Really, making fun of Legion supporting characters is like shooting fish in a barrel slender tube specially-constructed fish-constraining chamber attached directly to the barrel of the gun and removing the necessity to aim. There are plenty of goofy characters throughout Legion history, starting with Matter-Eater Lad and continuing on with classics like Tyr (possessor of the world’s stupidest-looking cyborg arm), Gas Girl (Hero of Lallor, with one of the worst superhero names ever), or of course any of the Wanderers.

But sometimes you just gotta.

SCIENTIST: So we have this new process for creating a superhuman we’d like you to try out.
ATMOS: Excellent! Let’s do it!
SCIENTIST: …don’t you want to know how it works?
ATMOS: Nope! Powers away!
SCIENTIST: Maybe you’d like to know what powers you’ll get?
ATMOS: I’m sure they’re good ones! But tell me anyways.
SCIENTIST: Well, you’ll be able to fly.
ATMOS: Flight! Always good! The standard for any superhero!
SCIENTIST: So you like that.
ATMOS: Why wouldn’t I? Admittedly, I could just get a rocket pack or something. I mean, this is the future.
SCIENTIST: True.
ATMOS: But flying solo has style. So I’m excited about flying. What else am I getting?
SCIENTIST: Well, you’ll get some super-strength.
ATMOS: Fantastic! Super-strength! Again, sort of a generic power, but this time not easily duplicable by science, and I can see where, as a superhero, I might need to punch things very, very strongly.
SCIENTIST: Or open a really tough jar.
ATMOS: It indeed amazes me that even in the 30th century we have not mastered the science of easily opening jars.
SCIENTIST: Your jar-opening skills will be improved approximately ten thousand percent by this process.
ATMOS: Good to know.
SCIENTIST: You’ll be tough, too. You won’t need to breathe in space.
ATMOS: That’s good, because what if I got tired while I was in space and needed to take a moment?
SCIENTIST: …yes. Oh, and you’ll get some nuclear bolts which you can fire from your hands. They’ll blow things up.
ATMOS: Excellent! This sounds like a decent little superhero package you’ve set up here, Doc. Hey, what’s that on that screen there?
SCIENTIST: What, that? …oh, nothing.
ATMOS: Looks like me!
SCIENTIST: Well, yes, it –
ATMOS: …where are my armpits?
SCIENTIST: You don’t really need to worry about –
ATMOS: Doc, come on, where are my armpits in that image of me? Why would you need an image of me minus armpits?
SCIENTIST: Well, if you must know, we think the superheroing process will vaporize them.
ATMOS: Vaporize them?
SCIENTIST: Yes.
ATMOS: That sounds like it’ll hurt.
SCIENTIST: Well, technically they’ll still be there, so it won’t be like you’ll feel them cut away or anything like that. They’ll just infinitely dissolve into seven-dimensional fractal space, and appear to be gone to normal three-dimensional sensory perception.
ATMOS: So it won’t hurt?
SCIENTIST: Define “hurt.”
ATMOS: And how will I put on deodorant now?
SCIENTIST: Well, that’s the clever part. See, the smell of your armpits won’t transfer through the dimensional bleed, so therefore –
ATMOS: Never mind that. That looks freakish, Doc!
SCIENTIST: So? You’ll have superpowers.
ATMOS: Yeah, I’m all for the having superpowers, but I’m going to look weird! How am I supposed to get chicks if I look like an action figure left on somebody’s plasma radiator?
SCIENTIST: Is that really important?
ATMOS: Hell yes it’s important.
SCIENTIST: …well, I’ve got this additional chemical process I could combine into the nutrient bath you take before we activate you in the comet trail. It would give you subliminal hypnotic powers.
ATMOS: Subwhattamal huh now?
SCIENTIST: You could make girls like you.
ATMOS: …isn’t that kind of like date rape?
SCIENTIST: Maybe a little.
(Pause.)
ATMOS: But only a little, right?
SCIENTIST: Definitely.
ATMOS: Okay! Let’s do this thing, Doc!

Tragically, Atmos was killed by B.I.O.N., a later-stage variant of C.O.M.P.U.T.O., in the “Five Years Later” Legion run. His armpits were never found.

Cannon and Saber (ironically named, because the assassin who uses guns is Saber and the assassin who uses blades is Cannon) struck an early blow for comics equality everywhere by being a gay couple who avoided traditional gay stereotypes to become a pair of deadly killers instead. Admittedly, noted family activist Donald Wildmon might say there is no difference and all gays are in their own way killers, but Donald Wildmon is whining about the erosion of the traditional family model and Cannon and Saber kill people with guns and knives, so I would suggest: different.

I am not being facetious or snarky, either. In the comics, Cannon and Saber were quite clearly a gay couple – the subtext was, as they say, text. And on top of that, years later some fans to whom this was important asked the writer who invented Cannon and Saber (I believe it was Doug Moench, but don’t hold me to that) if the pair were a gay couple. The writer’s response was essentially “well, duh.” Cannon and Saber are a gay couple. It is canon. (And saber.)

Cannon and Saber are further made good by appearing in the second Vigilante’s comic. The second Vigilante probably had the best run of comics, despite the fact that the first Vigilante (the cowboy with the motorcycle who showed up on Justice League Unlimited a few times) is probably the more iconic Vigilante. (As for the later Vigilantes, let’s just pretend they never happened. At some point you know Geoff Johns will make it so that this was the case anyway.) This means that there is an active lack of bad Cannon and Saber stories, which is always a nice thing.

Because they are skilled assassins who are nonetheless capable of making tolerant second-year university chicks go “awwwwww!”, and that is a skillset both rare and in demand in certain quarters.

So a lot of people have been emailing me excitedly about how Legion of Super-Heroes got cancelled by DC Comics, making the logical leap that if DC is cancelling the title, clearly I suddenly have a shot at it. Which is flattering and all, but let’s be realistic here: no matter how many readers I get per month, this is still just a rinky-dink blog and I am still a rinky-dink blogger, and if they weren’t willing to let Jim Shooter ride out his storyline I don’t think they’ll be willing to hand it over to me, a quantity unproven and unknown. Call it a hunch.

But I see no reason to let that stop me from offering completely unsolicited advice about a potential relaunch of the title! Because if there is one thing the internet is good for, it is allowing unproven and unknown quantities to offer their opinion, uneducated though it may well be. So, in vague order:

Give people a reason to care about it. The direct market these days is not entirely unpredictable, and one element of the comic-buying public that is quite obvious is that comics that are generally considered to be Important sell better. This is problematic for a title like Legion, which is divorced from current continuity by a thousand year temporal gap. In the past, DC has tried to rectify this somewhat by including clunky Legion crossovers into major storyline events. This was stupid and only produced generally shitty comics. (One word: Jamm.)

Thus, if you can’t give Legion that aura of Importance through storyline implications on its shared universe (although there are ways to do that over the long term), you need to find another way to do it.

Some will say “hire big-name creators,” but that’s a red herring, frankly. Big-name creators can make a comic (All-Star Superman), or they can have no impact at all (like how the Millar/Hitch Fantastic Four sells about as much as the McDuffie/Pelletier Fantastic Four did). I don’t think you could launch a title with much bigger names than Mark Waid and George Perez, and over the course of a year that book (Brave and the Bold) simply cratered, from 90,000 to 30,000 copies. (And that was, additionally, a very good comic.) Hell, DC launched Legion the last time with Waid and Barry Kitson, a pretty top-flight creative team, and only managed to kick off with 60,000 copies at the debut – and they shed half of their readers within a year.

Ultimately, all big-name creators can do is generate some initial excitement and give you a better shot at producing some really good comics. Which is not nothing by any stretch, but there are plenty of lesser names who can make the book and give you good comics, and if the initial excitement doesn’t last – and it traditionally doesn’t on Legion no matter who you put in charge – you might as well save money on production costs.

So how do you make people care about it? More on that in a bit.

Remember that this is a brand. You can tinker with it around the edges, but the thematic core of the Legion should remain stable, just as Superman shouldn’t go around killing people in an angstful fashion or anything like that. The Legion is/are

– idealistic
– superheroic
– either directly or indirectly (depending on version) the spiritual future-heirs of the Superman legacy (not “the DC hero legacy.” Superman specifically)
– typically defenders of a utopian status quo (this is one of the reasons the Waid reboot never really worked)
– numerous
– a team with a familial feel to them
– in the future (duh)
– and start off young, but unlike most comic characters have the option to grow/age/change over time to a certain degree.

There. That’s the brand. Whoever’s making the comic has to keep those bullet points in mind, because the brand has been wholly tarnished by questionable editorial decisions and mediocre comics, to the point where the casual fan’s mental image of the Legion is “they’re the comic where the continuity went to shit ten years ago and never came back” and that’s all they know or want to know. That’s what you have to overcome.

Think about what the title has to offer. I’ve already discussed some of the drawbacks of writing Legion from a current comics market perspective. Here are some of the pluses: it offers a larger storytelling window than any other comic the Big Two prints. It offers a relatively high degree of creative freedom as Big Two super-comics go (you don’t have to worry about anything else happening in the line, because from your perspective it all happened a thousand years ago). It offers scope and scale (whole freaking galaxies) like no other comic on the market, combined with the tight familial nature of the Legion offering character-based plots whenever you want them.

At its peak, a good rendition of Legion should have the scope and crazed power of the Morrison-era JLA (on steroids) combined with the soap opera plotting of the early Claremont/Byrne Uncanny X-Men, with a giant dose of space opera, a good dash of humour and a little mad science thrown in for kicks. That’s what the comic should be.

For crissake don’t listen to the whining fanboys. Well, other than me, obviously. But seriously: every fanboy who claims he’s just waiting for a return of the Paul Levitz Legion? Ignore him. Never stop ignoring him. These are fans nostalgically griping about a past you’ll never be able to give them; it’ll be one month of “YAY THE REAL LEGION IS BACK” and then the next month they’ll complain that these aren’t as good as (insert favorite era here) of Legion and why can’t Paul Levitz stop being executive vice-president of the company and instead do what’s really important, anyway, and write Legion again? You will never, ever, ever please these people, so don’t even start trying.

Never mind that we know exactly where the market for the Levitz Legion caps out now, thanks to the “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” storyline in Action Comics, which sold about 54-58,000 copies over the course of that storyline. And remember – those are sales boosted by variant cover editions, so if you do a little math it turns out that said run of Action Comics barely saw sales increase at all as a result of people wanting to pick up comics with Geoff Johns’ I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Paul Levitz Legion in them. Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #1 did better, with 68,000 copies for its first issue, but again you have the double boost of variant covers and the Final Crisis sort-of-a-tie-in to boost sales there. (The Final Crisis miniseries that featured the new Spectre and Renee Montoya as the Question sold about 57,000 copies for its first issue, and neither of those two characters typically sell anywhere near that many books, so my guess is that the Final Crisis name is moving more sales on these books than anything else.)

The point to be made here is this: the benefits from going backward to the Levitz Legion again are almost entirely illusory. Do not go back into the desert, no matter how much the fanboys tell you they love pounding sand.

Expand, expand, expand. This point is something that really applies to comics in general, but I don’t mind shrinking it down. Legion is a comic which at this point has a fundamentally small audience, and one which is shrinking steadily over time; you aren’t converting enough people to follow the brand, not nearly enough to compensate for those drifting away and losing interest. Legion is a comic which vitally needs to expand its market presence.

The way to do this is simple: give it away for free. At least a taste. Give people a chance to get hooked first, then reel them in. There are two ways I can think of to do this, and were it up to me I would do both of them.

Firstly – and I’ve said this before – I would put the entire run of the current Legion online. All of it, in page-per-click webcomic format (with advertising, of course – no reason not to make a little spare change where possible), in black-and-white (if people want to read in colour? Well, that’s what trade paperbacks are for). Use the website as a loss-leader to attract attention. (The average popular webcomic collection these days probably sells better than Legion does anyway.) When you put out new issues, put them online a month or two after the new issue comes out, again in black and white – if people want to read the story right away, and in colour, they need to buy it.

Secondly, I would launch the new series on Free Comic Book Day. And I would give it away for free. Hell, I would make it a 64-page special edition, with 32 pages of original story and 32 pages of background information for new readers. I want that new series of Legion kicking off when comic shops are doing their utmost to drag in new readers. Is this a bit of a gamble? Sure, maybe – but come on, DC’s offerings for Free Comic Book Day last year were a reprint edition of All-Star Superman (which was a good idea) and a terrible “Teen Titans Special” comic which was A) meaningless and B) lousy. And at this point I think the failures of the Brave New World dollar sampler and the unimpressiveness of the Final Crisis dollar sampler have shown that loss leaders only work when the comic sampler itself isn’t incomprehensible on its face.

And the reason I’d do this harkens back to my first point: you have to make people care about Legion again, and at this point I think the way you do it is treating the comic like it’s a big deal, because if you do so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you go balls-out with a new marketing scheme and product rollout that just isn’t like how the comic industry does things, people will be interested – and if the comic is good, people will stick around.

Sometimes, you just need the sort of villain who can get beat up by El Diablo, the Olympian or a random member of the Blood Pack. This is fine and good; even D-listers need their little victories. And for those little victories, you know where to go.

The Cadre got their start fighting D-list superheroes by fighting the Justice League. “But wait,” you say, “the Justice League aren’t D-list!” Ah, but this was the Detroit Justice League, featuring Vibe, Gypsy, Vixen (long before Brad Meltzer decided she was very very important) and Steel (not the black guy with the hammer, but instead the cyborg who doesn’t look like a cyborg). Sure, they also had the Martian Manhunter and Zatanna around, but let’s be honest: loser is as loser does. This is the Justice League that Aquaman organized and then promptly quit. That should tell you something right there.

And who are the stalwarts of the Cadre? Well!

Overmaster. An immortal alien, and the leader of the Cadre, responsible for creating all the other members. He was eventually killed by the second Amazing Man. By accident. This should tell you something about the Cadre right off the bat. (Admittedly, Overmaster did manage to kill Ice, but it’s not like that took.)

Nightfall. A college student who, when asked by the Overmaster if she wanted to become a supervillain, basically said “what the hell.” (Maybe she had a really vicious sociology exam the next day, and she totally hadn’t studied for it, because she was playing beer pong all night with the Kappa Kappa boys.) Nightfall’s power is to create a field of pure darkness which extinguishes all light. This was cool when Phantom Lady and Dr. Mid-Nite and Shadow Lass all did it, except that all of those superheroes can, you know, fight in the dark. Nightfall can not quite do this so much. Also, for some reason, she can fly. Why she can fly and most of the rest of the Cadre cannot is something that has never really been explained too much. Maybe the rest of them never thought to ask, and after the fact were too embarrassed.

Black Mass. A big fat guy with gravity powers. Black Mass is most notable for being shot through the head in The Joker: Last Laugh, and then somehow surviving both that and the subsequent black hole he created by accident. Black Mass is actually kind of badass accidentally. I mean, he got shot in the head, was rendered brain-dead, and somehow got better. That’s goddamned freaky, people.

Shatterfist. His gimmick is that if you squint he looks kind of like an evil luchador. Also he has fists that can, well, shatter things. Shatterfist got killed by Ice when she was taken over by Overmaster and went all crazy. After this, somebody else decided to become Shatterfist, despite the fact that there was no Overmaster around to give him shattering-fist powers. Presumably, given the remarkably generic nature of Shatterfist’s powers and costume (why does he have horns? Was the mask on sale?), he ordered them over the phone. “Hi, I’m an expert-level martial artist but I just don’t feel that’s enough to compete in today’s market. What do you have in the way of powers that could augment my martial arts abilities?… no, I don’t want to turn into a bear, thank you… no, not an eagle either… no, not a panther – look, could we skip past the turning into things powers and get to the fighting powers, please? I get that they’re thematic, but this phone call is long distance.”

Fastball. A former baseball player (of course!) who was given a robotic exoskeleton with which he could throw exploding balls. No, seriously. This is what he does, people. Also, he chews tobaccy. No reason, he just likes it. I am desperately trying to come up with something to say about this guy and I’m failing, because he’s so boring. Maybe there are robotic pole-vaulter exoskeletons as well? Robotic decathlete exoskeletons? “Fear… the Hurdler!” No, never mind, that’s boring too.

Shrike. You know Swift from the Authority? Like that. Except less interesting. She died in an issue of Suicide Squad, which – well, come on, you had to expect that at least one of these guys would die in an issue of Suicide Squad. Really, the amazing thing is that so many of them have survived for so long in this day and age, when you think about it.

Crowbar. Crowbar and his sex-pervert costume are notable in many ways. First off, Crowbar is one of the few villains in comics history to lose their trademark villain weapon in a card game. (Yes, this really happened.) Captain Cold, for example, knows not to gamble with his cold-gun, because Captain Cold is not a goddamned idiot, but Crowbar – well, Crowbar is special. He made his costume himself, you know, and he thinks it’s the coolest thing ever, because he made it up to look like a bunch of crowbars wrapped around his private areas! It’s thematic, you see.

You know, lame as they might be, the remaining members of the Cadre serve a purpose. Some villains are good for being the focal point of a lengthy story – not these guys. Some villains are good for when you need to have a rookie hero prove themselves – that’s not the Cadre either. The Cadre are the villains you need when you need to have a scene where your hero meets up with the other hero you want to write a teamup story for, but that other hero needs to be busy fighting bad guys to show that he deserves to be in your hero’s comic book on equal ground. The Cadre are the guys that other hero beats up. It is their purpose. And they are very good at getting their asses kicked.

Action Comics #309 is noteworthy among Silver Age Superman comics. The story is nothing particularly out-of-the-ordinary – your usual “Superman is being celebrated by the public and Lois/Lana use the opportunity to try and prove that he is also Clark Kent but he comes up with a clever method of fooling them” story. (The fact that a trope this complex is a stock Superman plot is one of the many things that is gloriously weird about the Silver Age.) Lois and Lana are prepared for all of Superman’s previous tricks and eliminate Superman Robots, Batman posing as Clark Kent, Chameleon Boy of the Legion of Super-Heroes shapeshifting into Superman, etc., by process of elimination.

But despite all of this, Superman and Clark Kent manage to appear in the same room, and naturally the secret is revealed in the final page of the story:

However, what is not generally known is that Edmond Hamilton wrote additional pages of the story, which were edited out. Although Curt Swan’s pencilled pages have, according to all reputable sources, been destroyed, I recently had the opportunity to see the original final pages of Hamilton’s script. Although I wasn’t able to get them to a scanner – the person in possession of the pages wasn’t willing to trust me with them – he did allow me to photograph them, and they are still mostly legible.

This is an important part of comics history, and I feel privileged to share it with you. It is worth remembering that the Silver Age was as often subversive as it was wacky.

continue reading "Revealing A Piece Of Comics History"

By popular request:

Your vastly improved dialogue to mgk@mightygodking.com with “Improved Martin And Lewis” as the subject header. The best ones get posted next week.

Sometimes you don’t hit that sweet spot right off the bat. Such is the case here with the Untouchables, who were originally known as the “Intangibles,” and who wore super-spacey-futurey outfits. This made them generic and boring, which is not where you want to go with a supervillainous team of Kitty Pryde wannabes.

And so the Intangibles went into DCU limbo for a long time, no doubt making snide fourth-wall-breaking references alongside Merryman, until some genius writer took a look at the concept and respun it. Hey, what’s another word for “intangible”? Well, “untouchable.” And waiiiiiit a minute…

And there you have it. Brilliant revision of a mediocre concept, done almost entirely out of a sense of style. Phasing gangsters with a dual-meaning name. It’s exactly what comics should be. Which is why I’m pretty sure we’ve never seen them since. (Heck, Karl Kesel reused the phasing villain concept when he created Loophole in Adventures of Superman. The Untouchables should sue! Or, since they are villains, shoot him. With phase-proof bullets.)

Sometimes you just have to stand back and admire simple creative elegance. This is one such time.

Ah, yes.

I was recently looking through scans_daily, and came across this post, wherein various posters debated the merits of Peanuts. One noteworthy poster claimed it was nowhere near as good as either Calvin and Hobbes or Dilbert. (Frigging Dilbert!)

People. Listen. This is not something I generally say, because I recognize there are many artistic works that I just do not “get” that I recognize are nonetheless of reasonable quality. (My Name Is Earl, anything Jane Austen wrote, most speed metal, et cetera.)

But if you do not like Peanuts, much less think it is in some way not good, then there are only two reasons this could be the case.

1.) You have not read much in the way of Peanuts and are ignorant.
2.) There is something the fuck wrong with you.

This is not up for discussion, unfortunately. These are your options. Sorry!

Also mentioned in this post, the popular – and wrong – concept that Peanuts was only good until an unspecified time and date (usually somewhere in the early 70s, although this is left indistinct by most people making the argument because they have no idea). True, Charles Schulz had a steady run of unparalleled greatness from 1954 until about 1978, and for the rest of his time spent drawing the strip was not quite that good (I mean, come on, that’s twenty-four years at the top of his game for fuck’s sake! Bill Watterson’s entire career only lasted ten! Berke Breathed burned out on a daily schedule after less than nine! Even Gary Larson only managed fifteen!), but even after his peak, Peanuts remained intelligent, introspective, and entertaining, with regular glimpses of where the strip had been in its finest years.

Just for the sake of argument, I’m going to present now a few Peanuts strips from the twilight years of his career.

continue reading "You’re Going Sadly Unrecognized In Certain Quarters, Charlie Brown"

From The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis #34.

Never try to start reading a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comic halfway through. It will only lead to sorrow.

WAIT

WHAT

DC COMICS ARE YOU SERIOUS

YOU NAMED A NAZI SUPERVILLAIN AFTER A POISON GAS USED TO KILL JEWS IN THE HOLOCAUST

BOY I SURE CAN’T WAIT TO SEE HIM FIGHT JOHNNY QUICK

WHAAAAAAAAAAAT

because WHAT WHAT WHAT

(although, one must admit, still better than Superboy Prime.)

Do you every worry about whether you could handle it if you were suddenly teleported to a world where humans and giant dogs communicated through telepathy and engaged in contests of sport?

Well, Rex doesn’t. Because he is the motherfucking Wonder Dog.

This is fucking brilliant.

One of the reasons I think the Waid/Kitson threeboot version of the Legion was fatally flawed from the outset is that its concept of making the Legion an oppositional force was wholly at odds with the core Legion concept, which tends to be utopian and status-quo defending rather than revolutionary and game-changing. Sure, you could argue that the revolutionary nature of the Legion was heroic in and of itself since they were rebelling against a stagnant society which needed them, but Waid started sabotaging this practically from the first issue by writing numerous Legionnaires’ characters as dilettantes, thugs or cynics. More realistic, maybe, but it’s the type of realism I think is somewhat misplaced in my comic book about teenaged superheroes in the far future.

Worse is that in practice, the revolutionary concept only really has one story hook to go with it, which is “Legion versus entrenched authority.” Comic creators of all stripes have come back to this trope again and again and largely without exception the stories are subpar. (Example of an exception which proves the rule: the v4 Earthwar saga, wherein the Legion fought entrenched authority that was corrupt and evil, namely the Dominion which had quietly taken over the Earth. That is fine. Of course then about twenty issues later we had the “outlaw Legion” arc, which sucked so hard it created its own portable vacuum.) The Legion, from my perspective, is interesting when they fight supervillains – the concept is primarily one with its roots in space opera and traditional superheroics, and I don’t think it lends itself well to stories attempting to deconstruct social politics in this regard. (In others, it can excel.)

Truthfully, I think a large part of the fondness for Geoff Johns’ “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Paul Levitz Legion” exists because the current Legion seems so fundamentally detached from the traditional superheroics typically associated with the team. Jim Shooter’s run has largely been marked by a vivid feeling of jumping through hoops to give the new conceptualization of the team lip service, resulting in the joyless vaguely-superheroic process stories that I loathe combined with soap-opera plotting.

But the answer to all of this is simple. It is painfully simple.

Shove the series forward a year.

After all, back during the “One Year Later” event post-Infinite Crisis (which almost entirely backfired, but that’s not really relevant here), the Legion was unique in that it didn’t advance a year, presumably because Waid didn’t want to bother and because in a series a thousand years apart from the rest of DC continuity there wasn’t any need. But a one-year gap gives a writer carte blanche to change the social status of the Legion as he sees fit, because in a superheroic universe a hell of a lot can happen in a year’s time.

What’s more, the one year leap creates a jump-on point for new readers, if handled correctly, and stimulates excitement among older readers. Legion fans may now debate the merits of the Keith Giffen v4 “five year gap” Legion, where Giffen (and Tom and Mary Bierbaum) shoved the series forward five years, but when they debate it they’re arguing about the execution of the story and whether the plotting and characterization were good or bad. I’ve never seen anybody suggest that the five year gap wasn’t a good idea in and of itself. Creating an instant in media res situation for all readers is exciting, and with proper followup can become epic.

Imagine, the first page of a new issue. A starfield on inky black, with thick white text covering the page, not unlike a still version of the scrolling text in Star Wars movies.

It is one year since [insert events of previous storyline here.]

The Legion of Super-Heroes is stretched to its breaking point. The Controller Virus decimated the Science Police in every major star system, and now the newly-named Science Pirates attack interstellar shipping routes with every passing cycle. Sensing weakness, criminals and outlaws now attack throughout the United Planets constantly. Only the Legion stands between them and the starvation of every outlying frontier colony on the Rimward Fringe, thanks to a desperate United Planets giving them full enforcement authority.

And Brainiac Five has been missing for seven months.

Once upon a time, there was Aquaman. And comics fans looked down upon Aquaman, and they saw that he was Good.

Well, not good exactly, but tolerable. In that way that, like, Poindexter from Revenge of the Nerds was tolerably entertaining. Sure, Poindexter wasn’t Lewis or Anthony Edwards or Booger or Takashi or the gay black guy, but when he was onscreen, you didn’t actively hate him. Like you hated Ogre. Oooooh, how we all hated Ogre! Until he became a good guy in the sequel. Or like how we hated Ted McGinley’s smug jock, until in the third movie (yes, there was a third movie, and a fourth! They even got James Cromwell to come back for the fourth movie? Why? Blackmail!) when we found out that secretly he liked using MS Office.

I am getting away from my point here, which is that although Poindexter was not particularly compelling or anything as characters go, it was funny when his crotch went up and down of its own accord. And then he played electric violin and that was pretty cool.

Anyhow, Aquaman is like the Poindexter of the DC universe. He is not a nerd or anything (he will kick your ass underwater and sometimes his hand is a hook, and do you want to gamble that you get him on a no-hook day? I thought not), but there is no large group of Aquafans desperately demanding the return of Topo as the aquatic equivalent of a furry or anything like that. (Although we did in fact get that.) People just say “huh, Aquaman, all right then.”

I am still getting away from my point here, which really has little to do with Aquaman per se because this is about the Marine Marauder. Who is kind of like Aquaman, but with breasts because she is a woman person. And, interestingly – according to her writeup, anyhow – a lazy one, too! Because it looks like she didn’t invent her powers (talking to fish – sorry, “commanding sealife”), but instead stole them from her brother, who was also the Marine Marauder, although presumably not one with breasts. (Unless he is out of shape.) You would think that a Who’s Who writeup would try to explain these things more definitively, wouldn’t you? I mean, I bet if you touched Roy Thomas with this issue, he would start to burn upon contact, just because it’s so vague.

(Geoff Johns, meanwhile, would become compelled to explain how the Marine Marauder fits into his 328957-part History Of Everything In The DC Universe Ever.)

But I like Marine Marauder. Because she is a girl who decided, from an early age, that she wanted to be rich without doing any work, and so chose the obvious path of becoming a marine biologist and then using fish to rob cruise ships. I’m sorry, but any girl who decides upon that on a life path has to be insane in bed, and as we all know, the only reasonable capacity for judging the value of a female fictional character is how good she would be in the sack. (Especially when her costume essentially consists of arrows pointing at her erogenous zones.) Hence:

Also she has a nice costume, and pretty hair. Why does her costume have a mohawk on it when she has nice hair? That doesn’t make sense. Someone get her a personal shopper.