Notes from the 52 Zoo Crew Digest

Since the release of the first issue of 52, pal Bombasticus and I have led a ragtag, fugitive fleet of comics geeks on a weekly email-based lonely quest for meaning, joy, and simple enjoyment through the series. Since, for all the hype, 52 has been a relatively thin broth to date, these discussions regularly devolve into digression, evisceration, kvetching, and obsessive analysis.

The following (with some minor edits to turn a rambling back-and-forth discussion into a semi-coherent conversation) is a transcript of our exchange around 52 Week 14. [Plain text mine; text in italics is the Voice of Bombasticus...]

Steel's moping seems inconsistent. After all, he was the guy who tried to talk Alan Scott into counseling to deal with his trauma. So why does he simply hide in his workshop instead of dealing with his difficulties?

I think all their "character" work is betraying the limitations of their craft in some ways that really should be alarming. Let Steel be butch. It shouldn't be this difficult to write a good solid guy and a good "dad" unless you either (a) don't know any (b) hate guys like that (c) both.

And really, the good solid guy part is pure Superman. That's the whole thing with the character: he arose out of the whole Doomsday fiasco, inspired by the Man of Steel himself, and acquitted himself well enough that he was accepted.

So extreme self-doubt is a mistake. After all, isn't one of the lessons of the whole Infinite Crisis thing that the 90s and Millennial passive, reactive and self-doubting Superman kinda sucks? So why accept that the lease has run out on that model, only to renew is for this one?

So he's the previous iteration of what they're doing with Booster Gold? Why do we need to break down two Booster Golds at once? Is this some kind of "art" thing of which I am ignorant?

Except Booster Gold wasn't created as intentionally (Louise Simonson-ically?) in Superman's image, the way Steel was. Of the new school, post Doomsday Superman analogues, he was the regular guy who embodied Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and found inspiration in Big Blue's example to kick butt and take names in the grand heroic tradition. Okay, it helped that he was a super-genius who created his own battlesuit, but the point with Steel was “it's the man, not the uniform, that counts.”

Booster has always been a jackass and a self-promoter first, and a hero second. It's the paycheck, then the uniform, then the man. Attempts to make him more heroic (killing off his sister to give him a well of angst, trading in his costume for battle armor to make him more hardcore and 90s) have always been short-lived, followed by an inevitable reversion to comic relief status.

Why do we need to break down two Booster Golds at once? Because that's one of the points about this whole 52 enterprise I don't understand. Each legacy hero has two proxies, and so you have to break both down to build them to the point where they find their inner hero. Of course, the inherent flaw in this seems to be that these characters (except for whichever one dies in the end) rise to whatever occasion they rise to, achieve their heroic potential, and save whatever day needs saving, just in time for the series to end and the Big Three to return to the stage. So we're creating, at best, a series of placeholders to play the "what it means to be a Hero" game until they're not needed anymore.

Seems to me that the whole discarding of heroes when they are no longer useful (especially when the discarding is done in the service of the mentor characters) is what creates disgruntled sidekicks-turned-supervillains.

Okay. Now this is really interesting because I found myself looking up the new Superboy, Clone-El or whatever his name is (and may I say, there are hidden werthamite depths to that character of which I was unaware), today and discovered that his awful buzzcut and leather jacket "look" was supposed to be a deliberate satire of kewl 90s character design.

There's a whole something to be written about the reaction to the kewl 90s. So much of what came out in that era (clubwear Superboy, Kingdom Come's Magog, freakyass alien transformer Guy Gardner, the Azrael battle-armored Batman uniform, etc.) was alleged to be satirical, but I think there's some desperate self-delusion in that. Sure, the creators involved may have disdained the designs, and taken a satirical line against the Image-ification of comics, but however they rationalized the work, there were also trying to find a way to match the taste of their audience. If there was satire, I suspect a lot of it was inner-directed (laughing so as not to weep at the hackwork their career had become), with the imitative output on the page reflecting significant (if reluctant) flattery.

I was surprised at this alleged depth of thought that went into him; I thought he was simply a bona fide ugly character.

But stuff like the death, replacement and resurrection of Superman (like so much of the stuff from that era) was the product of the creative summit model that gained favor somewhere in that era. I don't know the exact evolution (whether it was Carlin and the Superman group that got the summit ball rolling, or whether DC grabbed the idea from Bob Harras at Marvel, where the summit was the birthing cauldron of all those X-Men crossovers), but I know the editorial pages and letter columns of the day always talked about the editorial and creative teams for a particular group (the Batman Group, the Superman Group, the X-Men Group, the Spider-Man group, etc.) getting together to plan storylines for the year.

[Okay, whichever company started summitting, I suspect they appropriated the model from the world of soap operas...]

The summit makes sense, especially when we remember that this was the era of title proliferation. Superman was appearing in five core titles. Batman was in four. Each title had its own creative team with its own stories to tell. At the same time, it was essential that Superman (and his supporting cast) remained as consistent a character as possible across all delivery channels. The summit became the place to determine overall direction for the character, overarching plots, crossover storylines, and eventually EVENT stories.

This is why I suspect the practice began with Marvel. They were a bit ahead of DC with the intraline crossover model, with something like “The Mutant Massacre” as the pebble that presaged the “The Age of Apocalypse” avalache that caused the Spider-Man “Clone Saga” train wreck.

The summit model also made it possible (perhaps even necessary) for a strong editorial hand to take increasing control of the overall direction of the line (possibly in collaboration with the creative teams, possibly in response to their own particular ideas), and to begin planning epic-length stories that would (among other things) require readers to invest in the entire line (even the shitty books) to remain current with the story.

So what's my point? In the case of the Super-Clone, I suspect it wasn't depth of thought as much as spitballing run amok. "Let's kill Superman!" became "Then what?" became "Let's replace him with four new Supermen!" became "Can one of them maybe be Superboy?" became "Or maybe not the real Superboy - a clone!" became "But not an aw-shucks, corn-fed 50s Midwestern clone. Let's make him relevant, contemporary and now! Superman with a modern attitude" became "Like, with buzzed hair, and, maybe a leather jacket." became "And sunglasses!" became "And pointless straps on the costume!" And then Kesel and Grummet and whoever had to run with that.

[The other consequence of this creation model is that characters designed by committee, or designed in some other half-assed way, have the advantage of being utterly malleable, and easily retconnable. Suddenly need your Superboy to carry Luthor DNA? No problem. Just throw in a flashback scene of Luthor fiddling with the cloning matrix, and off you go...]

This got me thinking a little harder about the Death of Superman arc in general and how it plays into OYL and so on.

I think the big consequence of the Death of Superman model (and Knightfall, and Emerald Twilight) is that the creation by committee approach informs these crossover projects in a variety of ways. The benefit of this is you can plan ahead, and start laying the foundations for and clues about big projects, giving engaged readers bread crumbs to follow. The problem with this approach is that the current editors don't seem to have the iron fists of the Carlins and O'Neils of the past, so the vital center that keeps the whole enterprise cohesive is lacking. The creative team is running around on the playground, and there is no one out there with a whistle.

Steel did some cool things over in the "pantheon" era JLA and seems to be pulling some kind of B-/C+ string status. Okay, good. But then ICk comes along and kills Clone-El and now Steel is a crying barechested robot on the floor thanks to the 52 thing.

I'm sure Steel will get better somehow (albeit a robot, which is profoundly problemmatic for his demographic anyway, but I digress – we already HAVE Cyborg, or did before they screwed him up too, and in fact we now HAVE that other black guy who used to be Hornblower but now is half robot, you see my point). Is this a "win" or not?

I think it's a "this town isn't big enough for the two of us" thing. While Steel was tremendously useful in the patheon era JLA, the role of African American genius in the DCU has increasingly been given over to Mister Terrific in the JSA. As that character's star rose, Steel's seems to have dimmed. So it's not a win; it's at best a tie. I hope there wasn't a demograpic consideration involved. I suspect there wasn't, but the appearance is indeed problematic.

I like jackass Booster. He reminds me of comic relief characters in Miyazaki and elsewhere. Actually, he is Han Solo in a world of Luke (compare to marvel where they tend to be more normal guys). Is it his fault that they don't seem to know how to write him? I would think he would be huge, just as a vehicle of wish fulfillment and humorous light adventure if nothing else. Why isn't he huge?

I suppose I'm being unfair to the character when I really ought to blame the writers. I've never much cared for him, and I don't think he has the depth of be a Han. Unlike Superboy, whose center is soft and chewy and suitable for enrobement in any manner of candy shell, I think the character is being written as what he was created to be: a greedy, largely ineffectual, self-promoter who is at best accidentally heroic.

His character doesn't spring from an archetype, but from zeitgeist. As originally conceived, Booster is the Yuppie as superhero, the athlete as capitalist. He's a reflection of 1980s corporate culture, in the same way that Ghost Rider is a product of 70s biker culture, or Dazzler reflects the Disco era. Unlike, say, Lex Luthor in his John Byrne-conceived incarnation of CEO as megalomaniac, Booster's essential core isn't solid enough to change with the times. Aside from the fact that he's been updated to reflect current trends - what are the sponsor logos on his uniform if not a reflection of the NASCARification of the superhero [indeed, I believe DC has partnered with NASCAR in the past]? - he's still essentially the same character he was 20 years ago.

There's potential there. Certainly, the threshold for celebrity, and the barriers to endorsement entry have both been lowered. I suspect that there is more room for selling these days before people are seen to be selling out.

So maybe BG is the Ryan Seacrest of superheroes: a lucky lunkhead who just happens to have caught the right wave, and is savvy enough to cash in while the cashing is good.

Which woefully underused bit of brightly colored IP could step up to become a revenue stream, much like Superboy and Steel both stepped up in the wake of Superman last time, or how god knows who emerged after the last time Batman was out of the picture. Then when the big three come back, you have the big three streams plus a healthier B bench. You've added value, and good for you!

Superboy and Steel did that. They managed to do that with Wally Flash. Kyle GL arguably succeeded at this for a while. It can be done. I'm just wondering about the choices of these particular characters. Why not Metamorpho instead of Elongated Man? Why not Deadman instead of the Question? Was the IP compelling on its merits, or were these the characters the creators were clamoring to write? If it's the latter, then it suggests that the lunatics are indeed running the asylum, and that the editorial reins are being loosely (if at all) gripped.

That's a mixed blessing, I suppose. If the creators are telling stories they want to tell, it suggests that creative considerations are ruling over commercial ones. On the other hand, if the thing fails because they're telling stories no one cares to read, then there will be no place to tell stories anyway.

Who decided that the Metal Men were annoying? Who decided that the responsometer was stupid? Who took away Ralph's stretch and lovely wife?

A committee. And while some parts of the end result are about telling a story, some part also entails throwing out the stuff they find stupid, or unwieldy, or embarrassing.

I would kind of be willing to tolerate the proxies thing more if it could be reduced to purer algebra: Wonder Woman equals Black Adam modulo Elongated Man or whatever.

But what it the "modulo EM" part? How is EM a WW proxy? And if Superman = Steel (self-doubt) + Booster (self-aggrandizement), then where is the heroism, to this point?

This would be an interesting lens into the characters of all three and even a pretty powerful generator of stories -- you could just tune the dial a little one way or the other and see what shakes out of solution, then write how that happens.

But don't we have a few useful phrases for that process? Don't we call that the Multiverse? Or The Silver Age? Or An Imaginary Story?

One of the interesting blowbacks from SSOV is that all seven of them have been seen up and walking around post-SSOV 1. which SOLDIER can DIE? any of them?

this might be why it's been so difficult for Grant to write and/or been so providentially delayed. we get our emotional payoff of ONE SHALL DIE without actually having to sacrifice a perfectly good character. i think that's cool -- and different from the Claremont model of "thunderbird was born to be boring and die."

It's the wink. It's that panel near the end of "Whatever Happened to the Man of Steel?" where Superman turns to the reader, winks, and walks into the Gold Kyrptonite chamber. It's not just the act, but what it represents. It's the shared conspiracy of comics that says "this story may end, but it's okay. This is just one story of what might have been. If you don't like this possibility, try the next one. The story ends, but the character endures."

So a Soldier dies, because the story demands it, but death is a fungible condition.

Holmes didn't die at the Falls. Odysseus has one more stop to make. Dorothy finds a new corner of Oz to explore. Alice returns to Wonderland. The Road Goes Ever On and On. Onward and Upward! Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!