THE CRIME TAILOR: Okay, maybe you should explain this to me again.
OVERTHROW: I am a superb jai alai player and I wish to use that skill to become a supervillain.
THE CRIME TAILOR: …I’m not seeing it.
OVERTHROW: Come on, you do this all the time. Javelin is just a guy who didn’t even win an Olympic medal and he said you gave him very good stuff. I want good stuff.
THE CRIME TAILOR: Have you ever won an Olympic medal?
OVERTHROW: That’s entirely besides the point.
THE CRIME TAILOR: So no, then.
OVERTHROW: Jai alai isn’t an Olympic sport. If it was, I would certainly have won many medals.
THE CRIME TAILOR: Fair enough. So how do you want to do crimes using jai alai?
OVERTHROW: Well, I was think maybe the balls could explode? That’s good, right?
THE CRIME TAILOR: Sounds doable. Let me see what I’ve got in storage…

(The CRIME TAILOR goes into the back room. OVERTHROW stands around listening to the lite jazz in the background.)

THE CRIME TAILOR: Okay, so I got good news and I got bad news.
OVERTHROW: You don’t have any exploding jai alai balls?
THE CRIME TAILOR: Well, I was going to have to modify some exploding baseballs anyway to make those, but I forgot that the exploding baseballs all got sold last week.
OVERTHROW: To who?
THE CRIME TAILOR: Someone who blew up.
OVERTHROW: Oh.
THE CRIME TAILOR: You have to be careful with exploding baseballs.
OVERTHROW: I understand that. So no exploding balls. What are my other options?
THE CRIME TAILOR: Well, that’s the clever bit. See, I’ve got this small plasma projector that I haven’t been able to sell.
OVERTHROW: Plasma projector? Like, blood?
THE CRIME TAILOR: No, as in “superheated gas.”
OVERTHROW: That sounds dangerous.
THE CRIME TAILOR: I’m sorry, I thought you wanted to be a supervillain?
OVERTHROW: I didn’t say no. I’m just… waiting to hear how it works.
THE CRIME TAILOR: Well, normally plasma projectors are built into a gun or something, and the gun fires a big blast of superheated plasma.
OVERTHROW: Right. But this one is different?
THE CRIME TAILOR: This one basically makes a sphere of plasma.
OVERTHROW: …and then what?
THE CRIME TAILOR: That’s it.
OVERTHROW: So I would have a sphere of superheated gas in, what, my hand?
THE CRIME TAILOR: Well, I’m thinking I give you a… what do they call that scoop thing you wear in jai alai?
OVERTHROW: A xistera.
THE CRIME TAILOR: Right. We make one of those out of superdense metal. I’m thinking cargonite – durable, nearly unbreakable…
OVERTHROW: How heavy is it?
THE CRIME TAILOR: Fairly.
OVERTHROW: Would I still be able to do my jai alai tricks?
THE CRIME TAILOR: I’m sure. You might have to work out a bit, though.
OVERTHROW: I can handle that.
THE CRIME TAILOR: Okay, so now that we’ve got that worked out, how about your costume?
OVERTHROW: I think I will keep it simple. Jai alai uniform and a mask.
THE CRIME TAILOR: …not very supervillain-y, is it?
OVERTHROW: …well, what if we make it green?
THE CRIME TAILOR: All green, or do you want some highlights?
OVERTHROW: Maybe we could make the mask a different colour? Purple? I like purple.
THE CRIME TAILOR: …ehhh…
OVERTHROW: Is that in poor taste? Do they clash?
THE CRIME TAILOR: Not in supervillain fashion, no, but…
OVERTHROW: What?
THE CRIME TAILOR: Well, green and purple is kind of the Joker’s signature look.
OVERTHROW: Is that a problem?
THE CRIME TAILOR: Not for him it isn’t, if you get my drift.
OVERTHROW: …I think I’m fine with it.
THE CRIME TAILOR: It’s your funeral.
OVERTHROW: Or his!
THE CRIME TAILOR: Confidence is nice. Do you want the usual extras? Micro-kevlar padding, burn/tear resistant fabric…?
OVERTHROW: Yes. Also I would like some rocket boots.
THE CRIME TAILOR: Oh, hell. Look, kid, I’d be slacking on my duties as a tailor to super-criminals if I didn’t tell you that rocket boots are almost never a good idea.
OVERTHROW: I have heard the stories, but I think I would like them just in case.
THE CRIME TAILOR: Everybody says that, but do you know the number one cause of supervillain fatalities? It’s not the Suicide Squad. It’s rocket boots running out of fuel when you’re three stories up because you decided that having rocket boots meant you could fight Hawkman on his own turf.
OVERTHROW: But I will not be fighting Hawkman, I do not think.
THE CRIME TAILOR: Who are you planning to fight?
OVERTHROW: Blue Beetle?
THE CRIME TAILOR: …in that case might I recommend the Ski-Hi Mark 12s? Definitely the best rocket boot on the market right now, with a ten minute non-flammable combination fuel supply.
OVERTHROW: Are they worth it?
THE CRIME TAILOR: When it comes to rocket boots, I think you want to spend the extra money and not get some terrible surplus gear.

Hey, do you remember when you liked Deathstroke? I do. He showed up every once in a while, was incomparably badass, and then disappeared for a bit. And that was good. Why can’t we have that?

After all, Deathstroke’s core concept is one that doesn’t really lend itself to extended storytelling (which is one of the reasons his series was so lackluster, run for 65 issues though it did). He’s an ultracompetent mercenary. Up until about five or six years ago Deathstroke didn’t really want anything in the sense of having a grand purpose in life; he was just a guy who did his (extremely violent) thing for a lot of money, and that was basically enough for him. A character like this is reactionary at best: he doesn’t start or initiate plots because he doesn’t really feel the need to bother doing things like that, but he’s got enough substance that he’s not just a boring device either. Sure, Baddie With His Own Distinct Moral Code is a well-worn suit at this point, but it still works well enough that Deathstroke can be more than a gun on legs; he can be an antagonist with the ability to shift to ally when necessary. And that’s fine. He shows up every so often, beats the shit out of somebody, and fades back into the shadows in his costume which shouldn’t work but somehow does nonetheless.

About five or six years ago, though, Deathstroke got promoted, for reasons I will never quite understand (although somebody probably said “hey he’s awesome, let’s use him more than ever”). Now Deathstroke is one of the movers and shakers in the DC underworld, for reasons nobody really ever explained. I mean, it’s not like he likes any of the other villains or feels cameraderie with them; his sense of superiority, if nothing else, has remained intact. But now, rather than just being an ultracompetent mercenary, he’s been turned into an evil equivalent of Batman. He’s always three steps ahead, he’s always got two or three plans in motion, he’s of course completely deadly and able to beat up Green Lanterns and Flashes whenever he wants even if it doesn’t make sense (and fetishizing the “perfect human” concept is so much a Batman thing it doesn’t even need to be said, really).

But he’s not just evil Batman, because in his near-constant exposure since he got shoved up the ranks, he’s demonstrated that he’s actually an insane supervillain in the old-school style. Leadership in the Secret Society. Multiple plots to destroy the Teen Titans. A yearlong feud with Green Arrow (which he managed to lose, because Green Arrow decided to become a swordmaster in three months or something stupid like that). Most of it has been very stupid, and a lot of it has been retconned by writers to try and make it work with the “old” model for Deathstroke by saying that he only did all this shit to make his surviving children stronger, which smacks of desperation. (This assumes that anybody wants Jericho to be stronger. Jericho’s best moment, before he came back, was when he was an insane supervillain and Deathstroke stabbed him to death. Why don’t they do that again? Really, it’s the only argument for bringing Jericho and his whiteboy afro back: it’s so good seeing him get run through with a sword.)

And, of course, now he has his own villain team (well, another one), and he’s killed Ryan Choi for some reason, and Arsenal (ugh) will be on it. And of course, once again he’s got an extended master plan. Why does he have an extended master plan? Why does he need one? He’s rich and can do whatever the fuck he wants. Why does he have to be more overexposed than the fucking Joker? DC cancelled his series for a reason: he’s not a good protagonist. Why give him another one and stuff it with reject characters nobody cares about – I’m looking at you, new Tattooed Man – so we can get what will either be a terrible story arc that makes no sense or rendition #485 of “I have to do terrible things to test my children/make sure my children are safe”? Why not just let him sit in the background for a year or two and then let him come back and kick some ass for a brief period and have everybody be all WHOA?

(Ironically, his recent use in Batman and Robin made total sense and worked with the traditional version of the character; it’s very Deathstroke to take a job to fight Dick Grayson just because.)

I don’t see how anybody can’t not love El Papagayo.

I mean, honestly: can you imagine a better foil for mean old never-smiles Jonah Hex? El Papagayo is such a happy and friendly backstabbing amoral bastard. He has a happy parrot! How many baddies have a happy parrot? I bet Jonah Hex really hates that parrot. “Fuckin’ parrot,” he mutters under his breath (because Jonah Hex mutters under his breath, that is a very Jonah Hex sort of a thing to do).

And if there’s anybody who’s going to be the “damn Mexican” who gets away every time, who’s the guy Hex can never quite manage to fill with lead, I defy anybody to have it be someone other than El Papagayo. Because he has a happy parrot. Not everybody can pull off a happy parrot. Captain Stingaree, for example, never could. But then again, Captain Stingaree was insane and thought he was a pirate.

Meet Tomahawk’s Rangers!

Dan Hunter: Tomahawk’s sidekick and former man-boy life partner (seriously, one day I’ll post the Tomahawk and Dan Hunter entry from Who’s Who and you will al go eeeewwwwwwww) found himself dumped after he got old and chunky (look at the jowls on him, no wonder Tomahawk lost interest), so he found himself leading an elite unit of… guys!

Big Anvil: He’s strong! He once lifted a gate off its hinges! He’s got a beard! He wears a purple vest! Did we mention he’s strong? Because he’s strong!

Brass Buttons: This is a guy who came from a uniformed regiment and was so proud of the fact that he refused to take off his uniform even when he was in a band of guerrilla warriors. You can’t really ask questions about a guy who was in a top infantry regiment and then somehow got transferred to Tomahawk’s Band Of Unwashed Crazies; it wouldn’t be polite. Besides, the way he shined those buttons all the time was kind of creepy. Did anybody actually see this guy come from the regiment? Or did he just show up one day? Man, somebody ought to check that uniform for bloodstains or knife-stabbin’ holes.

Cannonball: Not the X-Man, but a guy who threw cannonballs at the enemy. Presumably there was no cannon working at the time. Or maybe there was. I mean, you can just see this guy throwing cannonballs, and there’s this other guy standing right next to him with the thingy that stuffs the cannon that looks like a giant Q-tip saying, “Uh, Horace, we’re just supposed to put the cannonballs in the cannon. That’s what they taught us in cannon school. I mean, look, the enemy’s still over two hundred feet away. Maybe we should fire the cannonballs with the cannon.” But Horace is all YARRRRRRRRGH TAKE THAT YOU BRITISH FUCKS and shortly thereafter he finds himself in Tomahawk’s Rangers.

Frenchie: A Frenchman! Who dresses like a Quebecois lumberjack! That makes him twice as French as anybody else on the planet! He grew up in a tiny French town and decided that it was just not French enough! Also, he is known for being agile – because he trained as a mime before learning to use his mimery to kill in the most singularly French way possible!

Healer Randolph: The amazing black man who is not actually black! Seriously, look at that dude. It must have been confusing when he was on the plantation. He’d be all “Can I help you, Master Johnstone?” And the visiting plantation owner from upstate would be all “WhaaaaAAAAAAA?” And then there would be a sitcom moment as everybody laughed and waited for his catchphrase, “No, actually I’m a slave, sir.” (Also, note that Healer Randolph was the only non-combatant in the Rangers. Typical that they didn’t want the black man having a gun. Didn’t they see The Patriot?)

Kaintuck Jones: Lived in northern Ohio all his life and still insisted on being called “Kaintuck.” His other nickname was “Dumbass Jones.”

Long Rifle: Actually just an excuse for the writers to come up with a strings of penis jokes.

Stovepipe: Kept explosives in his stovepipe hat. No, really. He did this. He decided that the best place to carry explosives was right on top of his head. And here’s the thing: Stovepipe survived the war! Lots of other Rangers all bought it (although, apparently, not “Suicide” Simms, who was particularly ill-named unless it was one of those things where you call the big fat guy “Tiny” or “Slim” because that’s funny) but Stovepipe, who spent just about every moment of every day courting death in the stupidest way possible, made it through unscathed. Fate is indeed a fickle bitch.

Wildcat: Was a Quaker and a pacifist until he went to war and found out that shooting people to death and stabbing them with bayonets and knives and occasionally spears or just, like, hitting them until they stop moving, and then staring at the red, red blood all over your hands – that is seriously like the most awesome thing ever! Occasionally wrote letters home that said things like Dear Mother and Father: Today I garrotted a Welsh-man who spied upon our camp. I believe I saw God in that moment.

“Hey, we need to create another character for the “Justice Society 2″ project.”
“Okay… so we got two kids Green Lantern had, Hawkman’s son, Wonder Woman’s daughter, and the Atom’s grand-nephew or something like that. Who else can we throw in?”
“Maybe the Flash has a kid?”
“Nah, I don’t like it. Dr. Mid-Nite?”
“Blindness isn’t heriditary. Doesn’t make sense. Hourman?”
“What, a kid who takes the same pill? We want superheroes here. We’ll save that idea for if we ever get desperate.”
“Well, that knocks out a lot of them. I mean, the JSA were a lot of guys who barely had powers if at all, right?”
“Yeah. Maybe Hawkman could have another kid?”
“What, another one? We already did the Egyptian thing with the first one.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t have wings. How about we give him a kid with wings?”
“Why would one kid have wings and the other kid doesn’t have wings? Come on.”
“Okay, okay, I get your point, but I think a winged superhero has the look to round out the team.”
“I don’t disagree, but how does he have wings? Hawkman’s wings aren’t hereditary either.”
“…maybe he’s not Hawkman’s son.”
“But that’s the whole point of this series. It’s the next generation of Earth-2 superheroes.”
“Maybe he’s… his… godson?”
“I’d say that’s weak, but we already got the Atom’s grand-nephew in this, and really he’s only an honorary grand-nephew at that.”
“Okay, godson then. But how does he get wings?”
“He takes a pair of Hawkman’s old wings. It’s not rocket science.”
“Come on, we can do better than that. I’m thinking that he’s actually a bird-man.”
“What?”
“A bird-man.”
“Like Koko B. Ware?”
“No, I mean a bird-man hybrid. A man-bird, if you prefer.”
“So, like, a guy with a bird-head and wings and talons.”
“No, that’s a little too freaky. I’m thinking just the wings. Maybe he can have some feathers in place of hair or something.”
“And this is Hawkman’s godson.”
“Yeah. Uh… a friend of his married a bird-woman.”
“A bird-woman.”
“From a race of bird-people.”
“This is one sexual deviant we are talking about here.”
“No, they mostly look human. But they’re evolved from birds, like we evolved from apes.”
“So he’s only slightly kinky.”
“Shut up.”
“Does he call her Beaky?”
“The point is that they had a kid.”
“And he’s from the race of bird-people. Which live where?”
“…a hidden secret city?”
“I can work with that. Where’s it hidden?”
“How about the Arctic?”
“You know what I think of when I think of the Arctic? Birds.”
“Well, that’s exactly why they’re hiding there, wiseass. Because nobody would think to look for bird-people in the Arctic.”
“I guess they probably had a hidden city in temperate zones first, but people kept coming up to it and saying “gosh, a hidden city of bird-people! It was right where I expected it would be!””
“Anyway. So we’re good on the origin, then?”
“Yeah, why not. Does he have any powers other than flying?”
“Does he need any?”
“Well, you’ve got one person who flies and can shoot energy blasts, and one person who flies and is basically a living Green Lantern ring. Doesn’t that make Kid Bird-Man kind of redundant?”
“This is a superhero team. There’s always room for a person who only flies and nothing else.”
“Fair enough. But I bet someday that somebody’s gonna take this guy and go full-on freaky-looking bird-man with him.”
“Might as well guess that he’ll get turned into a zombie or something.”
“That’ll be the day.”

Amos Fortune is a relic of a bygone age. It’s why people still have affection for the character. It’s also why he sucks.

The reason people still like Amos Fortune is because he’s got a very Silver-Agey quality to him. He’s an evil scientist obsessed with luck: there you go, Silver Age smacked up all over him. His evil robes can look quite distinctive when handled by the proper artist, and just because he’s not Lex Luthor doesn’t mean there isn’t room for him as a lesser scientist villain; there will always be room for the Mad Thinkers and IQs of the comics world, and so is there room for Amos Fortune.

This is not why Amos Fortune sucks. Amos Fortune sucks because rather than sticking with him being a master of evil luck-themed science, comic writers of the time used him in the other way emblematic of the Silver Age: as a catchall excuse for whatever mad science plot they felt like writing in any given issue. This is why Amos Fortune, the mad scientist obsessed with luck, invented a “de-memorizer” that could wipe out people’s memories: because. This is why Amos Fortune invented a “fortutron” which made people obsessed with gambling so they would lose all their money to him: because. And let’s not get started on the “Luck League,” wherein seven born-lucky people were given facsimiles of JLA members’ powers because… um… luck? This was just one of many stories where “luck” was a throwaway explanation for whatever the writer (usually Gardner Fox) felt like doing that month.

On top of that, Amos Fortune invented the Royal Flush Gang, who, like it or not, have staying power as a concept in the DC Universe. This effectively makes Amos Fortune the Pete Best of the DCU, except of course that the Royal Flush Gang aren’t exactly the Beatles of the DCU, so you need to find someone a little less impressive than Pete Best to analogize to Amos Fortune. Music nerds can do bit that for me. I’m sure you can find somebody appropriate who walked out on a third-tier band before they had a few hit records. Who was the guy who created, say, Boston and then quit before they hit it big? Amos Fortune is that guy.

Amos Fortune still makes the occasional appearance in modern DC comics, usually because Len Wein (who loves the character for reasons I’m sure I couldn’t explain if I tried) wants to use him in a story. In these comics, he’s always a behind-the-scenes mastermind, which also doesn’t work because Amos Fortune, while ideally suited to being a behind-the-scenes mastermind, has never been that guy. You don’t get fancy luck-themed robes if you want to be the guy working the levers on the Great and Powerful Oz.

Now, there’s certainly potential in Amos Fortune, even now. Probability is an interesting, amazing thing, and you can do really clever things with it as a villain if your writer is more ambitious than writing third-rate Black Cat stories. I’d really like to see somebody write those stories someday. But until then, Amos Fortune will always suck, because he’s just another megalomaniacal dude in some robes who makes shit, and that makes him kind of boring.

Some people like to point to that bit in Crisis On Infinite Earths where the Penguin is briefly depicted fighting Firestorm to a standstill as the “waitasec” moment of that series, but it’s not mine. After all, the Penguin is a pretty smart dude and he has umbrellas that shoot people. Plus, Firestorm is traditionally a dumbass.

No, the “waitasec” moment of Crisis for me comes in #10, when Earth’s villains attack Oa in the past to try and save it. (Long story.) In order to stop Krona from viewing the start of the universe and creating the multiverse by accident, the villains try to destroy his lab, and although most of them get conked out early on, three of them – the first Icicle, the first Mirror Master and Maaldor the Darklord – make it to the lab and are about to destroy it, but Krona kills them while they argue about who gets to smash his stuff. No, really.

Now, granted, the fact that he wears ancient-Roman-ish armour and wields a broadsword (and has a Jheri curl) might make him look like a bit of a low man on the totem pole. Heck, on the cover of his issue of Who’s Who he’s squaring off against Madame .44, who has the power of… two guns. But here’s the thing: Maaldor the Darklord wields the entire power of an entire sub-universe. His Who’s Who entry says he is basically omnipotent and that he can “destroy entire galaxies with a thought.” He fought the entire Green Lantern Corps to a standstill more than once.

Basically, he shouldn’t have gotten punked like that.

And here’s the other thing: Maaldor is kind of awesome in a low-rent B-list Vartox sort of way. He’s a full-on godly being who speaks of himself exclusively in the third person (like the Rock!) and hits people with a sword because he can, not because he needs to. He just like slashing people with a sword. It’s how he chills out.

That is a universe-powered being who knows what he likes. He’s due for a comeback.

It’s worth noting that Lois Lane has a singular distinction among comics characters, being the only non-super (or, at least, non-protagonistic) character to appear in Who’s Who.1 No other non-super characters make the cut: not Ma and Pa Kent, not Perry White, not Commissioner Gordon, not Amanda Waller.2

There’s a reason why Lois makes the cut and why none of them do: it’s because, even nearly fifteen years before she and Clark finally got married, she was established as Superman’s equal. Not just his “girlfriend” – at the time Who’s Who was published, the end of the Bronze Era, Lois and Superman/Clark were actually taking a break, because the Bronze Age Superman comics had made it pretty clear that Lois already had a pretty good idea that Superman was actually Clark and she wasn’t happy about him bullshitting for all those years (not that this made her stop loving him, of course, but it was definitely a bump in the road). Hell, fans had actually been clamoring for the two to get married for some time – not just the pre-internet equivalent of ‘shippers, but longtime Superman fans.

This is why: the only natural course of action for Lois and Clark is to get married.

It’s really not like any other relationship in comics. For example, as much as I disagree with the idea that Peter and Mary Jane shouldn’t be married (and consider it exhibit A that proven comic writers like Mark Waid and Kurt Busiek and many others can still be completely and utterly wrong about characters they’ve written god knows how many times in certain respects), there’s an argument that can at least be made for them splitting up or never getting married, because Spider-Man at his essence is about the virtue of fortitude.3 Fortitude is about picking yourself up and doing good even when life kicks you in the balls, and divorce – or pathetic magic wish fiat – is a kick in the balls. On the other hand, Batman and Catwoman (or Silver St. Cloud, or Vicki Vale, or Wonder Woman, or… well, pick one) can never get together because Batman, at his essence, is about the necessity of sacrifice. Batman not only doesn’t not need a happy ending, he actively opposes one.

Superman isn’t about any of that. Superman is about truth and justice and doing the right thing; he’s a purer story than any of his contemporaries, both at once simpler and infinitely more complex. That’s why he deserves a love interest who’s just as good and as tough (and understatedly complex) as he is; it’s why Lois Lane gradually evolved from being a comedic annoyance to becoming a tough, smart reporter.4 Eventually, because this is comics and that means a little hyperbole is a given, she became the best reporter. Which is fine, because as others have written before: Superman needs a super woman.

And this is the kicker: Lois Lane can’t really be a match for Superman if she doesn’t eventually figure out the whole secret identity thing. This is because there’s a dozen perfectly good reasons why Superman’s secret identity should work, and the comics have used them all: because most people just assume he’s Superman all the time, because it’s not that hard for someone who’s practiced to act like two different people and convincingly, because most people really just don’t look, because Superman super-vibrates when he’s on duty ever-so-slightly to blur pictures of him, whatever. They all work fine, which is why jokes about “it’s only a pair of glasses” ring hollow and feel petty.

But they don’t work if you’re supposed to be an ace reporter who by virtue of being not just good at your job but the best (and Lois is the best) means you’re supposed to recognize things as being a bit off when they’re off, even if it takes you a while because nobody else would notice it. If Lois is Superman’s equal – and of course she is – she has to realize those things happening. That’s why just about every satisfactory rendition of the secret ID reveal to Lois has Lois trumping it by figuring it out on her own.5 And once she knows, there’s no reason not to get married; that’s the only bar. She’s not going to accept “it’s too dangerous” (and Superman couldn’t stay away if he tried).

And really, what’s the appeal of a status quo where Lois isn’t aware of the truth? Superman angsting about how Lois doesn’t know? Lois scheming to prove that Superman has a secret identity? Boring recycled hjinks and Superman robots and Batman pretending to be Superman and other penny-ante misogyny? That shit was stale in the Silver Age – it’s why the Bronze Age happened, for Christ’s sake – and there’s just nothing left in it. Flashback stories are fine; let them be flashbacks. The complexity of a regular relationship suits Clark and Lois to the ground. They have the same problems every other couple does, just in a slightly different way involving evil scientists and tyrant aliens and the occasional giant killer robot. But they have them nonetheless. There’s more juice in that than a thousand “oh, how will I get away from Lois this time?” sequences.

There are a significant number of comics writers who think that Wonder Woman is Superman’s perfect match, mostly because they’ve read “Men of Steel, Women of Kleenex” too many times and think that the most important aspect of Superman’s perfect mate is whether or not he can fuck her according to the rules they’ve made up in their head. However, Wonder Woman is a boring cipher. Lois isn’t: she’s her own woman, and we’re well past the point where a Lois Lane ongoing should be back on the stands. (And not Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane either. She can stand on her own two feet, thank you very much.)

She really is the best female character in superhero comics.

1. Okay: Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang and Alfred all make appearances, but rather than as themselves, they’re listed under Elastic Lad, Insect Queen and the Outsider, respectively. If you don’t know how Alfred transformed into the Outsider, let’s just say “Silver Age Batman comics” and leave it at that. You’re better off not knowing. [↩]
2. Eventually in one of the supplements they published an issue that was mostly JUST non-super characters. Terry Long shows up. He is gross. [↩]
3. Much like Charlie Brown. The comparison has been made before, I’m sure. [↩]
4. And because girls started reading Superman comics and complained that she was being written as a dimwit, of course. [↩]
5. Exception: the actual one that happened in the post-Crisis pre-Death-of-Superman comics. Incidentally, if DC is going to retcon everything else to suit their whims, why don’t they retcon that? [↩]

I was going to write a long thing about Tyr sucking, but basically it boils down to this: he looks like when you were seven and you pulled off one of the arms off one of your action figures and then stuck a robot arm on it. And that’s just not cool. Not in a comic kids pay money for. They can stick their own damn robot arms on their own damn action figures. They don’t need comic books to do that for them.

Even when Dave Cockrum first drew him, he didn’t look cool. He looked like Dave Cockrum working on a prototype for one of the Starjammers.

If Cable had been invented in the 1970s, he would look like Tyr. I can’t think of any better way to describe Tyr’s total lack of cool than that.

Now, if you look at the Jester without knowing anything about him, you’d probably write him off as Yet Another Bad Idea From The Golden Age (Which Is Forgivable Because It Was The Dawn Of Comics And So On). Seriously, that’s possibly the silliest, most garish superhero costume of all time. Not only does it include a fool’s cap and bells and a muscle shirt with poofy sleeves, but it has both stripes and polka-dots in an eye-popping yellow-and-black motif.

But here’s the thing: the writers, even then, knew what they were doing! See, Paul Gustavson, who created the Jester (and also the original Golden Age Marvel Comics Angel, the one with the moustache, who has shown himself to have some legs as the more-or-less official symbol of Marvel’s Golden Age – the one who isn’t Namor or Captain America), recognized that the Jester was a pretty silly idea. Probably he created him after a three-day bender, looked down at the paper, then at the bottle of whatever he had been drinking, and quietly said “fuuuuuuck…”

And then he made it work. He did so by having the Jester’s total ridiculousness be his gimmick: the criminals the Jester fought were scared of him because the Jester, so far as they were concerned, was goddamn crazy. Gustavson emphasized the Jester’s freaky-sounding high pitched laugh in the stories, which makes sense because if you were a criminal, probably the last thing you would want to hear at 2 AM in a shadowy alley would be giggling from the shadows. That would be seriously creepy.

Basically, the Jester is the Joker if the Joker were a hero rather than a villain. And also not (too) crazy.

DC got the Jester along with the rest of the Quality Comics properties, but have barely touched him. With one major exception – a guest shot in Starman #46, where James Robinson basically let the Jester do his crazyfied schtick in a teamup with Ted Knight – he’s gone more or less unused. In a way it makes sense, because the Jester doesn’t really work in a modern setting and DC isn’t doing any titles like All-Star Squadron right now where they focus on a past historical era of superheroing. But it’s still a shame nonetheless, because there’s some real storytelling meat here.

This is the interesting thing about Sunburst: other than one appearance in a Global Guardians backup story in a Superboy comic, he was a total nonentity in the DCU Universe. I mean, total nonentity: he’d even been hypnotized – at his own request – to become unaware of his superpowers. Possibly this was because whoever was writing the story realized that Sunburst’s powers and gimmick were almost entirely a duplicate of the Global Guardian known as Rising Sun, who is pretty awesome in his own right.

But then, in Crisis On Infinite Earths #12, with literally no advance warning whatsoever, Marv Wolfman pulls Sunburst out of just about the deepest obscurity a comics character can go into, and not only gives George Perez the opportunity to draw Sunburst fighting the Anti-Monitor’s shadow demons alongside Rising Sun as part of the superb “battle around the world” sequence (seriously, Crisis #12 is probably the most brilliantly crafted ending to an epic comics story ever and if anybody says different they are wrong and bad and also wrong), but he goes even further and he gives Sunburst a little story arc.

It’s Sunburst who convinces Dr. Light (the female Dr. Light, not Dr. McRapeyrape) that to serve as a superhero is the highest honor one can undertake. With no introduction beyond Sunburst explaining that they both had to learn this, Wolfman makes Sunburst a noble figure without giving him more time than the character deserves – Sunburst gets maybe five balloons’ worth of dialogue. And then after that he kills Sunburst off, offscreen to boot, because that’s Sunburst’s arc: he learns he has to be a hero, he nuts up and is heroic, and he dies nobly in battle against baddies. With five lines of dialogue and maybe six or seven panels over an entire double-sized comic book, which was not incidentally one of the most important books DC had ever published, the final issue of the absolutely enormous gamble that Crisis was.

Basically, Sunburst is the Biggs Darklighter of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I mean that as a compliment. He’s an object lesson on how obscure characters should get killed off: he gets a noble ending and his death isn’t fetishized for the sake of gore.

Count Vertigo is one of those villains who I think has never really gotten his proper due. He’s kind of stuck in between the second and third tier of DC supervillains and should be higher.

He started off with a decent powerset that’s pretty unique and a great costume (seriously, it’s exactly what a supervillain costume should be: the exact right balance point between ominous and colorful, without becoming garish or over-the-top). This was later extended to be given a really great character hook: the heir to the throne of a small European country. It gave him a sense of duty and a motivation often not present in supervillains.

Of course DC tried to piss this away by destroying Vlatava, his country, when the Spectre went nuts (which the Spectre seems to do every other year now). But that was easily ignored – expat Vlatavans meant that Vertigo now had a country to rebuild. And Vertigo will do whatever he thinks is necessary to do that, and he’s smart, which is why he’s one of the villains who jumps back and forth between working for himself and working for the feds and working for other villains.

And that’s the real reason Count Vertigo is a good character. Most villains are predictable, because most villains are ciphers who only exist to make trouble for heroes and barely have motivations in their own right beyond “want money” or “kill a guy.” (The Joker, who should be a force of pure chaos, is absolutely terrible in this respect.) But the truly great villains are the ones that are capable of surprising the reader.

Major Force, as I previously pointed out, sucks because when you see him in a comic, you know exactly what he’s going to do. When you see Count Vertigo in a comic, he’s one of the few DC villains whose actions are never guaranteed (Lex Luthor and Captain Cold are the other two big ones in this regard for DC); maybe he’s working for Amanda Waller on the side this time around and only pretending to be working for the Society, or maybe he’s taking a commission for the Society proper, or maybe this is all something to do with Checkmate. He never has a hate on for a superhero, because what’s the point of that? He’s a professional, and not just because being a professional is cool, but because it’s vital for his survival and his personal mission.

True independent agents in the DCU are rare, but he’s one of them. And that’s why he’s good.

When DC bought Charlton’s intellectual properties, they got some decent acquisitions on the cheap out of it: the Question is probably the most important, along with Blue Beetle (“the intellectual property so good, they shot him in the head”), and although everybody makes fun of Captain Atom the good Captain has his place as the DC Universe’s official dupe of shadowy powerful men. After a long stint of meaninglessness, Nightshade managed to get a little respect as a member of Shadowpact, and they’ve revived the long-dormant Judomaster tag by giving it to some new girl Judomaster in JSA: Fifth One On The Right Gets A Miniseries.

And then there’s Peacemaker. Peacemaker, living proof that no matter how hard you try, some concepts are just stupid. In the case of Peacemaker, the concept was “a man who loves peace so much, he’s willing to kill for it.” Seriously, that’s his tag line. You know how I know that’s his tag line? Because every writer who uses a Peacemaker – any Peacemaker – uses that tag line, because it sounds dramatic. However, it also doesn’t make any sense, because it’s stupid. It’s a very stupid way to describe someone who is essentially a cop in a costume – moreso than most for that matter. Like Peacemaker, it only sounds cool until you think about it for a couple of seconds.

(It also doesn’t help that he has a terrible costume. The Keith Giffen rendition above is probably the single best version of Peacemaker’s costume and it is still fucking ugly as sin – like a Cylon on ‘ludes or something.)

And he’s kind of a schmuck. The Christopher Smith Peacemaker is basically a crazy dude who listens to the voices in his head (which he started hearing after, guess what, he got hit in the head!) who tell him to kill baddies. This works really good up until the voices tell him to go kill Eclipso, at which point he dies because he’s just a guy with a couple of fancy guns and Eclipso is, well. Eclipso. Since then, there have been several other Peacemakers. They have all been either boring or stupid. Yes, including the new one in Blue Beetle.

It’s easy to explain why Peacemaker sucks. Peacemaker sucks because he’s just a guy with some guns and a little baggage. He doesn’t even have Punisher-level baggage to justify why he wears a helmet that looks like a tin-plated fan. He just kind of thinks it’s the right thing to do. He’s so boring that the best thing he can do is be bodycount fodder. He did that just fine. Let him stay friggin’ dead until the next time they feel the need to rejuvenate the trademark.

I was gonna do this week’s entry starting out by making fun of Strong Bow’s listed abilities, which include the fact that he has very strong legs since he walks a lot. But then I looked at him and I changed my mind.

I changed my mind because fucking look at him. This is not some happy nature warrior. Look at the face. This guy is a stone-cold killer. He’s not a psychopath or a kill-crazy fun-seeker or a berserker ninja samurai Canadian possibly descended from a race of werewolves or something. He’s not somebody who kills people for fun; there’s no pleasure in it for him. It’s just what he often ends up having to do, and he’s just really, really good at killing people. You can tell just by looking at him, and by the way he holds that giant fucking knife.

This, my friends, is a total one hundred percent badass. Look at the background art, where he is stabbing a dinosaur to death. Maybe he needs meat for a long journey. Maybe the dinosaur decided to try and kill him, and found out the error of its ways. It doesn’t really matter. Strong Bow doesn’t care either way. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that the dinosaur has to die. Somewhere in the universe’s cosmic planner, somebody wrote “today, Strong Bow kills dinosaur,” and the reasons are really besides the point; there’s need for him to kill a dinosaur, so he kills the dinosaur.

Maybe I’m basing all of this on one bit of art, but so what? Look at it.

QUICK QUIZ: You are a billionaire American businessman turned Senator, enormously charismatic and vitally important in your country. You wish to become President of the United States. Do you:

A) leverage your personal wealth and popularity in the Senate to run for President, using your money strategically to create an unstoppable electoral campaign, targeting swing states with large cash outlays in the form of advertising, and spend your way to the Presidency in an era predating campaign finance laws?

OR

B) use your power and influence to take over a small, moderately unsuccessful high-tech crime cartel, use it to hire a shapeshifting assassin to kidnap the President and Vice-President, then have the shapeshifting assassin kill the President and assume his form so he can name you Vice-President, then resign, leaving you as the Presidency? (Note that if this plan fails, you have a backup plan where you don a palette-swapped version of the Prowler’s costume and fight Booster Gold to the death.)

Choose one and explain your answer.