Tom Recommends: Young Justice (Animated Series)

Animator Greg Wiseman has had a long string of animated series that have pleased fans but have always seemed to be cut short due to other factors.  He was forced off Disney’s Gargoyles and saw his Spectacular Spider-Man cut short due to the Spider-rights going to Disney.

Then there was Young Justice, an animated series set in the DC universe about a team of superhero sidekicks going on covert missions for the Justice League.

DC’s Rebirth: In Your Best Arnold Voice, “It’s Not A Reboot!”

DC gets a lot of flack from some for their various reboots of continuity.  Some of which is justified, like the mess that the New 52 left DC continuity in.  Marvel claims to have never rebooted their continuity.  Not on a grand scale like DC’s Crisis anyway.  But what do you call something like One More Day Marvel?  Besides a slap in the face to fans.  (IMO).

While Marvel seems to get a free pass on the whole “reboot” thing, they are constantly relaunching their line and doing soft reboots along the way.  How many of your favorite Marvel books have had new #1’s in the past couple of years?  I think Spider-Gwen which debuted in 2014 has already had 9 #1 issues!  (That’s possibly an exaggeration.)  The point is, Marvel is just as guilty in their own way.

And DC is hoping that by following the “Marvel model” with #1’s, a soft reboot and not a Crisis/Flashpoint/New 52 style reboot, fans will cut them some slack as well.

More on DC Rebirth’s “it’s not a reboot” after the cut.

Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Heroes Case File #41: Rocket Red

 

When the Justice League was funny, it was supposed to be tied to the United Nations.  That meant it actually had to have some foreign members instead of the usual collection of Americans.  Oh yeah, some of those Americans were aliens, and Aquaman probably had duel citizenship with Atlantis at the time, but when the closest you can come to a foreign member is Wonder Woman from Paradise Island, then you need to try a little harder and maybe pull out a good guy from a real country instead of a fictional one.

So, yeah, we got ourselves a Russian hero in Rocket Red.

Awesome Cosplay Of The Day: Jimmy Hijacks The Cosplay Edition

Jenny called in sick today with something called a “LEGO Dimensions Hangover”.  With Jenny away I can sneak into her office and post a collection of cosplays that are not #jennyapproved.  Shhh…don’t tell her…but check them out after the cut…

Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Heroes Case File #31: The Huntress

Offhand, I could not tell you which Huntress is in this picture.

Superheroes, for the most part, don’t age.  Marvel and DC have their superhero universes set in some sort of sliding scale timeline, where almost everything that’s happened since the superhero line was created somehow only occurred over a ten to twelve year period.  That means that even though there are Fantastic Four comics depicting Reed Richards and Ben Grimm in the trenches of World War II, today neither of those gentlemen are that old.  Aside from a handful of World War II era heroes and villains who have managed to stay active and keep their ties to the war (Captain America, the original Justice Society), or even the rarer other type (Frank Castle is a Vietnam vet), heroes are pulled from eras they existed in to avoid explaining how Batman swings through the streets of Gotham without a walker.

But there are ways to allow heroes to age, and one of them DC used to have was Earth-2.  Originally the home of the Justice Society of America, Earth-2 was the place where the Golden Age heroes did their thing.  And while none of them quite reached the state we’d consider “elderly,” some of them did marry and have children.  One of them was the Earth-2 Batman, and he had a daughter, and oh man, is this one messed up history.

Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Heroes Case Files #30: Snapper Carr

The JLA was mostly looking for a human sacrifice to appease Starro when they met this clown.

Kid sidekicks are a thing for many heroes.  Usually they’re supposed to be someone for the young reader to identify with.  And while not every superhero has had a kid sidekick, on the DC most of the major ones did.  In fact, the Justice League had one once for some reason.

His name was Snapper Carr.  And oh man, was he painful to read about.

Tom Recommends: Starman Volume 2

The Legacy Hero is a longstanding DC tradition.  The idea is to take an old character name and concept and rework the character into a new character who may or may not be related to the older one.  There’s a bit less of that with the “new 52” today, but when someone opted to rework the Flash from Golden Age Jay Garrick to Silver Age Barry Allen, everything went from there.  Furthermore, when Barry met Jay, a character most of Barry’s readers would have never heard of given their age and the collectability of old comics back then, the idea of connecting these old heroes took root and hasn’t really gone anywhere since.

One of the more prolific superhero names for DC has been Starman.  Originally, Starman was Ted Knight, an astrophysicist who discovered a way to channel starlight into a small wand he called a cosmic rod (stop giggling, Watson) that allowed him to fly and do stuff with stellar energy (mostly fire energy blasts).   Starman was, like many of his contemporaries, a member of the Justice Society and disappeared when the Golden Age of comics ended.  Unlike many of his contemporaries, the various attempts to create other Starman characters wasn’t as cut-and-dried as, say, Flash or Green Lantern.  There were many Starmen, all with different abilities and few with any relationship whatsoever to Ted Knight.

Post Zero Hour, DC produced another new Starman, this one the son of Ted Knight.  Jack Knight had no desire to be a superhero.  He was into collectables and ran a small knick-knack shop out of his home town of Opal City.  Circumstances pushed him into superheroing, and he probably became the single most memorable Starman of them all.

Podcast Reation: The “Do I Really Wanna Go There?” Edition

Technically, I haven’t done a whole reaction-to-Watson article yet. That will not change today.

This week on the podcast, the podcast was late and I did not get to listen to it until Monday.  My non-geek wife wanted to spend the extended holiday weekend down the Jersey shore, which is not that much like that awful MTV show depicted it to be.  We go to a nice, working class vacation town, whereas that show was filmed in a place my wife has been calling “Sleezeside” since well before anyone with a stupid nickname, no discernible talent, and a camera crew ever stepped foot in the place.

But, my parents’ tiny house down there has terrible internet connections, so while I was able to download the podcast, listening to it while trying to do stuff with the missus wasn’t in the bag, and there was a good chance any attempt to post anything here would have been a disaster when the connection cut in the middle of the write up.  So, I gave the show a listen this morning and now, well, now I need to react because it is my (self appointed) job.

In fact, my parents’ unreliable wi-fi connection there means I am a bit behind on my DCAU rewatch and don’t know if Jimmy and I will get through our required three episode discussion before the week is out.

What will I react to?  The fact I probably would have lost that trivia game badly, too?  Or something else?

Going Through The DCAU Part Eight

Continuing Jimmy and Tom’s rewatch of the DCAU.

This week, we cover the Batman the Animated Series episodes “The Clock King,” “Appointment in Crime Alley,” and “Mad as a Hatter”.

Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Case File #23: Arrowette

These guys need to learn to read signs posted on trees.

The comic book version of Green Arrow is best known as being one of the few heroes with a distinctive political point of view.  Who does Superman vote for?  Who knows?  Green Arrow is an out-and-out bleeding heart liberal, and that’s probably one of his defining characteristics.

Except he wasn’t always that way.  The character existed for a good twenty years before his political perspective came up at all.  Prior to that, he was the standard white bread DC hero who did good because it was good and if he ever had a thought deeper than which arrow to use at any given moment, he sure didn’t share it.  In point of fact, the guy was a Batman rip-off, living as a millionaire playboy with his sidekick and ward in a big mansion with a cave and a car and a plane underneath his home.  It’s not much of a memorable era for the Emerald Archer.

This era also gave us Arrowette.