Going Through The DCAU Part Ten

Once more, Jimmy and Tom are continuing their rewatch of the DCAU.

This week, we’re covering the Batman the Animated Series episodes “The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy,” the two-part “Robin’s Reckoning,” and “The Laughing Fish”.

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.

Jimmy Attempts To Read All Of Convergence: Week Five Part Two

Hey Watson! It’s Aquaman being a dick. No wonder he’s your favorite.

Convergence continues to trudge along with little of significance happening besides Rucka and Hamner’s return on The Question.

Be sure to catch up on all the Convergence happenings with coverage of:

Week One: Part One, Part Two
Week Two: Part One, Part Two
Week Three:Part One, Part Two
Week Four:Part One, Part Two
Week Five: Part One

Read on for Week Five spoilers after the break for Convergence Justice League #2, Convergence Speed Force #2,  Convergence The Atom #2, Convergence The Question #2 and Convergence Titans #2.

Doing It Right: The Resurrection Of Bucky Barnes

Bringing dead characters back to life in comic books is a given.  Readers generally don’t even really believe it when major heroes die anymore.  We expect them to come back.

I mean, technically, they’re just drawings on pages, so they can be revived rather easily.  You just need a good reason.

How, then, did Marvel pull off resurrecting a character that had been dead for decades in a way that actually worked?

Jimmy Attempts To Read All Of Convergence: Week One Part One

Convergence #1

Let the multiversal insanity begin.  Spoilers after the break for Convergence #1, Batman and Robin #1, Nightwing Oracle #1, Batgirl #1 and Speed Force #1.

Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Heroes Case File #11: The Alpha Centurion

Imperius Wrecks!

Superhero supporting casts can oftentimes change from creator to creator.  Its not that uncommon.  Yes, some aren’t going anywhere.  Superman will always have Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Perry White.  Batman will always have Alfred and Commissioner Gordon.  Spider-Man is going to be weighed down by Aunt May and J. Jonah Jameson for all eternity.  But lesser supporting cast members can come and go, sometimes without warning.  When writer William Messner-Loebs was working on The Flash, Wally West had a huge supporting cast of friends that succeeding writer Mark Waid decided were only sporadically useful at best and largely ignored aside from the Pied Piper.  Loebs had Wally and Linda Park say hello to each other at a mutual friend’s wedding on his last page, and aside from her and Piper, Waid built a new supporting cast made up more of various other speedsters.  More egregious would be how Judd Winick gave Kyle Rayner a gay friend, Terry, during his Green Lantern run.  At the end of one issue, Kyle appeared to die and Terry got his power ring…only for returning writer Ron Marz to come in the very next issue to see Kyle alive, well, and with the ring on the very first page, and some dialogue how sometime between issues Terry had simply returned the ring and that was that.  Terry was never seen again.

Then there was the Alpha Centurion.   No one really knows what happened to that guy.

Barry Allen: Why Exactly Isn’t He Still Dead?

He looks like he’s tripping over his own feet in that pose.

Crisis on Infinite Earths probably didn’t kill off anywhere near as many characters as its reputation.  But reputations are kinda screwy that way anyway, considering how many people are probably unaware how any “squeal like a pig” scenes make up so little of the movie Deliverance.  But there were really only two deaths in that story that really matter as far as DC was concerned.  Three if you count Prince Ra-Man, and nobody does.  One was Supergirl.  The other was the Silver Age Flash, Barry Allen.  Both of those characters stayed pretty dead for a while, but Barry’s was actually remembered by the general public, or at least by his superhero peers.

The funny thing was, Barry dying may have been the best thing to ever happen to the character.