Green Lantern and Flash:

Working together, hand in hand, to protect gay marriage.


Because if both of their deaths couldn't keep them apart, what makes you think a line added to California's constitution will?

What You're Missing...

...if you're not reading Tiny Titans.

The Amazing Theric

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Ben invited me to this blog to be the resident indie snob. I think I'm up for the task. After all, how many of you chose the weird comix out of the Northwest on Free Comic Book Day last year? And how many of you took Tiny Titans? Or that crappy X-Men one?

Yeah. That's what I thought.

Plebeians.

Full disclosure: I took all three. And liked two of them. And I also took a whole lot of other stuff too, not all of which was good and not all of which was bad.

Breaking Your Marvel Cherry

Okay, here goes the first official Marvel post... when I haven't written my October column yet. Heh. Uh, what the hell.

Spider-Man's marriage.

I read the first few issues of Brand New Day despite the way One More Day was a total insult to the fans. I wanted to give Dan Slott a chance, and I know that chucking the marriage was Joe Quesada's idea in the first place anyway. But Brand Buy Me was pretty vapid. Spider-Man, according to the dictates of the editors, did not grow as a person or as a character at all, especially not compared the to the paces he'd been through with revealing his identity, getting his marriage back together, and having Aunt May find out his secret.

But still, I'm pissed about One More Day. Spidey's comics have sold just fine for twenty years with the marriage, and lots of writers have made it work. Those who can't are just lazy.

I'm pretty partial to the marriage. I started reading Spidey comics in 1989, one year after he got married. Except for Ultimate Spider-Man, my comic Spidey has always been married. (And no, I didn't read the Ben Reilly issues. I wanted to read about Peter Parker. Peter freaking Parker!) I always liked the Spider-Marriage. In its early years, it really grew and provided some fertile story ideas. Admittedly, some writers did better with it than others.

One of the better marriage storylines (unfortunately buried in an atrocious Spidey story) is in Erik Larsen's "Revenge of the Sinister Six" arc from No Adjective Spider-Man Volume One #18-23. (Man. Comics have really crappy ways of keeping track of what's what.)

MJ gets a part in the new "Arnold Schwarzenheimer" movie, but she has to do nude scenes. She's okay with it, but Peter, of course, is not. At first he's reasonable. "I don't like the idea of you sharing your nakedness with the rest of the world. We have little enough privacy as it is, with you getting recognized on the street." Later he flips out. "I can't believe you took the part! Aunt May will see you naked! J. Jonah Jameson and Flash Thompson will see you naked!"

MJ, in counter, says "It's the 90s, Peter" (snort) and gives a jab at Peter's old high school damage by saying, "You know, sometimes you can be a real square!"

This story really works pretty heavily on the square-takes-himself-too-seriously-and-needs-someone-to-make-him-laugh side of Spidey versus the party-girl-who-needs-a-rock-of-steadfastness-MJ. In one of the truly dated, but still relevant scenes, Peter is shaving while MJ puts a CD on in her spanking new CD played. (This was 1993, in case you're wondering.)

Peter: "Couldn't you put on something more soothing, like maybe a recording of a buzz saw cutting through sheet metal?"

MJ: "You don't like Guns N' Roses? You don't like anything recorded in the last ten years."

Peter: "Sure I do. Billy Joel. Nick Lowe. Dave Edmunds. Elton John."

MJ: "Exactly my point. You don't like anything new or cutting edge."

Peter: "They're cutting edge!"

MJ: "What do you think of Hammer, Extreme, Prince or INXS?"

Peter: "Not much. You forgot your favorite, the Fine Young Cannibals."

MJ: "They're passe."

Peter: "I thought as much."

Okay, it's TOTALLY CHEESY. But replace it with some modern music references (MJ likes the Killers, Arctic Monkeys, Gorillaz, My Chemical Romance, Pete likes... well, the same things) and you see how the whole thing works.

At the end, MJ tries to talk the producers into scrapping the nude scenes. As she does so, it becomes clear that they want her for her body, not her acting ability. She goes back to talk to Peter about it, and while he mentions his latest escapade taking down Dr. Octopus (again, this is a pretty atrocious Spider-Man story, but it's worth your dime for the Pete & MJ story) she tells him about how humiliated she felt in front of them.

Good stuff. This is long, sorry.

Hello!

I'm Spencer, the Marvel guy on this blog. Together, the Fobster and I will spout our opinions about comics until geek comes out of your screen and rubs you down.

I also have a comics column here. I'm doing this blog partially because I can't write in the column about current issues of comics, only reprints and graphic novels, since there' s a big delay between writing the columns and having them published.

Geoff's Revenge

I imagine that writing serial characters who don't belong to you can be challenging. You put your heart and soul into a character, then you move on to another book and some hack comes along and screws with your baby.

Geoff Johns hasn't had to deal with this problem all that much. He's been writing for DC for about ten years now, and he has a tendency to stick with a character for a long time. He introduced Stargirl Courtney Whitmore in her shortlived series in 1999 and has been writing her in JSA and then Justice Society of America since then. He brought Hal Jordan back to life in 2004 and looks to be writing the character for the foreseeable future. He had a solid five-year run on The Flash, remarkable in how well-received it became, considering that the title was still in the shadow of Mark Waid's then-recent run that had lasted even longer. Johns's run certainly did justice to the character of Wally West, but it's even more memorable for the way he redefined the Flash's rogues gallery. He put a lot into establishing who these characters were, what motivated them, and what rules they lived by.

And then other writers came along and screwed with his babies. The Rogues did all sorts of things Geoff Johns would never write them doing, most notably teaming up with kid psychopath Inertia to kill the then-current Flash, Bart Allen--a character who, ironically, had been made unrecognizable to creator Mark Waid when Geoff Johns recast him as Kid Flash in Teen Titans; Waid has stated that he's since made peace with Johns over this fact. Johns is not so forgiving.

Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge, while just as enjoyable as every other Johns-penned story I've read, is fairly transparent in its metatextual motivations. This is Johns coming back to his Rogues and undoing the harm other writers have done to them. The premise of the story is that the Rogues are pissed off over the crappy year they've had (among other things, they spent a while on a prison planet) and they regret having broken their number one rule: Never kill a Flash. Because the Johns-written Rogues would never have done this, it's made clear that the person responsible for the murder is Inertia, that somehow he talked them into doing something they wouldn't normally do. In other words, Inertia is the two-dimensional effigy representing all the writers who have blasphemed Johns's sacred Rogues. And like any good effigy, Inertia gets the burning he deserves. The moment I saw Inertia's smoking corpse was when I realized what a vengeful bastard Geoff Johns is. You do NOT mess with his characters.

The cherry on this sundae of writer's revenge actually came before Inertia's death. In his final moments, Inertia puts an end to two of Johns's original contributions to the Flash mythos: first he blows up Weather Wizard's baby, introduced in one of Johns's earlier stories, and then he reverts Johns-created villain Zoom back into a wheelchair-bound Hunter Zolomon. As if Johns, having learned not to trust other writers to treat his characters well, is simply taking his toys out of the sandbox and going home.

I'm not sure that last bit was necessary, though. It seems Johns has concluded that if you want a job done right you'd better do it yourself, and has decided to come back to The Flash, after all. As much as I distrust the idea of bringing Barry Allen back, you can count on me buying Rebirth. Spiteful or not, Geoff Johns writes good stories. At the end of the day, that's all I care about.

As it turns out

Smallville is actually pretty good this season. Go figure.