Oh jeez that's right, I have a blog, don't I? I was right in the middle of something ... what was it ... ah yes:
At one point or another, you’ve probably found yourself in the middle of a hostile situation between friends, family, or co-workers, right? You want to keep your relationship with both parties intact, and that means not picking a side, which therefore often means playing both sides. And when you play both sides, sometimes it feels like you’re not on anyone’s side at all. It’s awkward and unpleasant, and you feel insincere and cowardly.
This is Zatanna’s unhappy state of being.
See, magic users and superheroes don’t really get along. Superheroes see magicians as aloof and haughty; too mysterious for their own good (not to mention that a lot of them don’t like magic because it doesn’t seem to have any “rules”). Magicians see superheroes as naïve goofs who tend to ignore the big picture. Don’t get me wrong, everyone’s mature enough to recognize each side does things the other one can’t, but it's hard to coordinate your efforts when you're suspicious of each other.
Zatanna is a magician and a superhero. We’re very fortunate that there’s someone like her around; there are times when the two camps really need to work together, and nobody can facilitate that like Zatanna. When the Toyman invades Metropolis on Memorial Day with an army of toy soldiers, it looks like a job for Superman. But when it turns out the spirits of soldiers from every American war are inhabiting those toys, you call in Zatanna; it’s not like Doctor Fate has a bloody clue what the Toyman’s deal is, after all, or who he might have struck a deal with to pull this off.
But the rest of the time? She’s friends with Oliver Queen and the Phantom Stranger, and those guys do not get along. So to the Stranger she’s saying, “Yeah, sorry about Ollie, he’s just really short tempered and, y’know, he’s an immediate-response sort of guy, and you kind of have to respect that,” but to Green Arrow she has to explain, “Look, I know it seems like the Stranger doesn’t care about the common man, but he’s working on a bunch of different levels you’re not seeing all the time, you know?” Invariably, everyone ends up mad at her, and that’s just great, isn’t it?
Threats … threats … One thing I got out of the existing Seven Soldiers Zatanna series and the usual sort of daddy-stuff to be found in Morrison’s work is this idea that Zatanna sometimes still feels like that little girl who gets things wrong – an adult who still feels like a kid. So I think a lot of the threats would occur at that intersection between childhood and adulthood, where all those childish whimsies turn sour.
There’s the Toyman bit I’ve already mentioned, but that’s only a precursor to the arrival of the Cosmic Toyman, an entity called the Puppeteer, and he lures his victims with childhood things reanimated and ruined – your fifth grade teacher telling you you’ll never make anything of yourself, children’s show hosts encouraging you to take crack, beloved cartoon characters getting old and senile and sick and dying; the Puppeteer poisons your nostalgia, and while he’s at it, he’ll bring back Barnabus the Teddy Bear King to really rub it in.
Along the same lines, picture a bitter, dejected twentysomething who reconnects with his childhood imaginary friend. But instead of a simple playmate, this individual now wants an accomplice, someone who can help him get all the money, power, and women he’s always wanted. Imagine Calvin and Hobbes as a precursor to a horrible nightmare (but oh God don’t really think of it as Calvin and Hobbies, I mean really).
Imagine discarded children’s art projects – broken clay pots and egg-carton dragons, scribbled stick figure families emerging from their typing paper world – lashing out because they’re confused and unloved. They may not be very good, but those kids tried hard just the same, and that ought to count for something, right?
But it won’t be all uncomfortable reflections of childhood. Zatanna should be a funny comic, too – funny and meaningful in the way that Buffy was. A jealous sorcerer can force Zatanna to relive every bad date she’s ever had, although it only shows her how much she’s learned from the unpleasant experiences. And when adults are suddenly being visited by the ghosts of their teenage selves, most people feel bad after being chewed out by their younger selves for settling for their boring adult lives; Zatanna, on the other, has to contend with the absolutely dreadful 16-year-old she was, but there’s something to take from that as well.
One more thing – I’m interested in the stage magician, performance aspect to Zatanna. For that reason, of all the Seven Soldiers books I am proposing, hers is the only one that will have first-person narration. But it won’t just be an excuse to dump some exposition, or show and not tell character traits – Zee will be, in some sense, putting on a show for the readers, talking them through each issue the way a stage magician talks you through a magic trick. And what’s important to take from that is that stage magicians are very often untruthful in their monologues; at the very least, they’re trying to mislead you, so you’d really have to look at what her narrative captions say and whether or not they can be taken at face value. Because very often, I would have Zatanna try to throw you off the trail, just to see if you’re paying attention.
Ecneidua, kniht rof sevlesruoy!
Oh, by the way, the Bulleteer/Guardian/Zatanna crossover I mentioned … all will be revealed next time in the last series proposal – Manhattan Guardian.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sunday, November 1, 2009
This (Was) Halloween
Another Halloween has come and gone. I'm a little sad; Halloween is like my Christmas - my favorite holiday, and I'm sad to see those Halloween supply stores that pop up every October go back to being empty out-of-business big-box stores, like zombies returning to the grave. To commemorate the occasion, I have written a grim little post about Friday the 13th and Jason Voorhees over at MGK's House of Pop Culture Pain. In a livelier spirit (pun?), here is me at Halloween:
It was a rare blessing to have a mask that was not only large enough to contain my enormous head, but also accomodated my glasses so that I didn't have to walk around the whole night squinting through black mesh. Halloween is the one night a year that I regret giving up contacts, but not this time.
That was my Halloween. Hope you had a good one.
Spent Halloween at friends' house, where I assisted in the passing out of candy. In truth, I didn't so much "pass out candy" as "lurk about the front yard beckoning at passersby and trying to unnerve small children." Look, I'm not a bad guy, this is the whole point of Halloween.
Afterwords: bars. It was not the first time I have sung the DiVinyls' "I Touch Myself" at karaoke, but it is the first time I have done it dressed as a ghost (the skeletal fingers added a particular layer of obscenity).
And yes, of course I cut a small hole in the mouth of the mask so I could drink through a straw (or, as in the photo below, a child's sippy cup shaped like a monkey's head). I am no fool.
It was a rare blessing to have a mask that was not only large enough to contain my enormous head, but also accomodated my glasses so that I didn't have to walk around the whole night squinting through black mesh. Halloween is the one night a year that I regret giving up contacts, but not this time.That was my Halloween. Hope you had a good one.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #5: Bulleteer
Generally speaking, I dislike overthinking superheroes. Maybe that sounds odd coming from a guy who writes Superhero Theory posts (used to anyway), but there’s a very specific kind of overthinking I find insidious in large enough doses. Why doesn’t everybody figure out Superman is Clark Kent? Why can’t Reed Richards cure cancer, and really, what’s the great benefit to society of exploring weird alternate dimensions anyway if it seems to have no practical application in the everyday Marvel Universe? If the Hulk causes such massive property destruction when he rampages through town, shouldn’t he be causing thousands of deaths? And really, shouldn’t Batman just kill the Joker and save all his potential future victims?
The truth of the matter is, mainstream superhero comics don’t hold up to such logical scrutiny because they were never designed to. They’re not about that, which is why it’s not important (on a story level, anyway) why the dark Jedis have red lightsabers, and why Rebel ships have red lasers when Imperial ships have green ones. The original trilogy has more important things to talk about (and the reason the prequel trilogy suffers is because it doesn’t have anything more important to discuss and so engages with that sort of menial business).
Generally speaking, I find a conversation about superheroes’ sex lives in a Justice League comic just unpleasant.
But the function of Bulleteer is that she’s not a “mainstream” superhero. She’s on the fringes, and so that frees her comic to deal with the fringes of the superhero set. If you point out in a Superman comic that glasses and playacting are a crummy disguise, you cheapen Superman, or at the very least you poke the concept so full of holes it can’t stay above water. But you can play with superhero tropes using these marginal figures. Morrison made Mind-Grabber Man a straight man pretending to be gay for the attention, and used Bulleteer herself to examine the superhero as fetish object.
If Superman and the Justice League can be likened to A-list Hollywood stars, Alix Harrower and her ilk are the David Faustinos of the DC Universe. The seedy underbelly of the superhero world.
Here’s a book where you could deal with what happens when a superscientist thinks he’s discovered the end to all disease, but drug companies try to keep it under wraps. The great agony of what it would really be like to have Daredevil's heightened senses, where all the world's a garbage can, rain is hell, and you're eating nothing but plain noodles night after night because you can't handle anything with a stronger flavor to it. How the Rook, Tomahawk City’s moral paragon protector, deals with the fact that his bloodthirsty vigilante rival Simple Simon is actually getting more tangible results than he is. Another city rejects its longtime superhero when it’s discovered she actually hails from another dimension and is thus technically an illegal alien.
Again, not something I’d want to see in Daredevil or Superman's books, but this is a place you could grow and cultivate these ideas while still keeping them safely quarantined in their own little corner of the DC Universe.
Right, but I haven’t established the status quo. In Seven Soldiers #1, it’s revealed that she’s the descendant of Aurakles, the first superhero, and that her ultimate destiny was to kill Queen Gloriana. In that issue, a policeman tells her after questioning, “You’re free,” to which Alix replies, “Am I?” As the series begins, she’s still asking that question. You know how in the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk show, David Banner is always extremely coincidentally in the right place at the right time to make a difference? The same thing happens to the Bulleteer, only she recognizes it, and interprets it to mean that she isn’t free, that she’s being controlled by fate -- or, in the interest in imagistic unity, that fate is the gun, and she is its bullet.
So she has a tendency to just let things happen. She rarely pursues hero-for-hire gigs, they just seem to fall in her lap. Her accountant and financial manager Morgan Chapel, a regular supporting cast member, is just a guy she picked out of the phone book at random, and though he has no experience in superhuman affairs, he proves himself a natural at it. After getting fed up with commercial air travel (it's a pain to get past the metal detector when you are in fact made of metal), she happens to save the life of the Machine Queen, a 52-year-old mechanic who specializes in esoteric vehicles and builds Alix an inexpensive Bulletcar (complete with ejector-seat “launcher”) out of an old Dodge Dart, and she becomes another supporting cast member.
This drifting attitude has a number of unintended consequences. Remember Crazyface from Morrison’s Shining Knight? Alix is tricked into recovering his super-enhanced cybernetic eyeballs for his brother, who gets them implanted and becomes the Reverse Crazyface to avenge his death. (This will eventually lead into a crossover involving Bulleteer, Manhattan Guardian, and Zatanna, but I’ll get to that later.) She can also sometimes seem cold and distant, but ultimately her compassion wins out (she did, after all, try to take Sally Sonic, the woman who ruined her marriage and indirectly led to Alix’s husband’s death and her “condition,” to the hospital after their fight).
This I see as the overarching conflict in the series: Originally her trying to fight fate was jeopardizing the world, but now having completely surrendered to it isn’t proving any healthier.
The format: I’d like these to be largely self-contained stories, to be told, for no real reason other than it seems right to me, in a sort of action movie/new wave/neo noir mashup style; Cowboy Bebop is my stylistic guide here.
And there will be time for subplots. For example, the Machine Queen has long been building a working, full-scale Batmobile replica as a hobby, but when it’s stolen, Alix has to track down The Man Who Would Be Batman. As for Alix herself, her husband’s secret superhero fetish has put her off romantic entanglements to some extent. She finds nebbish, timid Morgan Chapel nonthreatening, but is that a good foundation to a relationship? (Note: It is not.) And is Morgan even interested? It turns out an ageless, perfect physical specimen encased in shining indestructible metal is not to everyone’s taste. Frankly, I’d like to see a relationship in a superhero book that’s weird and awkward and has serious foundational problems and maybe just doesn’t work instead of the usual storybook whirlwind romance.
After all, this is the book to do it in.
The truth of the matter is, mainstream superhero comics don’t hold up to such logical scrutiny because they were never designed to. They’re not about that, which is why it’s not important (on a story level, anyway) why the dark Jedis have red lightsabers, and why Rebel ships have red lasers when Imperial ships have green ones. The original trilogy has more important things to talk about (and the reason the prequel trilogy suffers is because it doesn’t have anything more important to discuss and so engages with that sort of menial business).
Generally speaking, I find a conversation about superheroes’ sex lives in a Justice League comic just unpleasant.
But the function of Bulleteer is that she’s not a “mainstream” superhero. She’s on the fringes, and so that frees her comic to deal with the fringes of the superhero set. If you point out in a Superman comic that glasses and playacting are a crummy disguise, you cheapen Superman, or at the very least you poke the concept so full of holes it can’t stay above water. But you can play with superhero tropes using these marginal figures. Morrison made Mind-Grabber Man a straight man pretending to be gay for the attention, and used Bulleteer herself to examine the superhero as fetish object.
If Superman and the Justice League can be likened to A-list Hollywood stars, Alix Harrower and her ilk are the David Faustinos of the DC Universe. The seedy underbelly of the superhero world.
Here’s a book where you could deal with what happens when a superscientist thinks he’s discovered the end to all disease, but drug companies try to keep it under wraps. The great agony of what it would really be like to have Daredevil's heightened senses, where all the world's a garbage can, rain is hell, and you're eating nothing but plain noodles night after night because you can't handle anything with a stronger flavor to it. How the Rook, Tomahawk City’s moral paragon protector, deals with the fact that his bloodthirsty vigilante rival Simple Simon is actually getting more tangible results than he is. Another city rejects its longtime superhero when it’s discovered she actually hails from another dimension and is thus technically an illegal alien.
Again, not something I’d want to see in Daredevil or Superman's books, but this is a place you could grow and cultivate these ideas while still keeping them safely quarantined in their own little corner of the DC Universe.
Right, but I haven’t established the status quo. In Seven Soldiers #1, it’s revealed that she’s the descendant of Aurakles, the first superhero, and that her ultimate destiny was to kill Queen Gloriana. In that issue, a policeman tells her after questioning, “You’re free,” to which Alix replies, “Am I?” As the series begins, she’s still asking that question. You know how in the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk show, David Banner is always extremely coincidentally in the right place at the right time to make a difference? The same thing happens to the Bulleteer, only she recognizes it, and interprets it to mean that she isn’t free, that she’s being controlled by fate -- or, in the interest in imagistic unity, that fate is the gun, and she is its bullet.
So she has a tendency to just let things happen. She rarely pursues hero-for-hire gigs, they just seem to fall in her lap. Her accountant and financial manager Morgan Chapel, a regular supporting cast member, is just a guy she picked out of the phone book at random, and though he has no experience in superhuman affairs, he proves himself a natural at it. After getting fed up with commercial air travel (it's a pain to get past the metal detector when you are in fact made of metal), she happens to save the life of the Machine Queen, a 52-year-old mechanic who specializes in esoteric vehicles and builds Alix an inexpensive Bulletcar (complete with ejector-seat “launcher”) out of an old Dodge Dart, and she becomes another supporting cast member.
This drifting attitude has a number of unintended consequences. Remember Crazyface from Morrison’s Shining Knight? Alix is tricked into recovering his super-enhanced cybernetic eyeballs for his brother, who gets them implanted and becomes the Reverse Crazyface to avenge his death. (This will eventually lead into a crossover involving Bulleteer, Manhattan Guardian, and Zatanna, but I’ll get to that later.) She can also sometimes seem cold and distant, but ultimately her compassion wins out (she did, after all, try to take Sally Sonic, the woman who ruined her marriage and indirectly led to Alix’s husband’s death and her “condition,” to the hospital after their fight).
This I see as the overarching conflict in the series: Originally her trying to fight fate was jeopardizing the world, but now having completely surrendered to it isn’t proving any healthier.
The format: I’d like these to be largely self-contained stories, to be told, for no real reason other than it seems right to me, in a sort of action movie/new wave/neo noir mashup style; Cowboy Bebop is my stylistic guide here.
And there will be time for subplots. For example, the Machine Queen has long been building a working, full-scale Batmobile replica as a hobby, but when it’s stolen, Alix has to track down The Man Who Would Be Batman. As for Alix herself, her husband’s secret superhero fetish has put her off romantic entanglements to some extent. She finds nebbish, timid Morgan Chapel nonthreatening, but is that a good foundation to a relationship? (Note: It is not.) And is Morgan even interested? It turns out an ageless, perfect physical specimen encased in shining indestructible metal is not to everyone’s taste. Frankly, I’d like to see a relationship in a superhero book that’s weird and awkward and has serious foundational problems and maybe just doesn’t work instead of the usual storybook whirlwind romance.
After all, this is the book to do it in.
Monday, October 12, 2009
NEW sketchblog!!
I know I know.... Josh is an asshole. He never posts here anymore and its not even about wyatt earp when he does. Well Justin has been holding his weight around here much better than Josh has but to be honest Justin can't just post scripts and the like. He has to post non earp content because Josh hasn't touched an earp page in something like 6 months. As with everything else stuff happens. Life happens. Day jobs, houses, friends, family, life, death, fuzzy puppies. These are all parts of life and get in the way of things like wyatt earp comics. The truth is that I find it difficult to sit down and draw on my own time for more than 20 minutes. If I'm drawing these days its because I get paid. Spending 10 hours a day drawing followed by more drawing when I get home is a little difficult. However, inspired by many of the other artists I follow I've decided to start a sketchbog. The idea is for it to be updated daily and so far its been going pretty well. I started it a few weeks ago but haven't wanted to share it or go public until it got on a roll. It should only be sketches, or concept pieces. Never finished work and hopefully not often paid work. Take a minute, stop by, tell me what you think. Even if it is just one word: "asshole"
http://joshlynchart.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Follow along with your very own copy of Glamour which I know you are secretly hiding
For my triumphant return to being allowed to write on Mightygodking.com, I have contributed a riveting piece regarding a free copy of Glamour I recently came to find in my possession. No, I don't know why I wrote it, either.
Also, it may interest you to know (though it probably will not) that I am on Twitter. A bit, anyway. I must admit, I'd never planned on having an account, and I'm still a little fuzzy on how to read those damn "@UserName" tweets. I've only signed up because my office uses it as a sort of internal communication device, and to be honest, I have no idea what I am going to do with it outside of work stuff. But I might think of something. Following that riveting sales pitch, you will no doubt be falling over yourself to follow me at jduck1.
Also, it may interest you to know (though it probably will not) that I am on Twitter. A bit, anyway. I must admit, I'd never planned on having an account, and I'm still a little fuzzy on how to read those damn "@UserName" tweets. I've only signed up because my office uses it as a sort of internal communication device, and to be honest, I have no idea what I am going to do with it outside of work stuff. But I might think of something. Following that riveting sales pitch, you will no doubt be falling over yourself to follow me at jduck1.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
You will not be rid of me that easily
Good afternoon.
I have regained the ability to write to you near-instantaneously over a great distance via the "internetwork." I will type out a few things in this space, and when I hit "Publish Post," my words will be transmitted and available for everyone to see, despite the fact that there are no visible wires or cables connecting my typing-device to any other thing.
Truly, it is a strange and marvelous time to be alive.
I have taken a few minutes away from moving, and organizing in anticipation of more moving, to write this. The big move is going thoroughly all right. The new place is just a half-hour by freeway from the old place, so we are doing it in small chunks, after work and on the weekend. I will spare you the expected blog post reflecting on how many comics I own, and how they are difficult to move, and how it makes me wonder whether it is healthy to devote so much time and money to a hobby that leads me to accumulate so much stuff, and how one might consider it strange to be hoarding and lugging about boxes of thin periodicals originally intended to be disposable. Frankly, I am fine with all of that. My lower back is aching not because I have too many comics, but because I am weak and unused to such prolonged heavy lifting.
There are still more things to be hauled, new pieces of furniture to be purchased (microwave stands: I am not sure such a piece of furniture exists, but my wife seems to think it does), and more important people and agencies to inform of my relocation (VISA Cardmember Service, your call is forthcoming). After all of this is taken care of, there are two things I intend to do.
1.) Get a kitten (grey, tabby).
2.) Resume posting regularly.
That means more MGKontent is in the works, and Why I Should Write Bulleteer is also in the hopper.
Thank you for not leaving forever.
I have regained the ability to write to you near-instantaneously over a great distance via the "internetwork." I will type out a few things in this space, and when I hit "Publish Post," my words will be transmitted and available for everyone to see, despite the fact that there are no visible wires or cables connecting my typing-device to any other thing.
Truly, it is a strange and marvelous time to be alive.
I have taken a few minutes away from moving, and organizing in anticipation of more moving, to write this. The big move is going thoroughly all right. The new place is just a half-hour by freeway from the old place, so we are doing it in small chunks, after work and on the weekend. I will spare you the expected blog post reflecting on how many comics I own, and how they are difficult to move, and how it makes me wonder whether it is healthy to devote so much time and money to a hobby that leads me to accumulate so much stuff, and how one might consider it strange to be hoarding and lugging about boxes of thin periodicals originally intended to be disposable. Frankly, I am fine with all of that. My lower back is aching not because I have too many comics, but because I am weak and unused to such prolonged heavy lifting.
There are still more things to be hauled, new pieces of furniture to be purchased (microwave stands: I am not sure such a piece of furniture exists, but my wife seems to think it does), and more important people and agencies to inform of my relocation (VISA Cardmember Service, your call is forthcoming). After all of this is taken care of, there are two things I intend to do.
1.) Get a kitten (grey, tabby).
2.) Resume posting regularly.
That means more MGKontent is in the works, and Why I Should Write Bulleteer is also in the hopper.
Thank you for not leaving forever.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Telegram For You
NO INTERNET AT NEW APARTMENT YET STOP
POSTING FROM REMOTE LOCATION STOP
MOVING GOING OK STOP
CABLE INTERNET COMING SATURDAY MORNING, WILL RESUME USUAL THINGS THEN FULL STOP
POSTING FROM REMOTE LOCATION STOP
MOVING GOING OK STOP
CABLE INTERNET COMING SATURDAY MORNING, WILL RESUME USUAL THINGS THEN FULL STOP
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #4: Mister Miracle
I’m sticking this one in the middle because it’s different than all the others. See, I’m not so sure I should write Mister Miracle.
David Brothers has a piece about Afro Futurism and Mister Miracle, and it’s compelling stuff. Morrison’s reimagining of the New Gods mythos was fascinating and relevant, and it elevated the characters above some of their more pedestrian post-Kirby portrayals. Truth be told, I’ve never been the biggest New Gods fan, but Shilo Norman’s experience really opened it up for me. I think the Afro Futurism/“elevation” approach is how Mister Miracle should be written…
…but I’m not the guy to do it. It’s not just a matter of authenticity, it’s one of experience. I’d only embarrass myself if I came on here with my underdeveloped ideas about what Afro Futurism really means, fused it with wacky comic book plots, and passed it off as “something meaningful.”
But, the challenge was to come up with a way to write all these books, so I have to do something. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED:
So, Shilo Norman was the understudy of the original Mister Miracle, eventually became a 21st century celebrity escape artist (only in the DC Universe!) and was tapped by the New Gods to liberate them from the evil gods of Apokalips. After Final Crisis, Darkseid has been defeated and the New Gods are reborn. And what happens to Shilo?
Well, the only thing I can think of is he wakes up one day after Final Crisis to discover that those fabulous space gods no longer have any need for their human savior now that his purpose is complete, and they’re restored on Earth-51 or whatever.
The New Gods have forsaken him.
This would be a less-actiony, more introspective series than my other ones. Shilo Norman knows there’s something bigger than what he can see and touch out there, and he used to be a part of it, but now it’s all gone. All he has left is Motherboxxx, which retains its incredible powers, but seems to have lost its soul; where that “ping!” sound once seemed like the distant echo of a great cosmic bell ringing from Heaven, now it sounds like nothing more than a cheap electronic tone.
Once you’ve tasted what it’s like to be the living avatar of freedom, going back to being a rich guy with a nice house is going to seem pretty shallow. What does the mythical Hero do when his special destiny is fulfilled? After Luke Skywalker vanquished the evil of the Empire, did he have trouble going back to being an ordinary guy? Shilo’s new mission is to escape depression and sorrow, to escape loneliness, to escape the mundane and material -- and find his New Gods once again.
So what does Shilo actually do in the comic? He seeks the great spiritual and/or philosophical leaders and experiences of the DC Universe: Shilo visits Nanda Parbat and Mount Olympus and discovers the final recording of the last science-priest of Krypton, embedded in a crystal in the Phantom Zone. He uses his vast wealth to buy five minutes of Vandal Savage’s time, and asks the immortal terrorist from 50,000 BC for his perspective on life, the universe and everything.
He puts himself through a number of innovative new traps as well. The old physical traps will still be there (being thrown out of a plane with no parachute, stuck in an avalanche, etc.), but, like the monsters in Shining Knight, just as momentary glimpses of Shilo’s everyday life, whereas the stories will be driven by more unusual traps. These will be more conceptual or metaphorical in nature, and they won’t always be something Motherboxxx can just fix. After spending his last penny on the visit with Savage, Shilo will be broke and homeless and living on the streets (where he meets Ali Ka-Zoom, of course!), a trap he accidentally escapes by unwittingly saving the life of Millions, the Richest Dog in the World. Mister Miracle throws himself into a time loop in which he’s forced to replay the death of a young boy in a traffic accident that Shilo is unable to prevent through conventional means (an old chestnut of a sci-fi plot, I realize). And, in a twist on Schrodinger’s Cat, when Shilo volunteers to take part in a quantum experiment that goes horribly wrong, two Mister Miracles emerge -- one alive, one dead -- and he decides to hold and attend his own funeral.
I will also do the unthinkable and admit Brad Meltzer had an idea that I thought was interesting. Doctor Impossible, who’s either Scott Free’s long-lost evil brother from Apokalips, or deranged muscle-for-hire who stumbled upon New Gods technology and only convinced himself he’s a god, returns. But after Shilo’s experiences in Morrison’s miniseries, he’s willing to admit there may be more to Doctor Impossible than meets the eye. On the other hand, the thought that this guy might just be a crazy dude forces Shilo to consider that his own experience with the New Gods might be self-delusion as well.
And it’s Doctor Impossible who pits MM up against a variation of Darkseid’s Life Trap: the Golden Slumbers, which consists of only a powerful hypnotic code, a comfortable bed, and a banner we’ve seen in Morrison’s Invisibles: La mort est un sommeil eternel. Unlike the Omega Sanction, each dream-existence is more pleasant than the last; in some he finds his New Gods once again, in some he learns to live happily without them, in some he is welcomed into the fraternity of superheroes and becomes Earth’s second Superman. It’s like the Black Mercy, but with one difference: sometimes you wake up from the Golden Slumbers … and then you decide to fall back asleep.
So there you have it. I could write Mister Miracle, I suppose. But even though I like some of the ideas above, I’m not so sure I should.
David Brothers has a piece about Afro Futurism and Mister Miracle, and it’s compelling stuff. Morrison’s reimagining of the New Gods mythos was fascinating and relevant, and it elevated the characters above some of their more pedestrian post-Kirby portrayals. Truth be told, I’ve never been the biggest New Gods fan, but Shilo Norman’s experience really opened it up for me. I think the Afro Futurism/“elevation” approach is how Mister Miracle should be written…
…but I’m not the guy to do it. It’s not just a matter of authenticity, it’s one of experience. I’d only embarrass myself if I came on here with my underdeveloped ideas about what Afro Futurism really means, fused it with wacky comic book plots, and passed it off as “something meaningful.”
But, the challenge was to come up with a way to write all these books, so I have to do something. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED:
So, Shilo Norman was the understudy of the original Mister Miracle, eventually became a 21st century celebrity escape artist (only in the DC Universe!) and was tapped by the New Gods to liberate them from the evil gods of Apokalips. After Final Crisis, Darkseid has been defeated and the New Gods are reborn. And what happens to Shilo?
Well, the only thing I can think of is he wakes up one day after Final Crisis to discover that those fabulous space gods no longer have any need for their human savior now that his purpose is complete, and they’re restored on Earth-51 or whatever.
The New Gods have forsaken him.
This would be a less-actiony, more introspective series than my other ones. Shilo Norman knows there’s something bigger than what he can see and touch out there, and he used to be a part of it, but now it’s all gone. All he has left is Motherboxxx, which retains its incredible powers, but seems to have lost its soul; where that “ping!” sound once seemed like the distant echo of a great cosmic bell ringing from Heaven, now it sounds like nothing more than a cheap electronic tone.
Once you’ve tasted what it’s like to be the living avatar of freedom, going back to being a rich guy with a nice house is going to seem pretty shallow. What does the mythical Hero do when his special destiny is fulfilled? After Luke Skywalker vanquished the evil of the Empire, did he have trouble going back to being an ordinary guy? Shilo’s new mission is to escape depression and sorrow, to escape loneliness, to escape the mundane and material -- and find his New Gods once again.
So what does Shilo actually do in the comic? He seeks the great spiritual and/or philosophical leaders and experiences of the DC Universe: Shilo visits Nanda Parbat and Mount Olympus and discovers the final recording of the last science-priest of Krypton, embedded in a crystal in the Phantom Zone. He uses his vast wealth to buy five minutes of Vandal Savage’s time, and asks the immortal terrorist from 50,000 BC for his perspective on life, the universe and everything.
He puts himself through a number of innovative new traps as well. The old physical traps will still be there (being thrown out of a plane with no parachute, stuck in an avalanche, etc.), but, like the monsters in Shining Knight, just as momentary glimpses of Shilo’s everyday life, whereas the stories will be driven by more unusual traps. These will be more conceptual or metaphorical in nature, and they won’t always be something Motherboxxx can just fix. After spending his last penny on the visit with Savage, Shilo will be broke and homeless and living on the streets (where he meets Ali Ka-Zoom, of course!), a trap he accidentally escapes by unwittingly saving the life of Millions, the Richest Dog in the World. Mister Miracle throws himself into a time loop in which he’s forced to replay the death of a young boy in a traffic accident that Shilo is unable to prevent through conventional means (an old chestnut of a sci-fi plot, I realize). And, in a twist on Schrodinger’s Cat, when Shilo volunteers to take part in a quantum experiment that goes horribly wrong, two Mister Miracles emerge -- one alive, one dead -- and he decides to hold and attend his own funeral.
I will also do the unthinkable and admit Brad Meltzer had an idea that I thought was interesting. Doctor Impossible, who’s either Scott Free’s long-lost evil brother from Apokalips, or deranged muscle-for-hire who stumbled upon New Gods technology and only convinced himself he’s a god, returns. But after Shilo’s experiences in Morrison’s miniseries, he’s willing to admit there may be more to Doctor Impossible than meets the eye. On the other hand, the thought that this guy might just be a crazy dude forces Shilo to consider that his own experience with the New Gods might be self-delusion as well.
And it’s Doctor Impossible who pits MM up against a variation of Darkseid’s Life Trap: the Golden Slumbers, which consists of only a powerful hypnotic code, a comfortable bed, and a banner we’ve seen in Morrison’s Invisibles: La mort est un sommeil eternel. Unlike the Omega Sanction, each dream-existence is more pleasant than the last; in some he finds his New Gods once again, in some he learns to live happily without them, in some he is welcomed into the fraternity of superheroes and becomes Earth’s second Superman. It’s like the Black Mercy, but with one difference: sometimes you wake up from the Golden Slumbers … and then you decide to fall back asleep.
So there you have it. I could write Mister Miracle, I suppose. But even though I like some of the ideas above, I’m not so sure I should.
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