Author: Kelson Vibber

The Horton Grand

comment on the post “San Diego Comic Con Reflections, Part One“:

My wife and I were also at the Horton Grand. I absolutely agree on that hotel — it’s fantastic.

Except for the fact that we were in a second-floor room that looked out onto Fourth, and the windows didn’t block much sound, so we could hear drunken revelers, motorcycles, and stretch Hummers idling below our window into the late hours of the night.

I wasn’t aware it was supposed to be haunted. I think I would have preferred the ghosts to the street view.

Re: Continuity questions (Annuals, specials and spin-offs)

Hmm, let’s see if I can have a go at this:

> Flash Annual #1-13

Annual 1 is tricky, because Wally’s seeing Connie, not Tina, but living in his mansion. I put it between #4 and #5, figuring that he’s met Tina, but they’re not dating yet.

Annual 2 I put between #19 and #20 — it’s clearly after the long Vandal Savage story that ends in #18, but before the Invasion!-through Porcupine Man story that starts in #20.

Annual 3 is easy: between #28 and #29. #28 wraps up the Porcupine Man story. The annual features Wally’s Justice League transporter being delivered. He uses the transporter in #29.

Annual 4 is unclear, since there’s nothing to really anchor it, but I set it around the time of #55, the War of the Gods crossover, because Armageddon 2001 and War of the Gods ran more or less concurrently.

Annual 5 is another slightly vague one, but I place it around #66, early in Waid’s run and right after the framing sequence of “Born to Run,” because it’s the last time you’ll see Chunk for a long, long time.

Annual 6 is explicitly set during “The Return of Barry Allen,” between #77 and #78

Annual 7 is out of continuity

Annual 8 is a bit vague, but I’d place it just before “Dead Heat” because Wally and Linda have worked through the worst of their post-“Terminal Velocity” relationship issues.

Annual 9 is either out of continuity or so far in the future it doesn’t matter.

Annual 10 is sometime after “Hell to Pay,” so shortly after #129.

Annual 11 is unclear, but sometime before “The Black Flash” starts in #139. I’ve put it between #134 and #135, which doesn’t *quite* fit.

Annual 12 is early in the Dark Flash saga, probably not long after #152, because no one knows who he is yet.

Annual 13 is shortly after Wally’s and Linda’s wedding and honeymoon — I’ve put it right before the start of “Wonderland,” between #163-164

> Speed Force #1
> Secret Files #1-2
> 80-Page Giant #1-2
> Flash Plus Nightwing #1

The rest of these are trickier to place, especially since they range all over. I’ll let someone else give them a try.

> Also, are there any other spinoffs or major guest appearances from around 1992-2001? Thanks!

Well, there’s Impulse, of course. There’s Flash: Iron Heights, which fits nearly into Geoff Johns’ run right after “Birth Right” and Flash: Our Worlds at War which brings Cyborg to Keystone City.

Green Lantern #66-67: “Fast Friends”
Green Lantern/The Flash: Faster Friends (2 parts, the comic book seen in season one of Lost)
Robin #62-64
Flashpoint (a 3-part Elseworlds mini)
Amalgam Comics: Speed Demon
Legionnaires Annual 3 has XS meeting Barry on a trip through time.
New Year’s Evil: The Rogues
Silver Age: The Flash
The Kingdom: Kid Flash
Wonder Woman Plus Jesse Quick

Cosplayer Coincidence

Wayne Lippa wrote:

So, I was looking at a few of your other pictures, Kelson, and just out of curiosity, what was the story behind the photo of you and Misty Lee?

Early last year I followed Mark Evanier’s blog for a while, and in one of his posts he recommended a magic show in the Los Angeles area. It was a one-weekend show with one act of Misty Lee and one act of Sylvester the Jester. I got tickets and went. I think it was around March, or maybe May.

So during the 2006 Comic-Con, I was walking around and saw someone who, at first glance, seemed to be wearing a very good Zatanna-style costume. I asked her if she’d pose for a picture (which unfortunately turned out to be out-of-focus, so I didn’t post it). As I lowered the camera, I recognized her as Misty Lee.

I told her I’d been to her show in Burbank, she said something about “I hope it wasn’t ___ night, that one was terrible!” I couldn’t remember which day of the weekend I had gone, and she offered to pose with me for another photo. She also offered me tickets the next time she did a show in the area. She seemed very happy to be recognized as Misty Lee, magician, rather than as random attractive woman in hot costume. I handed my camera to the man she was walking with, and glanced at his name badge: he was her husband, Paul Dini.

So I got my picture taken with Misty Lee, by Paul Dini! (It’s too bad I look terrible in that photo — I’m 5-10 pounds heavier than I am now, only half-smiling, and starting to blink.)

Re: To be honest i hope Bart stays

Christening Wally West and/or Bart Allen as The Flash was never necessary. DC already had an established character, Barry Allen, as The Flash.

Unnecessary perhaps, but we got some damn good stories and characters out of Wally’s run as the Flash. We also got Impulse. How likely would DC have been to introduce Impulse if they still had Barry as the Flash and Wally as Kid Flash? And it’s hard to imagine Young Justice without Impulse.

Similarly, it was unnecessary to create Barry Allen in 1956. DC could easily have pulled Jay Garrick off the shelf, dusted him off, and revamped him, but they chose instead to create a new character using the Flash name. And this was someone who carried three titles for the better part of a decade!

Typing Patterns for Authentication

“NPR’s Marketplace is reporting on a new authentication scheme. BioPassword tracks the way you type your password: how long each key is depressed, the time between keystrokes, overall speed. When someone tries to log into your account, it compares the pattern to what it has on file. It only allows you in if both the password and patterns match. The technique has been around a while: World War II morse code operators used it to determine whether a message was sent by an ally or an impostor.”

On Slashdot

Browser Wars Declared Over

Opera Watch reports that Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Google declared the Browser Wars to be over at a panel at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. “Instead of trying to trump one another by adding features in point releases, the companies that developed these browsers are instead intent on advancing their use as platforms for a new generation of rich Internet applications and for tackling the hurdles that will come along with that shift in strategy.” ComputerWorld and eWeek have more details. Apple, the remaining major browser manufacturer, was not represented at the panel.

On Slashdot

Crisis and Retconning

There’s an easy way to keep things simple: Either build on earlier stories without changing them (or change only the obscure stuff), or start over.

Retcons are like epicycles, the sort of secondary orbits that astronomers invented to explain discrepancies in planets’ motions when they thought the planets all had circular orbits and revolved around the Earth. The epicycles got more and more complicated until enough people noticed that you could get rid of most of them if you assumed the planets revolved around the Sun. Then they realized that you could get rid of the rest if you assumed the orbits were elliptical instead of circular.

If you *totally* reboot a series, like Wonder Woman after COIE or Legion of Super-Heroes after Zero Hour and again last year, things are simple. It’s just like launching the Justice League cartoon — it’s a totally separate continuity from the previous version, so contradictions aren’t a problem.

When you revise *parts* of history, things get complicated. Wonder Woman herself might have had a simple reboot, but the Justice League and Wonder Girl (Donna Troy) were still around, and their histories had to be revised. Donna has gone through *how* many origins since then? Origin-wise, she’s hardly recognizable. They actually did a better job with Power Girl by saying “Forget all the retcons, she really is the cousin of Earth-2’s Superman”

Sorry about the rant…

Re: Starship Troopers

On its own merits, Starship Troopers was a passable, somewhat cheesy action/war movie. Nothing fantastic, but not a complete waste of two hours either.

As an adaptation, though, it was terrible. It was as if someone read the back cover, wrote a script, then skimmed through the book to add in salient details in hopes that people who had read it would be happier. (Hey, it says here that the main character comes from Buenos Aires. Let’s add that in!)

A movie *can* be both a good film and a good adaptation. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a good example. It didn’t stick to the books 100%, but most of what it changed made sense, given the difference between the written word and the moving image. And because it stayed true to the books where it counted most, people who have read them tend to like the movies as much as people who haven’t.

An interesting side note about Starship Troopers: I was actually an extra in the opening scene with the hybrid football/basketball game. They needed spectators, and it was filming nearby (California State University at Long Beach, usually referred to as Cal State Long Beach). It was actually
extremely boring — I assume it’s typical that you spend more time setting up a shot than actually filming it. I spent two days waiting for them to set things up, then cheering or booing for 30 seconds while the cameras rolled, then waiting again. In the end I got: (1) a cast/crew T-Shirt (2) lots of reading time (3) conversations with some interesting people and (4) a girl’s phone number. So it wasn’t a *total* waste of time!

Bart/Impulse/Kid Flash

Paul Ewert wrote:

What does the list think of Bart assuming the “mantle” of Kid Flash over in the TEEN TITANS book?

I’m actually kind of disappointed by it, although it makes sense under the circumstances – especially given that (a) Wally’s disappeared, and (b) Bart’s probably spent the entire issue trying to remember Wally’s name and face.

As Impulse, Bart had his own identity. Yes, he was yet-another-speedster – but he wasn’t a sidekick, he wasn’t the second or third Kid Flash – he was Impulse.

What’s bugging me is that they’ve taken someone who, despite his youth and naivete, really was his own hero, with an original name and costume, and turned him into a sidekick – and a sidekick with a hand-me-down name and costume.

BTW, has anyone else noticed that Geoff Johns now has control of *all* DC’s speedsters:
Jay – JSA
Wally – Flash
Bart – Teen Titans
Jesse – JSA
Max – possessed by the Rival, Jay’s enemy, and as such a JSA villain.

Mike Koehler wrote:

Didn’t bart remember Linda when everyone else forgot her, what keeps him from doing this here?

That’s why I said “probably” – at this moment, we don’t really know who *does* remember. In fact, I’d expect Bart and Iris remember at least Barry’s career, if not Wally’s.

I’m assuming the JLA, JSA, classic Titans, etc. are all affected, or someone would have showed up at Wally’s front door in the past 2 months and said “Hey, Keystone is falling apart – put that costume on and *do* something about it!”

If Bart’s forgotten, then the switch to Kid Flash makes even more sense, especially if the Flash has been out of action for two months.

On the other hand, it’s not clear how much time has passed since the “I’m not sure if I believe in him” scene (which IIRC took place after Wally defeated Zoom, but before Hal and Barry showed up). This whole storyline appears to take place over the course of a single weekend, which would place it 2 months *before* Ignition begins. In that case, it’s only been a couple of days, and might even take place before the mass-amnesia hit.

Re: HYPERIUM

Trying to explain the Chain Lightning finale in terms of Hypertime

here goes:

First, an explanation in line with the basic many-worlds approach to time: When Wally changed the past, he could only go forward again in the timeline he had just created. This makes perfect sense when Wally’s the one making the changes, but it doesn’t explain why Cobalt Blue killing Barry changed history around Wally. (Similar problems apply to stories like Bart Saves the Universe.)

So, a Hypertime-based explanation: The Kingdom #2 described Hypertime as branching off of a “central timeline” or “main timeline,” i.e. the mainstream DCU. Given that DC has a long, well, history of stories in which time travelers change history, perhaps what’s going on is a realignment of which timeline is the “main” timeline.

It’s not totally consistent, but then neither is any other explanation. Personally, I think the DCU is too big and too complicated to ever hope for 100% consistency. With 60 years of stories (some of which have been officially removed from canon), hundreds or thousands of writers, artists, and editors, it’s sometimes amazing it’s as consistent as it is.

Re: The latest Titans comic

I’ve almost dropped the current series three times, twice holding on because I’d heard a new writer was starting soon. Now the only reason I’m still getting it is that there may only be 4 issues left.

I hope I don’t sound too curmudgeonly over this, but I don’t think the team ever recovered from “Titans Hunt” – the Wolfman/Grummett one, not the Dan Jurgens one. A decade ago.

There was just enough good stuff in there (early Team Titans, for instance) to keep me going through the Dark Raven saga, the kick-the-crap-out-of-Cyborg saga, and the let’s-break-up-Nightwing-and-Starfire-because-we-want-to saga.
I didn’t even bother with the Dan Jurgens series, though I did pick up the 4-parter with (most of) the originals.

JLA/Titans showed promise, and I really liked the Arsenal mini, but once the series actually started, it was just kind of bland. It looked like it was going to pick up for a while when Jay Faerber started working with Devin Grayson, and they turned out some good stuff, but then once he started writing on his own, it turned to crap. The only good thing to come out of his time working the book solo was resolving the Donna Troy mess, and she’s been practically ignored since. (I’d include making Cyborg human again, but that was co-plotted with Grayson.) And then the stupid DEO kids, Epsilon, and that damn Jesse Quick story.

I was ready to drop it, when I heard Tom Peyer was going to take over. So I thought, he’s done some good stuff, and if Faerber shares some of the blame with his editor, Peyer has more clout and should be able to put up more of a fight against crappy ideas.

But the last few issues have just been boring. Last week, I was seriously thinking of just not picking it up when I went to the comic store. Even though it was in the middle of a story, I just didn’t care anymore.

I realize that I’m comparing it to a “golden age” than can never come back – the (surviving) characters have all changed too much since then – but is it too much to ask that the main story be more interesting than the one-page
Starfire guest spot?

Right now I’m only picking up the next few issues because they’re supposedly the *last* few issues – and I’m not sure I should even do that.

So no, I won’t “lay da smack down” on anyone for dissing Titans. Not when I’ve thought the same (and possibly worse) myself.

Re: Smallville vs. The Flash

I think it would be quite possible to keep the sense of history, and yet keep it simple enough that people can just tune in and understand what’s going on. Now, the example I’m going to give may have the advantage of working with a more well-known character than the Flash, but bear with me:

The Mask of Zorro.

In this movie, Antonio Banderas’ character becomes the new Zorro, taking over for Anthony Hopkins. By the end of the movie, Catherine Zeta-Jones is getting into the mask-and-sword act. Sure, people knew who Zorro was going into the film: a swordsman who wears a mask and fights injustice and oppression. The important details (his family and estates being taken from him, the vendetta against the man who took them, etc.) were (I believe) specific to this film, and were able to fit into a normal-length movie and still leave room for a plot.

So I can see a 2-hour pilot that sets up Barry Allen having been the Flash for however many years, and during the course of the story his nephew Wally West (in his late teens or early 20s), one of the few people to know his secret identity, is struck by lightning and gains similar powers. Barry starts training him, and by the end of the pilot he sacrifices his life to save the world (or at least some huge number of people) and Wally decides to carry on his mentor’s legacy.

If they wanted to, they could tie it into the previous series. It’s been about 10 years, they could get John Wesley Shipp to reprise his role as Barry for an episode, and state that Iris came back sometime after the end of the series. Or if they wanted to link Barry and Tina (there was some speculation), her original name could also have been West.

So it’s at least possible. Whether someone will be willing to try it remains to be seen.

Re: Issues of Continuity

Crisis wasn’t focused to much on fixing inconsistencies as it was on reducing complexity by reducing the myriad dimensions of the multiverse to a single universe. I suspect they planned to fix problems at the same time, but they’re still cleaning up the inconsistencies *created* by the Crisis.

Let’s look at the Titans (since I’ve been reading them since 1984). Since Wonder Woman hadn’t appeared yet in the post-Crisis universe, Wonder Girl couldn’t be her adopted sister, so she needed a new origin. A few months before the Crisis, they had finally revealed the origin of an early Titans character, Lilith, in a story involving the mythical Greek Titans. The new origin they came up with for Wonder Girl *contradicted* the origin they had just written for Lilith! Not only that, but the Lilith origin had introduced a group of villains called the Children of the Sun, so *they* needed a new origin too! And this is just one writer (Marv Wolfman co-wrote Crisis and wrote Titans from about 1980-1994).

Probably the most infamous contradictions were the result of erasing Superboy despite his key position in Legion of Superheroes history. They were trying to fix that one for years with one patch after another until they started over with Zero Hour.

Now Zero Hour, despite being (in my opinion) the far inferior story of the two, was definitely intended to clean up inconsistencies. It didn’t (at least, not much). Except for the Legion, I don’t think much of anything *really* changed as a result of Zero Hour.

I guess that’s part of why Waid and Morrison came up with the overlapping part of Hypertime: to acknowledge that inconsistencies exist.

And I hate to say this, because I really like the way Geoff Johns has been handling the Flash, but glaring inconsistencies keep popping up (Goldface shouldn’t be that old, and since he’s a cop killer he shouldn’t be out yet and the cops should hate his guts, Iris couldn’t have been around when Julie was pregnant unless she was time travelling more than we know, Chillblaine wasn’t “found” dead, Polaris flat-out killed him, etc. – although that last bit I need to check up on to see if I remember it correctly).

Anyway, there’s an interesting story on how long it took for the changes made in the Crisis to really stick in the introduction to “Legend of the Green Flame,” Neil Gaiman’s Superman/Green Lantern story which didn’t get printed for a decade. Apparently there was major disagreement among the editors as to just what had changed or was going to change. As whoever was writing the intro put it: (and I’m paraphrasing here) “on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Green Lantern knew Superman was Clark Kent. Neil’s story was written on a Wednesday, but turned in on a Thursday.” Since it hinged on there being a friendship between Supes and GL, they axed the story.

Re: JSA news/spoiler for Starman #72

To be blunt, as long as the Golden Age is tied to World War II, most of the original JSA members are guaranteed to die within the next couple of decades. In twenty years, it’ll be hard to accept a 100-year-old running around fighting crime. The only ways to keep them around are to make them immortal or to change continuity and given them a 60-year timeline the way the Silver Age has been given a 12-year timeline.

—

And we all know how popular *that* would be!

Re: Hawk and Dove

Captain Arsala of the Washington, DC Special Crimes Unit. Went after Dove, Dawn was trying to work out the whole secret identity thing and get him to date her as Dawn instead, eventually he figured out they were the same person. He and Dawn were camping when Monarch found them, blasted Sal into oblivion, and grabbed Dove.

Funny thing about Armageddon 2001 #2 is that you can see that they got halfway through the story before they decided to change Monarch’s identity. It’s supposed to look like a major red herring, but it’s way too choppy, plus if you take into account things like the following Justice League Europe issue in which Catherine Cobert has a nightmare about an evil Captain Atom, it strongly implies that CA was originally supposed to be Monarch.

Linda’s Race

Hector Guerra asks when Linda changed from being white with green eyes to Asian

Better question: Why did she ever have green eyes?

Linda’s been asian since her first appearance back in #28, when William Messner-Loebs was writing the series, identified as Korean within a few issues (either right after that appearance or during the Celestial Enlightenment storyline, either way before issue #40).

Somewhere during the time Wieringo was doing the art, the colorists seem to have forgotten that asians tend to have brown eyes, and they went green for a while (maybe spillover from constantly correcting Wally’s eye color?), though they do fairly consistently color Linda’s skin a shade darker than Wally’s. Looking back at Terminal Velocity, I can see a definite change when Salvador Larocca started (though at the time, since I knew she was asian, I just interpreted any differences as variations in style, like comparing Wieringo’s Wally to Jackson Guice’s or George Perez’ Wally – although it’s not really fair to compare anyone to George Perez (except perhaps for Phil Jimenez)).

As far as the shape of her face goes, I’d chalk it up to varying art styles, but once you throw in the eye color, it makes me wonder if some bonehead editor wanted to downplay the interracial aspect of their relationship.

Re: Flash Paradox

Actually, it’s not a paradox *yet,* just a loop. Confusing, but internally consistent. The main thing about a paradox is that it *isn’t* consistent – the old thing about going back in time to kill your grandfather, so you’d never be born to go back in time and kill him, so he’d still be alive, and so would you, and you’d go back in time…

Now a *real* paradox would be if, for some reason, John Fox *hadn’t* saved Iris… then Wally never would have gone to Central City and met the Flash, and you have either the Flash line ending with Barry or being picked up by someone else… who might have found a different solution to Mota (50th Anniversary Special) that wouldn’t have left him slowly turning into Radioactive Man over 700 years to reappear in John Fox’s time and lead to his gaining super-speed.

Hmmm… if that happened, then he wouldn’t even have the *chance* to help rescue Iris, and that future would remain intact. So I guess it technically wouldn’t be a paradox either. Aargh!

No wonder Wally gets a headache whenever he deals with time travel!

Re: Flash#164 jay garrick

In my opinion, to be considered a “Hypertime story,” it would have to make use of some facet of Hypertime that cannot already be explained by traditional understanding of time travel. Even if what’s really going when you change the past is the splitting off of a new hypertimeline, you can still interpret it as an alteration of a single timeline. After all, under most circumstances the time traveler has no way of breaking out of the timeline he creates – as far as he can tell, there *is* only one timeline.

One of my favorite quotes about scientific paradigms is “You can’t build a bridge with Relativity.” Gravity is a relativistic effect (or a quantum effect), but if you try to use relativity or quantum mechanical equations to design a bridge, you’ll never accomplish anything. You build a bridge with Newtonian physics, even though the underlying causes of the stresses that you’re trying to distribute are relativistic or quantum in origin. You can argue that a bridge is not a quantum object, because it doesn’t matter whether the electrons in its molecules are in clouds, orbitals, or tiny cardboard boxes.

So if a story confines itself to the main DCU timeline and could be told without knowledge or existence of Hypertime (just as we’ve been building bridges for centuries without knowledge of relativity, quantum physics, or whatever the next paradigm is that will come along), I think it can safely be considered “not a Hypertime story” in the same way that a bridge doesn’t involve relativity.

It’s possible to interpret any time travel story within the realm of Hypertime – I went to a great deal of trouble to figure out how Chronos, Team Titans, Armageddon 2001, Zero Hour, Bart Saves the Universe, Crisis and other stories could fit within Hypertime – but I would argue that none of these stories were Hypertime stories, because they could all be told within a traditional time-travel or multiverse framework. (I even had someone complain of this when I originally posted the Hypertime article on my site, which was why it was quickly retitled “Time and Hypertime.”).

If “Wonderland” turns out to use classical time travel without
branching, crossing, or mingling timelines, then it doesn’t use anything that is uniquely Hypertime. If it does, we can call the writer on it. Otherwise, it’s like calling “The Fugitive” a story about DNA. Yes, both pursuer and pursued have it, but it’s irrelevant to the actual story, which could just as easily be told about humanoid silicon-based lifeforms or sentient robots with only a few changes in dialog and none to the plot or setting.

—

That’s the whole point. As an engineer, you don’t need to know all the hardcore physics details. When you build a bridge, it’s an engineering process, and all you need to deal with are things like gravity, wind, strength and elasticity of the material, etc. All that other stuff, even though it’s going on at subatomic level, is irrelevant to the bridge. In the same way, I see the underlying structure of Hypertime as being irrelevant to a plain time travel story, unless it involves something that can only be explained with Hypertime.

Re: The Flash #163: or about how can REALLY anyone beat The Flash

I like the idea of Wally’s attention span – even at super-speed (I think someone once said he isn’t actually impatient, it’s just that things happen more slowly for us than they do for him) – as a limiting factor. As Ex-Speed McGee (or was it Mason?) once said, super-speed doesn’t help if you don’t see it coming.