Why I should be Editor in Chief of DC Comics: 4. Solo Titles
[Introduction | Supers | Bats | Wonders & Lanterns ]
So I hear there are other heroes in the DC Universe who may or may not be able to carry their own title?
17. AQUAMAN is Arthur, King of the Britons Oceans. Swimming fast, talking to sealife, hanging with Mera and Tempest and Lagoon Boy, defending the oceans from invaders, and being really angry while he does so. At some point I did promise that there would be a mini-series spin off in which he teams up with Ra’s Al Ghul, Poison Ivy and Gorilla Grodd to do some Saving of the World, but he also gets to fight Ocean Master and Black Manta in a good old fashioned hero vs villains superhero adventure comic.
18. FLASH is Wally West. And Barry Allen. And Max Mercury. And (sometimes) Jay Garrick. And Jesse Chambers in a binder. Many people, many costumes, same uniform costume design. Because when you’re fast enough that you can seem to be in two places at once, sometimes people can’t tell that you ARE in two places at once. The Flashes are scientists, although they have different areas of interests. Barry is a detective. Wally is a physician (after a life threatening disease in his teens gave him a medical interest.) Wally is also the charismatic one: He’s the Flash that does the interviews, and pretty much all the talking. Back to Plok’s idea three years ago: “if you think about it the nature of the Flash’s power is simply that time is funny around him, and that’s where the whole thing starts and stops…and, if you like, begins again” there’s a whole bunch of temporal shenanigans going on around the stories of protecting the twin cities of Central/Keystone Cities from rogues.
19. GREEN ARROW is Connor Hawke. Not that Oliver Queen isn’t alive and well and living in Star City with Dinah, Mia and Sin - which he is - but he’s busy with his own stuff as you will see. Connor lives a little way out of the city, and he’s as likely to team up with Roy Harper / Red Arrow as anyone else. In fact, he rather dotes on his sort-of-niece Lian as much as his sort-of-sister Sin. He is Buddhist, and a better martial artist than a bowman, but uses the bow to honor his family. As many of his adventures take place in the rural areas of Northern California as Star City itself, and Connor’s stories tend to be about saving individual people more than great threats to entire areas. The stories are small, in that they affect only small numbers of people at a time, but each one is important.
20. VIXEN is Mari McCabe, a model from Zambia (I have no special attachment to her being from a fictional country) who is in possession of a totem that grants her powers from the animal kingdom. Mari has traveled to America, but she is not American, but she is known there. Due to the high profile nature of her job, she moves around frequently, and her adventures are international.
21. HAWKMAN is Kadar Halim, the reincarnation of an archaeologist who died thirty years ago, and ALSO the reincarnation of a prince and explorer from the planet Thanagar, and ALSO the reincarnation of an Egyptian Prince Khufu, and ALSO the reincarnation of… well you get the idea. Kadar is a policeman from Long Island who regains his memories from his past lives when he comes into contact with an Nth metal artifact on his raid. Kadar is politically conservative and religious, but when his ideas of the afterlife become clouded by evidence of reincarnation, he reevaluates, though never loses, his faith. His past lives are not restricted to Earth, of course, but he can only remember each life as he encounters evidence of it, so the ones he knows of were mostly on earth.
22. STATIC SHOCK features Vergil Hawkins, aka Static, in an unashamedly Spider-Man-inspired title about a teen hero including secret identity shenanigans, the pressures of juggling school work with heroics and lots of witty banter. So the nu52 book was terrible: this is one of those things I think is firmly about bad writing and not in the least about a bad character concept, so let’s give it another go: classic superhero storytelling in a modern setting with a modern teenager.
This is a YOUNG READERS title, aimed at the 11-14 age bracket.
Next time: JUSTICE
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