Tag Archives: Justice League

DC Comics Tries for Diversity With Justice League United

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Comic book readers are often seen as a drooling collection of adolescent babymen, trapped in their parents’ basement where they freebase Cheetos and giggle blankly at Power Girl’s boob window.

This is a false and even ridiculous stereotype — and yet, over the last few years, DC comics has been working overtime to convince the public that it is all too, too true. Back in 2011, when they launched their new 52 marketing initiative and rebooted numerous titles, DC decided to turn the character Starfire, best known for her appearance on the Teen Titan animated series for kids, into a sex-hungry amnesiac whose main personality trait is a desire to sleep with as many men as possible. At the same time, they launched their new Catwoman series with an image that suggested that the heroine’s ass had attained sentience and was attempting to reach through her spine and throttle her cleavage. Then, at the end of 2013, the company objected to a storyline in which Batwoman, their one high profile lesbian character, planned to get married. DC insisted that this was not because of homophobia, but because their characters can’t get married because the audience is made up of delicate little flowers who are afraid of commitment and marriage in any form. More recently, DC released Teen Titans #1, and put an underage girl with enormous breast implants front and center on the cover. When writer Janelle Asselin pointed out that this was not ideal , the comics community responded by soberly and maturely deluging her with rape threats. Way to buck the stereotype, fellas.

Given this recent history of utter cluelessness and insensitivity, I was not sure what to expect from DC’s new Justice League United #0. Presumably inspired by the huge success of Marvel’s new teen Muslim hero Ms. Marvel, Justice League United introduces a new female Cree Native American hero named Equinox. There are few enough non-white heroes that any addition to their number is welcome. But, given DC’s track record, the chances that the character would be treated with respect, or even minimal intelligence, seemed low.

In the event, Justice League United #0 is not especially sexist or racist. That is a very low bar, though, and while the comic clears it, that is about as much as can be said in the story’s favor. Writer Jeff Lemire’s script is a masterpiece of poor pacing; heroes and villains pop up here and there almost at random as the setting lurches from space to some sort of comics convention to Canada to wherever. There’s no sense of suspense; it’s just one damn thing after another, with characters we care nothing about burbling out default tough-guy schtick and anonymous villains rolled out to make the sort of portentous threats you’d expect from villains. Artist Mike McKone provides typically ineffectual mainstream art, neither consistently stylized enough to be interesting nor competent enough to attain even the basic anatomical accuracy which is supposedly the goal.

Despite the fact that Equinox’s appearance has been heavily promoted, the character herself barely shows up, and her walk-on is almost aggressively anonymous. Miyahbhin chats with a friend briefly, goes home, encounters some sort of weird stranger who turns into a monster and then vanishes, leaving Miyabhin’s granny to comfort her. You get no sense of Miyabhin as a character, or of her relationship with her friends or her grandmother. It’s just another in a series of meaningless special effects moments before we zip off to the next random plot point.
 

Justice_League_United_Vol_1_0_Variant

 
The difference with G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel series couldn’t be more stark. There, the series is all about Kamala Khan’s sense of being stuck between the different norms of her American culture and her Pakistani family. Transforming into a superhero is interesting because it links up with Kamala’s story of trying to assimilate and stay true to herself. We care about the superheroics, in other words, because we care about Kamala. In contrast, Miyabhin is just one more blob of gaudy computer coloring to throw at the wall.

What’s perhaps most striking about the comic is its utter indifference to new readers. Again, this is a first issue introduction to a new series with a character who seems specifically designed to appeal to an audience outside the core superhero demographic of 20-30 year old guys who have been reading superhero comics for decades. And yet, there’s almost no effort to introduce us to the characters, or even to tell us what they can do (there’s some banter about the limits of Animal Man’s powers which I guess is supposed to be helpful, but mostly just seems clumsy.) The last couple of pages shift to a confrontation between Lobo and Hawkman which is completely unmotivated and disconnected from everything else in the issue. I even know more or less who Lobo and Hawkman are, and I sure didn’t care that they were going to fight. What would someone who hadn’t read thirty years of DC comics make of their stand-off?

Even when DC specifically attempts to reach out to new audiences, and even when it attempts to include female and minority characters in a respectful manner, it is badly hampered by its incompetence, its basic lack of professionalism, and, above all, by an overwhelming, all-encompassing insularity. Even with the best will in the world, Jeff Lemire, Mike McKone, and DC editorial simply have no idea how to tell a story that will appeal to anyone but the tiny group of fans who are determined to read about DC characters no matter how low the quality of the product in which those characters appear. Justice League United, for all its faults, does prove that that insularity doesn’t necessarily have to result in insensitive assholery. But it shouldn’t be a surprise that it often does.

School for Alter Egos

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Equinox

 
I’m looking at DC’s newest character, Equinox, a teen superheroine based on Cree activist Shannen Koostachin. She’s a member of Jeff Lemire and Mike McKone’s Justice League United. Like Marvel’s Alpha Flight, the team is Canadian, so the character continues the U.S. publishing tendency to place Native America outside of U.S. borders. But I see some promise here: Equinox is from an actual tribe, her costume isn’t red, her features aren’t cartoonishly “Indian,” and she’s not showing any thigh or cleavage. That helps offset the “her power stems from the Earth” cliche, and I actually like the idea of a character who will have different abilities as the seasons change–never heard that one before.

But will she be better than Wyatt Wingfoot? He was born in Fantastic Four No. 50, cover-date May 1966 , on newsstands a month before my June-issued birth certificate. Wyatt’s dad is “Big Will Wingfoot – the greatest Olympic decathlon star this country ever had!”Here on Earth-1218, that’s James “Big Jim” Thorpe, gold medalist for the 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon. Stan Lee even gave his name to the college coach trying to draft Wyatt: “I’m sorry! I’m not interested in athletics, Coach Thorpe!”
 

FF51_WyattWingfoot

 
Jack Kirby penciled the issue, but I prefer Sante Fe painter Ben Wright’s Thorpe rendering. I picked “Jim Thorpe in His Carlisle Indian School Football Uniform” for the cover of my novel School for Tricksters. Wright’s website says he “draws from Native American ceremony, symbolism, and tradition” and identifies him as “part Cherokee,” rarely promising signs. But I like the painting because the old-timey helmet sets the period, plus his slightly stylized Thorpe looks really cool. The big “C” on his chest could be a superhero’s. Carlisle Man!
 

kate buford thorpe bioschool for ticksters cover

 
Biographer Kate Buford later told me Wright got it wrong. The cover of her Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe features the original photo with an inside caption: “Jim Thorpe with the Canton Bulldogs, c. 1920, Canton, Ohio.” So the “C” is for Canton, a team Thorpe played for after his career peaked. Ben painted over the facts—the way lesser-known inker Joe Sinnott thickened Kirby’s lines for FF 50.
 
School for Tricksters is a historical novel, so I paint over a shelf of facts too. My daughter’s 11th grade history teacher capped a recent Carlisle Indian School lesson with “Oh, I’m sure those kids must have wanted to be there,” so my daughter grabbed a row of books from my office to write a rebuttal for her research paper. I recommended Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance: The Glorious Imposter. I used to exchange emails with the author, Donald Smith, up in Alberta. Thorpe is the School’s most famed student, but I prefer the adventures of Chief Buffalo Child, AKA Sylvester Long. He’s the real Carlisle Man.
 

sylvester long lance bio

 
The School railroaded children from their western reservations to the middle of Pennsylvania to be transformed into working class mainstream Americans. According to Long’s autobiography, he was born a full-blood Blackfoot in a great plains teepee, and so an ideal student for the program. Except that his birth certificate says Winston-Salem, NC, and both his parents were ex-slaves. Which still makes him the ideal Carlisle student, since Carlisle was all about painting over facts. The real-life dual-identity Long graduated to Hollywood, where he played another version of himself–until the movie exposure lead to his unmasking and suicide.

Sylvester, a mild-mannered library janitor, longed to be exceptional—a supeheroic dream for a mixed blood Clark Kent in the Jim Crow South. But did he just doodle over his real self or did he become his disguise? When Dean Cain proposed to Teri Hatcher on the season two finale of Louis & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, the network shot three answers: “Yes,” “No,” and “Who’s asking, Clark Kent . . .  or Superman?” They were trying to prevent the “real” answer from leaking before the show aired. Smith documents at least a dozen Lois Lanes in Long’s adventures, but no marriage proposals.  His identity wasn’t stable enough to settle down.

I ask my students the same question when analyzing superhero texts: what is the character’s core identity? I suggest four options: A) the superhuman, B) the human, C) neither, or D) both. For decades, Superman’s answer was “A.”Clark Kent is just the pair of fake glasses he wears around humans (David Carradine gives this a great monologue in Tarantino’s Kill Bill). But that flips to “B” after the 80s reboot. Clark lived a perfectly normal childhood until his superpowered puberty made him hide behind a cape and tights.

Sometimes students go with “C,” arguing that both Clark and Superman are public faces worn by an inner Kal-El. It’s a common idea outside of comics, that we all have a secret private self who transforms according to context: home, work, frat party. It fits the standard master-of-disguise trope too. Long could have wandered downtown any of his free Saturdays and leafed through a copy of Nick Carter Detective Weekly at a Carlisle newsstand in 1912. The old banner illustration is a row of heads, “Nick Carter In Various Disguises,” with the largest and literally central self right there in the middle.

But “D” is the most daring choice. What if the center doesn’t hold and we’re all just a series of shifting performances? Zorro admits as much when he unmasks himself as the languid Don Diego. The costume wasn’t just a disguise; it made his whole body come alive—something Bruce Banner and the Hulk understand too. Are any of us really the same person when we’re angry? And is the goal to find a “golden mean” as Don Diego promises his fiancé? Like Teri Hatcher, Lolita is no polygamist. And yet who is the Scarlet Pimpernel’s wife married to? If Sir Percy is just a foppish disguise, why does he keep laughing that inane laugh even after he unmasks?

All that is too complicated an answer for early 20th century America. When they unmasked Sylvester they only saw a dual-identity fake. Except then why did a private detective have to write over the facts, claiming he fingered rouge and hair-straightening gel from the corpse? Long’s alma mater championed the dual-identity model too, doctoring “before” and “after” photos of graduating students. Sometimes you have to white-out a shirt collar to keep the world savage/civilized.

Big Jim’s white/not-white wife was a Carlisle student too. She and Jim lost their first child, James Junior, their only son. Kate Buford and I give dueling banjo readings ending with the death scene, proof that narrativized facts and fact-based fiction can get along just fine. Kate and I live in the same town too, and our books came out just weeks apart—coincidences even most comic book readers wouldn’t believe. Stan Lee invented the Keewazi Indian reservation for the Wingfoots and dropped Wyatt into the Human Torch’s college dorm. Johnny looks up at his hulk of a roommate: “Say, whatever they feed you at home, I’d like it on my diet!”

Wyatt is still wandering the borders of the Marvel multiverse. I think he’s tangled with the Kree a few times too–an alien race Lee and Kirby created a year after Wyatt and who have only a phonetic resemblance to Equinox’s tribe. Equinox’s alter ego, Shannen Koostachin, was only fifteen when she died in 2010, but Canada’s House of Commons unanimously celebrated her superheroic achievements:

“In her short life, Shannen Koostachin became the voice of a forgotten generation of first nations children. Shannen had never seen a real school, but her fight for equal rights for children in Attawapiskat First Nation launched the largest youth-driven child rights movement in Canadian history, and that fight has gone all the way to the United Nations.”

And now she’s made it to Justice League United.
 

FF50_Wyatt

Real Life Justice Leagues

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RLSH

 
Wall Creeper, Shadow Hare, Dragonheart, Zetaman, the Crimson First—never heard of them? They’re self-proclaimed superheroes patrolling the streets of Denver, Cincinnati, Miami, Portland, and Atlanta. There are dozens more—Hero Man in L.A., Captain Prospect in D.C., Razorhawk in Minneapolis—with  entire Leagues of such would-be Avengers: Team Justice, Black Monday Society, Rain City Superhero Movement, Superheroes Anonymous. RealLifeSuperheroes.com insists its members “are not ‘kooks in costumes,’ as they may seem at first glance.” According to rlhs.org, they “seek to inform, and, most importantly, inspire” through “charity work and civic activities.”

Since these organizations, like non-costumed neighborhood watches, work within the law, they usually do no harm, and their “safety patrols” might even deter crime a bit. But they’re not superheroes. They’re self-designed cosplayers staging theatrics on city streets. They don’t actuate the superhero formula. Which is a very good thing. Otherwise they would be a league of Patrick Drums, AKA The Scorpion.
 

>Drum

 
Drum doesn’t dress up in a giant scorpion costume. When police arrested him in 2012, he was wearing a white tank top and khakis. Lexi Pandell recently detailed his adventures in The Atlantic. Like the Punisher or Dexter or the 1930s Spider, Drum is dedicated to killing bad guys. Oliver Queen on season one of Arrow crossed off names from a checklist of targets he murdered; Drum only ex-ed out the first two on his list of 60 registered sex offenders living in his Washington state county (about eighty miles outside the safety patrols of Seattle’s “real life superheroes” Buster Doe, No Name, and Phoenix Jones). While RLSH members “believe in due process” and “are certainly not vigilantes,” Drum told a courtroom, “This country was founded on vigilantism.”

The list of superheroes taking inspiration from animals is longer than Clallam County’s registered pedophiles. Bruce Wayne, like Drum, needed a defining emblem before starting his war on criminals. A bat didn’t fly through Drum’s window, so he looked back to a childhood memory instead. In a note he left beside his victims’ bodies, he explained how he’d once watched scorpions in a pet shop aquarium circling “in full battle ready posture” to protect a pregnant female. “This spirit always impressed me.” He left his emblem, a scorpion encased in a lollipop, with his signed notes. After his second murder, Drum planned to go off the grid and “live in the wild,” the site of his origin story. When he was ten, a stranger got him drunk and lured him into the woods for oral sex. Like Batman, Drum is after vengeance.

“My actions were not about me,” he wrote in superheroic grandeur. “They were about my community. I suffered many failures and my overall view of things was one of hopelessness. I took that hopelessness and in turn threw myself away to a purpose. I gave myself to something bigger than myself.” And, as in so many superhero sagas, the community championed him.  The county prosecutor abandoned the death penalty because she doubted she could convince a jury to execute him. Drum has too many supporters.

And what if those supporters organized a league of like-minded vigilantes? They wouldn’t look like comic book Avengers or any RLSH cosplayers. They’d look like the Klan. Detroit is currently patrolled by a RLSH cosplay team called the Michigan Protectors, but back in the ’30s, the city was under the watch of the Black Legion, a splinter group from the Ohio KKK. The Protectors’ Adam Besso, AKA Bee Sting, retired from superheroing in 2012 after pleading guilty to attempted assault with a weapon (his “stinger” was a shotgun). But that’s nothing to the 1936 conviction of nine Black Legion members for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Poole, an alleged wife-beater targeted by the vigilantes.
 

220px-Black_Legion_Uniforms_with_Skull-and-Crossbones_Insignia

 
According to historian Peter H. Amann, the Black Legion’s founder, William Shepard, supplied his superhero team with secret rites and costumes: “You have to have mystery in a fraternal thing to keep it up,” he said; “the folks eat it up.” Black Legionnaires sported black hoods, pirate hats, and robes with cross-and-bones on the chest—the same emblem Exciting Comics’ superhero Black Terror would use in comic books. Despite the Black Legion’s apparent passion for “crime fighting,” in “real life,” Amann writes, their actions “were neither glamorous nor likely to reduce crime.”The Detroit News made the same conclusion: “Hooey may look like romance and adventure in the moonlight, but it always looks like hooey when you bring it out in the daylight.”

So will the world never witness a League capable of championing real Justice? Maybe not, but the virtual world already has. Terre des Hommes, an international children’s rights charity group, has introduced “a new way of policing.” Like Drum, the organization wants to target pedophiles, but instead of hunting down and killing registered convicts, this Justice League exposes unconvicted ones roaming freely on the web. From their high tech batcave, a warehouse in Amsterdamn, members of Terre des Hommes (it means “Land of People”) don the team disguise of a computer-animated Filipino child named “Sweetie.” She’s supposedly ten (same age as Drum when he was assaulted), and when predators video message with her, they have no idea Terre des Hommes is locating their real world addresses. So far the superheroic Sweetie has netted some 200,000 Internet users. A thousand of them wanted to pay her to perform sexual acts.

Terres des Hommes has swept 71 countries so far. Drum couldn’t cover a single U.S. county. I doubt many RLSH cosplayers have considered assuming the alter ego of a powerless ten-year-old to battle crime, but Sweetie is probably the only real life superhero out there. I wish her Justice League continued success.

 

Sweetie

 

Annotated Justice

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DC Comics has rebooted its line of superhero comics, beginning with its flagship title, Justice League. Written by Geoff Johns with pencils by Jim Lee, Justice League is supposed to be an entry point for readers unfamiliar with the DC Universe. That’s the theory. But DC Comics are not exactly known for being “new reader friendly.” And Geoff Johns is an acquired taste (one acquires that taste by reading superhero comics, and only superhero comics, for 40 years straight).

As a courtesy to newcomers, I offer this annotated guide to Justice League #1.

Cover

While the line-up of the Justice League has changed many times over the decades, the iconic team has always included DC’s most revered characters plus Aquaman. Starting at the top left and working clockwise, there’s Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Green Lantern, Cyborg, Batman, and the Flash. Batman is arguably the most famous, but Superman has a TV show (Smallville) and a movie in the works, Green Lantern recently appeared in a movie that most of you didn’t bother to see, Cyborg guest-starred in about two episodes of Smallville, and Wonder Woman almost had her own TV series.

Casual fans might notice that the costumes look a bit different from their classic appearances. Superman no longer wears underwear outside of his pants. Most of the men appear to be wearing armor instead of spandex. And Wonder Woman now has a choker, presumably because her bare neck was drawing attention away from her cleavage.

Page 2-3

This is a great example of Jim Lee’s artwork. It’s full of dynamic motion, though I’m not sure what that motion is. Is Batman using his cape as a makeshift parachute? Or is he running away on his knuckles? I say the latter, because Batman is just that damn tough.

Batman is pursuing an alien monster while being pursued by the cops, and just when the alien seems to gain the upper hand, Batman is rescued by — Green Lantern.

Page 8 

As DC Comics helpfully reminds us, superheroes are modern myths overflowing with allegorical subtext. As this scene makes clear, Green Lantern is not just a guy with a flashlight in his chest. He’s also a metaphor for light, because lanterns provide light. And Batman is a metaphor for darkness, because bats like the dark. So they represent light and dark, the two sides of heroism (and humanity!). Green Lantern hits things in the light and Batman hits things in the dark. Green Lantern is like Zeus and Batman is like Hades. On second thought, Superman is Zeus and Green Lantern is Helios (Aquaman is Poseidon, that’s clearly a given). Or maybe Green Lantern is Jesus if Jesus were a space cop. And that would make Batman … um, let’s say Dark Jesus. The point is these characters are MODERN MYTHS.

Anyway, Batman and Green Lantern pursue the alien into the sewers, where Lantern gives Batman some grief about not having superpowers.

Page 14

Batman more or less punks Green Lantern and takes his magic ring. Given that Green Lantern has the power to do anything or create anything he wants, some readers may wonder how the unpowered Batman humiliates him so easily. Two reasons: first, Green Lantern is an idiot. Second, while Batman may not have super-strength or magic, he has the greatest superpower of all, one that allows him to win any fight: popularity.

Page 15

The alien screams “For Darkseid!” and blows itself up. Darkseid was, as every comic nerd knows, the main villain of the “Fourth World” saga, a collection of stories created by legendary comic artist Jack Kirby. Long story short, DC Comics kicked Kirby to the curb and mismanaged his creations for several decades. Darkseid’s last appearance before the reboot was in a recent story called Final Crisis. In the climactic battle, Batman shot Darkseid with a cosmic bullet and then Superman killed him with the power of song (the exact song was not specified, but it was probably soft adult contemporary). The scene was a dramatic celebration of creativity. Too bad actual creative people like Kirby don’t get as much love.

Page 21

This is the introduction of Victor Stone, the teenager who will eventually become Cyborg. He’s half man, half machine, and all black. That last feature is useful for marketing purposes because the Justice League isn’t known for its diversity.

And interacting with minorities would be a good thing for Batman and Green Lantern, as they have a tendency to engage in racial profiling. They decide that Superman, being an alien, must somehow be involved with the alien monster, so they fly to Metropolis to interrogate him. And Superman, rational adult that he is, punches out Green Lantern and then challenges Batman.

Page 24

Next issue: Superman vs. Batman! Who will win? Superman has super-strength, super-speed, flight, invulnerability, freeze breath, and heat vision. That may sound impressive, but Batman is really, really popular.

Justice League: Friends and Clueless Man-Things

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Somehow my child has ended up with a copy of Justice League Adventure: Friends and Foes. It’s a 2003 digest size softcover collection of comics based on the Cartoon Network JLA series (I guess..it’s got some cartoon network affiliation.) Anyway, my son likes it, so I’ve read it a couple times, and stored up a fair bit of bile.

Here are some questions for the creators (of whom there seem to be an inordinate number.)

1. Why are you so obsessed with continuity? This is a book for kids right? Why do you keep throwing in plotlines that make only minimal sense if you haven’t been following the DCU for the past ten to fifteen years? One story centers around the Green Lantern Corps being mind-controlled by Braniac, without making anything but the most passing effort to explain what the Corps is, or who Braniac is, or why we should give a rat’s ass. Another is built around the Martian Manhunter’s backstory, but it’s just kind of assumed everyone knows all about the Martian Manhunter’s backstory already, because, hey, you’re eight, why wouldn’t you have already memorized the derivative tragedies of a thousand Superman knock-offs?

2. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have the super-heroes be heroic? The writers seem to have a weakness for having our hero team stand around like douchebags while some hapless semi-civilian martyrs him/herself for the good of the universe. I think there are five stories, and this happens twice; once a tween super-hero loses all her powers to *save the universe*! and once a brain-washed Martian baddy gets religion and sacrifices himself to *save the universe*! That’s a pretty lousy record, is all I’m saying. If you were a super-hero team and you had to martyr a vaguely innocent bystander on 40% of your adventures, you might want to find a different line of work, no?

3. What the fuck is up with the erotic subtext? Not one, but two stories here have this squicky erotic mind-control element. In one, a semi-nude Poison Ivy forces a magic potion on a compliant and semi-nude Aquaman; in the other the Psycho Pirate causes a bunch of erotic hijinks, including an old white geezer who gets it on with a hot minority chick and some Batman on Wonder Woman action. Again I ask; is this what the under-8s are clamoring for? Really and truly?

Photobucket
Geezer on girl action, because that’s what the kiddies want. Jason Hall’s the writer and Rick Burchett’s the illustrator.

As I’ve mentioned before, Marvel really seems to have figured out how to do entertaining, cleverly-written, all-ages titles. DC…well, at least on the evidence offered here, not so much.

Update: A couple of folks, including Heidi at the Beat have pointed out the contradiction in my saying my son liked the comic and the rest of my post. I should have explained better, no doubt. Short clarification; he likes everything with super-heroes, but on that scale he wasn’t really all that into this. Longer explanation in comments, if you care to scroll down.