I'm shelving the rest of my reviews this week and retracting all of my earlier bitching, because Blackest Night No. 8 is a perfect comic.
We are now BEST FRIENDS. (sorry Jimmy Olsen No. 72)
We're also forming a crime-fighting duo!
Our CLOSE FRIENDSHIP will see us through the ups and downs of investigating the seedy comic book underbelly of my house.
Yes, we truly are BFF.
Name: Mitchell Lee Reid
Height: Some inches (no one actually told me)
Weight: 6lbs, 11oz
First appearance: March 25, 2010 at 4:05am, Halifax, Nova Scotia
Known relatives: Rachelle Goguen (mother), Matt Reid (father)
Base of operations: Bedford, Nova Scotia
Group Affiliation: the family Goguen-Reid
Origin Story:
Mitchell arrived on the scene two weeks before his due date, ready for action. Not content to wait around for a normal birth, which would take, like, a thousand hours, Mitchell decided to straight up punch his way out of the womb. He attempted to come out hand first, which resulted in a c-section operation for mom. This made mom more vulnerable to an attack by Magneto, as she had 16 staples across her abdomen, but they have since been removed.
Despite the impatient nature of Mitchell's birth, he is a pretty mellow and quiet baby. His favourite activities include sleeping and trying to rid himself of his sworn enemy, jaundice.
... but I'd like to nominate a comic for the title of Most Tenuous Link Between Cover Image and Actual Story.
It's a much-bandied-about fact that the covers for Silver Age comics, and especially Silver Age DC comics, were occasionally drawn long before the story that they were connected to was even written - that the cover was essentially used as the seed idea that the story was later grown around. I've certainly encountered plenty of olde tyme comics that were probably put together in that way but this is the one time that I am absolutely confident in pointing my gnarled finger and screeching like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
First, the cover:
Within, the number one story (Mystery in Space being an anthology comic) is entitled
The hero: a brown-haired, strong-jawed dude, but not the same brown-haired, strong-jawed dude.
Whoops, I guess that image doesn't really show his hair colour. In any case, it's not the same guy and he has to run around getting the titular seven wonders for those evidently lazy aliens. And the wonder on Mercury is:
And that's about it for the jewel-folks, which probably means that this is the only Silver Age comic that I can think of that features the (implicit) death of the standard-issue leggy dame/ chiseled-featured dude duo.
I'll bet that the Jewel Full of Murder was a big attraction at the Seven Wonders museum they end up putting together at the end of the story.
The incomparable KYLE BAKER will be speaking at the Halifax North Branch Library tomorrow afternoon! Baker, as you probably know, is an incredibly prolific writer and illustrator, who has won every comics-related award there is and worked for every publisher and company in the business. I just read (or in some cases re-read) a bunch of his stuff including Nat Turner, Why I Hate Saturn and The Bakers books—all amazing, and each totally different from the last. Baker's work is as diverse as it is brilliant.
Baker's talk is part of a day-long Graphic Novel Camp—an event providing education about comics and celebrating the medium. LBW's BFFs Mike Holmes and Faith Erin Hicks will also be there, as well as Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant fame), and the wonderful Rebecca Kraatz (if you haven't read her book, House of Sugar, do it! And check out the beautiful wood-burned images on her website. Looking at them is like a present you give yourself).
For more information about the Graphic Novel Camp event go here.
This is event is free! So come by!
King City No. 6
It’s way past the third issue, but I’m going to do it anyway! I am going to kick off my new THIRD ISSUE RECAP, designed to strike a balance between my own hatred of spoilers and my friend Tubby’s assertion that my reviews can read like I assume that everyone has already read the comic that I’m talking about.
Hey, maybe I should have explained THIRD ISSUE RECAP on this actual third issue. Ah, well, no changing it now. This is another one that involves comics that are inaccessible to me at this point, so I may b a bit vague.
I have no idea if they’re still making children’s cartoons in the “exceedingly happy utopian community of tiny creatures occasionally menaced by generic evil” vein, but basically every second show that I watched as a youth fit that description, so I was powerless to resist this book.
I first ran into Grickle in a library copy of an earlier collection by Graham Annable, possibly also called Grickle, and am extraordinarily glad to have a chance to squirrel this away into my book pile.
I've calmed down since, but I got kind of irritated by a certain aspect of Green Lantern No. 52 earlier today. Let's watch!
Spoilers! Spoilers aplenty! Read no further if you care about such things!
So this is a mostly-talking issue and I’m not too upset about it. There had to be an origin of that white light thing that Sinestro ate in Blackest Night and if it was a bit long, well, that’s kind of what happens when a story is blown up to somewhere between four and ten times the size that it needs to be. Gah, and there’s probably going to be another one of these for Nekron, isn’t there.
So Sinestro stops in the middle of a fight with about a million dudes and narrates the history of the White Light Entity. It goes something like this: the Entity appeared in our universe and created all of the stars and planets and stuff. It then created the Earth at the point in space where it first entered our universe and hid inside (deep within the planets gooey centre in the narration but about a foot below the surface in the actual comic). The Entity’s presence caused life to evolve, and then as creatures start displaying emotions (emotions like willpower!) they are transformed into Ion and Parallax and Predator and so forth, seven in all. I think that this is the origin of the emotional spectrum. Like, Ion is the first anything anywhere to exhibit willpower and afterward there is green light power for all - it's not explicitly stated but it's strongly implied and so I'm going with it.
This whole thing has been bugging me for a while now and I think I’ve figured out why: it’s the Earth-centric aspect of the whole thing, straight out of terrible 50s sci-fi. Where Our Heroes Are is the Most Important Place in All Creation. It’s a perennial problem in comics, especially DC comics, wherein writers feel a perpetual need to explain the remarkably high instance of alien invasion and such. I kind of thought that they settled that problem fine way back in Invasion: humans have a crazy genetic code and so there are lots of superhumans and so alien races want to exploit/conquer/destroy our planet. Simple, and yet every new event seems to layer on another heaping spoonful of importance, until the fictional history of the DCU Earth resembles some ungodly narrative casserole. I swear, if this exact same origin was set on a random alien planet I would have no problem with it, but it isn't and now I have to tear it apart.
Okay, so the timeline goes: Entity arrives - creates universe - creates Earth, hides inside - life starts - unicellular/whale-looking thing feels first will - flying bug thing generates first fear - some other bug (?) feels first love - snake feels first avarice - bull (?) feels first rage - bird feels first hope - octopus feels first compassion.
I guess that this is a comic book and that the Earth could be 10+ billion years old instead of the 4 or 5 we currently reckon it to be, and maybe the universe revolves around a stationary Earth that is certainly not quintillions of kilometers away from where it might have been 10 billion years ago. Maybe the DCU is that radically different than ours.
And maybe the entire Age of Reptiles happened without any creature feeling anything like rage. Maybe dinosaurs went about their business in a dignified manner and didn’t take anything personally. It took the Rise of the Cows to mess things up for everyone. And maybe no living creature in the entire universe felt hope or compassion any time until the last, say, million years or so - remember, that octopus didn’t get around to it until after the cow-murder.
But even if every Green Lantern story told before this whole rainbow brouhaha is now said to be completely apocryphal, there are some holes in this story. Geoff Johns creation Larfleeze the Orange Lantern got his start billions of years ago, all fighting the Guardians and betraying his homies and such. And then billions of years went by and snakes and apples evolved and a snake in an apple tree felt avarice for the first time. Bah.
I suppose that I should be as willing to discard what I know about evolution and such as I was to abandon cosmology and common sense and the prior established history of the Green Lanterns and by extension the DCU, but this last detail pushes things just a bit too far. An earth that is the centre of the universe, that evolved the very first life anywhere and that reached the Age of Mammals something like 10 billion years ago (necessary for anyone to have gotten angry for most of the history of the universe, remember) only to remain in a sort of evolutionary stasis since then is just a bit too much for my suspension of disbelief glands to process. Especially since I just described the planet Malthus, a central element in Green Lantern’s history. There’s already a place that this could have been set that would have made all of this make sense! I mean, it wouldn’t be the greatest story ever told, but by GOD would it be about a billion times more palatable without ERTH ISS COOL AND IMPURTENT scrawled across it in foot-high letters.
Okay, I had to go and do something and I’ve calmed sown a bit. All I’ve got left is that it’s weird that that one robot would know the term “Western Seaboard” and not “Tootsie Pop”. They’re both pretty Earth-colloquial, right?
Okay… nerd rage spent. Go read the rest of the reviews in the next post for me being happy about comics. I'll try not to do this any more.
Living Between Wednesdays is a place for people who love comic books and superheroes.
