Fastest Man Alive

The Flash

After a couple titles where I basically said "keep doing what you're doing," The Flash is where I really start to deviate from post-Blackest Night canon.  If you read my BN#8 rewrite, then you already know one of the biggest turns I'm taking.

As much as I like Barry Allen as the Flash, I think his role in the Flash legacy is more important than seeing him in the tights again.  He made the ultimate sacrifice in Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the decades since saw a lot of growth and development in his replacement, Wally West. Bringing Barry back isn't just a Silver Age Revival moment, it's almost like an undoing of 20+ years of Flash comics.

Okay, they didn't exactly undo it, as these seven Flash characters prove.

I guess "sidelined" is the more accurate word.

But while, per my My52 rules, I can't retcon away Barry's return, I can turn it into a momentary blip before getting back to continuing the Flash story. 

Y'see, 25 years after his sacrifice in CoIE, someone thought it'd be clever to book-end the DC Crisis events with Barry's return at the start of Final Crisis in 2008.  Unfortunately, as far as Blackest Night was concerned, this was just the latest hero resurrection which left the door to the afterlife wide open for Nekron to make his entry into the living world.  While the official mini-series saw a different solution to closing that door, my Blackest Night rewrite ended with Barry again making the ultimate sacrifice and returning to the afterlife in order to close that door. Apologies to anyone who read and enjoyed Flash: Rebirth earlier that year.  It didn't take.

Which leaves us with Wally back in the Flash suit.

The unique thing about Wally is that he's spent almost his entire life as a superhero, and readers got to watch him grow up as Kid Flash, take on his mentor's mantel, get married, and have kids.  Some might argue that maybe it's time to let Wally enjoy his success and retire to spend time with his family while the next generation Kid Flash fleets up, but they already tried that once.

It didn't end well for everyone involved.

Wally's weakness, though, as far as I'm concerned, is that I don't actually know what he does when he's not superheroing.  I guess maybe he's a stay-at-home dad?  Nothing wrong with that, but I do want to steal a bit from Barry and reintroduce the forensic detective aspect to the character.  I'm a bit of a fan of forensics and police procedural shows like CSI and wouldn't mind seeing that play a role in Flash's comics. Story-wise, I can say that Wally's (brief) experience with Barry during his (brief) return to the living could inspire him to pursue forensic sciences.

His wife, Linda, however, hews a little too close to Superman's Lois Lane, the *other* trouble-attracting news reporter who married a super-hero.  I'm hoping that my choice in Adventures of Superman to move Lois to a TV news anchor's desk will create enough difference between the two characters that they'll play out a bit differently from each other. The big retcon here, though, is saved for Flash’s kids.  I’m not sure why, but at some point one of Flash’s writers decided that his twin children should become different ages and get different superpowers.  (Maybe someone said "Eight superspeed characters?!?  That'd be rediculous!") If Wikipedia is to be believed, there was some imbalance because the twins had to share their connection to the Speed Force.  To which I say "two kids had to share a superpower?  That's awesome!"

So expect further imbalances to show up requiring the West's to once-and-for-all link the kids through the Speed Force even stronger, and coincidentally evening out their ages.  While I'm tempted to steal from Mas y Menos from the Teen Titans cartoon, I think it's enough to have superspeed kids who can gain extra boosts of speed but only by stealing it from his/her sibling and slowing them down.  There are so many "teaching your kids to share" parallels here to pass up for a father of two like myself.  This title will have to feature an occasional back-up story concerning the pre-teen adventures of these Tornado Twins.

Personality-wise, I want to be clear that Wally is not comic relief.  He got a bit of that reputation from his animated counterpart in the Justice League cartoon, but even going back to his earliest published days as Kid Flash he had a strong sense of responsibility and living up to the Flash legacy.  In fact, I'm prepared to argue that he's the hardest working hero in the DCU. Sure Superman can lift a battleship, and Batman knows 17 forms of karate, but when Flash runs 2,000 miles, he actually has to run 2,000 miles.  When he punches someone 20 times in a second, he still has to throw 20 punches.  Being superfast doesn't take any of the work away, it just makes it *look* easier.

Tired of being a wannabe gamer...

Tabletop, pen & paper roleplaying games have been part of my life since I was, like, 12, and I'm still pretty into them, even if my gaming in the past several years has been a bit sparse.  I like to say I'm between gaming groups, but that brings with it the illusion that some day I'll find a new gang to join.  I've been spoiled by a couple rock-solid groups in my life, both during my high school days in Ohio as well as the gang I adventured with up in Seattle.  The closest thing I've come to a gaming group here in San Diego recently moved away before we had a chance to do more than dabble.  (Ironically, they moved to Seattle...=wanh wanh=).

I've attempted some Organized Play events, like Living Forgotten Realms for D&D4e or Pathfinder Society for Pathfinder, but those experiences top out at mediocre and occasionally dipped into uncomfortable. 

Despite not having a regular gaming group, though, I've continued to pursue the hobby and keep up on current releases as much as my budget allows.  I've found that, without the baggage of actually having to play, you can get a lot done in imagining what it'd be like to play and prepping for campaigns that might happen someday.

So if I set the Maybe Machine for a look at my roleplaying ambitions, I see a lot of campaign notes and adventures piling up for that hypothetical someday when I'll have a reliable group again.

I've never really tried at homebrewing campaign settings or adventures and assume that I'd suck at it.   What I do have are a lot of pre-published games rules, settings and adventures which I've been assembling in my mind for future play.  Frankly, I have more potential gaming campaigns in mind than I'd ever have time to run, so now it comes down to imagining which game I'd run if I got the chance.

When I pick this thread up again, I'll try pitching some of my favorite ones.

Glamazon

Wonder Woman

We round out DC's Big Three (so named because they've been continuously published since their debut in the 30s and 40s) with the My52 Wonder Woman.

This is where my limited comic reading fails me, though, because I’m not 100% sure if this was still WW’s status as of Blackest Night.  However, my most recent awareness of Wonder Woman is her post-52/One Year Later status where she took on the mortal identity of Agent Diana Prince for the Department of Metahuman Affairs.  As an added quirk, Wonder Woman's enemy Circe curse/gifted her by causing her to lose her power when in her civilian identity as a way to help her experience life as a mortal.

She even does the old Lynda Carter spin to transform from one to the other.

Assuming this is still the status quo, I can't think of anything better to do than keep on keepin' on.  As an agent for DoMA, Diana travels the nation with her partner, Tom Tresser, encountering metahuman threats all across the U.S. like a superpowered X-Files.  Unlike some of her Justice League counterparts, WW never had a Gotham City or Metropolis to watch over, so being a travelling hero would be pretty easy to pull off.

The biggest challenge is deciding how Tresser, presumably sharp agent himself, would keep from realizing Diana was Wonder Woman when the Amazon shows up in yet another city at the same time they’re there and Diana is nowhere to be seen.  I believe there were a couple moments where he straight up hinted that he knew her identity, but at least one was waved off as being the result of a fever, and the other didn't come right out and say it, so I'm inclined to keep her ID safe for now.  My tool for this will be a subtle enchantment in her “curse” which keeps him from finishing the thought when he gets close to putting two and two together.  He'd be like "Hang on, Diana.  How come you always disappear right when Wonder Woman - ooh, ice cream!"  In any case, Tresser serves as a nice Steve Trevor replacement as the man who thinks he’s the action hero of his own story only to be regularly saved by Wonder Woman.

He's also, sort of, officially an Amazon too.

Current status of her Amazon sisters and Paradise Island is that Zeus created an island of male counterparts, the Olympians, and the two genders are learning to live in peace.  Diana, however, had renounced her Amazon status following her murder of Ares, which is just fine with me.  See, I've never been a fan of limiting a characters story options by focusing too much on one aspect of them, and I think Wonder Woman has been a little too Greek myth-centric lately. By distancing herself from Paradise Island for a while, and adding in her travels with DoMA, we get to see her tackling a more diverse range of threats.

I know it's a bit anti-climactic to post my versions of comic characters with just "keep doing what you're doing," but bear with me.  I've got some big changes in mind for my next few titles.

The Dynamic Duo

Batman and Robin

A year or so prior to Blackest Night, the Big Event for DC Comics was Final Crisis, a mind-bending epic where Darkseid took over the Earth.  It had its high-points and low-, but the finale had Batman zapped by Darkseid's omega beams and left a burnt corpse in Superman's arms.

But don't worry, he got the bastard who did this.

An epilogue showed Bruce Wayne had actually just been transported back to caveman times, but as far as his friends in the 21st century were concerned, he was dead.

Then came a mini-series called Battle for the Cowl, and when the dust settled from that, former-Robin Dick Grayson was the new Batman and Bruce Wayne's illegitimate son (and trained assassin) Damian Wayne was his Robin.  Evidence began mounting that Bruce Wayne hadn't been killed, which would eventually lead up to the Return of Bruce Wayne mini-series.

Unfortunately for Bruce, that mini-series came *after* my arbitrary April 2010 My52 launch date, and I happen to really enjoy the combination of Dick and Damian.  So Bruce gets to live out the rest of his life in prehistory, and a new Batman and Robin make the scene full-time.

It's hard for me to editorialize on these characters because they were pretty much pitch-perfect in Grant Morrison's post-Final Crisis run with them.  Dick Grayson brings all the bad-assery of Batman without all the grim attitude.  In other words, he has all of Bruce's skills, but without the need to constantly impress everyone with them.  Damian's Robin, meanwhile, drops the "acrobat sidekick" shtick and turns him into a skilled combatant with a mean streak as long as the Batcave.  Combine that with the petulant attitude of a spoiled child and you have one of the most enjoyable Robin in ages.  

My kids treat me this way, and they DON'T know 26 ways to kill a man.

Their surroundings got an invigorating coat of new paint as well, moving out of the Batcave and into the Bat-bunker beneath Wayne Tower, and travelling in a new, high-tech Batmobile. Morrison wasn't shy about introducing new villains either, and treated readers to characters like Professor Pyg and Johnny Karaoke and the Geisha Grrls.

In the free moments between fighting crime and reigning in Damian, Dick finds himself fighting in the board room where he faces off against business challengers to Wayne Enterprises.  He still has loyal friends like Lucius Fox and Alfred, but there are a lot of sharks in the water following Bruce's death.

So really the only thing I'd change about this series is the build-up to Bruce Wayne's return.  'Cause he won't.

It's a bird and/or plane...

I'll kick off the My52 library with one of the oldest names in the biz: 

The Adventures of Superman

April of 2010 saw Superman still hip-deep in his New Krypton epic, a storyline that wouldn’t conclude until June.  Once that wraps up, though, Supes returns to his place on Earth with a more focused attitude that can best be described as "comfortable." Having experienced his ethnic roots warts and all, Superman has grown more confident in his Earth-born code of morality and becomes an assertive man-of-action rather than a self-doubting man of indecision.  With this comfort also comes a great sense of humor, and his guilty pleasure is to just kind of mess with people both as Clark and as Superman, although probably not to the extent of his antics in the 60s.

Superdickery.com has more great examples like this, but imagine his victim as 
some un-prosecutable mob boss, and I think this illustrates how 

a more comfortable Superman can “defeat” opponents in ways other than just punching them a lot.

Lois and Clark are still married, of course, but I’m going to put some space between them by moving Lois from investigative newspaper reporter to broadcast news anchor.  Despite the existence of 24-hour news-as-business outlets, the Daily Planet remains at the top of the news game in the DCU due to a reputation of timely, in-depth and insightful news coverage.  GBS broadcasting wants that same level of legitimacy and woos Lois over to their news anchor desk.  For her part, Lois accepts the new job as an opportunity to influence a news channel. While this takes her off the streets (mostly), I see her change from “constantly needing rescue” to “powerful media icon” as an upgrade.  Plus I’m sure she’ll still find lots of trouble with her new, perhaps resentful cast of characters as well as the regular danger of just being Superman’s wife.

The vacated role of Endangered Normal will be filled by photojournalist Jimmy Olson.  No longer just a photographer for other people’s stories, Jimmy’s body of work has gotten him recognition as a legitimate reporter.  His penchant for disguises and amateur sleuthing don’t always work out, though, and he occasionally must rely on his Superman signal watch to get him out of a jam.

And while I have little intention of trying to change or “update” any of our classic costumes, I confess that I fell in love with the new S-Shield design for Supergirl in the New 52.  Similar to the 'S' Superman wore during his electric Superman Mint/Cinnamon Blue/Red phase, I think it looks pretty snazzy and reflects a more “get thing done” attitude.  Maybe I’d try to pass it off as an alternate family crest for the House of El based on his experiences on New Krypton.  I dunno.  He still gets to keep the red shorts, though.  

I entertained the idea of trying to draw it myself, but in the end I just 

Photoshopped it onto this drawing by Jerome K. Moore for Young Justice.  

Hopefully he doesn't mind me using his art here 

because I think he exactly captures the tone I'm looking for.

Blackest Night 8b

As discussed in my previous post, my hijacking of DC Comics discarded pre-New 52 Universe hinges on a rewrite of the conclusion of the Blackest Night miniseries. Let me sum up that series for those who haven't read it.

Blackest Night in a nutshell

With all the respective Corps of the emotional spectrum in place (e.g. the Green Lanterns of willpower, the Red Lanterns of rage, etc.) following the War of Light, billions of black power rings flood the galaxy.  Each latches onto a corpse and reanimates it as a soldier to bring about the return of Nekron, the entity of Death.  The means to do this is to elicit an emotional response in the victim matching a color of the spectrum (blue hope for the return of a loved one, fer instance) and then kill them to collect their, I don't know, emotional energy, I guess.

Fer instance, seeing the violet light of love in Hawkgirl right before 

zombies put a spear through her chest.

When enough energy had been gathered, Nekron was able to break out of his prison and materialize on Earth.  Once there, he revealed his ultimate goal to find the White Entity of Life (from which the emotional spectrum sprang) and then kill it, ending all life everywhere.

The plan actually went pretty well, with the White Entity not even defending itself against Nekron's attacks until Sinestro took on the power of the white light and became a one-man White Lantern Corps.

The official ending had the heroes using the white light to bring Nekron's chief zombie lieutenant, Black Hand, back to life, severing Nekron's tie to the world and sending him back to the Land of the Unliving.  For a grand finale, a bunch of characters, such as Aquaman and the just-killed Hawkman, were brought back to life.

I suppose that's one way to do it, but instead, let's fire up the Maybe Machine and run it through a slightly different ending.

When we left off at the end of Blackest Night #7, we were looking at this:

This is actually the opening panel of Blackest Night 8, 

but the closing image of BN7 is kind of non-informative.

In the My52 version of BN8, this fight doesn't go so well for Sinestro.  As in the original version, he discovers that killing Nekron's current body doesn't stop him as he just "jumps" into another convenient corpse.  Sinestro fails as the universe's protector, and Nekron is able to land a killing blow on the White Entity.

As the entity is dying, and taking all of life with it, Hal Jordan gets a cunning plan.  If the entities of the emotional spectrum are fractures of the White Entity, then returning them to the White Light should revive it.  He acts on his plan, releasing Ion, the Green Entity of Willpower from the Green Lanterns' central power battery.  When his plan starts working, and the White Entity starts to revive, the other corps are guilted into following suit, and eventually all the emotional entities are reunited into the White Light and the universe is saved.

A picture of Sinestro pondering the seven emotional entities, 

just to prove that I didn't make them up.

That still leaves Nekron kicking around, though, which leads to significant story change #2. Nekron was initially able to access our world through the wide open door left by the return of such previously-dead characters as Superman, Green Arrow and, most recently, The Flash (Barry Allen).  The only way to get Nekron out of this world is to close that door.  Just as Barry Allen was willing to make the suicide run in Crisis on Infinite Earths, he accepts his fate here and volunteers to return to death if it means locking up Nekron forever.

Another side effect of this door closure is to declare that character resurrections will NOT be happening under my watch.  This series doesn't end with the return of any characters, and any writers who killed off their characters expecting them to come back at the end are stuck gnashing their teeth in frustration.  Hawkman dead, Martian Manhunter dead, Batman dead, Barry Allen re-dead.

And that's where we end our revisionist writings and from where we'll kick off our stories in the next blog post.

   

My52

I miss comics.  I never really outgrew the adolescent wish fulfillment of superpowered comic book heroes.  The truth is they sort of outgrew me.  DC Comics was the publisher I held onto the longest, but eventually even it outpriced my budget and out-“matured” my sense of taste.  Recently, my comic hobby has been little more than reading Wikipedia and daydreaming about what I would do with the characters if *I* ran the zoo.

Then, a couple years back, DC Comics did something interesting.  In the fall of 2011, they just up and stopped writing their stories and started all over again (mostly) with what they called the “New 52”.  I don't blame them for seeking younger readers, but these newer, hipper, edgier characters were clearly not meant for me. 

Honestly, if the worst thing I can say about the Teen Titans is that 
Superboy has a tattoo, that just confirms I'm being a curmudgeon.

But then the armchair comic editor in me realized that, if DC Comics aren't using their old continuity, why couldn't I?  They've an entire universe of beloved characters and stories just collecting dust.  And while I'm not interested in actually writing individual issues (which is a big lie), I still boil with ideas of how I'd use those characters and what type of stories I'd tell with them.  Let's call this mental exercise "My52."

Except that I won't be starting exactly at the end.  While one of my goals is to refrain from any wholesale retcons, I won't feel guilty ending Blackest Night in the same way the original authors did: setting things up for the stories I want to tell.  So my continuity will hold true up through issue #7, but expect a significant rewrite of the finale in Blackest Night #8 in a future blog post.

Before I get into specifics, though, let's set a few ground rules.

1. I'm not a business.  I don't need to worry about concerns of income, marketability, or maintaining copyrights.  I don't care how popular Batman is, he doesn't need more titles than Flash.  
2. I have to respect what writers have done before.  Blackest Night #8 rewrite aside, this isn't a retcon exercise.  I need to make the best of what there is, not what I *wish* there was.
3. Because my comic reading was pretty slim there toward the end, I'm pretty sure some inconsistencies will creep in.  So while I won't intentionally rewrite timelines, I accept that some may get rewritten by accident.
4. I don't need to kill off characters to get them out of the limelight.  Characters I consider too boring or confusing or otherwise don't inspire me will just quietly get on a bus and go off to live new lives.  I won't need to explain where Beast Boy went to explain why he's not in my Teen Titans.
5. My52 will continue the concept of the 10-Year Sliding History which posits that all DCU history occurred within the ever-compressing past 10 years (an outline presented quite well in 1994's Zero Hour event.)  Because a lot has happened since then, I'm upping it to a 15-Year Sliding History.  The original Teen Titans have aged, characters will have had children, and so on.

Now, while it would make the most sense to pick up where they left off when they started their New 52, I have to confess I don't actually know that much about the comics published in the last couple years of DC's pre-New universe.  I think the most recent DC comic I read was 2010's Blackest Night 8-issue miniseries.  I liked it quite a bit, even if it was a bit gory (it gets a pass, though, because it was about zombies).

This is the Dark Knight, you know...rising.

What I do know is that Blackest Night ended with the return of several formerly-dead characters, such as Martian Manhunter and Aquaman, as a way to set things up for the future. So when it comes to selecting a stepping off point for My52, the end of Blackest Night seems like as good a spot as any.

An example of the Timeline presented in Zero Hour.  

For our purposes, change that "10" to a "15."

  

Coming up next: Blackest Night #8b and the starting status quo.