, then goes into a rage when Terry is beaten in a hate crime. The problem with the story, as Ragnell pointed out, is that Kyle doesn't learn anything. He was okay with homosexuality before, he's okay with it after, he thinks people who gay bash were bad before, he thinks the same after. He doesn't learn anything, and therefore neither do we.

And so, I'd like to single out Flash #53, for adding an interesting new facet to an old character, for adding a fully formed gay character to the roster of DC superheroes, for setting up plot lines for the next 15 years, and for telling a fun little afterschool special all in one issue.

Tomorrow, overlooked comic #2: The glasses come off!