A primer to the non-Two-Face stars of Walt Simonson's "The Judas Coin" (mildly NSFW)

[about_faces]

For the past couple weeks, I've been working on my review of Walt Simonson's new graphic novel, The Judas Coin, watching my post get increasingly long-winded as I filled it with more scans, tangents, links, gifs, and all manner of distractions until the actual review itself was dwarfed by everything else! The post is currently huge, and I haven't

Comments

[about_faces]

Well, if there's all this stuff in it, I'm definitely getting it...

Man, if only all this stuff--these actual stories, I mean--actually were in it! Since my biggest problem with The Judas Coin is really in the price tag for such a slim book, I now really wish it also included one great story from each character in addition to Simonson's work! Oh, well.

... the people who wrote him didn't seem to know either, given how many revised origins he got.

Yeah, I have to wonder how that happened. Did his actual stories keep changing, or was there just one issue where they just decided to give him several possible origins just to keep him mysterious, ala what they did with the Phantom Stranger? Well, until the New 52. Now he's just Judas. The end. Way to ruin the defining interesting trait about the character, DC.

Is it possible, I wonder, that Captain Fear sounds like that due to the nature of his origin? I mean, if he learned Spanish by way of his own Carib dialect, and from there trace amounts of English, French, etc., during his time as a pirate (an eclectic bunch they were, from what I've read), it would make sense that his accent would be somewhat bizarre.

Mmmmmaybe, but I dunno, that accent seems way more of a straight-up Spaniard parody than anything else, right down to saying things like "You lied about the gold" as "Joo lie about de gol'."

Personally, I think writers acting out on their childhood nostalgia can be a beautiful thing - if (and this is a big one) it does not interfere with the way characters have subsequently been written since then.

Boom, absolutely right. Unfortunately, the mentality of far too many writers is an egotistical, lazy scortched-earth "screw trying to build upon what came before, my way is the ONLY way it should be!" Thankfully, there's nothing in The Judas Coin that steps on anyone else's toes, partially because most of the stories are pretty standalone tales that could take place at any point during the characters' careers in their prime. Well, except for one, but I won't spoil it. Even then, it works very well.

[psychopathicus]

There is, I think, an unfortunate tendency with modern comics writers (or, possibly more accurately, editors) to think that resolving decades-old, purposely-encouraged ambiguity is a brilliant idea, because think of the publicity! Never mind what happens after that, or that pinning down characters meant specifically not to be pinned down could be construed as a bad idea - sales, dammit! In recent years, this has been applied first to Wolverine, then Gentleman Ghost, and now it's the Stranger's turn. Bah.
OK, so maybe it is meant to be a straight-up Spanish accent - if his first non-Carib language was Spanish, my theory would still apply. After all, there are former French colonies in Africa where the prominent accent is French, even though the native languages are of course still spoken.

[lego_joker]

the mentality of far too many writers is an egotistical, lazy scortched-earth "screw trying to build upon what came before, my way is the ONLY way it should be!"

... and this right here sums up a large portion of many DC characters' publishing histories, especially post-Crisis. The most high-profile of them is probably Wonder Woman. Even George Perez couldn't create a definitive enough version for future writers to follow, like Miller had done with Batman and Byrne with Superman.

Come to think of it, it's probably part of the reason why that live-action WW movie has been in pre-production for about one and a half eternities now. No one can agree on what Diana should be, and it sure as hell doesn't help that one of her monikers is "Champion of All Women", which already makes it a giant problem to write any "definitive" version of her without instantly dating her.

On the post itself: this really is a nice little cast of C- and D-listers (plus Harvey). Sad that I can't afford to shell out for the book right now.

Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional, but Dixon did create a villain named Captain Fear for his run on Detective. He bore pretty much NO similarities to this Captain Fear, and his story actually played out like a long-lost episode of the Adam West show.

The More You Know!

[about_faces]

The most high-profile of them is probably Wonder Woman. Even George Perez couldn't create a definitive enough version for future writers to follow, like Miller had done with Batman and Byrne with Superman.

I just wish that someone had been intelligent enough to rework the character in such a way without having to--you guessed it--the lazy, scortched-earth "my way is the ONLY way it should be!" origin of having her be Zeus' daughter. I hate that so many people are utterly WOWED by this origin as being so fresh and compelling, when all I see is a unique character's origin being reduced to making her yet another Hercules-style demigod. Besides, having a man (not just any man either, but an UBER-KING) at the center of WONDER WOMAN'S origin is just wrong. Making all the Amazons rapists doesn't help either. God, stop it, me, think of your blood pressure.

When I was working on the Captain Fear section, I actually thought to myself, "Man, I have to remember to mention the Chuck Dixon Captain Fear because it's Batman-related, and if I don't, lego_joker will correct me." But I still forgot because, well, that storyline is one of the handful from that era which I still haven't read! I always loved that cover of Batman strapped to a lonely buoy with sharks coming his way.

Either way, I have to imagine that it was intentional in theory on Dixon's part, seeing as how he already did the "take a historical DC hero and make him a modern villain" thing with the Trigger Twins.

[psychopathicus]

A long-standing theory on my part regarding Wonder Woman is that she's one of the earliest victims of retcons, as one of the earliest examples of a character born from a unique vision and viewpoint who has suffered in the hands of subsequent writers who don't share the original's vision.
Think about it. The first writer to tackle Diana after Marston was Robert Kanigher, and he not only immediately changed the focus of the stories from female empowerment to wacky (and creepy) squabbles between her many and manifold suitors, he applied slash-and-burn tactics to his own stuff after it had reached a certain level of silliness.
This may or may not have been justified (I haven't read much of Kanigher's Wondy, so I can't say for sure), but the overall effect on the character was disastrous. Wonder Woman's roots, after all, were in silliness, with a great deal of her earlier stories reading like surreal children's books. By deep-sixing the details of the Kanigher run, DC implicitly also said bye-bye to what had come before it, goodbye to all the wacky fantasy and girl power creed that had made the Marston stories so memorable - and if the character's roots were gone, then what could they be replaced with? Nobody knew, and nobody has really figured it out to this day.
I mean, if you look at the early days of Batman and Superman, not all of the stuff introduced then is still there, of course, but most of it is - the major Bat-villains are still the Kane and Finger ones, and while the Superman mythos may have been diverted down some odd paths over the years, it ultimately always goes back to the whole mild-mannered-reporter thing that has been set in stone since the beginning. With Wonder Woman, almost all of that has been ditched. Etta Candy and the Holliday Girls (OK, Etta's still around, but nigh-unrecognizable most of the time), the mental radios, the Kangas, etc., etc. - all gone. The only things that do remain from that era are Diana herself, a few of her early villains and supporting cast (albeit largely mutated into nigh-unrecognizable forms), and Paradise Island/Themyscira - and boy oh boy, do writers love dicking around with that last one. The character herself may be a powerful symbol, but unless and until someone acknowledges and uses her roots, the stuff surrounding her will remain in flux - very, very confusing and occasionally outrage-inducing flux.