Wearing a costume and running around fighting crime/causing crime is the most impractical thing EVER

Okay, after days of swearing at pieces of fabric and stabbing my fingers with pins, and spending half a day in a mask and headpiece, I've come to the conclusion that there is no practical value whatsoever in dressing up to fight crime or perpetrate villainy.  I couldn't blink with the mask on, I couldn't grab anything with gloves (let alone type), my little wrist cuffs kept on falling off, my sleeves rode up, the pants twisted around, and the headpiece got really, really annoying, and the white "face paint" (jerry-rigged white concealer stick, really), got on everything, so I couldn't even touch my face.  And even though I wasn't running around, I was wearing heels.  Argh!  Cosplay is not fun!  I can just imagine the joys of dressing up as Wonder Woman.

So that got me thinking who has the most practical costume?

The best I could come up with was The Question.  Just a man in a suit.  That's pretty easy to run around in, though maybe not the best for actual hand-to-hand combat.  The hat might fall off, too, but no big deal.

Any Green Lantern can generate his or her costume from their ring, so that's carte blanche to have whatever kind of costume your heart desires.  So Green Lantern costumes = practical.

Shapeshifters get a pass, too, considering that their clothes are a part of their body.  (I think.  No one's ever answered that question to my satisfaction.)

So, hooray for these guys.

Anyone want to add to the list?

Oh, here's a picture of Vril Dox.  His outfit is pretty practical because it's a military uniform.  And he's got jodphurs.  I like jodphurs.  And Vril Dox.

Can Mars just go away now?

Okay, my comics finally came and I got a chance to read Brightest Day #12.  Of all the stories, I'm liking the one revolving around the Martian Manhunter one the least.

Since the Martian Manhunter is one of my favorite characters, I had really high hopes for his story arc.  I thought Brightest Day would be an opportunity to take the character back to his roots, or maybe back to his roots with a little twist of noir.

Instead, the J'onn's antagonist is basically a female version of Malefic.  *sigh*  (For the record, I really don't like Malefic, J'onn's evil twin brother, for those of you who don't know who he is.)  Coupled with that is an origin retcon, which always bug me to no end.

But all of that out of the way, here's what I think really needs to happen to bring the charcater of the Martian Manhunter to new heights:

Get rid of Mars.

Get rid of it!  I don't mean obliterate the planet Death Star-style, but just let it stay in the background, not the forefront.  Here's why:

1.  Mars is so poorly defined.  Is it a war-like culture reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs?  Is it a planet/nation of philosophers and poets?  Honestly, I can't keep track of what Martian culture was like.

2.  And while we're at it, can we cut out the whole "the entire planet has the same culture/government/language bit?  As much as I love Star Wars, the fact that Tatooine is entirely desert makes no sense.  (Okay, "Galaxy far, far away," so I guess it has different rules.)  Yes, I know there were White Martians, which to me, are a mess to begin with anyway.  There were Pole Dwellers, but they got retconned out, I tink.  But take a look at these speech bubbles from Brightest Day #12:

The Martian Symbols of Love and Hate?  Slip "Earth" into that sentence and it makes no sense.  Can you think of the Earth symbol for danger?  The Earth symbol for love?  If someone dropped you off a country with a completely different language and culture, would you even know what a stop sign looked like?!  ARGH!  A whole planet can't have the same culture!

I think somewhere in the DC universe it was explained that Earth has a variety cultures.  To me, that's just an excuse to have a lack of imagination.  That's why whenever I see a female alien creature with hardly any similarity to humans yet is still drawn with bosoms to identify her as female, I start wanting to throw things across the room.  It makes no sense and it's just lazy.  Heck, even abs shouldn't be the same.  Which brings me to point 3.

3.  The Green Lantern universe handles aliens and alien cultures much better than any incarnation of Mars ever could.  So you know what?  Let's just forget everything about Martian culture, leave it as some sort of vague understanding that it was slightly different than Earth culture, and let J'onn J'onzz move on to superheroing and detectiving, and leave the aliens to the mythos that does it well.  Stop trying to define Mars, becuase the whole Mars history has gotten so convoluted, that there's just no way you can define it with any modicum of logic short of another history-changing Crisis.

4.  Every story centered around Mars, by default, makes the story about J'onn J'onzz being an alien, not about what he does as a superhero.  There is no forward motion in a story that basically boils down into a character trying to figure out his destiny when he already chose it decades ago.  In any recent story that I can think of, J'onn J'onzz doesn't DO anything other than try figure out who J'onn J'onzz is.  He's become the Odo of the DC Universe, for those who have seen Deep Space Nine: he is only defined by his race and how different/similar he is to them.  Sure, Odo was the security guy who bantered with Quark, but he was the "good Dominion guy," too.  There's more to J'onn than just being the de facto "good" alien of the JLA.

5.  Quick: name three things Superman stands for.  Okay, try that with J'onn J'onzz.  It's nowhere near as easy, is it.  Why?  Because any major Post-Crisis story involving J'onn J'onzz--except American Secrets and DC: The New Frontier--boils down to "Should I like Mars more or Earth more?"  The more Mars is in the foreground, the less J'onn J'onzz's core values are.  And I don't mean core values as in "Earth is more important to me than Mars," which is a passive value.  I mean it in the sense of what a hero considers is worth fighting for and acting upon, like "Truth, Justice, and the American Way."

6.  Get rid of Mars, get rid of the Superman parallels.  The less J'onn is torn between two worlds, the less he is like Superman, and the more he can do other things to make him different.  You know, like be a detective.  Kind of how he started out.

Okay, rant is finished.  Anyone got any counter-arguments?  Or some Maalox?

Talking Comics With the Uninitiated, Part 2

So a while back I had a conversation with my mother about Wonder Woman's new costume and how much she hated it.

I'm starting to get my Halloween costume together.  Two years ago I made a promise to someone (who's going as the Joker) that I'd be Harley Quinn, which left me kind of at a loss as to how to pull off a work-safe (a.k.a. not super-tight) Harley Quinn costume.  Lo and behold, I managed to pull it off by finding a jester costume to modify.  I have no sewing machine skills, so this is where my mother comes in.  She has no idea who Harley Quinn is.

I had been showing her various pictures of Harley to give her an idea of what she looked like, but I never explained to her who she was exactly.  Actually, I did, but she wasn't listening at the time.

Apparently my mother thought the costume was a part of her body or her skin something, and not like an actual suit.  I don't know what goes on in the heads of non-comics readers...

Mom:  Well, I don't know what all these superpowers do to people!

Me:  She doesn't have superpowers, Mom.  She's just a girl in a suit.

Mom:  Oh.  But what about the horns?

Me:  They're part of her costume!  She's got pigtails and stuff.

Mom:  Okay.  You still have to make the glasses yet, right?

Me:  They're not glasses!  That's a mask!

Mom:  Oh.

Me:  And she doesn't have superpowers.  She's just crazy.

Mom:  What?

Me:  She's nuts.  She's the Joker's sidekick.

Mom:  She's a villain?!  Wait, I thought she was a hero!

Me: *facepalm*

Mom:  So she's a devil or something?

Me:  No!  She's cute!!!  See?  She's all like clingy and the Joker's all like, "Get off of me!"  It's funny!

Mom:  Okay, I guess she's kind of cute.

I then started asking my mother if she could take the headpiece apart and re-sew it back together because the black and red were on the wrong sides and she's like, "Does it REALLY matter?"  And of course I'm like, "YES."  Never offer to make anything for someone with OCD.  She is going to switch the sleeves around because they don't match at all, but I conceded the headpiece and the tunic, so it will be backwards, so I'll just have to pretend I'm Bizzarro-Harley or Left-Handed Harley or something.

You can just imagine how entertaining it will be when I take her to see the Green Lantern movie next summer.

Are All Characters Sacred?

The two part "Starro the Conqueror" episode of Batman: the Brave and the Bold which featured B'wana Beast had me thinking deep thoughts the other day about minor characters.

It seems as though that both the comics industry and comics fandom operate under the premise that any character, no matter how small, out-of-fashion, ridiculous, or poorly thought out, is sacred.  For the former, it is because they are intellectual property that might garner profits, for the latter, it is out of emotional attachment and identification.

Is this a valid premise, however, for a creative industry?  Should all characters be above censure, even if hardly anyone likes them?  Is it okay to admit a mistake, forget a character was created, and move on?

I offer this up as an open-ended question, because I have not come to a conclusion myself.  I can offer points on both sides of the argument: there are some characters I just don't like, and at the same time, I applaud the efforts of writers who can take an obscure character and bring him or her to new heights.  That being said, I don't like to see legacy characters trotted out in low-quality stories just for the sake of selling books.

But I teared up a little at the end of a cartoon about B'wana Beast, so that's got to count for something.

Adam Strange by Alex Saviuk

Part of my love for Adam Strange stems from how many cool flying poses the guy can assume.  Carmine Infantino always managed to draw so many awesome poses for Adam in his Silver Age stories that communicated a realistic sense of motion through the air.  I also love it when superheroes have their own flying styles, or even fighting styles, that pushes them into the realm of iconic and original.

So whenever I see a contemporary artist find a cool pose for Adam Strange, I'm very happy.

75 Favorite Moments in DC History: Number 49

49.  Justice is served, Harvey Dent style (Batman: Shadow of the Bat #62-63, 1997.)  (***Potential Spoilers!***

I know hardly anything about The Punisher, but the more I think about it, the more I think I'd like him.  Sometimes I need a break from the peaceful-warrior style of Justice served by heroes like The Martian Manhuner, and I need a Machiavellian approach to satisfy those darker yearnings for Revenge...er...Justice.  (Did I mention I'm half-Sicilian?)

Fun Fact: My Mom's dog is a Chow Chow!

There's a book I have called Batman and Philosophy in which one of the essays examines whether Batman's decision to not kill the Joker is causing more lives to be lost.  Depending on the mood I'm in, I'll waver between, "Don't sacrifice your morals and break your one rule!" to "Oh, just kill him already and be done with it!"  But Bruce Wayne won't ever pull a trigger, even in the name of Justice.

But guess who will?

All Batman villians must laugh when shooting their henchmen.  It's just tradition at this point.

Yeah, that's right, Batman: Harvey Dent will get your dirty work done.  Good thing about leaving things to the Fate of a coin toss: it's really good at absolving guilt.  The good portion of Harvey's psyche decices to emerge and punish criminals under the mantle of "Janus."  He's pretty darn close to being a superhero, too: he dons a mask of the Greek god Janus and some black robes and starts punishing criminals and righting wrongs, and even twarts Two-Face's plans to destroy the city, becoming his own nemesis.  I could get used to this.

Plus, as an added bonus, we get to see Harvey Dent in a naval uniform and speak all piratey and shoot people with a gun that makes really cool sound effects:

C'mon, say it out loud, you know you want to: SHFF!!

Oh, and slap people around, too.

If anyone at DC is looking for a "new" angle to take Harvey Dent in, instead of the hoodie-wearing-betrayed-by-his-own-gang incarnation, you could always revisit this.

Just don't forget the military uniform, okay?