Now, I know that Tomahawk is a perfectly respectable Golden Age character who lasted for over a dozen years as a feature in various DC anthology comics and then had his own title which lasted for twenty-two. He had a great villain and a bunch of unimpressive or ill-considered spinoffs, so you know he was popular. Basically, he is an important part of comics history.

That having been said, I look at this picture and just EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW and that ruins it completely. Tough break, Tomahawk. Next time, don’t be so amazingly creepy.

I’m not actually reading DC Comics any more – the combination of moral ickiness re: Alan Moore and the new comics just mostly being shit is enough for them not to get my comics dollars any more, beyond a few collections. The final Hitman trade paperback is due out in August and I believe that will be the last DC comic I purchase for the foreseeable future, because I pretty much own all the stuff I will ever want from DC ever, because they were good enough to have produced pretty much all of it years and years ago. Maybe they will do some deluxe Legion reprints of the Giffbaum era at some point and I will buy those.1

But someone handed me the first three issues of Earth 2 last week, and – well, they’re shitty comics, of course. I mean, it’s great that they’re setting up Alan Scott as basically Earth-2’s Superman equivalent, except he’s gay. But all this means, in practice, is that they replace a woman in a refrigerator with a gay lover on an exploding train; that the comic is slightly more progressive doesn’t make it not-shitty. It’s just a non-shitty note in a shitty comic. But the Nu52 version of Solomon Grundy shows up at the end of the third issue, and it is basically a microcosm of everything I now hate about DC Comics.

The new Solomon Grundy appears to be some sort of avatar of death – he bears an irritating resemblance to the revamped design of Necron that showed up in Blackest Night, with leather bondage straps and skirt-trousers and things like that (and has it really been over two years since that awful, no-good crossover finally ended? It seems like it was just yesterday that its unflagging shittiness was new to us). He is an avatar of death because Earth-2’s Green Lantern is, sort of, an avatar of life.

This is stupid. This is bad everything-is-connected comics writing. It’s all the more startling coming from James Robinson, who wrote a damn good Solomon Grundy when he used Grundy in Starman, but what every comics writer seems to be saying these days is that DC comics are basically written by the editorial staff now, because god forbid they trust some hack like George Perez or John Rozum to write a damn superhero comic book. But regardless of who is actually writing this, it is bad, because Solomon Grundy is not an avatar of death. Nobody wants to read about Solomon Grundy being an avatar of death. What people want out of Solomon Grundy being in a comic is for him to be, when you get right down to it, a off-brand version of the Hulk who is usually a bad guy.

Seriously, this shit isn’t hard. Solomon Grundy is a copy of the Hulk that lets DC Comics write the Hulk into stories without having to negotiate anything with Marvel. That’s the entire fucking point of the character. He can be a vicious cunning Hulk (like in the Golden Age stories where he first showed up) or he can be a dumb savage Hulk (like he was in The Long Halloween), or he can be a gentle cute and cuddly Hulk (like in Starman). But that’s who he is. That’s who the fans expect him to be. There’s no reason to try and tie him into the rest of your superhero universe’s pre-determined theory; really, if you’re writing a superhero universe and everything ties back to one central origin element for everybody, you’re probably doing something wrong.2 If you try to write Grundy as being anything else, you just wasting paper and ink on your own lousy concept.

I mean, it’s not like anybody was going to think Mr. Avatar of Death was an awesome idea if you called him “Death-O” or something.3 That’s how you know it’s a shitty idea: whenever DC knows an idea is shitty, they grab one of their existing intellectual properties from the Not Bein’ Used Trunk4 and awkwardly slap it onto the shitty idea in the hopes that fanboys will say “oh, it’s the new version of [NAME], I loved the old version, let’s give this a try.” Granted, they do this whenever they think they have a good idea too, because, well, DC Comics. But it’s more egregious when it’s something like this – when not two years ago DC put out a nigh-unreadable Solomon Grundy miniseries that tried to incorporate Grundy into the larger DC comics mythos and which was a horrible creative misfire, and now they’re doing it again but even moreso.

The bottom line is this: Grundy works best when you keep him simple. He’s a sorta-undead sorta-plantman Hulk. You don’t have to explain it any more than that. You don’t buy a comic with Solomon Grundy in it because you want a deep plot about Grundy’s origin or motivations. You buy a comic with Solomon Grundy in it because you want to see him punch the good guy in the face and then get punched in the face by the good guy (or something along those lines). The fact that DC no longer seems to understand this is a large part of why I – a DC fan since I was six – no longer buy their comics.

STRICTLY FOR CLASSIC GRUNDY.

1. V4 LSH is something I keep meaning to discuss, mostly because of Giffen’s use of the ninepanel grid – now that I’ve experimented personally with ninepanel storytelling, I find the format fascinating and keep meaning to return to it for a dedicated long-form story. But I digress. [↩]
2. Or you are Garth Ennis writing The Boys, which is, by the way, probably his fourth long-form comics masterpiece. More on this in another post sometime. [↩]
3. Actually, given the 90s ethos currently pervading DC, I guess he would be something like “Grymm.” TO THE EXTREEEEEEME. [↩]
4. Which I believe is in Paul Levitz’ old publisher’s office. [↩]

When Crisis on Infinite Earths happened, one of its effects was that the Golden Age versions of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were no longer available for membership in the All-Star Squadron, which was at the time still an important and going concern as a comics property. DC’s solution was to relaunch All-Star Squadron as The Young All-Stars, creating a subteam of youth characters within the All-Star Squadron which would feature their new replacements for the Golden Age trinity: Fury for Wonder Woman, Flying Fox for Batman and “Iron” Munro for Superman.

This didn’t work all that well. In retrospect, there was the problem that if these three characters were intended to replace Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, putting them on an 1940s version of the Teen Titans probably wasn’t the way to go about doing that. After all, several definitive All-Star Squadron stories – most importantly “The Ultra War,” which is probably the greatest of all Squadron stories and the one where the Golden Age Superman’s feud with the Ultra-Humanite is absolutely central to the plot – rely on the presence of the big three, so having a “new trinity” that doesn’t address the continuity problemss of removing the “old trinity” became a headache, not least because Roy Thomas was writing this and whenever Roy Thomas couldn’t address a continuity problem in a comic he was writing, he got cranky.

But it also didn’t work because the replacement characters were problematic. Flying Fox was not bad at all. Fury was kind of a mess. “Iron” Munro, meanwhile, fell in somewhere between the two. The character has a simple and appealing visual design to him – the superhero costume as stripped down to tight shirt and pair of pants, twenty years before anybody thought that Superboy should wear jeans, and in some ways a callback to Doc Savage. (e.g. this cover.) It’s pulpy, in the ways that pulp is good.

But he never really integrated within the fabric of the DCU WW2 setting in a way that felt organic, much in the way that the All-Star Squadron never really did post-Crisis. (Really, the franchise was dealt a serious blow by Crisis, forced to re-imagine itself somewhat, and never recovered from it. You will note that up until the nu52, references to the Golden Age since Crisis are almost always about the Justice Society rather than the Squadron, to the point that the Johnny Quicks and Robotmen of the world are often referred to as Society members.) This wasn’t for lack of trying: “Iron” Munro was revealed to be Damage’s father, was referenced by Superman as being Clark’s idol when he was a kid – but it always came across as minor elements of DC saying “hey, you should really care about this guy!” rather than making people really care about him.

Which is a bit of a shame, because I still think the character has a visual flair to him that could really work. But he doesn’t. Not yet.

Night Slayer is one of the many examples of the school of Batman villain that’s more old-school 70s-style Batman than modern Batman: the guy who wants to be as good as Batman at being Batmannish, but evil. There are others, of course: Black Spider, the Wrath,1 KGBeast and Prometheus are all from this “hey let’s sit down and make a Batman villain” train of thought.

And, honestly, most of them are crap, because the entire point of Batman is that he’s more or less an ultimate paragon of humanity. None of these guys are threatening, because you know Batman is going to win. I mean, come on. Night Slayer knows martial arts and can “blend into shadow.” KGBeast has a gun-arm. Prometheus is Evil Batman Squared. Nobody particularly cares about any of them (except KGBeast, who somewhere along the line got chic for being sort of corny in an Old School Comix sort of way and because “Ten Nights of the Beast” is a pretty good Batman story – but seriously, everything since then has been mucho downhill).

The anticlimax with Batman’s inevitable victory with these guys is somehow greater than the inevitability of him beating the Joker or Two-Face or anybody else from his usual gallery of Arkham psychotics. Although you know Batman is going to win in those comics too, ultimately any story about fighting somebody really psycho-crazy is, at root, a horror story, and the point of a horror story is the experience being appropriately ghoulish, creepy or weird. It’s not the end; it’s the journey. But when Batman fights Evil Skilled Person, the journey is that much less interesting, because not only is Batman going to win, but most of the time Batman’s going to win and he’s going to win on his home turf. I mean, you can’t outfight Batman. You can only try to out-weird him, most of the time. Which means that Batman stories versus non-crazies are the Batman equivalent of process stories more than anything else, and nobody really gets excited about process stories.

The exception that proves the rule here is Bane. I’m firmly in Tim O’Neil’s camp on this one: Bane is one of Batman’s best villains, and I’d go further and argue that he is the best Batman villain.2 Bane is the best Batman villain of all because he beat Batman. Straight-up, no qualifications, he beat Batman. Yeah, Batman eventually came back and managed to tie it up; big deal, because nobody else ever put him down on the count before. Because Bane beat Batman by, essentially, being Batman – smart, planning, physically extremely capable, nigh-inhuman supply of willpower3 – his victory was never an Arkham horror story. It was a straight-up Batman-versus-a-criminal story, except Batman lost, and lost definitively.

The last few issues of Secret Six have been fantastic because Bane decided it was time to screwing around and get back to doing what he does best: e.g. beating Batman to prove he’s the best. When Batman finds out about this, what does he do? He calls in every superhero he can find, because Batman knows Bane can beat him. Does Batman call for help when he has to fight the Joker again? No, he just goes out and beats up the Joker, because it’s Thursday and that’s what Batman does on Fridays. When Bane shows up, Batman has to stop himself from pissing his pants.

And because Bane is so good, he just makes all the other “normal” Batman villains that much worse.

1. Taking a moment here to admit that the Wrath was actually a really great concept and had a great story, but was executed so well that logically, by any sense of narrative, he had to die at the end, and there endeth the Wrath. [↩]
2. Riddler is my favorite, but that’s not the same thing. [↩]
3. FREE STORY IDEA FOR DC COMICS: Bane. Green Lantern ring. Done. [↩]

The problem with the Spectre is that he is shackled down by continuity.

This wasn’t how it used to be. It used to be that the Spectre was sort of awesome because you could do anything you wanted to do with him. Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson had him fight demon lords using whole planets as weapons and travel through time to fight pirate ghosts in a dozen reincarnations. Neal Adams kept that high adventure, but started telling stories where the Spectre fought more horrific evils. Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo had him straight-up murdering criminals in cruel ways and telling pure horror stories. Doug Moench made him an occult detective again. John Ostrander went to the Christian theology well, again and again. Not for nothing in The Books of Magic does John Constantine snark about how the Spectre’s power levels change all the time.

But it’s that Ostrander run that nailed things in. Prior to the Ostrander run, what the Spectre did and was – these were flexible and mutable things. He was a ghost. No, he was a spirit possessing a dead man. No, he was a spirit working in context with a dead man. No, he was all of that at the same time. However, Ostrander’s take – that the Spectre was God’s Angel of Vengeance possessing a dead human as its avatar – has become the standard.

The problem is that Ostrander’s Spectre worked wonderfully for Ostrander because Ostrander wanted to write a specific set of stories about human belief and the inherent problems that the idea of a vengeful God poses with Christian dogma. That was great when he was playing off in his own corner of the DC Universe and just letting everybody else do their thing. It’s not so great when his rules for the Spectre have become unbending canon because the Ostrander Spectre is ridiculously powerful and becomes an obstacle or menace rather than a character when used by writers not as skilled as Ostrander, which is to say most people.

And this is disappointing because there’s no reason one should feel constrained to keep doing with the Spectre what Ostrander did. After all, one of Ostrander’s plot points was that the Spectre replaced Eclipso as the Angel of Vengeance, which is a reminder that God is basically arbitrary from a mortal standpoint. You can take that as far as you want. Any writer working on a Spectre comic should feel completely empowered to do anything they want to the Spectre and just say “well, because God did it.” Hell, bring back Percival Popp the Super-Cop if you like. All that should be a Spectre writer’s goal is to avoid doing rehashed Ostrander stories, because you can’t really improve on them.

(And although I like Crispus Allen as a character, the Spectre looks stupid with a goatee.)

My first encounter with Signalman came in an issue of Justice League of America I read when I was about five – specifically a two-parter where he was part of the Ultra-Humanite’s Secret Society of Super-Villains. (This was one of the periodic JLA/JSA teamups which were so awesome at the time and which modern-day comics writers try to duplicate, not understanding that once the JLA and JSA are basically neighbours the idea of the JLA/JSA teamup loses a lot of its cachet.) In this story, he beat up Batman. Batman. (In the same issue the Monocle beat up Hawkman, which was awesome.) And the way Signalman beat Batman was brilliant: he hypnotized a crowd of innocents and let them beat up Batman, using Batman’s unwillingness to harm innocents against him in a sort of Bronze Age-version of Bane using Batman’s own dedication against him. Clearly this was a major player!

Imagine my disappointment years later when I did some checking up and found out that Signalman was a Golden Age chump of a bad guy who wasn’t anywhere near as awesome-looking when George Perez wasn’t drawing him and who was basically a lesser equivalent of the Riddler, except worse because the Riddler’s riddles were usually at least reasonably difficult whereas Signalman’s were just stupid. And let’s be honest, at least the Riddler has a sense of style: he wears nice suits. Signalman wears fugly red-and-yellow tights, with diagonally striped underwears, and a cowled cape with “signals” all over it.

And Signalman finally figured out that warning Batman ahead of time that you were going to commit a crime was stupid, what did he do? He adopted a new identity: the Blue Bowman. And then he tried to beat Green Arrow at super-archery. What the hell, Signalman. What the hell.

A rating earned mostly by the time George Perez drew him and he was briefly kind of awesome.

…and then there was that time DC decided that the space cartoon chipmunk who was a Green Lantern needed a enemy who was sort of the space cartoon chipmunk version of Cobra Commander.

And it was glorious.

Bloom County was originally about Milo Bloom, a wisecracking kid in glasses, and his family with whom he lived in a boardinghouse. Then one day, supporting character Binkley got himself a penguin as a pet, and we all know what happened next: Opus eventually became the flagship character of the strip and Berke Breathed’s entire career.

Brainiac Five is, in that sense, the Opus of the Legion of Super-Heroes. After all, the Legion stories were originally the province of Superboy and his three friends Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl – but for a very, very long time those three characters were all bland milquetoasts, and not simply because of the Silver Age’ tendency towards whitebreadiness: Rokk and Garth were both pretty bland for decades after their creation, and Imra only came into her own late in Paul Levitz’ run as “the one who was willing to go further to get the job done,” which is pretty basic but is at least a character note. Eventually – and primarily in the reboots – Rokk became Captain America of the Future and Garth became the hothead, and those three finally had personalities, but it was too late for them to reassert their prominence as the founders.

Mostly this was because Brainiac Five showed up. Brainy has become pricklier in recent years – the beginning of the reboot, where he was downright antisocial, was probably the apex of that – but the character, even in the Silver Age, has always had a streak of self-importance and ego that is nonetheless appealing because you have to admit he’s got a point: he really is the smartest superhero in comics, smarter than ten Reed Richardses put together, and if he occasionally loses patience with Element Lad you can’t blame him for that.1

But also it’s appealing because you understand where Brainy is coming from. After all, his name is Brainiac Five: most incarnations of the character have established that he’s the “only good Brainiac,” with all of the other ones being evil universe-conquering android dictators.2 Despite being the engine for most of the team’s plans and ideas – when Brainiac Five is stumped, you know the team is really, really in trouble, because he’s their go-to guy for having a solution to whatever evil they have to beat – he’s always proven himself to be absolutely balls-awful at being the leader of the team.

It’s interesting, because most other characters who become “most popular” among fans (and Brainy is, at this point, far and away the most popular Legionnaire ever) eventually become the de facto leader of the team: see how Wolverine has grown from being just the team berserker into the respected elder statesman of the X-Men, to the point where the next X-crossover has him openly challenging Cyclops for leadership of all mutants everywhere.3 But despite the fact that the Legion’s greatest successes are all more or less driven by Brainiac Five and he’s the most popular character, he’s definitively not the leader of the team.

You can of course explain his popularity pretty easy: he’s the Batman of the Legion in terms of style, the thinker, the planner. Nerds always love thinkers and planners, because the idea of not having any superpower other than “I’m smarter than you” is one most nerds imagine themselves to already have.4 But he’s usually also the idealist: the guy who refuses to exploit the Metal Men once he realizes they’re sentient. Nerds like that too. He’s surpassed being a bit of a social outcast, but is still clearly his own man: nerds like that as well. And he gets to be a bit of a sarcastic dickhead and get away with it because his smarts are so necessary, and you’d better believe nerds love that idea. You can make an argument that Brainiac Five is in many ways the ultimate mirror for nerd self-flattery…

…except, of course, that he’s got a history of mental instability.

…and his greatest failure – being unable to save Supergirl, the woman he loved – puts the lie to his “I can solve any problem” reputation.

…and he’s quite clearly unhappy most of the time.

That’s why Brainiac Five is such a great character: he takes all of those nerd fantasies, embodies them, and then destroys them by demonstrating their irrelevance. It doesn’t matter that he once temporarily destroyed the embodiment of a conceptual end of the universe by smashing it in the face with a different conceptual embodiment of the end of the universe: at the end of the day he’s still, all things considered, a very sad person. And that’s a pretty great thing.

(Also: I love super-smart characters because they can engage with essentially anybody and be ready for it. You just know that Brainy knows of the existence of the Endless, for example. He might be irritated that they exist, but he can handle the idea that vague concepts can be personalized. Wouldn’t you love to see him chat with Destruction some time?)

1. Partially because Element Lad is such a douche. [↩]
2. As someone quipped early in the first reboot: “What, was Darkseid Two taken?” [↩]
3. See also: Batman. [↩]
4. Which usually they don’t, but. [↩]

I don’t want anybody to get me wrong when I praise the DC Comics version of the O.S.S., which appeared in old war comics – mostly G.I. Combat – and were, well, basically war comics. War comics geared more towards espionage, obviously, with all the cool fripperies that World War II-era spying had on the side. But, yes, by and large, bog-standard war comics, really only noteworthy by the fact that Control – the dude with the pipe – was actually really awesome both visually and as a character, a predecessor in a lot of ways to the modern incarnation of Nick Fury (who’s become a lot different than the 60s-era Nick Fury, who was a glamourous secret agent rather than a byzantine spymaster). But other than that, nothing beyond perfectly good war comics.

But I love the idea that there’s more to work with here. Basically, what you have the potential for here is the World War II equivalent of Greg Rucka’s Checkmate: an espionage and spy comic set in a superhero universe. Except that here you’ve got the Golden Age equivalent: a spymaster working with a variety of secret agents to defeat Nazis (and the Dragon King, why not?) in the secret war-beneath-the-war. The tone would be pulpier than Checkmate is, because spying just plain used to be pulpier in the old days: Sten guns hidden in bushes, spy cameras baked into loaves of bread. But it’s the DCU, so you’d get the little touches that would make it worthwhile: an ongoing series of missions to attempt to seize the Spear of Destiny and/or Holy Grail, for example, to break the Axis’ magical wall preventing American superheroes from attacking them. Or maybe an undercover op to destroy the War Wheel Mark II before it can be deployed at Arnhem. Control could have any number of great and relatively underused Golden Age characters to call upon: the Crimson Avenger, the Jester, the Invisible Hood, Giovanni Zatara, G.I. Robot…

…the more I think about this, the more I want to write it.

I have always loved the Rocket Reds, and the reason is simple: they are the Barry Horowitz of the DC Universe.

Barry Horowitz, for those not in the know, was a professional wrestler and probably the last truly great jobber – the designated loser, the one who showed up to get his ass kicked by the up-and-coming star or the veteran needing the easy win to re-establish himself. He jobbed out for twenty years in the WWF before it became the WWE, and he was a master at not only making his opponents look good at kicking his ass, but at getting the crowd to love it when they kicked his ass. Barry Horowitz with his trademark self-pat-on-the-back, always entirely undeserved and always pointedly obnoxious, who always got pinned. Of course, over time the crowds came to love Horowitz, because you had to recognize skill when you see it, which eventually led to the “HOROWITZ WINS!” angle, wherein he finally managed a win and the crowd went nuts.

Which brings me back to the Rocket Reds. It’s worth remembering that the Rocket Reds were, for the most part, not a very pleasant bunch when they first arrived: Rocket Red #7 – the “classic” Rocket Red we all remember from the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League – was an exception to the rule. Most of the Rocket Reds were portrayed as clueless peons of an oppressive regime. And so they remained… until they weren’t that any more, because dammit, there is something likeable about the Rocket Reds. The Rocket Reds somehow have become something like the Russian ideal of a superhero – soldiers rather than vigilantes, sense of duty to the state, predilection for getting their ass kicked but in a stoic, we’ll-wear-you-down-eventually sort of way. In the Villains United special during Infinite Crisis, which was really the high point of the whole misguided exercise, Gail Simone has former Rocket Reds busting into their old armory to suit up in Rocket Red armor to go fight the army of villains, all the while chatting calmly about how this will most likely get them killed, and the humour of the scene just feels very grimly Russian in a way that’s very essential.

Nowadays the Rocket Reds are more or less a required element whenever one does a DC comic that might involve Russia. It’s almost impossible for there not to be Rocket Reds – it would be like going to Gorilla City and not having sentient gorillas. (If and when Batman ever goes to hire the Batman of Moscow, that Russian Batman should be a former Rocket Red.) Because the Rocket Reds might be the guys who get their asses kicked so the real heroes can look good – but they’ve got such a great way of getting their asses kicked that you can’t but help rooting for them.

Firestorm suffers from a unique problem in comics, which is that he’s too powerful.

This is actually a rare thing to have happen. People complain that Superman is too powerful, but Superman gets an out because he’s Superman and his stories are often about the problems of being that powerful, particularly in relation to his friends and family, who aren’t.

But Firestorm is actually more powerful than Superman in a lot of ways. He doesn’t have the strength, but he’s pretty tough (and can turn intangible and doesn’t need to breathe and can absorb energy blasts); he’s got blasty powers and he can transmute matter at will (the “no organic matter” clause has been revoked, I think, three times now). This last one, as I have argued previously, makes him basically a godlike being. Which is fine, because superheroes can be that thing –

– but not all of them. And this is Firestorm’s problem: he is redundant, because he is designed to occupy the Superman slot in a universe where Superman already exists. Recall – as a way of demonstrating how this is the case – that in Superman Forever one of the Superman-analogues who comes along on the adventure is an alternate-universe Captain Atom who is basically a less immature Firestorm with a different costume.

It’s not an accident that all of Firestorm’s best character moments tend to come in stories where the really big guns have been taken out and he’s the only one left (JLA: Obsidian Age) or where the stakes are so big that Firestorm’s insane power level just makes him one of half-a-dozen godlike beings necessary to save the planet. (Crisis On Infinite Earths is the exemplar of this story type – and probably Firestorm’s best moment as a character, since in that story he basically becomes the Spider-Man of the godlike superhero set and gets most of the really good lines. I think this, along with some of the early 80s Justice Leagues where the JLA was fighting really high-stakes battles, are the best comics Firestorm has ever been in – and his character in them also informed the later early development of Kyle Rayner as a character. But I digress.)

The other way out of the “too powerful” trap is to up the scale and use the character in cosmic stories – see Green Lantern or Thor, for example. But Firestorm isn’t any good for this because he’s too grounded, because Firestorm’s weakness is that he’s too stupid to use his powers effectively, because understanding the elemental composition of matter is actually tricky. (At least, this is the case of the Ronnie Raymond incarnation, who seems to be the pre-eminent version of the character – even though I would argue the Jason Rusch version is superior.) It’s the sort of weakness that’s simultaneously a really clever idea and a really bad idea, since it’s original but also keeps Firestorm out of truly cosmic stories (because he’s a dummy) and instead fighting useless twats like these.

At this point I think the character is effectively mired in the dogshit he’s stuck in and needs a radical story revamp in order to be usable for the future, but that’s me. Shame. It’s an excellent costume.

Hoo boy.

You know that Colonel Computron dates back to a certain time: that brief moment of about five or six years when computers were both becoming increasingly familiar to the general public, but were still basically considered to be magic. His computer-suit gives him super-strength and super-intelligence because computers can do anything!

Plus, he looks godawful. Carmine Infantino was always the Silver Age artist who felt like he wanted to start the Golden Age over again: just look at his character designs. Other than the modern Flash costume, they are mostly terrible: either garish and ridiculous (Trickster, Pied Piper, Top, Rainbow Raider) or minimalist and dull (Heat Wave, Weather Wizard, Mirror Master). He only hit the sweet spot occasionally, with Captain Cold or Abra Kadabra, and Colonel Computron is far, far away from the sweet spot; on the page he manages to be just a big boring barely-articulated silver suit.

Of course, this means that, being a pathetic lame villain best relegated to the backbins of comic history, Colonel Computron was brought back multiple times, although eventually they just started calling him “Computron” because, I don’t know, maybe that was less pathetic if you looked at it the right way. I’m pretty sure he got killed off in an issue of Checkmate. I’m sure that made the comic FIVE TIMES AS THRILLING.

Ghost has become a reasonably popular supporting characters in superhero comics over the past few years. Unfortunately for this Ghost, I’m talking about Marvel’s Ghost, the Iron Man villain and Thunderbolt. DC’s Ghost, on the other hand, languishes in relative obscurity.

Which is a pity because in a lot of ways they’re the same character: scientist/engineer invents phasing thingy, uses it to steal stuff, attracts ire of Forces of Status Quo (Iron Man/Captain Atom), feud ensues. Of course, Marvel Ghost arrived later and with a more inspired creative team (the classic Michelinie/Layton run on Iron Man, versus later Steve Ditko during his Charlton run – and not everything could be Blue Beetle or the Question, frankly, which is one of the reasons Captain Atom has always been the Michael Biehn of superheroes), which made a lot of difference; his gradual shift of emphasis from thief to anticorporate terrorist has helped rejuvenate the character and make him more relevant.

DC Ghost, in comparison, has languished as part of DC’s back catalog. You can almost see the ticket he’s holding in his hand that says “due to be killed off by another supervillain who needs to look badass, 2014.” Because these days that is just how DC rolls; there won’t be any attempt to use the character because someone like Ghost is just a costume to passed from nameless baddy to nameless baddy, like Black Spider or Hyena. It’s a stylistic choice, and not an indefensible one (after all, if you want your story to focus on a hero and his life, the villain can literally be just an empty mask), but I’m not going to pretend I’m fond of the approach.

Pulsar Stargrave has always been, to me, one of the criminally underused ideas in Legion history, for a few reasons. He has an awesome name, for starters. He’s got a great look, too: a neo-Roman togacape, dressed in imperial white, give the impression of someone who knows he’s in charge but it’s stripped down enough that you know he can rumble if he wants to do so. And, of course, he’s green, which lets you have an ambiguous tie to Colu and/or Brainiac Five if you want (and you should).

Of course the net result of all this is that Pulsar Stargrave has barely been touched. He’s been used barely at all – and one of those times was in the Legion of Substitute Heroes one-shot where he was more or less just played for laughs by Keith Giffen as a generic Big Bad suitable for antagonizing against Matter-Eater Lad.1 On top of that, his powers are vague in all the wrong ways. He’s Generic 70s Cosmic Baddie and he doesn’t have to be.

I think there’s a lot of potential here that hasn’t been tapped. You can make Pulsar Stargrave Brainiac 7, for example, a Brainiac from the future come to conquer easier temporal targets. Or make him the Anti-Matter Universe’s equivalent of Brainiac 5 – the logical endpoint of what would happen if the smartest person in the universe was completely amoral, self-interested, and power-hungry. (You could also give him an evil goatee that way, and don’t think for a second that this wouldn’t be completely awesome.) The point is that right now Pulsar Stargrave is just waiting for a good idea to show up and use him as its vehicle, and he would make an awesome vehicle in that respect.

1. Did he show up in R.E.B.E.L.S. recently? Did I imagine that? I’m not sure. [↩]

Mr. Mxyzptlk is a great character because he effectively inverts the entire Superman storytelling model.

Superman stories are in many ways about God. Superman can be capricious (as he often was with his tricks in the Silver Age). Superman can be merciful. Superman can be compassionate. Of course the Superman-as-God metaphor has been stretched awfully thin at this point so I won’t go into further detail on that score, but you get the point: most Superman stories are about a being more powerful than humanity ever can be.

And then Mxyzptlk comes along and now Superman isn’t squat. This is because while Superman is a dandy metaphor for God, Mxyzptlk, for all practical intents and purposes, is God. Mxyzptlk can’t be beaten, stopped or destroyed; he only goes away when you satisfy the rule he made up on a whim. And, like God, he’s basically unknowable; you can see aspects of Mxyzptlk but never the whole.

There’s Chubby Purple Bowler Hat Mzyzptlk, who’s probably the nicest and kindest version in the “trickster god as secret friend of humanity” model (and indeed that version of Mxyzptlk claimed to have been Anansi, Coyote and Loki). There’s Skinny Orange Skirt Mxyzptlk, who’s meaner, nastier, and inevitably self-impressed with his own schtick; where Chubby Bowler Hat will show up as often to help as much as play, Skinny Orange Skirt isn’t really interested in helping anybody. For a brief streak there was that version of Mxyzptlk that was an extremely evil and nasty pair of twins (which instantly reminded everybody that Alan Moore had a very terrifying point when he suggested that Evil Mxyzptlk would be the greatest of all Superman foes).

(The fact that Mxyzptlk is a good character for postmodern commentary on the story he’s appearing in is, if anything, a bit of a crutch at this point: it was cute to have Mxy chat with DC editorial once or twice, but at this point when you’ve got Mxyzptlk, Animal Man, Deadpool, the Joker, Squirrel Girl and god knows how many other characters all knowing they’re inside a comic book it gets old fast.)

And as has been demonstrated on other levels, Mxy works as a foil for just about any character. He’s best for Superman, of course, because of how he turns Superman stories inside out. But “placating a capricious god who will happily cause you to lose whatever dignity you might possess” is a story that works for anybody.1

You don’t want to overload on Mxy. He’s best in small doses, every once in a while, and he should never again be used as a prop to make somebody else look scarier. (“Emperor Joker” was enough, but then DC decided to let Superboy Prime beat up Mxy to get additional superpowers for some reason and that was just one more reason that Countdown was the worst thing DC has ever published.) You can’t downplay God if you want him to have full impact when he does show up, after all.

(Seriously, though, bring back the twins aspect. They were scary as hell.))

1. Granted, Batman works better with Bat-Mite because Batman loses his dignity much faster with a super-fan rather than a super-foe, but that’s just tailoring. [↩]