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Mindy Newell: Feed ‘Em, Burp ‘Em, Diaper ‘Em

newell-art-130923-134x225-3301073Ah, the joys of new parenthood.

Interrupted sleep. Desperately trying to figure out why the baby is crying. Shock and palpitations at the cost of Pampers (or Luvs or Huggies). Interfering grandparents.

Yeah, it’s tough being the parent of a baby. (Just wait until they are teenagers!)

At least you don’t have super-powers. At least you don’t have arch-nemeses and equally powered villains eager to use your darling as a weapon against you

Once upon a time I worked with Keith Giffen, Ernie Colon, and Karl Kesel on a mini-series for DC that we called Legionnaires Three. The story twists on the kidnapping of the infant Graym Ranzz by the infamous Time Trapper. Baby Graym is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Ranzz, a.k.a. Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl, a.k.a. Garth Ranzz and Imra Ardeen. Upon discovering their child is gone, both are stunned into superhero impotency as Imra breaks down in heart wrenching sobs, held by a seemingly stoic Garth.

I remember getting a lot of flak in the fan mail. (Remember fan mail?)

“Saturn Girl is the Iron Butterfly! She would never cry!”

“Garth is the weak one. Imra would kick ass!”

“You don’t know anything about the Legion! Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl would rally the troops, get on the case!”

Well, I do know about the Legion. But more important, I know about being a parent. And as I answered in the letters column (remember letters columns?), and I’m paraphrasing here, Garth and Imra may be superheroes, but they are also parents, and any parent, super-powered or not, would be sucked down into a mass of shocked, weeping, screaming, emotional protoplasm on discovering their child kidnapped. (Do I really have to reiterate that?)

Anyway, I got to thinking about babies and super-powers, superheroes and being a parent.

I talked about being the parent of a super-powered kid once before here on ComicMix, in May 2012. I called the column “My Kid’s a Superhero,” and it was in honor of Mother’s Day. It was about Martha Kent and it went like this:

A few months later Martha was vacuuming – Jonathan did the laundry, so it was a fair exchange – and went to move the couch, where all the dust bunnies lived. Baby Clark wanted to help him mommy, so he picked the couch up. Martha went to the liquor cabinet and poured herself a stiff one. When Jonathan came back from the lower 40 for lunch, he found an empty bottle of Johnny Walker Red and his wife in a drunken stupor. When she came to she had a hell of a headache and a hell of a story. Jonathan called Doc Newman who told him new mothers are under a lot of stress and to just take it easy with her. The doctor then hung up and called his wife and told her that Martha Kent was nuts.

Martha thought she had it rough?

Susan Storm Richards, a.k.a. the Invisible Woman, was pregnant with her first child when it was discovered that the irradiation from the cosmic rays that gave the Fantastic Four their powers would also prevent Sue from carrying the baby to term. Desperate to prevent this, her husband Reed (Mr. Fantastic), her brother Johnny Storm (the Human Torch) and their best friend ever Ben Grimm (the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing) travelled to the Negative Zone and wrested the Cosmic Control Rod from the villain Annihilus. The Rod allowed Sue to carry her baby to term. The baby boy was named Franklin, after Sue’s father.

But it turned out that Franklin was a mutant, an immensely powerful mutant with psionic abilities. Reed, afraid that Franklin’s power could wipe out life on Earth, “shut down” Franklin’s mind, effectively reverting him to a normal kid.

Sue was furious with Reed because she had not been consulted before Reed took this drastic step, and she left him, taking the baby with her.

Yeah.

Parenthood.

It’s enough to make a superhero hang up his or her cape.

ComicMix Columnist Mindy Newell became a grandmother on September 20, 2013. She is ecstatic.

Call her Grandma. Call her Gran’maw. Call her Abuela. Call her Gamma.

Just don’t call her Bubbe.

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

 

John Ostrander: Realistic Fantasy

Ostrander Art 130922I’ve often maintained that the best fantasies are ones that have one foot firmly set in reality. We need something to which we can relate. We are asked to enter into a “willing suspension of disbelief,” as coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However impossible or implausible in reality an event in literature is, we accept it. Quite simply, we’re being told a story and we concede reality to get on with the story – up to a point.

When Superman first appeared in 1938 he was a fantastic character but, in those early stories, he fought real-life villains and situations – slums, gangsters, crooked politicians, corrupt cops and so on. The United States, like most of the world, was still deep in the Great Depression. World War II was looming. For so many people, the reality was that the banks had failed them, the courts had failed them, the police failed them, the system had failed them. With Superman, the Little Guy had a hero who worked outside that corrupt and broken system, working for them, working to achieve justice. Superman was originally very anti-establishment and that may have been his greatest power.

Then came the War and Superman was co-opted, along with the other heroes, to fight the Axis, to bring down the Nazis. Reasons had to be given why he didn’t just fly to Berlin and take down Hitler. That was the reality of the situation and the fantasy was having a harder time fitting in.

After the War, Superman became fully co-opted by the Establishment. His biggest concern was his girl friend, Lois Lane, learning his secret identity.

Marvel came along in the 60s and introduced a psychological realism – the heroes had neuroses, psychological problems, issues that they needed to work out. Spider-Man was the poster boy for the neurotic new hero and it resonated. After all, to put on a mask and go out to fight crime, you had to be a bit crazy. Peter Parker had money troubles, work troubles, girl troubles; he was bullied in high school and it was all compounded by his choice to be Spider-Man. However, he couldn’t stop. He was driven by the death of his Uncle Ben for which he held himself partially responsible. Great fantasy, solid reality.

The reality became more of a soap opera as time went on. What was once fresh became cliché. Like Mickey Mouse (oddly enough, since The Mouse now owns Marvel), Spider-Man went from being a character to being a franchise to being a product and a corporate symbol.

Marvel’s New Universe wandered in at some point and one of its claims was a new realism. One of the boasts was that, when their heroes or villains lifted up a building, you could see broken plumbing underneath. I ask for a little more reality than that and the line eventually folded.

Milestone Comics came in and it had a solid dose of reality, setting their heroes in the African-American community and reflecting that truth. One of my favorite books was the Blood Syndicate; one of the tags for it was “They’re not a team. . . they’re a gang.” That was different and reflected a new reality. Sadly, Milestone didn’t last long enough to get old.

DC has re-launched itself with the New 52 and Marvel has Marvel Now but both, to my taste, veer still more towards fantasy and soap opera. The storylines have gotten more convoluted and event driven.

And then there’s Art Spiegelman’s Maus – the classic hat adroitly combines both fantasy and reality. By using mice as Jews in Germany during World War II, Spiegelman heightened the reality and made what might have been unbearable to look at very readable and very compelling.

After 9/11, the comics industry spoke to the tragedy. More than one person wished that Superman had been real that day. Then maybe he could have prevented the planes from crashing into the World Trade Center. None of the books that came out of that horror, to their credit, tried to do that but, at the same time, they were one shots. There was no lasting effect in the books unlike New York City and our national psyche. Failing to do that made them all a little impotent. The Punisher continued to hunt and kill gangsters; wouldn’t it have been more realistic to have him go after terrorists at home and abroad?

Take a look at the real world around you. How much of it is reflected in your comics? What drove Superman in his earliest incarnations – a hero outside the system, working for justice that the Little Man can’t get – is as or more prevalent today as it was 75 years ago. Look at the news – is any of that reflected in the comics you read? How would a hero deal with terrorists? What if a superhero was a member of al-Quaeda? How can we pit our angels against our demons in such a way as would, as Shakespeare put it, “hold a mirror up to nature”.

I enjoy comics; I enjoy reading them and I enjoy writing them. I do. They can be good entertainment. They could also be more. They could stand, I think, a little more reality.

Or maybe that’s just me.

MONDAY MORNING: Mindy Newell

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

 

Marc Alan Fishman: Boom! Is! Doing! It! Right!

fishman-art-130921-150x195-4690831It wasn’t too long ago that I heard Mike Gold exclaim “I’m really liking what you’re doing there.” He was talking to Ross Ritchie about Boom! Studios. It got me thinking. From one publisher to another, true respect shared between gentlemen. No snide jabs. No undercurrent of jealousy or malice. Just respect. And it’s that respect that made me realize that Boom! Studios is a shining example of what is going right with our industry.

A cursory glance at their site shows a publisher pushing boundaries in every conceivable direction. Where the brand was once known for either being Mark Waid’s playground or Stan Lee’s litter box, today they are producing comics in every genre under the yellow sun. They once clung to licenses from Disney in order to pay the bills. Without Mickey’s teets to suckle from, instead they’ve smartly chosen popular brands like Adventure Time, and the biker-beloved Sons of Anarchy in order to draw in more ‘non-comics’ fans to the shelves.

Boom! also has broken its brand into smarter sub-brands in order to focus efforts on different emerging markets. KaBoom!, its kid-centric brand, is of course anchored by the aforementioned Adventures of Finn and Jake. But they’re also branching out with other recognizable brands like Peanuts, Garfield, and the Adventure-esque Bravest Warriors. The fact that Boom! recognizes the kids market and pushes their line in order to draw the wee ones into a comic shop should be commended. And while a licensed kids book is nothing new in the marketplace… the fact that their books are not chained lock-in-step to their source material means kids will be able to see the comic medium as a place to explore the vastness of the worlds they may only know in cartoon form. It’s a small thing, that means huge ramifications as the li’l readers grow up.

Beyond that, Boom! recently realized its creative teams had more to say and show. So much so that they’ve chosen to branch out even further, with the newly dubbed BOOM! Box imprint made for experimental comics. Not happy to place these potentially “indie for indies’ sake” titles into Boom! Town, or its newly acquired Archaia lines… the box will house the weirdest of the weird. The idea being of course that comic creators who would otherwise choose to self-publish short runs of books that might be too crazy for even a “B” or “C” publisher like Boom! to consider… are given the carte blanch to actually give it a go anyways.

As an indie publisher myself, I’m of two minds on that. One mind says “kudos to Ritchie, Gagnon, and Watters for having balls!” The other mind morbidly declares “Yay! One more sub-publisher with money behind them to tell Unshaven Comics they’re cute for trying!”

These days a cursory glance over my newsfeed on Facebook shows normally at least several daily references to what DC or Marvel is messing up. DC way more than Marvel, if you’re tallying. It’s a bit hilarious to me, given my recent rekindled love of professional wrestling. Because when one steps back to see the forest for the trees, they’ll eventually see the cyclical nature of the continual soap opera that is male-fiction. With Boom! taking the role of the babyface… We crave a heel, and DC is glad to play the role right now. Can’t stand Villains Month? Keep blogging about it! Think Man of Steel crossed a line? Put it on a tee-shirt! Think Dan DiDio is secretly behind it all, and should be fired? Make a god-damned hashtag, and tag him in every post you write for a month! Guess what? There’s no such thing as bad press. Case in point? I’m DVR’ing Dads tonight on Fox. Do the math. I’ll wait for you to catch up. But I digress.

Boom! is doing it right. They’ve branched out beyond the capes (while still putting out some decent-if-not-mind-blowing cape comics) to compete with Image for the Comics With Original Ideas the Big Two Won’t Touch (and face it, Vertigo isn’t near what it used to be, and Marvel never even tried to compete there). They’ve made kids comics that matter again, and in doing so, have ignited passion for our media in the next generation… buying us soon-to-be-old-farts at least another few years to do what we love. The old adage is true; big risks equal big rewards. Boom! for the time being is reaping plenty of rewards.

We fans, bored of the Big Two are now seeing a true third leg of the market arise. Small(er) presses are proving profitable. Hollywood is even catching wind of it. And when big money backs small(ish) companies, it seems that the money may be headed not only into the coffers of secret investors… but back into the comic medium itself. It’s a grand day to be a comic fan, kiddos.

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

 

The Point Radio: Sean Hayes Steps In To Save The World

PT092013

Somebody needs to save us all, so why not Sean Hayes? We talk to Sean about his busy summer producing and why he is back in front of the camera again in SEAN SAVES THE WORLD. Plus Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello explain why their roles in PRISONERS were so difficult, and is Sharon Carter headed to TV?

THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other  mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

REVIEW: The Adventures of Superboy Season Three

Superboy Season threeWhen last we visited Clark Kent and Lana Lang, they were at college, leaving Smallville behind and as Season Three of the syndicated series arrived, it came with changes. The first was that Superboy became The Adventures of Superboy and then the focus moved the characters from the well-named Shuster University to a quasi-internship at The Bureau for Extra-Normal Matters in Capitol City, Florida. Clearly, the actors were aging and the premise of them being in college stopped making sense, plus menace of the week stories was becoming tougher to make plausible on the static campus. The more plausible setting worked for super-heroes but certainly took something away from the civilian side of life, a similar issue plaguing Smallville in its latter seasons.

The third season, out now on DVD from Warner Archive, also brought the welcome removal of the annoying Andy McCalister, character, with actor Ilan Mitchell-Smith taking a curtain call in this season’s “Special Effects”. He was replaced in the cast with coworker Matt Ritter (Peter Jay Fernandez) and the Bureau chief C. Dennis Jackson (Robert Levine).

While there are certainly foreshadowing elements to the far more successful Smallville, the tone this season actually evokes memories of Robert Maxwell’s film nourish first season of The Adventures of Superman, which ran some thirty years earlier. Credit for this positive change, reflecting the adult reality the leads now found themselves, goes to producers Julia Pistor and Gerard Christopher, with DC Comics’ support and approval. Christopher, who inherited the cape the previous season, seems comfortable in the uniform and while no great actor, certainly was stalwart.

The thirty minute format remain inhibiting so character development was almost nil except when it played a role in the story such as “Rebirth” where Clark thought he took a life and hung up his cape. Every series has to explore alternate futures and this series honored that trope with both “Roads Not Taken” and “The Road to Hell”, the latter a fine two-parter with former Tarzan Ron Ely as an aging Man of Steel from a possible future.

On the other hand, several stories seemed mired in the past such as “Wish for Armageddon”, which felt like an antiquated Cold War story in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall’s collapse.

Luthor, Bizarro, and Metallo make return appearances as opponents while first timers included The Golem in a strong neo-Nazi story. Pa Kent (Stuart Whitman) turned up for an appearance, a reminder of when Clark’s life was simpler and dad was always there to guide the way.

Overall, it’s a stronger season than the preceding one, but also one that less resembled the comics fans wanted and appeared somewhat alien to the general audience, neither resembling the comics or the film series.

The transfers are fine overall and the made-to-order 26 episode, three-disc set comes without any bonus features.

Martha Thomases: News Fantasy

thomases-art-130920-150x130-6601559This past Sunday saw the Season 2 finale of the HBO series The Newsroom. When it was over, I was really happy with the season.

Apparently, other people? Not so much.

There are a lot of reasons to criticize The Newsroom. It’s not very realistic. The people who work for the cable news network, especially those with off-camera jobs, are much too attractive. Even the slobs are put together by stylists. Because it is an Aaron Sorkin show, characters will frequently speak in paragraphs, something hardly anyone does in the real world, and certainly not at work in a fast-paced newsroom, where anything more than a grunt or a nod takes too much time.

It’s a world where we know a character has been emotionally damaged because she is female and she cuts and dyes her long blonde hair into a cute red pixie cut. This is so shocking that the network’s lawyer doesn’t want her to testify at a lawsuit. It’s a world where women wear phenomenally high heels to work, and keep them on all day, even when they are at the office for 16 hours or more.

It’s a world in which a major news decision, which we are supposed to consider to be courageous, involves reading the AP wire and seeing that one story might be more important than another.

In other words, it’s a fantasy. I enjoy fantasy. I enjoy HBO fantasy. True Blood and Game of Thrones are my idea of fun times. Why shouldn’t I like The Newsroom?

If you don’t like it, I understand. It’s a series pitched to big city media junkies, even more than The West Wing. It’s easy to claim it’s a liberal fantasy, but if it was truly progressive, the women would be more than caricatures. The Jane Fonda character (a joy!) is the only woman not defined by her relationship to a man (unless we count her son). And she is played for comic relief.

The big pay-off at the end of the last show (SPOILERS! if you’re squeamish) was when the lead anchor, played by Jeff Daniels, proposed to his executive producer (and former fiancée) Emily Mortimer. It was a surprise because they hadn’t been dating, because they hadn’t been flirting, and they certainly hadn’t been sleeping together – at least not recently. He realized he loved her because of who she is and how she lives.

It’s as shocking as the Red Wedding, and way more romantically satisfying.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

REVIEW: The Fly

FlyWhile growing up, I among the last generation that got to watch classic black and white and early color horror films day and night. Before talk and game shows became cheap fare, New York stations would run movies before dinner and throughout the evening. Some were cheesy, even to my pre-adolescent eyes, but others were just downright scary. Among the latter was the effectively creepy The Fly. 20th Century Home Entertainment has just released this beloved classic on Blu-ray and it has been nicely transferred to enthrall a new generation.

Of course, many of the readers here probably only know the fun and weird remake by David Cronenberg, which does nicely stand on its own, but the original is well worth a loo, too.

Released in 1958, it was one of Fox’s truly great horror/sci-fi offerings after decades of inferior efforts. The film is based on the forgotten George Langelaan short story of the same name which first appeared in the June 1957 edition of Playboy. Fox quickly snapped up the rights and assigned the script chores to Shogun’s James Clavell. Despite its brevity, he whittled away elements of the story and focused squarely on the doomed Andre (David Hedison, pre-Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea), a scientist cursed by his own lab work.

Told partly in flashback, the movie has Helene Delambre (Patricia Owens) recount how and why she killed her husband Andre as her confession to her brother- in- law Francois (Vincent Price) and Inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall). Essentially, Andre was building a transporter device and of course decided to test it on himself without any assistance or witnesses. As he stepped into the beam, an innocent fly also entered the streaming energy and, well, things happened.

There’s a sense of creeping menace as the film slowly unfolds its tale even though it somewhat telegraphs that clearly some body parts got mixed up. But it also builds up a nice sense of tension until the big reveal, when the cloth covering is removed and we see the giant fly head where Hedison’s handsome face should be. It’s a measured approach, letting things build without a lot of melodrama or screeching violins. We’re sold on believing this tale thanks to Owens’ strong performance with a nice turn from Price. Hedison is underrated here considering how much he has to do without speaking or having his face shown.

Of course, that’s saved for the great final shot, which horrified me as a kid and still brings backs strong memories.

Fox gets credits for the fine transfer of this CinemaScope classic, retaining some of the color and sprucing up the rest. The sound is similarly strong, letting the sound effects come through nicely. The new edition also comes with an interesting and amusing Commentary with Actor David Hedison and Film Historian David Del Valle. There’s a repeat of Biography: Vincent Price from 1997 (44:03); Fly Trap: Catching a Classic (11:30), which explores not only this but the two unnecessary sequels; Fox Movietone News (:54) recapping the film’s premiere in San Francisco; and, the original Theatrical Trailer (1:59)

REVIEW: Nichols

nichols-art-150x145-6738571Like most humans presently stalking the Earth, I’ve been watching teevee ever since my eyeballs could focus. Being a fanboy collector, I do my share of possessing odd and great stuff. Sadly, there were two teevee shows I absolutely worshipped that I could not find, even from collectors who obtain their DVDs through questionable means.

The first is T.H.E. Cat, Robert Loggia’s jazz-based New Orleans cat burglar private eye show. It only lasted one season, it was in black-and-white, and each episode only ran 30 minutes. So it’s half-life in syndication was roughly the same as Lawrencium. There are some truly awful bootlegs around, 12th generation dubs of a kinescope shot off of teevee set that desperately needed rabbit ears. I haven’t given up, but the challenge is undermining my otherwise natural sense of happy optimism.

The second is Nichols, the post-western western about a pacifist who was shanghaied into becoming the sheriff of a small Arizona town in 1914 that is being overrun by bicycles and its very first automobile. Pretty heady stuff for 1971. It, too, lasted only one season but at least it was an hour long and it was in color. But in those days, local teevee stations wouldn’t touch a show that only ran 24 episodes.

This week I received a package from Warner Archives containing the entire Nichols collection on six DVDs. I ordered it the minute it was announced.

First, a word about Warner Archives. They sell a couple thousand DVDs of hard-to-find stuff from Warner Bros., MGM, Sony (Columbia), Paramount, HBO, Cinemax, and Hanna-Barbara. Lots of obscure movies and teevee shows, lots of comics stuff (for example, the complete runs of both the Superboy and the Shazam series), and they add new titles roughly every minute. These DVDs are made-to-order: they’re professionally packaged and of high quality. Warners discovered something Frank Zappa learned 20 years ago: if you can’t stop people from bootlegging, boot ‘em yourself.

Nichols starred – no surprise here – James Garner and was produced by his Cherokee Productions company with many of the same people who later did The Rockford Files. The show starred Margot Kidder – yes, that Margot Kidder, seven years shy of Lois Lane. Veteran character actor Neva Patterson and Stuart Margolin (later “Angel” on Rockford) also starred. But in my fertile brainpan, the real star of this show was its creator/writer/producer and occasional director Frank R. Pierson.

Pierson had a pedigree to die for. He’d written Cat Ballou, Cool Hand Luke, The Anderson Tapes, Dog Day Afternoon, The Good Wife, and 11 episodes of Have Gun, Will Travel – one of the best written shows in history. Oh, and shortly before his death last year, he wrote an episode of Mad Men and was its consulting producer. And he directed The L Word and Citizen Cohn. This man defied stereotyping.

Nichols was clever, heartwarming, very funny, brilliantly acted, and it had a point. It was very much a product of its time, that time being the enlightened days of peace, love, and sideburns, but it’s so well produced and acted that shouldn’t annoy anybody today. It deserves to be seen, and if you’re a fan of any of the people involved, it needs to be seen.

 

Eclipso – A Dark and Shadowy History

  • News
  • September 19, 2013

Eclipso_OriginDan Didio has written the latest iteration of the character for Villains Month, part of the new Forever Evil crossover event.  It ties up a plot arc that’s been weaving through the New 52 books since their inception – the villain’s black diamond has appeared in the short-lived Team 7 title, as well as Catwoman Demon Knights and even Sword and Sorcery. So clearly his return is intended to be a big one.

But this isn’t the first time DC has tried to make Eclipso into a top-echelon threat. Not by a long length.

People go on about how many times Aquaman has been revamped, but I gotta tell you, I think Eclipso has him beat.  Originally a sort of Jekyll-Hyde pastiche, he was released from within scientist Bruce Gordon whenever he was caught in the shadow of an eclipse.  Fortunately, eclipses are rather rare, so the character almost never appeared…oh, wait…ah, I’m being told that he could also appear under the shadow of an artificial eclipse, like a tea tray being used to block the light of a sunlamp.  Well, that certainly changes things.

He had a run in House of Secrets that got reprinted quite a bit in the wonderful years of the 100-page Super-Spectaculars, where people my age got most of their knowledge of the golden age and early silver age of comics.  He re-appeared on occasion when they needed a relatively generic and replaceable villain – he showed up in the Metal Men book as a Big bad, for pete’s sake.

It was with Eclipso: The Darkness Within that they first tried to make him into a major player.  Eclipso was now a major force of evil, hidden on the dark side where he secretly tried to control and destroy the shards of a massive black diamond, the Heart of Darkness.  But a visit by Lar Gand (Not the Legion’s  Mon-El, but the post-crisis version…look, just read my history of the character if you feel the need to catch up) gave Eclipso the idea to use the diamonds to possess the heroes of Earth, just as he’d used the first/original shard to possess Gordon.

The series did well and spawned a Eclipso title, one of the few times a villain carried a book.  Bruce Gordon was now being played as the Van Helsing to Eclipso’s Dracula, the Nayland Smith to Fu Manchu.  The book didn’t last all that long, and Eclipso sank back into the mid-card.

ComicMixer John Ostrander got ahold of him during his exemplary run on The Spectre, and the history changed again.  Not merely a demon of evil, Eclipso was in fact God’s first tool of Wrath, before The Spectre.  Eclipso, it’s explained, cause the biblical Flood at God’s behest.

This version of Eclipso returned a number of times, possessing Superman, taking Alex Montez as a host in a great arc in JSA, and most controversially, taking over Jean Loring, who was in quite a state after the events of Identity Crisis.

But in there, we got another version of his origin.  Now it’s explained that the black diamonds came from Apokalips, and Eclipso was created by Darkseid.  That was one of those changes that turned vast gouts of the past of the character into the rubbish heap, and it was not taken well by fans.

The New 52 has seen fit to bring the character back to his “god of vengeance” position, though his connection to God has not been re-confirmed.  With a number of appearances in several books, it’s a thread that has been in place for about all of the New 52.   Dan Didio, who did a very good job with the first few issues of Phantom Stranger, does a good job here summing up the latest new history of the character, and making clear how big a threat he can be.  Another small change – Bruce Gordon has now become “Gordon Jacobs,” likely to make the name more different from its original in-joke sources, Bruce Wayne and Commissioner James Gordon. He’s now being portrayed as a disgraced scientist, after an experiment with a solar-powered city goes terribly wrong.  This sets Gordon up to be tempted by Eclipso, as opposed to merely possesed against his will.  Like the spin made the the Phantom Stranger, it allows the character to be a bit more complex.

They’ve used Phantom Stranger to set up a couple other powerful Mystic characters – the first appearance of Raven was made there, though not mentioned by name, and that of her demonic father, classic Teen Titans foe Trigon, who also received a Villains Month issue.

Whether Eclipso will be a major player in Forever Evil, or if he’s being set up for an even later use is unsure.  But with the amount of time they’ve spent into setting him up, there are clearly big plans for the character.

REVIEW: The Wonderful 101 – One-credible

The Wonderful 101 has been a year coming – it’s been part of Nintendo’s many show reels for the Wii U system since its release, and it was one of the most popular demos at last year’s New York Comic Con.  And it has been worth every minute.

Conquering alien horde Geathjerk has set its sights on Earth, and the secret army of the Centinels, code named “The Wonderful 100” is out last hope against with you leading them, the “101st”.  The team saves citizens, and then quickly deputizes them into duty, using them like building blocks to form weapons and tools to fight the rampaging monsters.

Another work from  Hideki Kamiya, produced by Atsushi Inaba, it’s got a lot in common with their Viewtiful Joe series for the Game Cube.  If Viewtiful Joe was a love letter to the Kamen Rider series, Wonderful 101 is a love letter to the Super Sentai series, the shows they use to bring us Power Rangers.  Like Joe before it, the game is rife with fourth-wall breaking comedy, over the top action and magnificent character design.

Also like its predecessor, the game is VERY complex.  With dozens, potentially hundreds of heroes and villains on screen at once, things can get very small very quickly, combine that with a control system that at various times uses all the buttons of the Wii U Game Pad, including drawing on the screen, the playing is required to do quite a lot, quite often.  Reasonable progress can be made with button mashing (and a very welcome “very easy” mode) but there’s enough opportunity for impressive combos and innovative gameplay to keep a dedicated gamer engrossed.  With a hundred hidden characters to find and many times that in hidden items, the replay value of the game is vast.  It takes advantage of the Wii U Game Pad to deliver a new playing mechanic.

The work pays off, as the story is filled with many twists and turns, skewering the tropes of tokusatsu while it tributes them.  The character design alone will keep you laughing for days. (Wonder Beer? Wonder Toilet?).  The theme song, “Heroes’ March” that plays under the action, is a wacky ditty that sounds like what would happen of John Philip Sousa did the theme for a Power Rangers show, orchestrated by Jim Steinman.

The complexity may make it the kind of game that might turn a casual player off, but for the hardcore gamer (not to mention fans of Japanese science-fiction) it’s a treat.

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