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Post by mh on Dec 4, 2013 19:49:03 GMT -6
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Post by Babu Baboon on Dec 5, 2013 10:36:57 GMT -6
Boy did DC manage to screw him up.
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Post by mh on Dec 5, 2013 11:27:27 GMT -6
yeah. it seemed like the only way dc could come up with when resurrecting old characters was to turn them into bloodthirsty psychos. the writers realize these guys are considered expendable & are gonna get killed soon enough, so they don't invest much thought into them. i'm so glad manhunter died & stayed dead
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Post by Babu Baboon on Dec 5, 2013 12:32:04 GMT -6
Nah, DC just created new Manhunters to drive crazy and kill off.
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Post by mh on Dec 5, 2013 16:02:23 GMT -6
Nah, DC just created new Manhunters to drive crazy and kill off.  yeah, but it doesn't really taint his memory. at least not a lot. when dc decided poor old washed up hal jordan, the best possible green lantern, needed to be "alan scott-ed", instead of pushing him out gracefully they made him -- well you know the stery. that basically ended it for me & modern comics. and after it turned out everyone & their mamas loved poor old washed up hal jordan, they had to bring him back as GL and spent years explaining his psychotic murderin' away. just liek they had to undead the best possible flash, poor old washed up 'killed in crisis' barry allen. I mean, look at this panel, he was friggin dead! if we went out tonite and dug up river phoenix, that's what he'd look like!
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Post by Babu Baboon on Dec 5, 2013 16:28:48 GMT -6
Yeah, you don't get much deader than Bary was. It seems crazy to bring him back after they spent two decades with Wally. To a whole generation, Wally West was the Flash.. I think DC is more worried about what is marketable to other mediums than the dwindling comic market now.
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Post by mh on Dec 6, 2013 15:06:45 GMT -6
yeah, I think that's definitely it. the old "flash" series had it's fans, and DC may be thinking if and when justice league is filmed a "barry allen" flash would attract more fans than "wally west". imagine if they'd brought "jay garrick" back after 20 yrs. how pissed would people have been? love barry, but really, he should have stayed dead. it was the greatest superhero death of all comics, and they ruined it. wally kind of surpassed barry, who surpassed jay. and jay garrick was one cool flash! probably the coolest. the bizarre steel helmet, and whole connection with hermes & mercury thing, is outta sight
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Post by Doc Quantum on Dec 6, 2013 18:34:36 GMT -6
Yes. The Wally West era really introduced the idea of LEGACY to the DC Universe, which was arguably DC's greatest strength compared with Marvel. Under Mark Waid, especially, Wally became far more than he'd ever been before as Kid Flash.
I don't see much Legacy in the New 52 Universe. But then, I stopped reading DC back around 2005/2006, when everything really started to suck.
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Post by williscorto on Dec 22, 2013 21:24:54 GMT -6
I didn't have a problem with Hal Jordan going nuts.
This is why:
a. Marvel has many significant threats. DC overused (and continues to over use) Darkseid. DC has a handful of "cosmic" threats, none of which ever got much traction - Krona (Green Lantern), Trigon the Terrible (Teen Titans), Starro (JLA), Despero (JLA), The Time Trapper (Legion), Wotan (Dr Fate), Karkul (JSA). There's no Galactus/Thanos/Beyonder types in that list. so, Hal Jordan was a good addition to a lacklustre big villain line-up.
b. As a villain, the character was tremedously formidable. As I think I said on the DCMBs about a decade agao, here is a character who could encase Superman in a shell of ring-generated Kryptoinite, raze the Batcave from orbit, etc. As a founding member of the JLA, he knows his friends' weaknesses intimately. He is because of this network of friendships more dangerous than Prometheus ever could be.
c. He is the classic character who fell from grace - a rare thing in comics. No other big name character ever did this. I think at Marvel you had the Swordsman go bad (and who remembers him?) but otherwise villains tend to become good guys (Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Rogue, Magneto) rather than heroes becoming villains.This was the equivalent of Thor deciding to become a force for evil. It was a courageous editorial decision.The problem was the execution. Instead of GL becoming a Magento-esque for of nature, they made him someone who could be taken out by a punk with a steel pole.
I should add that Green Lantern was one of my favourite characters for a very long time (I think I had most Silver Age issues of GL at one point), so its not as if I have no respect for the character. Making the character an arch-villain was a tremendous step.
As for The Flash, well, I'd read in a Grant Morrison interview that he was set to bring Barry Allen back. This made not sense ot me and I agree with Quantum's views on this entirely.
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Post by mh on Dec 22, 2013 21:59:34 GMT -6
I didn't have a problem with Hal Jordan going nuts. c. He is the classic character who fell from grace - a rare thing in comics. No other big name character ever did this. teel pole. I should add that Green Lantern was one of my favourite characters for a very long time (I think I had most Silver Age issues of GL at one point), so its not as if I have no respect for the character. Making the character an arch-villain was a tremendous step.  |
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Post by williscorto on Dec 22, 2013 22:44:18 GMT -6
Again, I think it was an execution thing.
Say they did it like this instead:
a. Sinestro gets into Jordan's ear, saying that the Guardians are useless: they have a treaty of non-interference with Darkseid, they failed to save Krypton, and they stand by idly while Warworld destroys planets. Sinestro casts seeds of doubt into jordan's mind.
b. A delegation from Tamaran arrives on Oa. The Tamaranians want a GL to patrol their star system and end slavery there. The Guardians cite their treaty not to interfere in Vega star system matters. A Tamaranian envoy protests too much and physically challenges the Guardians. They incinerate him. Jordan is outraged.
c. Thanagar invades Rann. Adam Strange asks for the Justice League's assistacne. Hawkman persuades the JLA to stay out of it - Thanagar is seeking to stop Rannian smugglers selling arms to Thanagarian criminals. Green Lantern disagrees and says the invasion is disproportionate. He goes to Rann and wipes out a big chunk of the Thanagarian fleet, hospitalising Hawkman and Hawkgirl. The JLA decide he needs to be stopped, and formally expel him from their ranks. In addition, the GLC say he is acting extrajurisdictionally, as Rann is outside of sector 2814 and send a contingent of Lanterns to stop him. Green Lantern finds himself fighting both the JLA and the GLC. He routes both, accidentally killing a fellow Green Lantern in the process.
d. The Guardians try to deactivate his ring. But the Spectre, who values justice over the law, quietly intervenes and creates a parallel path to the Main Battery - thus, Jordan becomes the Parallax Green Lantern.
e. Apprehensive that the JLA might try and stop him again, Parallax seeks to negate their ability to project power beyond the Earth: he destroys the JLA Watchtower and hits the Earth with radiation that disables boom tubes. In doing so, he comes into conflict with the JLA again....
I'm just dicking around with this, really. But it would have been easy to cast Jordan as a righteous villain who the audience would have sympathised with and even cheered on. This is kind of what Bendis is currently doing with Uncanny X-men. Scott Summers is a villain - he's even surrounded himself with the morally ambiguous (Magneto, Emma Frost, Magik). Everyone wants his hide for taking out the Avengers and preaching mutant revolution and mutant resistance. And yet you cheer him on.
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Post by mh on Dec 22, 2013 23:05:19 GMT -6
Again, I think it was an execution thing. Say they did it like this instead:
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Post by williscorto on Jan 8, 2014 3:05:03 GMT -6
Thanks. Something like that would have enabled an easy rehabilitation (Magneto seems to be constantly in an out of the X-men, for years, because he is a sympathetic villain) rather than create a yellow butt parasite that makes people's hair go grey.
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Post by Doc Quantum on Jan 8, 2014 16:18:25 GMT -6
Getting back to the Peacemaker for a moment, I recently read most of the Vigilante series from the 1980s up to the point when the Post-Crisis Peacemaker was first introduced in those pages.
The Christopher Smith/Peacemaker we see in The Vigilante #36-38 is a crazy person. Simply because the current Vigilante touches him while trying to reason with him, Peacemaker shoots the current Vigilante in the chest with a gun powerful enough to blow him clear off a plane, and moments earlier he's seen blowing away two terrorists who have taken over the plane. The death of the current Vigilante is what spurs Adrian Chase, the first modern-day Vigilante, to don his mask again.
Clearly, the Post-Crisis Peacemaker was not introduced to be a headlining character, but to merely act as a foil for the Vigilante. He's given the same level of violence as the Comedian from WATCHMEN (who is based on the original Peacemaker) but with the crazy notched up times ten. Peacemaker is essentially what Adrian Chase is fated to become if he keeps going along the path he takes.
This is shown to be true when Adrian Chase kills a cop by kicking him off a balcony several floors to the street below, when he breaks into the dead Vigilante's house to get a full Vigilante uniform to wear. He doesn't show any remorse at the time, but this killing of a police officer is what drives Chase over the edge and eventually causes him to commit suicide in the last issue of the series. Peacemaker is like the "Ghost of Christmas Future," in the sense that Adrian Chase will become the crazy Peacemaker if he doesn't take himself out of the game.
And thus was the original Peacemaker destroyed as a viable character.
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Post by Doc Quantum on Jan 8, 2014 16:25:03 GMT -6
This kind of segues with the portrayal of Hal Jordan in Emerald Twilight. The breaking point for me was when he murdered his fellow Green Lanterns. Hal Jordan was never a killer -- Darwyn Cooke made great use of this point to portray how Hal dealt with his no-killing policy during the Korean War, in DC The New Frontier -- and to see him casually turn Kilowog into a skeleton just flies in the face of everything the character stood for.
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yeah, but it doesn't really taint his memory. at least not a lot. when dc decided poor old washed up hal jordan, the best possible green lantern, needed to be "alan scott-ed", instead of pushing him out gracefully they made him -- well you know the stery. that basically ended it for me & modern comics. and after it turned out everyone & their mamas loved poor old washed up hal jordan, they had to bring him back as GL and spent years explaining his psychotic murderin' away. just liek they had to undead the best possible flash, poor old washed up 'killed in crisis' barry allen. I mean, look at this panel, he was friggin dead! if we went out tonite and dug up river phoenix, that's what he'd look like! 
