Okay this misconception keeps coming across my dash and it drives me nuts because it means people are lumping two very different versions of the DC universe under one disparaging banner. So let me just say this to get it off my chest because I'm this close to shaking somebody:
The New 52 ended seven years ago in 2016.
That started a section of DC's history called "Rebirth" in which they started bringing elements of the pre-Flashpoint continuity back into the timeline. The first changes came in a big burst called Convergence -- which is how Jon Kent effectively manifested fully formed at 10 years old -- while other reintroductions like Kon-El, Bart Allen, Cass Cain, etc. were more gradual.
The original plan, being forced through by King of Bad Decisions Dan Didio, was that after ~4-5 Rebirth would give way to another full reboot known as 5G. I could go into detail about the plans but they're honestly not important to this post because Didio was (thankfully, finally) ousted from his role as publisher early in 2020, along with something like 80% of the higher-level editorial staff. DC had a complete creative turn-over at the start of the pandemic and completely changed directions as a result. The material being developed for 5G was retooled into the hypothetical future event "Future State" to buy the new staff time to pull together their new direction.
That new direction is called INFINITE FRONTIER. It started in 2021 and THAT is the era of DC comics we're in now. Infinite Frontier is an active push to bring back the pre-Flashpoint characters, as well as some pre-Crisis ideas and characters, while also keeping the few elements of the New 52 that people actually liked (like Jason Todd's more heroic characterization) and actively pursuing diversity initiatives both in creative staff and in creations. And outside of the big events, they're making a real effort to keep these comics short and self contained in the hopes that that'll make them more accessible. So it's actually really easy, if you read comics pre-Flashpoint and dropped off, to just pick up a series and go with the flow. Anything confusing is just a Google away.
Please, please don't make the mistake of thinking modern comics are as bad as the New 52 just because some people are butthurt their ship isn't getting canonized. There have been some really good comics made in the last few years that you should totally try! Spirit World, Monkey Prince and the entire We Are Legends line has been genuinely fantastic. The new Birds of Prey is shaping up to be a ton of fun. Dark Knights of Steel is an entertaining Elseworld. Urban Legends and Brave & the Bold have done some really fun things with shorter anthology books. One Minute War was a really fun Flash family event and everything Stargirl's done recently is liable to make you cry.
I'm begging people to give these comics a chance. It's just really sad to see them being dismissed out of hand.
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I think this point got a little lost amid the general fandom glee at Dominique and Vanitas bonding (or at least it did for me), but looking back at chapter 60, the implications that this scene has for Vanitas are fucking wild.
It's not the only aspect of her relationship with him, but a huge cornerstone of Dominique's feelings toward Noé is the fact of her absolutely massive crush on him. Like, as much as she's venting about how he frustrates her, Dominique's thoughts on Noé in this scene are the thoughts of a woman that is canonically in love with him. And Vanitas apparently thinks/feels the exact same way.
As their shared venting reaches its fever pitch, Vanitas and Dominique both reach the exact same ending point. Noé is stubborn and overly straightforward and unrelenting, and both of them feel helpless against it. And they say as much!
They say as much, and then they both cut themselves off and flinch away in the exact same way, as though they've said too much. They've revealed some deeper truth about their feelings and the ways that Noé's force of personality affects them.
Dominique reacts this way presumably because she touched a little too close to the reality of her romantic feelings for him. The thing cut off at the end of "Since he's like that, I—" is some expression of the depths of her incredible fondness for and attraction to him. And Vanitas apparently feels the exact same way as Dominique. He expresses almost the exact same outward sentiment and catches himself and flinches in the exact same way. So if Dominique is speaking here in (albeit frustrated) love, then what emotions is Vanitas speaking from?
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My best friend and I had a call recently---she’s back with her family for a bit helping out with some hometown stuff. As part of the stuff, she’s been going through a (deceased) relative’s scrapbook, compiled in the American Midwest circa 1870-1900 and featuring mostly cut-out figures from the ads of the day.
She talked about how painstaking this relative’s work was. (Apparently the relative was careful to cut out every finger, every cowlick; this was by no means carelessly or hastily assembled.) But she also she talked about how---the baby on the baking soda ad is ugly, it is so ugly, why anyone would clip this heinously ugly illustrated baby and paste it into a scrapbook? Why would you save the (terribly told, boring) ghost story that came with your box of soap?
(Why include these things in the first place? we asked each other. ”There’s a kind of anti-capitalism to it,” she mused.)
And we discussed that for a bit---how most of the images, stories, artists, and ads were local, not national; they’re pulled from [Midwestern state] companies’ advertisements in [Midwestern state] papers, magazines, and products. As a consequence, you’re not looking at Leyendecker or Norman Rockwell illustrations, but Johann Spatz-Smith from down the road, who took a drawing class at college.
(College is the state college, and he came home on weekends and in the summer to help with the farm or earn some money at the plant.)
But it also inspired a really interesting conversation about how---we have access to so much more art, better and more professional art, than any time in history. As my bff said, all you have to do to find a great, technically proficient and lovely representational image of a baby, is to google the right keywords. But for a girl living in rural [Midwestern state] of the late 1800s, it was the baking soda ad, or literal actual babies. There was no in-between, no heading out to the nearby art museum to study oil paintings of mother and child, no studying photographs and film---such new technologies hadn’t diffused to local newspapers and circulars yet, and were far beyond the average person’s means. But cheap, semi-amateur artists? Those were definitely around, scattered between towns and nearby smallish cities.
It was a good conversation, and made me think about a couple things---the weird entitlement that “professional” and expensive art instills in viewers, how it artificially depresses the appetite for messy unprofessional art, including your own; the way that this makes your tastes narrower, less interesting, less open.
By that I mean---maybe the baby isn’t ugly! Maybe you’ve just seen too many photorealistic babies. Maybe you haven’t really stopped to contemplate that your drawing of a baby (however crude, ugly, or limited) is the best drawing of a baby you can make, and the act of drawing that lumpen, ugly baby is more sacred and profoundly human than even looking at a Mary Cassatt painting.
And even if that isn’t the case....there was this girl in [American Midwestern state] for whom it was very, very important that she capture every finger, curl, and bit of shading for that ugly soap ad baby. And some one hundred years later, her great-something-or-other took pains to preserve her work---because how terribly human it is, to seek out all the art we can find that resonates with us, preserve it, adore it.
It might be the most human impulse we have.
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My bet on what Annabel wanted to do and why
So I'm reading the mansion arc again because the hiatus is over and that scene is coming back to me.
Now I have a whole theory as to why Annabel did what she did and for what. One of those "all or nothing" ones, but I thought it was interesting to share anyway.
The Background
The first thing to keep in mind is Annabel's role within her group: she's there to get information and to see herself as someone competent and worth following, but also as an agent of chaos in the shadows, actively trying to get them to fight each other (put a pin in that, because it's going to be important).
The whole scene where Montresor makes Ada bark introduces us to this guy, not as just any bully, but as someone extremely sadistic. While Annabel manages to get him to back down in the end, this makes it clear to her that he's a problem she needs to solve by yesterday, because, as if his sadism weren't enough, he's uncomfortably interested in Lenore.
The Amontillado
So she decides to take the first step to satisfy Montresor's thirst for blood by throwing someone under the bus, and unfortunately Duke is the most logical choice: Berenice and Eulalie share a room, Morella can manifest, and although Prospero is not Pluto's friend, he won't get involved in this kind of shady business. Duke, on the other hand, is an easy prey: he cannot manifest and shares a room with Montresor. It's all advantages.
But Annabel can't allow Montresor to commit murder outright. Not that she gives a shit about Duke's life, but if this guy finds out he can murder people in school, it's pretty certain that it will be impossible to push him back. Next it will be her, or worse, Lenore.
It's hard to tell if she suggested putting him behind a wall or just told Montresor, "Why get your hands dirty? I know you can be more creative." Either way, she's doing it to buy time: again, there's no upside to Duke dying, but maybe she can twist this in her favor somehow. And she needs to do it fast.
The Pendulum
The answer comes to her as if it fell from the sky with the pendulum, which is on the table as an object to be chosen during the test, and the stroke of luck is that it is Lenore who chooses it. So she keeps it: this was the piece she needed to turn the situation around.
Annabel knows where Duke is. And maybe our friend isn't far away either (there were five people moving through guarded corridors, one of them unconscious), so it's enough to get to where he is, break through the wall, and leave the pendulum aside so Duke can find his way back to school or join his friends more easily. After all, he'll have Pluto looking for him like crazy, and it would be absurd for him not to use his spectre for that. And if these people don't manage to hit the right spot, she has already discovered the pendulum's range during the test, she could do it herself without arousing suspicion.
The test is over. The Misfits get more and more desperate, Lenore is taken to Dreamland and Ada manifests only to fall into Montresor's arms. All of this actually suits her quite well, for one specific reason: Annabel wants to put a target on Montresor's back and make him doubt his "trusted" people.
Will's spectre can copy people's appearance, while Ada shared a team with Lenore during the test. Both could have stolen it. At the very moment Montresor discovers that the pendulum was used to save this guy, there will be doubt as to which of these two (whom he thinks he has in the palm of his hand) betrayed him. After all, they both seemed pretty uncomfortable with the situation.
Suspicious of Annabel? That was the look on her face as Duke desperately begged her to stop them.
Speaking of Duke, after he tells the rest of his friends what happened, Montresor would be an immediate target to confront…just like Annabel. But hey, "protect me from your allies and I'll protect you from mine," Lenore will avoid getting her guts ripped out (right?).
Maybe she found out she couldn't manifest after the test, so she left it until the next day. In this image, we are told that Annabel gets up ridiculously early, which is quite possible without anyone seeing her.
And while Pluto mentions that he still can't manifest again, let's remember that Annabel has a little more control over her spectre than he does.
Parenthesis: on the Widow Watch
The question here is: if this idiot had it all figured out and swears her wife is okay with all this crap, why not tell Lenore?
My answer is summarized in this picture:
Annabel is a long-term player, this girl doesn't care about Duke's safety, and his life only seems relevant to her because his death doesn't benefit her. She doesn't care about saving him, she cares about how saving him will distract Montresor from Lenore and allow her to take the first steps to get rid of him.
If Lenore runs off to save Duke (something Annabel thinks she will do out of guilt), the only thing she will accomplish is to make Montresor even more fixated on her and possibly blow Annabel's cover: it would be strange if they could suddenly find him easily without anyone telling them.
Another thing to consider is that Lenore arrives at the Widow's Watch in this state:
She may not have been able to see what happened to Montresor from up there because of how surprised she is, but Lenore's clothes are burned, and it doesn't take a genius to know who inflicted at least some of those wounds on her. All the more reason to try to keep Lenore out of this situation until the time is right.
House of Cards
One thing I really love about Annabel is that while many of the things she plans make sense, and indeed several of her predictions come true (such as the students not being able to manifest themselves by approaching Lenore), to quote her, she is not a mind reader. And watching her machinations unravel because of things she can't control is not only plausible, it's really interesting.
Especially when Lenore is the cause. Immovable object meets unstoppable force, and until they get their act together, this is doomed.
And disaster has arrived at that very moment.
The first thing that disarmed Annabel at this point, in my opinion, is that Lenore knew what she had done to Duke before she should have: without knowing her intentions, this looks like a completely deliberate and cold-bloodedly planned simple murder attempt. Annabel was confident that Lenore would understand as soon as she saw the pendulum, either as "I got our enemy off your back for now, but he won't stop" or, if I'm wrong and this woman has some self-awareness, as "I found no other way to get our enemy off your back, but I did everything I could to keep this man safe".
While the jokes about Annabel being a masochist are hilarious, on a serious note, I think it's appropriate to note that his complete failure to see how angry Lenore is is because she's never seen her this angry. Or worse, she's never seen her so angry at her. And she knows what Lenore is capable of in that state.
As if that weren't bad enough, her predictions were that Lenore would run to find Duke, but instead this woman picked up a revolver and walked right into the lion's den.
In other words, Annabel has not only failed catastrophically to keep Lenore away from Montresor, she has prompted her into a direct confrontation.
Everything she thinks she knows about her has just gone to hell.
The fallen queen
One last thing I think is interesting about the situation Annabel is in right now is that there is a threat she has no idea about. Annabel was counting on Lenore to protect her from her allies, but…
If Montresor has eyes, he knows. That means he only has to add 2+2 to see through Annabel's little games.
And the one person who could have protected her right now has no interest in what happens to her.
Hiatus over, people. I hope you're as anxious as I am.
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