Or – “Justice, Like Lightning, Should Ever Appear, One If By Land, Two If By Sea…”
The Bronze Age of comics brought the winds of change, and though Luke Cage, John Stewart, T’Challa and others preceded him, Jefferson Pierce was DC’s first African-American headline character… Is his first swingin’ 70′s appearance Dy-No-MITE, or will this issue be a jive turkey?
Once again, we travel to the recesses of my imagination and wonder, what if they where to let me make a movie with the comic characters of my choice? Yes, I to can hear Hollywood giving a collective GASP of horror! Well, this time, my choice is BLACK LIGHTNING!
Or – “Persistence Pays Off…”
When Stephen and I were in college, there came Image Comics, a coalition of guys who drew and whose drawings sold comics, they were a huge financial success. In their wake came half a dozen other companies that tried to launch entire comic book universes, all at once, to rake in some of the proverbial phat cash. The Ultraverse. Comics Greatest World. Valiant. To my mind though, the most successful launch came in the form of Milestone comics, a universe that chose to focus on diversity, giving us the adventures of characters of differing colors, creeds, orientations, and what have yous. And of those Milestone characters, my favorite was certainly the teen hero of Hemingway High, the man-boy called Static. Now that the Milestone characters have been absorbed into the mainstream DCU, it seems that we’re finally going to see Static achieve his full potential. Eat that, X-O Manowar, Hardcase and Motorhead!
When it all went to hell
For the most part, the Year One stories from DC Comics tend to follow the origin stories of the characters with a little extra thrown in for taste. In the case of Black Lightning, it looks like an entire retcon is taking place. The Tobias Whale plot is still there, but toss in a dose of magic and mysticism, and Talia al Ghul and you’ve got a very different story from the one you read in the 1970’s.
Power Struggle
Black Lightning continues his first year of protecting Suicide Slum, trying to change his old neighborhood for the better, and finding it extremely difficult every step of the way. Issue #3 arrived last week, dropping readers right into the holiday season, and right into big trouble for DC’s first black superhero.
Welcome Back, Pierce
Except for the most recent stories featuring Jefferson Pierce, most readers probably have no knowledge of the early days of Black Lightning. And even those that do have detailed knowledge of one of DC’s first black superheroes, are about to learn a little more as the company releases yet another Year-One mini-series.
Or – “How We Got Where We Were A Year Ago But Now Aren’t Anymore…”
Perhaps the most unpleasant realization of the “One Year Later” stories is the gnawing feeling that the writers DIDN’T KNOW how their characters got to this new status quo, and that when the time came to reveal the truth, it felt like a lot of vamping and ad libbing. Granted, 52 became less of a “story of the DC universe” and more an untraditional superhero narrative about Ralph, Booster, Montoya, and (to a somewhat lesser degree) John-Henry Irons, but even the last three weeks of that book have found what felt like a lot of hurried explanations shoved into any panel that would fit. The Nightwing Annual had the space to show a “Behind The Music” story of Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon’s journey into and out of couplehood and did it smashingly, but now that it’s time to figure out how the Outsiders went from Arsenal-led “Mission: Impossible” riff to Nightwing-led “A-Team” riff, things are… less satisfying.
Or – “It Took Seven Months To Give Us The First Issue?”
I’ll say this for the new League, they’re a diverse lot. While still overwhelmingly Caucasian (even if you discount the pink skin of the non-human John Smith and Clark Kent), they’ve given two legacy heroes a chance to step up, righted one of the greatest wrongs of the Detroit-era League by re-inducting Vixen (and putting her back in her old costume), revitalized an old favorite in Red Tornado, finally given Black Lightning a spot at the big table, and have a female chairman, something that I think has previously only happened during the “JL America/Task Force/Extreme Justice” era. It’s an interesting start, with an interesting mix of heroes from all eras of the League, and I haven’t been this excited about a lineup since the days of the Maxwell Lord Justice League back in ’87. So, where do Earth’s Mightiest Heroes stand after their first story arc?
Or – “Strange Days, Indeed… Most Peculiar, Mama.”
Of all the mysteries left unsolved in the wake of the time-jump caused by 52, the question of what happened to the Outsiders has been the most maddening, partly because their change in status quo was so dramatic, and partly because Judd Winick has insisted on giving us absolutely nothing to go on, not even an oblique hint. Even now that they’re revealing the events that filled the one-year-gap, certain questions remain maddeningly unanswered (notably the whole “Grace isn’t what she seems” issue), and Winick is probably going to hell for it. Serve him right, crafting an interesting series of mysteries and then giving us no clues to them. *removes tongue from cheek* Are they going to give us ANYTHING this time ’round?
Or – “Superheroes Make For Some Interesting Fathers…”
As a parent, I find it interesting how the superheroes treat their kids. The poster child for this is, of course, Franklin Richards, whose mutant abilities have popped him up and down the power charts like a whore’s drawers. Young Frankie’s parents only refer to him when they want to hurt each other by calling their spouse neglectful, only to return to their experiments/flirtations-with-fishmen the moment their ire cools. The Vision and The Scarlet Witch’s children were wished out of existence, we’ve seen recently the toll that an absentee Batman father had on l’il Damien Wayne-Al -Ghoul, and even staid and trustworthy Cyclops let his kid be fired into the timestream to “save his life,” (superhero code for “give me back my freedom.”) With all that taken into account, it’s good to see couple of decent dads on display in Outsiders… Who am I talking about?
