Essentials

I'm curious about the recommended reading lists attached to the 2 page origins in the back of 52.

What criteria was used to determine "essential storylines"? Are these the stories you have read to understand these characters? Are these the best stories told using the character? Or are they just what's been collected into trade paperbacks, recommending the individual issues only as a last resort?

Take last week's recommended reading for Batman, for example. It's hard to argue with Batman: Year One on that list. It's not only THE definitive origin for Batman for the last twenty years, it's also a hell of a good story. But The Bat-Man in The Batman Chronicles is hardly the same character written now, and Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told isn't one coherent storyline at all (though I guess the individual issues collected could be considered essential).

But the real standout on the list is The Dark Knight Returns. It's the only storyline recommended so far that is absolutely out of continuity, a story set in the dark alternate future of 1986. Reading that book will NOT get anyone not familiar with Batman up to speed with the character currently starring in Detective Comics.

And yet...

No book* in the last 20 years has had such an effect on how Batman is written as Dark Knight Returns. Batman as obsessive, as fanatical, violent, asshole-ish, all comes from Frank Miller's depiction of what Batman would be like when he's old enough to have a late life crisis. So while reading the book won't give you the history of Bruce Wayne, you DO kind of HAVE TO read it to understand the history of Batman as a character.

But then ANY book could be Essential, if it has a profound effect on a character. Watchmen is essential reading for all the Charlton characters running around the DCU, especially the Question, Blue Beetle, or Captain Atom (hmmm....). All Star Superman will almost certainly become essential. And Kingdom Come, for good or ill, is absolutely necessary to read to understand why the DCU looks the way it does.

I guess it's just further proof that saying this story changes everything and this one changes nothing means nothing, and that any story could be the one that really takes characters to somewhere new. So why worry whether it lines up with other depictions. It's all Hypertime anyhow...


*arguably, Dini and Timm's Batman: The Animated Series is an even bigger influence, but the recommended list seems limited to books.

Thursday Afternoon Recommendation

If the Question was one of the greatest beneficiaries of Hypertime, his Charlton cohort Captain Atom was one of its greater victims. While new versions layered interesting characteristics and interpretations onto Vic Sage, the same versions stripped whatever was interesting about Nathanial Adam away. DC already had a nuclear powered accident survivor by the time Captain Atom was introduced, as well as military men turned weapons of mass destruction, and soldiers from another era trapped in the present. And once it was clear how he wasn't like those people, he became defined by only one aspect, and, as Dave Campbell points out, it's not a very compelling one:

Captain Atom is a tool. Whenever writers need an asshole superhero, they get Captain Atom. He’s constantly trying to beat up other heroes on behalf of the federal government.

And that's basically it. His defining feature is that he's as powerful as Superman, but he obeys the authorities, and it's always the wrong choice to make. And since Captain Atom is also portrayed as honest and sincere, he comes across as insanely naive, if not a little mentally handicapped.

Which was why blasting him into the Wildstorm Universe in Will Pfeifer and Giuseppe Camuncoli Captain Atom: Armageddon (trade paperback on-sale this week) was so brilliant.


When the Justice League butts up against President Luthor, the reader knows the government is in the wrong and spends most of the time wondering what kind of stick is up Atom's ass that he can't see it too.

But when The Authority cuts a swath of destruction across the Washington Mall, leaving the charred corpses of thousands of terrorists and tourists in their wake, and the President is left wondering if there was anything he can actually do, well suddenly the idea of a gold skinned god who limits himself to the will of the electorate starts to sound pretty appealing.

Captain Atom: Armageddon is probably the best inter-company crossover I've ever read (which I know isn't saying much but...) because it actually contrasts the characters that meet, rather than the usual misunderstanding, fight and team-up model. The Wildstorm characters see the establishment asshole that Captain Atom is usually portrayed as. But from Captain Atom's point of view, he's trapped in a world ruled by amoral, hyper-violent superheroes who have terrified the populace into submission. There's no misunderstanding, they understand each other perfectly. That's why they fight.

The whole book could be read as a contrast between the morally rigid Marvel heroes of the 1960s (Steve Ditko was one of Captain Atom's co-creators) and the violent, morally ambiguous Image heroes of the 1990s, a pastiche Armageddon rings an almost literal death knell for. Having moved through the awkward adolescent rebellion phase of WildC.A.T.S. and the "I'm at college so I must be right about everything" false maturity of The Authority, a real adult, a crotchety old survivor of a forgotten era, has come to tell them that they are getting it wrong, and the world is in danger because of it.

And Captain Atom plays an interesting Ghost of Christmas Future. Like Mr. Majestic, he's a popular hero from a comics company bought by DC Comics. But while Mr. Majestic can still headline his own series (er, sort of), the Captain has been reduced to C or D-list status. His very presence screams "You may be a big shot in your own world now, but someday you're going to be a background cameo in Infinite Crisis on Infinite Earths. One day, I was like you. One day, you will be like me."

It suggests a model for future Captain Atom stories that could be interesting, the law abiding superhero in a world where the law isn't respected much, a walking conscience with the firepower to back it up. The Boys of the Wildstorm Universe proper, if you will.

'Course, he's not in the Wildstorm Universe anymore, and in the DCU our sympathy will always be with Superman and Wonder Woman over the man in the shiny skin, so either he should go back (if only to make some more time with the Engineer) or he should get some new "heroes" to play with.

Play up some of the aspects of his Watchmen analogue, Dr. Manhattan, his disconnect from humanity due to his powers, and how that hurts him, rather than coldly interests him as it does his blue-bald twin. Add in a supporting cast of government employees who work with him and aid him. Some he can talk to, rescue, be rescued by. Maybe one or two villainous, or at least venal, bureaucrats, so the whole thing doesn't read like government propaganda. An anarchic villain or two who maybe have an actually good cause but poor methods.

There's a really good character there. Pfeifer and Camuncoli found him. And the gauntlet is thrown for the next writer to make him great.

Or you could just keep writing the unlikable establishment tool with the stick up his ass. If that's your thing.

Question Time

To me, one of the greatest beneficiaries of Hypertime has got to be be The Question.

While everybody has a different favorite part of 52, everybody seems to agree that The Question is awesome. Whether he's mentoring Montoya with koans, rifling through barely organized files in his rusted out old van, cracking a Gauntlet joke, or casually breaking the fourth wall, everything he's done so far has been HIGHLY amusing. And that's not even getting into the kung fu.

But who IS The Question? Or rather, which Question is that? Is he Steve Ditko's Objectivist crusader? Denny O'Neil's "Zen Master of Crime Fighting"? Bruce Timm's paranoid conspiracy theorist? Even Rick Veitch's urban shaman?

And thanks to the wonders of Hypertime, the answer is "All of them." The Question is "comics' only Zen Objectivist conspiracy theorist." From wildly different authors' visions of who The Question is, we get some basic truths about him from where his different philosophies overlap. There's a fundamental belief that perceived reality and objective reality are very different, that our flawed faculties cannot passively understand the world and that truth must be actively sought by asking the right questions.

In short, "Things are never as they seem."*

So basically, any writer going forward, as long as he keeps that core, can go forth and write a great Question story, picking and choosing from all the earlier versions across time and media the parts he likes, jettisoning that which doesn't, and adding something of his own. Add in a bit of Mr. A. and Rorschach, The Question's creative doppelgängers, and one of the greatest character designs in comics, mix well, and you've got the character of the year.


*Of course, the philosophies diverge as to why reality can't be seen, whether it's because humans aren't rational enough, or whether they are too caught up in themselves, or whether They are hiding the truth from the world.

It Had to Be Said #3

Crisis on Infinte Earths did not fail in its goal of creating a simpler universe that new readers could understand.

Crisis on Infinite Earths succeeded in its goal of creating a more complicated universe that took better advantage of all the toys that DC had to play with.

Consider, if the purpose of the book was to simplify the universe, they should have just wiped out everything and started over from the beginning. Said THIS is the first appearance of Batman, everything that came before doesn't matter. (With Superman, they kind of did do that, but with the Man of Steel miniseries, not COIE, and it didn't take).

Instead, Marv Wolfman basically said, "You know the past 50 years of comics, spread out over three companies and innumerable separate titles? Yeah, almost all of those stories happened, but all in the same place and over a period of about 10 years." Does that sound like he was even trying to make things simpler?

No, what he was trying to do was create a world where THIS was possible:


Now, you can either start each issue explaining why Dr. Fate and Captain Marvel are on Earth 1 and just which Batman that is, exactly, or you can just accept that they are all from the same Earth and just go from there. Which would you prefer?

Then there's the fact that ongoing books sell better when they are tied to other, more successful ongoing books. It's one thing to read about Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters. But interest is peaked and sales are higher if you know that, at any moment, Wonder Woman might stop by. That's the main reason the Charlton characters were brought into the DC Universe, rather than be relaunched with Watchmen. (On the other hand, somewhere in Hypertime there's a 20 year old ongoing series set in the Watchmen universe, still written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons).

Besides, there's a lot of arrogance that goes into the thought that the DC U needed to be simplified, or still needs to be simplified, for new readers. Remember, we were all new readers, once, and unless you've been collecting since Action Comics #1, there was some piece of backstory you didn't know when you first sat down. Somehow it didn't stop you from having fun, why should it stop someone else? Anyone could understand parallel earths, anyone could understand unified earth, I'm pretty sure everyone will be able to grasp Earth-New.

No, if there's a problem with getting new readers to enjoy current comics, it lies not with the rich, confusing history created by Crisis on Infinte Earths, but with current comic not using that history properly. Comics too worried about correcting, contradicting, clarifying, or simply copying the comics of the past, and not worried enough about creating new stories, new histories, for the comics of the future.

There, it had to be said.