"I--I wish you could swim...Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim
Though nothing will keep us together
We can beat them for ever and ever
Oh we can be heroes just for one day"
21. Aquaman: Yeah, he’s usually the butt of jokes. But he’s the king of an undersea kingdom, and that’s gotta count for something. And he swims... like dolphins can swim.
22. Starman (Jack Knight):A reluctant “legacy” hero, the youngest son of the Golden Age Starman. Jack’s brother was killed trying to follow in his father’s footsteps – and despite his best efforts, Jack managed to uphold the tradition, too.
23. John Constantine: A combination of Faust and Tom Regan from Miller’s Crossing. Plus he smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and looks like a rock star.
24. The Red Tornado (Ma Hunkle): One of my absolute favorites. Ma Hunkle didn’t want her kids getting into trouble in the rough neighborhood they lived in – so she pulled on some longjohns, threw a saucepan over her head and foiled mischief as the Red Tornado. Mother of the Year.
25. Gorilla Grodd: A psychic gorilla. He has two ways to pop your skull like a grape. Because he has amazing mental powers. And he’s a gorilla.
26. Ra’s al Ghul: Because he got all Woodward and Bernstein on Batman – instead of trying to unmask him, he simply followed the money, figuring out who in Gotham City could afford a Batmobile. Nothing he’s done since has ever compared to that one moment.
27. The Spectre: God’s Old Testament vengeance given form. And on his coffee break, he’s the ghost of a hardnosed cop. Ostrander and Mandrake performed an amazing feat in their 1990s series, 
saddling him with enough ethical and philosophical dilemmas to make someone so powerful a plausible protagonist. Plus, I love when people look in his face and they see skulls where his eyes should be. That shook me to my core as a little kid, and I still love it today.
28. Mr. Mxyzptlk: Superman can do pretty much anything. So to pit him against a foe who can do anything is a great idea – particularly since it forces Superman to resort to trickery rather than overwhelming force. And getting him to say his nearly unspellable name backward? Genius.
29. Hitman (Tommy Monaghan): Okay, so he kills people for money. He and his pal Nat the Hat still had one of the best friendships in comics. And he cheered Superman up once, so he can’t be all bad.
30. Alfred: The Man behind the Bat – and one of the few people willing to call Batman to the carpet for a bad decision. Scipio at The Absorbascon has a good post on Alfred; I think he’s 100 percent right.
Rob
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Another Chunk o' DC Goodness
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7 comments:
Aquaman -- and sometimes he's in on the joke. The reveal of how Blue Devil got his trident back during all the IC stuff made me laugh out loud.
Jack "Starman" Knight rocks. He's on my list of UnderAppreciated DC Characters, if I ever get around to compiling that list...
John Constantine... Looks less like Sting than he did twenty years ago, but he's still got me reading every month. (Although I often let a few months build up before I read, since most of the Hellblazer stories are so heavily serialized.) And for a while there he had one of the best supporting casts in the DCU. He's survived the transition to Vertigo, a number of very different writers, lung cancer and being played by Keanu Reeves. Anybody see that movie?
Awww, Ma.
You wanna sell a comic, put a gorilla on the cover. Or someone getting hit with a fish. Say... how about Gorilla Grodd hitting someone with a fish?
Ra's al Ghul -- Plus he's got a killer hot daughter. And a bunch of Lazarus Pits.
I was a little upset with what went down with the Spectre in IC, 'cause I've always liked the character. We'll see where we go from here.
Mxyzptlk had some good times in last year's Superman books. I wanna see a standalone in which Mxy and Ambush Bug go on a pub crawl.
Talk about great supporting casts. Tommy had one of the best. And they kept the world safe from zombie seals.
And Alfred is THE great supporting cast character. (Okay, maybe it's selling him short to call him supporting cast, but if the Academy can nominate Jake Gyllenhal for a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, then I can call Alfred a supporting character.) In a already outstanding supporting cast across the Batbooks and Gotham in general, Alfred stands out. I'd never known about Alfred's pre-Penniworth incarnation; I'm one of those readers who fell into thinking that Alfred was always the character as I knew him. It just feels so right to have him as he is now that I have a hard time imagining it otherwise.
I certainly raise my glass to Ma Hunkle and Ra's al Ghul; it'll be a shame if they can't figure out how to work Talia into the continuity of the new movie series.
However, the Rob Staeger I knew, respected, and had a sobering number of conversations with on the general topic... would never have gotten to 30 without including Zatanna. Explain yourself.
Oof. I can't, really. She's on the list, but a bit lower -- probably because the backwards magic always takes me out of the story a little bit. (Then again, the fishnets she wears also take me out of the story a bit, and I can't fault her for them...)
I'm cool with the sdrawkcab gniklat business. Cool with the fishnets, too, if only on principle (vide Judy Garland in Summer Stock, and, for that matter, many concerts before she got too doughy).
But on a not wholly different sublect, just when did Etrigan stop being a rhyming demon? Can anyone tell me when, how and why this happened? Was it just because most writers can't give him dialogue in rhyme without it sounding stupid? Just because they can't craft passable verse is no reason to punish the poor demon. Did I justsay "ppor demon"...?
I'm cool with the sdrawkcab gniklat business. Cool with the fishnets, too, if only on principle (vide Judy Garland in Summer Stock, and, for that matter, many concerts before she got too doughy).
But on a not wholly different sublect, just when did Etrigan stop being a rhyming demon? Can anyone tell me when, how and why this happened? Was it just because most writers can't give him dialogue in rhyme without it sounding stupid? Just because they can't craft passable verse is no reason to punish the poor demon. Did I justsay "ppor demon"...?
Uh, no. I said "poor demon."
And the silly wordverification posted my comment twice.
But, seriously, Etrigan has been getting mighty beat up in his current series. Poor Demon.
I think Etrigan was not a rhyming demon in his original issues -- it was something later writers added on, and it stuck. Byrne likes to think of himself as a "back to basics" guy (not that he's entirely consistent on that), so he reverted him back -- in the Demon's appearances in Wonder Woman, I believe (though no explanation was ever given). I think Etrigan's rhymed or not at the writers whim since then.
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