Tag: Comics

Re: Hypertime again or not?

The way I look at the overlapping aspect is to think of hypertime as a network of rivers. They all flow in the same direction, but sometimes they diverge and reconnect (such as when there’s an island in the middle of the river). A particular timeline is the path each water molecule takes as it goes from one part of the river to another. Many of these paths will cross each other and overlap, and the molecules themselves will knock into each other, influencing the paths they take.

It’s the idea of the “timestream” taken a step further.

Why I don’t want to see Savitar again…

I noticed a lot of you seem to want Savitar to come back. I don’t. Not because he wasn’t a great villain, but because he *was* – and because bringing him back from the dead would cheapen that death and the sacrifice Wally almost made. Likewise, bringing back Barry or Zoom permanently would cheapen Barry’s sacrifice and the tragedy of Zoom’s death (and all the grief Barry went through during his trial). I don’t know how many of you read The Titans currently, but I remember an issue where Starfire is showing Damage and Argent around their HQ and shows them the gallery of fallen Titans – Jericho, Kole, Golden Eagle, etc. “They all came back, right?” one of them (prob. Argent) asks. “I mean they *were* Titans…” And Starfire says, “You *do* know that when people die, they usually don’t come back, right?”

When someone comes back within one story, it makes sense. Terminal Velocity was like that. As someone said on another board, you start with the warning that “no one has ever gone into the Cave of Death and come back alive!” and you know instantly the story has to be about the one person who does come back. It ends up being like Orpheus’ descent into the underworld and his return. Or to pick a more modern example, Sheridan’s death on Z’ha’dum in Babylon 5. But Orpheus only went to the Underworld once, and Sheridan never returned to Z’ha’dum. Wally’s been “lost in the speed force” 3 times so far, and he’s come back every time. He even dove into it to rescue Linda during the Black Flash story. The threat’s gone. I didn’t even take it seriously this last time, at the end of Chain Lightning.

To go back to the Titans for a bit, they were formed to battle Trigon the Terrible, the demonic conqueror of another dimension who had set his sights on ours and who was Raven’s father. They barely defeated him once, and then in the second storyline he was “destroyed forever” by the spirits of the Azarathians. Great story, great conclusion, and we move on. 80 issues later, they do the Dark Raven storyline, and by the end of the series, Trigon is back just long enough to be “destroyed forever” AGAIN. How many times can you destroy someone forever? It makes the original victory hollow.

Resurrection only works for a limited pool of characters (Resurrection Man, Ras al Ghul, maybe a few others), and even then it has to have serious consequences (such as the death of Morpheus the Sandman and his replacement with Daniel – another facet of Dream, but a different persona from the one we’d come to know.)

Re: Why do you like THE FLASH?

The first comic I really collected was the New Teen Titans, and the first storyline I read was the second Trigon story (at the beginning of the deluxe series). So I’d read about Wally as Kid Flash (he had a prominent role in that story) there and in Crisis, so I thought I’d pick up the Flash. What I liked the most, especially early on, is that you have here an ordinary guy who’s a super-hero. He’s not billionaire Bruce Wayne, he’s not from another planet, he’s this regular guy who has powers, but has to deal with everyday problems like his parents, his girlfriend(s), his rent, etc. After that it was watching him slowly come out of Barry’s shadow, and in the last few years the core of the book has been his relationship with Linda – again, not a storybook one, but a real one, where they disagree, they argue, and they have to deal with how they differ just as much as with how they’re similar. The other key this series has is its focus on the Flash legacy. There are very few series where the hero’s predecessors are as important as Jay, Barry, and even Max and Johnny are with Flash – there’s the two present holders (Wally and Jesse) and the future in Bart and, to some degree, in Iris West II (whether she’s part of the “main” timeline or not)

That said, I do miss a lot of the older supporting characters. Mason, Tina and Jerry, even Chunk and Argus.

Re: Impulse Cancellation

I’m not sure if it applies here as well, but in campaigns to keep TV shows on the air they always have some recommendations:

  • letters on paper are always given more weight than email. 100 emails could come from one person with a mail bot, but chances are that 100 letters were sent by 100 different people (since you’d have to spend $33 on stamps – and never mind international postage)
  • If you can write legibly, it’s better to write it by hand in blue pen. That way they know for sure it’s not a photocopied form letter.
  • Keep it short and to the point. Maybe two paragraphs, and start out by telling them that you like Impulse and don’t want to see it cancelled. You can go on to say why you like the series, but don’t go on for pages extolling its philosophical implications. They probably won’t read anything that long.
  • Don’t send it to the Impulse lettercol – if it was their decision, the series wouldn’t be in danger. You want to send your “please don’t cancel the series” to the higher-ups at DC. The lettercol is the place for your philosophical treatise.

Anyone want to organize a letter-writing campaign? I don’t have the time to run it myself, but if someone else wants to run it, I’d be happy to put up a link to the info if you want to put it on your own site, or you can send me a page and I’ll put it on my own server. I get enough hits on my site that it’ll be a good gateway to get people to notice it.

Super-Speed Perceptions

Replying to Minyon’s post:

has anyone ever wondered how he staves off the boredom. I mean at the speed he processes information, a normal conversation would seem to take forever. I actually remeber a story in one of the annuals where the whole thing took place from Wally’s POV, and the entire story was resolved in the time it took for an elevator to fall 2 floors. Normal life must be a real DRAG for the man.

Wally’s perceptions have changed from time to time. In the first issue, he runs several miles past Vandal Savage before the image even registers on his retina – which doesn’t make sense, because if that were true, how could he possibly run around things and dodge obstacles? Then in #30, there’s another story from Wally’s super-speed perspective. He and Connie go to a movie, and everything is taking place in normal speed, when suddenly the picture stops on one frame, and everyone in the theater (including Connie) freezes. He can’t figure out what’s going on, until he notices a pressure at the back of his neck. he turns around, and there’s a bullet hanging in mid-air. Suddenly he realizes his speed has reflexively switched on, and he goes around the theater looking for other bullets and stopping them before they actually hit anyone. He notices after a while that the picture’s moved to another frame (though realistically, the screen should’ve gone dark between frames), and decides he’d better hurry up. Once he’s confident he’s caught all the bullets, he goes over to the gunman and switches his perceptions back to normal speed (at which point a bullet he missed hits the exit sign). So at as far as William Messner-Loebs was concerned, Wally could switch from normal to hyper-speed perspective at will.

That elevator story– does anyone remember which annual it was in?

Re: DC shutting down web pages

I’ve been out of town all weekend, and haven’t had a chance to catch up with the whole discussion, but I have *some* info on this. About a year ago, DC shut down a Superboy website (I forget the title, but I think it was fly.to/superboy ) that had lots of unpublished stuff and images and such. They didn’t actually shut it down so much as say “you can’t have anything on this list,” and he decided that there wouldn’t be anything left of his site but an article or two (like my Les Mis page now consists of one article and a FAQ), and pulled it down completely. Last I heard he’d opened a new site based on the developing relationship between Superboy and Wonder Girl, avoiding the stuff they were complaining about.

Around the same time at least one other site, a Secret (as in Young Justice) website, got a similar letter. Actually it was an identical letter; someone had sent it to her, apparently as a mean-spirited prank, so she took her site down until she discovered that it hadn’t actually been sent by DC, then put it up again.

There may have been one other site, which I think may have been Hawkman-related, around the same time, but I don’t recall the circumstances of that one at all.

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Another poster asks if my site will be okay

I think so. The only thing I’d be worried about would be the images. The articles certainly, and probably the bios, should fall under the research/reference/review category, though I’ll have to qualify this with IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer).