If I’d gone this year, I might not’ve been so late with the script for this week’s comic!

As it is, I heard the stories about Didio’s off-the-cuff explanation of why Wally West isn’t in the New 52 and the “skeptical fan” being won over by pages of Before Watchmen over Twitter. Also a funny story about some Marvel employees getting stranded after their flight was canceled, which would have made for a good comic in its own right, but that would have been too “inside baseball” even for US.

Quotable quotes from @JoshCritic:

“I like to think I’m generally a fan of whimsy but the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon makes me want to open a vein and leak out like a Capri Sun.”

I can’t take credit for this one; the “Rainbow Lantern” line came from my girlfriend. And she doesn’t even read comics, so that she thought of it before me just goes to show how out of it I’ve been lately.

Prior to that, we didn’t have any plan to mention the Alan Scott thing at all. I didn’t have anything particularly insightful to add, and I really wanted to avoid the increasingly tired formula of  “prejudiced guy says something ignorant and our wise and evolved hero points out why he’s wrong”. I’m not saying we’ve never gone to that well (though we have always tried to add a little twist to the exercise), just that I’m conscious about not repeating it at every opportunity.

I’m kind of interested to check out Earth 2 now, where I wasn’t before. I mean…James Robinson has NOT had a great track record for, like, a little while now. But I like his approach to this change. It was precipitated by the realization that de-aging the JSA would remove one of DC’s existing gay characters from canon: Alan’s son, Obsidian. So why not balance the scales and make Alan gay? And when asked if Robinson would be writing this version of Alan any differen, his response has been simply, “No. He’s attracted to men, and that’s the only difference.” That appeals to me, as does the knowledge that Alan won’t just be “the gay one” on the team, swallowed back into the roster when nobody has a particular use for him.  (Northstar, I’m staring a hole right through you) No, he’s the square-jawed leader of this world’s premiere superhero team, and possibly the most powerful mortal on the planet. That’ll certainly make those “Gay Superheroes in Comics” lists less of a lame read.

Of course, anyone put off by DC’s “Look at us! Look at us!” patting-themselves-on-the-back parade, it’s hard to blame you. Promotion is one thing, but it’s not terribly classy to be THAT proud of yourself for doing the right thing. Act like you’ve been there before, y’know?

Quotable quotes from @JoshCritic:

“Wonder if the mainstream news is more surprised about the original Green Lantern being gay or about there being more than one Green Lantern.”

My favorite thing about the kerfuffle surrounding the mystery GL being teased in Green Lantern #0 is how it’s begun to feed on itself. The first wave of responders criticized DC’s racial insensitivity in introducing a new Muslim character with a gun and what looks like a ski mask. And then the second wave of responders criticized the first wave’s racial insensitivity in immediately assuming any dark-skinned character with a gun is inherently a thug.

And we here at Comic Critics are never content to take a side when we can poke fun at both. I like how we seem to be unconsciously creating a continuity where Batman just doesn’t know how to react to black people.

I will say this, though. I haven’t given the image of the new GL a LOT of thought, but every thought I have given it centers on how ludicrously out of place the gun is. The people pointing out that other comic characters use guns are missing the point spectacularly, as those other characters generally do not have the “most powerful weapon in the universe” (direct quote from about 64% of all GL stories ever written) sitting snugly on their finger. War Machine has guns built into his armor, he’s not holding a gat.

(And if he ever was holding one, you can be damn sure he wouldn’t be holding it at an angle. Because, in the immortal words of the Punisher, “they put the sights on top for a reason.”)

Maybe it’ll turn out that there’s a great in-story reason for the gun, like it’s a badass space gun that shoots space bullets and fucks up space monsters. Or maybe it’s just got some connection to #0’s story and makes zero appearance afterward. I dunno. But that’s kind of irrelevant right now, since all we have to go on is this one image. Which is why you’ve gotta put a lot of thought into such images. Minus the gun, nobody’s having this conversation. Hell, even make the gun green and glowing, and we’re probably not having this conversation.

But hey, at least DC’s past the point where they’d rather scrap a story completely than publish one with a Muslim character in it.

Quotable quotes from @JoshCritic:

“I can’t wait for the issue where the Guardians have to update the Book of Oa with gun control laws.”

As much as I hate pushing Brandon’s gorgeous Cyclobama image further down the page, I figure I’ve had a long enough vacation from these blog posts that I stress over even though I know in my heart nobody could possibly care about them.

Our current strip can be taken several different ways, which is something we encourage. I like to think Comic Critics! never goes for the most obvious point of view (whether we do or not, who the hell knows, I just like to think we don’t). But for the most part, it came from a place of just really wanting to point out how insane DC has been lately. Like, dangerously insane. Like, if DC was a person it would need to be locked up in Creedmoor before it wandered naked into the middle of the  Macy’s Day Parade and started fucking the big Underdog balloon.

And I know what you’re thinking, “What do you mean ‘lately’?” But seriously, just look at their track record since the New 52 reboot, and you’d think DC actually stopped trying to run a legitimate comic book company and has been filming a This is Spinal Tap-like mockumentary for the past year. Solicited creators being kicked off books before they even came out, scores of creators quitting over editorial interference (some of them almost immediately), a very public series of accusations by Rob Liefeld, a heckuva lot of cancellations, the firing-and-immediate-rehiring of Gail Simone….

And then the triple-play that spawned this comic. Andy Diggle was hired to write Action Comics and quit before his first issue hit the stands. The very next day, it was reported that Josh Fialkov walked off both of his Green Lantern books. The very NEXT day, it was revealed why; DC wanted him to kill off John Stewart, a move which they would have needed more fan goodwill than they even had before the reboot to pull off successfully.  It’s like all the comic news sites suddenly turned into The Onion for a day.

I almost can’t wait to see what wacky thing happens next. Anyone care to take any action on this? I’ll lay odds that it’ll have something to do with Stephanie Brown again, like someone will erase her from a Greg Capullo flashback montage and replace her with a crudely drawn Bette Kane, causing Capullo to leave the book.