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davidmann95 · 3 years

Note

So... Morrison’s 10 part interview on All-Star Superman, along with all other older Newsarama articles, just seem to have ceased to exist. One does not simply live without having those interviews available to reread... Can I find them anywhere else?

Rejoice! I finally borrowed a computer I could put my flash drive into, and emailed myself my copy of the Morrison interview. Here it is below the cut, copied and pasted direct from the source way back when, available again at last:

Three years, 12 issues, Eisners and countless accolades later, All Star Superman is finally finished. The out-of-continuity look at Superman’s struggle with his inevitable death was widely embraced by fans and pros as one of the best stories to feature the Man of Steel, and was a showcase for the talents of the creative team of Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant.

Now, Newsarama is proud to present an exclusive look back with Morrison at the series that took Superman to, pun intended, new heights. We had a lot of questions about the series...and Morrison delivered with an in-depth look into the themes, characters and ideas throughout the 12 issues. In fact, there was so much that we’re running this as an unprecedented 10-part series over the next two weeks – sort of an unofficial All Star Superman companion. It’s everything about All Star Superman you ever wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.

And of course there’s plenty of SPOILERS, so back away if you haven’t read the entire series.

Newsarama: Grant, tell us a little about the origin of the project.

Grant Morrison: Some of it has its roots in the DC One Million project from 1999. So much so, that some readers have come to consider this a prequel to DC One Million, which is fine if it shifts a few more copies! I’ve tried to give my own DC books an overarching continuity intended to make them all read as a more coherent body of work when I’m done.

Luthor’s “enlightenment” – when he peaks on super–senses and sees the world as it appears through Superman’s eyes – was an element I’d included in the Superman Now pitch I prepared along with Mark Millar, Tom Peyer and Mark Waid back in 1999. There were one or two of ideas of mine that I wanted to preserve from Superman Now and Luthor’s heart–stopping moment of understanding was a favorite part of the original ending for that story, so I decided to use it again here.

My specific take on Superman’s physicality was inspired by the “shamanic” meeting my JLA editor Dan Raspler and I had in the wee hours of the morning outside the San Diego comic book convention in whenever it was, ‘98 or ‘99.

I’ve told this story in more detail elsewhere but basically, we were trying to figure out how to “reboot” Superman without splitting up his marriage to Lois, which seemed like a cop–out. It was the beginning of the conversations which ultimately led to Superman Now, with Dan and I restlessly pacing around trying to figure out a new way into the character of Superman and coming up short...

Until we looked up to see a guy dressed as Superman crossing the train tracks. Not just any skinny convention guy in an ill–fitting suit, this guy actually looked like Superman. It was too good a moment to let pass, so I ran over to him, told him what we’d been trying to do and asked if he wouldn’t mind indulging us by answering some questions about Superman, which he did...in the persona and voice of Superman!

We talked for an hour and a half and he walked off into the night with his friend (no, it wasn’t Jimmy Olsen, sadly). I sat up the rest of the night, scribbling page after page of Superman notes as the sun came up over the naval yards.

My entire approach to Superman had come from the way that guy had been sitting; so easy, so confident, as if, invulnerable to all physical harm, he could relax completely and be spontaneous and warm. That pose, sitting hunched on the bollard, with one knee up, the cape just hanging there, talking to us seemed to me to be the opposite of the clenched, muscle-bound look the character sometimes sports and that was the key to Superman for me.

I met the same Superman a couple of times afterwards but he wasn’t Superman, just a nice guy dressed as Superman, whose name I didn’t save but who has entered into my own personal mythology (a picture has from that time has survived showing me and Mark Waid posing alongside this guy and a couple of young readers dressed as Superboy and Supergirl – it’s in the “Gallery” section at my website for anybody who can be bothered looking. This is the guy who lit the fuse that led to All Star Superman).

After the 1999 pitch was rejected, I didn’t expect to be doing any further work on Superman but sometime in 2002, while I was going into my last year on New X–Men, Dan DiDio called and asked if I wanted to come back to DC to work on a Superman book with Jim Lee.

Jim was flexing his artistic muscles again to great effect, and he wanted to do 12 issues on Superman to complement the work he was doing with Jeph Loeb on “Batman: Hush.” At the time, I wasn’t able to make my own commitments dovetail with Jim’s availability, but by then I’d become obsessed with the idea of doing a big Superman story and I’d already started working out the details.

Jim, of course, went on to do his 12 Superman issues as “For Tomorrow” with Brian Azzarello, so I found myself looking for an artist for what was rapidly turning into my own Man of Steel magnum opus, and I already knew the book had to be drawn by my friend and collaborator, Frank Quitely.

We were already talking about We3 and Superman seemed like a good meaty project to get our teeth into when that was done. I completely scaled up my expectations of what might be possible once Frank was on board and decided to make this thing as ambitious as possible.

Usually, I prefer to write poppy, throwaway “live performance” type superhero books, but this time, I felt compelled to make something for the ages – a big definitive statement about superheroes and life and all that, not only drawn by my favorite artist but starring the first and greatest superhero of them all.

The fact that it could be a non–continuity recreation made the idea even more attractive and more achievable. I also felt ready for it, in a way I don’t think I would have been in 1999; I finally felt “grown–up” enough to do Superman justice.

I plotted the whole story in 2002 and drew tiny colored sketches for all 12 covers. The entire book was very tightly constructed before we started – except that I’d left the ending open for the inevitable better and more focused ideas I knew would arise as the project grew into its own shape...and I left an empty space for issue 10. That one was intended from the start to be the single issue of the 12–issue run that would condense and amplify the themes of all the others. #10 was set aside to be the one–off story that would sum up anything anyone needed to know about Superman in 22 pages.

Not quite as concise an origin as Superman’s, but that’s how we got started.

NRAMA: When you were devising the series, what challenges did you have in building up this version of the Superman universe?

GM: I couldn’t say there were any particular challenges. It was fun. Nobody was telling me what I could or couldn’t do with the characters. I didn’t have to worry about upsetting continuity or annoying people who care about stuff like that.

I don’t have a lot of old comics, so my knowledge of Superman was based on memory, some tattered “70s books from the remains of my teenage collection, a bunch of DC “Best Of...” reprint editions and two brilliant little handbooks – “Superman in Action Comics” Volumes 1 and 2 – which reprint every single Action Comics cover from 1938 to 1988.

I read various accounts of Superman’s creation and development as a brand. I read every Superman story and watched every Superman movie I could lay my hands on, from the Golden Age to the present day. From the Socialist scrapper Superman of the Depression years, through the Super–Cop of the 40s, the mythic Hyper–Dad of the 50s and 60s, the questioning, liberal Superman of the early 70s, the bland “superhero” of the late 70s, the confident yuppie of the 80s, the over–compensating Chippendale Superman of the 90s etc. I read takes on Superman by Mark Waid, Mark Millar, Geoff Johns, Denny O’Neil, Jeph Loeb, Alan Moore, Paul Dini and Alex Ross, Joe Casey, Steve Seagle, Garth Ennis, Jim Steranko and many others.

I looked at the Fleischer cartoons, the Chris Reeve movies and the animated series, and read Alvin Schwartz’s (he wrote the first ever Bizarro story among many others) fascinating book – “An Unlikely Prophet” – where he talks about his notion of Superman as a tulpa, (a Tibetan word for a living thought form which has an independent existence beyond its creator) and claims he actually met the Man of Steel in the back of a taxi.

I immersed myself in Superman and I tried to find in all of these very diverse approaches the essential “Superman–ness” that powered the engine. I then extracted, purified and refined that essence and drained it into All Star’s tank, recreating characters as my own dream versions, without the baggage of strict continuity.

In the end, I saw Superman not as a superhero or even a science fiction character, but as a story of Everyman. We’re all Superman in our own adventures. We have our own Fortresses of Solitude we retreat to, with our own special collections of valued stuff, our own super–pets, our own “Bottle Cities” that we feel guilty for neglecting. We have our own peers and rivals and bizarre emotional or moral tangles to deal with.

I felt I’d really grasped the concept when I saw him as Everyman, or rather as the dreamself of Everyman. That “S” is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are.

Batman is obviously much cooler, but that’s because he’s a very energetic and adolescent fantasy character: a handsome billionaire playboy in black leather with a butler at this beck and call, better cars and gadgetry than James Bond, a horde of fetish femme fatales baying around his heels and no boss. That guy’s Superman day and night.

Superman grew up baling hay on a farm. He goes to work, for a boss, in an office. He pines after a hard–working gal. Only when he tears off his shirt does that heroic, ideal inner self come to life. That’s actually a much more adult fantasy than the one Batman’s peddling but it also makes Superman a little harder to sell. He’s much more of a working class superhero, which is why we ended the whole book with the image of a laboring Superman.

He’s Everyman operating on a sci–fi Paul Bunyan scale. His worries and emotional problems are the same as ours... except that when he falls out with his girlfriend, the world trembles.

Newsarama: Grant, what are some of your favorite moments from the 12 issues?

Grant Morrison: The first shot of Superman flying over the sun. The Cosmic Anvil. Samson and Atlas. The kiss on the moon. The first three pages of the Olsen story which, I think, add up to the best character intro I’ve ever written.

Everything Lex Luthor says in issue #5. Everything Clark does. The whole says/does Luthor/Superman dynamic as played out through Frank Quitely’s absolute mastery and understanding of how space, movement and expression combine to tell a story.

Superboy and his dog on the moon – that perfect teenage moment of infinite possibility, introspection and hope for the future. He’s every young man on the verge of adulthood, Krypto is every dog with his boy (it seemed a shame to us that Krypto’s most memorable moment prior to this was his death scene in “Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow.” Quitely’s scampering, leaping, eager and alive little creature is how I’d prefer to imagine Krypto the Superdog and conjures finer and more subtle emotions).

Bizarro–Home, with all of Earth’s continental and ocean shapes but reversed. The page with the first appearance of Zibarro that Frank has designed so the eye is pulled down in a swirling motion into the drain at the heart of the image, to make us feel that we’re being flushed in a cloacal spiral down into a nihilistic, existential sink. Frank gave me that page as a gift, and it became weirdly emblematic of a strange, dark time in both our lives.

The story with Bar–El and Lilo has a genuine chill off ammonia and antiseptic off it, which makes it my least favorite issue of the series, although I know a lot of people who love it. It’s about dying relatives, obligations, the overlit overheated corridors between terminal wards, the thin metallic odors of chemicals, bad food and fear. Preparation for the Phantom Zone.

Superman hugging the poor, hopeless girl on the roof and telling us all we’re stronger than we think we are.

Joe Shuster drawing us all into the story forever and never–ending.

Nasthalthia Luthor. Frank and Jamie’s final tour of the Fortress, referencing every previous issue on the way, in two pages.

All of issue #10 (there’s a single typo in there where the time on the last page was screwed up – but when we fix that detail for the trade I’ll be able to regard this as the most perfectly composed superhero story I’ve ever written).

I don’t think I’ve ever had a smoother, more seamless collaborative process.

NRAMA: The story is very complete unto itself, but are there any new or classic characters you’d like to explore further? If so, which ones and why?

GM: I’d happily write more Atlas and Samson. I really like Krull, the Dino–Czar’s wayward son, and his Stalinist underground empire of “Subterranosauri.” I could write a Superman Squad comic forever. I’d love to write the “Son of Superman” sequel about Lois and Clark’s super test tube baby.

But...I think All Star is already complete, without sequels. You read that last issue and it works because you know you’re never going to see All Star Superman again. You’ll be able to pick up Superman books, but they won’t be about this guy and they won’t feel the same. He really is going away. Our Superman is actually “dying” in that sense, and that adds the whole series a deeper poignancy.

NRAMA: Aside from the Bizarro League, you never really introduce other DC superheroes into the story. Why did you make this choice?

GM: I wanted the story to be about the mythic Superman at the end of his time. It’s clear from the references that he has or more likely has had a few super–powered allies, but that they’re no longer around or relevant any more.

For the context of this story I wanted the super–friends to be peripheral, like they were in the old comics. The Flash? Green Lantern? They represent Superman’s “old army buddies,” or your dad’s school friends. Guys you’ve sort of heard of, who used to be more important in the old man’s life than they are now.

NRAMA: Some readers were confused as to how the “Twelve Labors” broke down, though others have pointed out that Superman’s actions are more reflective of the Stations of the Cross (I note there’s a “Station Café” in the background of issue #12). Could you break down the Twelve Labors, or, if the cross theory is true, how the storyline reflects the Stations?

GM: The 12 Labors of Superman were never intended as an isomorphic mapping onto the 12 Labors of Hercules, or for that matter, the specific Stations of the Cross, of which there are 14, I believe. I didn’t even want to do one Labor per issue, so it deliberately breaks down quite erratically through the series for reasons I’ll go into (later).

Yes, there are correspondences, but that’s mostly because we tried to create for our Superman the contemporary “superhero” version of an archetypal solar hero journey, which naturally echoes numerous myths, legends and religious parables.

At the same time, we didn’t want to do an update or a direct copy of any myth you’d seen before, so it won’t work if you try to find one specific mythological or religious “plan” to hang the series on; James Joyce’s honorable and heroic refutation of the rule aside, there’s nothing more dead and dull than an attempt to retell the Odyssey or the Norse sagas scene by scene, but in a modern and/or superhero setting.

For future historians and mythologizers, however, the 12 Labors of Superman may be enumerated as follows:

1. Superman saves the first manned mission to the sun. 2. Superman brews the Super–Elixir. 3. Superman answers the Unanswerable Question. 4. Superman chains the Chronovore.  5. Superman saves Earth from Bizarro–Home. 6. Superman returns from the Underverse. 7. Superman creates Life. 8. Superman liberates Kandor/cures cancer. 9. Superman defeats Solaris. 10. Superman conquers Death. 11. Superman builds an artificial Heart for the Sun. 12.Superman leaves the recipe/formula to make Superman 2.

And one final feat, which typically no–one really notices, is that Lex Luthor delivers his own version of the unified field haiku – explaining the underlying principles of the universe in fourteen syllables – which the P.R.O.J.E.C.T. G–Type philosopher from issue 4 had dedicated his entire life to composing!

You may notice also that the Labors take place over a year – with the solar hero’s descent into the darkness and cold of the Underverse occurring at midwinter/Christmas time (that’s also the only point in the story where we ever see Metropolis at night).

It can also be seen as the sun’s journey over the course of a day – we open in blazing sunshine but halfway through the book, at the end of issue #5, in fact, the solar hero dips below the horizon and begins the night–journey through the hours of darkness and death, before his triumphant resurrection at dawn. That’s why issue 5 ends with the boat to the Underworld and 6 begins with the moon. Clark Kent is crossing the threshold into the subconscious world of memory, shadows, death and deep emotions.

Although they can often have bizarre resonances, specific elements, like the Station Café, are usually put there by Frank Quitely, and are not necessarily secret Dan Brown–style keys to unlocking the mysteries. I think there might be a Station Café opposite the studio where Frank Quitely works and the “SAPIEN” sign on another storefront is a reference to Frank’s studio mate, Dave Sapien. At least he’s not filling the background with dirty words like he used to, given any opportunity

NRAMA: For that matter, do the Twelve Labors matter at all? They seem so purposely ill–defined. They seem more like misdirection or a MacGuffin than anything that needs to be clearly delineated.

GM: They matter, of course, but the 12 Labors idea is there to show that, as with all myth, the systematic ordering of current events into stories, tales, or legends occurs after the fact.

I’m trying to suggest that only in the future will these particular 12 feats, out of all the others ever, be mythologized as 12 Labors. I suppose I was trying to say something about how people impose meaning upon events in retrospect, and that’s how myth is born. It’s hindsight that provides narrative, structure, meaning and significance to the simple unfolding of events. It’s the backward glance that adds all the capital letters to the list above.

Even Superman isn”t sure how many Labors he’s performed when we see him mulling it over in issue 10.  When you watched it happening, it seemed to be Superman just doing his thing. In the future it’s become THE 12 LABORS OF SUPERMAN!

NRAMA: And on a completely ridiculous note: All–Star Superman is perhaps the most difficult–to–abbreviate comic title since Preacher: Tall in the Saddle. Did you realize this going in?

GM: Going into what? Going into ASS itself? In the sense of how did I feel as I slowly entered ASS for the first time?

It never crossed my mind...

Newsarama: I’d like to know a little more about Leo Quintum and his role in the story. He seems like a bit of an outgrowth of the likes of Project Cadmus and Emil Hamilton, but in a more fantastical, Willy Wonka sense.

Grant Morrison: Yeah, he was exactly as you say, my attempt to create an updated take on the character of “Superman’s scientist friend” – in the vein of Emil Hamilton from the animated show and the ‘90s stories. Science so often goes wrong in Superman stories, and I thought it was important to show the potential for science to go right or to be elevated by contact with Superman’s shining positive spirit.

I was thinking of Quintum as a kind of “Man Who Fell To Earth” character with a mysterious unearthly background. For a while I toyed with the notion that he was some kind of avatar of Lightray of the New Gods, but as All Star developed, that didn’t fit the tone, and he was allowed to simply be himself.

Eventually it just came down to simplicity. Leo Quintum represents the “good” scientific spirit – the rational, enlightened, progressive, utopian kind of scientist I figured Superman might inspire to greatness. It was interesting to me how so many people expected Quintum to turn out bad at the end. It shows how conditioned we are in our miserable, self–loathing, suspicious society to expect the worst of everyone, rather than hope for the best. Or maybe it’s just what we expect from stories.

Having said that, there is indeed a necessary whiff of Lucifer about Quintum. His name, Leo Quintum, conjures images of solar force, lions and lightbringers and he has elements of the classic Trickster figure about him. He even refers to himself as “The Devil Himself” in issue #10.

What he’s doing at the end of the story should, for all its gee–whiz futurity, feel slightly ambiguous, slightly fake, slightly “Hollywood.” Yes, he’s fulfilling Superman’s wishes by cloning an heir to Superman and Lois and inaugurating a Superman dynasty that will last until the end of time – but he’s also commodifying Superman, figuring out how it’s done, turning him into a brand, a franchise, a bigger–and–better “revamp,” the ultimate coming attraction, fresher than fresh, newer than new but familiar too. Quintum has figured out the “formula” for Superman and improved upon it.

And then you can go back to the start of All Star Superman issue #1 and read the “formula” for yourself, condensed into eight words on the first page and then expanded upon throughout the story! The solar journey is an endless circle naturally. A perfect puzzle that is its own solution.

In one way, Quintum could be seen to represent the creative team, simultaneously re–empowering a pure myth with the honest fire of Art...while at the same time shooting a jolt of juice through a concept that sells more “S” logo underpants and towels than it does comic books. All tastes catered!

I have to say that the Willy Wonka thing never crossed my mind until I saw people online make the comparison, which seems quite obvious now. Quintum dresses how I would dress if I was the world’s coolest super–scientist. What’s up with that?

NRAMA: Was Zibarro inspired by the Bizarro World story where the Bizarro–Neanderthal becomes this unappreciated Casanova–type?

GM: Don’t know that one, but it sounds like a scenario I could definitely endorse!

Zibarro started out as a daft name sicked–up by my subconscious mind, which flowered within moments into the must–write idea of an Imperfect Bizarro. What would an imperfect version of an already imperfect being be like?

Zibarro.

NRAMA: I’d like to know more about Zibarro – what’s the significance of his chronicling Bizarro World through poetry?

GM: It’s up to you. I see Zibarro partly as the sensitive teenager inside us all. He’s moody, horribly self–aware and uncomfortable, yet filled with thoughts of omnipotence and agency. He’s the absolute center of his tiny, disorganized universe. He’s playing the role of sensitive, empathic poet but at the same time, he’s completely self–absorbed.

When he says to Superman “Can you even imagine what it’s like to be so different. So unique. So unlike everyone else?” he doesn’t even wait for Superman’s reply. He doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings but his own, ultimately.

NRAMA: The character is very close to Superman, so what does it say that a nonpowered version on a savage world would focus his energy through that medium? Also, does Zibarro’s existence show how Superman is able to elevate even the backwards Bizarros through his very nature?

GM: All of the above. And maybe he writes his totally subjective poetry as a reflection of Clark Kent’s objective reporter role. The suppressed, lyrical, wounded side of Superman perhaps? The Super–Morrissey? Bizarro With The Thorn In His Side?

But he’s also Bizarro–Home’s “mistake” (or so it seems to him, even though he’s as natural an expression of the place as any of the other Bizarro creatures who grow like mold across the surface of their living planet). He feels excluded, a despised outsider, and yet that position is what defines his cherished self–image. He expresses himself through poetry because to him the regular Bizarro language is barbaric, barely articulate and guttural. And they all think he’s talking crap anyway.

It seemed to make sense that an interesting opposite of Bizarro speech might be flowery “woe is me” school Poetry Society odes to the sunset in a misunderstood heart. He’s still a Bizarro though, which makes him ineffectual. His tragedy is that he knows he’s fated to be useless and pointless but craves so much more.

NRAMA: Zibarro also represents a recurrent theme in the story, of Superman constantly facing alternate versions of himself – Bar–El, Samson and Atlas, the Superman Squad, even Luthor by the end. Notably, Hercules is absent, though Superman’s doing his Twelve Labors. With the mythological adventurers in particular, was this designed to equate Superman with their legend, to show how his character is greater than theirs, or both?

GM: In a way, I suppose. He did arm–wrestle them both, proving once and for all Superman’s stronger than anybody! And remember, these characters, along with Hercules, used to appear regularly in Superman books as his rivals. I thought they made better rivals than, say, Majestic or Ultraman because people who don’t read comics have heard of Hercules, Samson and Atlas and understand what they represent.

For that particular story, I wanted to see Superman doing tough guy shit again, like he did in the early days and then again in the 70s, when he was written as a supremely cocky macho bastard for a while. I thought a little bit of that would be an antidote to the slightly soppy, Super–Christ portrayal that was starting to gain ground.

Hence Samson’s broken arm, twisted in two directions beyond all repair. And Atlas in the hospital. And then Superman’s got his hot girlfriend dressed like a girl from Krypton and they’re making out on the moon (the original panel description was of something more like the famous shot of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kissing in the surf from “From Here To Eternity.” Frank’s final choice of composition is much more classically pulp–romantic and iconic than my down and dirty rumble in the moondirt would have been, I’m glad to say).

Newsarama: Tell us about some of the thinking behind the new antagonists you created for this series (at least the ones you want to talk about...): First up: Krull and the Subterranosaurs...

Grant Morrison: We wanted to create some throwaway new characters which would be designed to look as if they were convincing long–term elements of the Superman legend.

We were trying to create a few foes who had a classic feel and a solid backstory that could be explored again or in depth. Even if we never went back to these characters, we wanted them to seem rich enough to carry their own stories.

With Krull, we figured a superhuman character like Superman can always use a powerful “sub–human” opponent: a beast, a monster, a savage with the power to destroy civilization. For years I’ve had the idea that the familiar “gray aliens” might “actually” be evolved biped dinosaur descendants, the offspring of smart–thinking lizards which made their way to the warm regions at the Earth’s core.

I imagined these brutes developing their own technology, their own civilization, and then finally coming to the surface to declare bloody war on the mammalian usurpers! It seemed like we could develop this idea into the Krull backstory and suggest a whole epic conflict in a few panels.

Dom Regan, the Glasgow artist and DC colorist, saw the original green skin Jamie Grant had done for Krull, and suggested we make him red instead. Jamie reset his color filters and that was the moment Krull suddenly looked like a real Superman foe.

The red skin marked him out as unique, different and dangerous, even among his own species. It had echoes of Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur that played right into the heart of the concept. A good design became a great design and the whole story of who Krull was – his twisted relationship with his father the Dino–Czar, his monstrous ambitions – came together in that first picture.

The society was fleshed out in the script even though we see only one panel of it – a gloomy, heavy, “Soviet” underworld of walled iron cities, cold blood and deadly intrigue. War–Barges that could sail on the oceans of heated steam at the center of the Earth. A Stalinist authoritarian lizard world where missing person cases were being taken to work and die as slaves in hellish underworld conditions.

NRAMA: Mechano–Man?

GM: An attempt to pre–imagine a classic, archetypal Superman foe, which started with another simple premise – how about a giant robot villain? But not just any giant robot – this is a rampaging machine with a raging little man inside.

Giving him a bitter, angry, scrawny loser as a pilot turned Mechano–Man into a much more extreme and pathological expression of the Man of Steel/Mild–Mannered Reporter dynamic, and added a few interesting layers onto an 8–panel appearance.

NRAMA: The Chronovore – a very disturbing creation, that one.

GM: The Chronovore was mentioned in passing in DC 1,000,000 and would have been the monster in my aborted Hypercrisis series idea. It took a long time to get the right design for the beast because it’s meant to be a 5–D being that we only ever see in 4–D sections. It had to work as a convincing representation of something much bigger that we’re seeing only where it interpenetrates our 4–D space-time continuum.

Imagine you’re walking along with a song in your teenage heart, then suddenly the Chronovore appears, takes bite out of your life, and you arrive at your girlfriend’s house aged 76, clutching a cell phone and a wilted bouquet.

NRAMA: One more obscure run that I was happy to see referenced in this was the use of Nasty from the old Mike Sekowsky Supergirl stories. What made you want to use this character?

GM: I remembered her from the old comics, and felt her fashion–y look could be updated very easily into the kind of fetish club thing I’ve always been partial to.

She seemed a cool and sexy addition to the Luthor plot. The set–up, where Lex has a fairly normal sister who hates how her wayward brother is such a bad influence on her brilliant daughter, is explosive with character potential.

They need to bring Nasty back to mainstream continuity. Geoff! They all want it and you know you never let them down!

NRAMA: Speaking of Mike Sekowsky, I’m curious about his influence on your work. I have an odd fascination with all the ideas and stories he was tossing around in the late 1960s and early 1970s – Jason’s Quest, Manhunter 2070, the I–Ching tales – and many of the characters he worked on, from the B”Wana Beast to the Inferior Five to Yankee Doodle (in Doom Patrol), have shown up in your work. The Bizarro Zoo in issue #10 is even slightly reminiscent of the Beast’s merged animals.

GM: Those were all comics that were around when I was a normal kid, prior to the obsessive collecting fan phase of my isolated teenage years. They clearly inspired me in some way, as you say, but certainly not consciously. I’d never have considered myself a particular fan of Mike Sekowsky’s work, but as you say, I’ve incorporated a lot of his ideas into the DC Universe work I’ve done. Hmm. Interesting.

While I’m at it, I should also say something about Samson and Atlas, halfway between old characters and new.

Samson, Atlas and Hercules were classical mainstays of old Superman covers, tangling with Superman in all those Silver Age stories that happened before he learned from his friends at Marvel that it was possible to fight other superheroes for fun and profit, so I decided to completely “re–vamp” the characters in the manner of superhero franchises. Marvel has the definitive Hercules for me, so I left him out of the mix and concentrated on Atlas and Samson.

Atlas was re–imagined as a mighty but restless and reckless young prince of the New Mythos – a society of mega–beings playing out their archetypal dramas between New Elysium and Hadia, with ordinary people caught in the middle – and Superman.

Essentially good–hearted, Atlas would have been the newbie in a “team” with Skyfather Xaoz!, Heroina, Marzak and the others. He has a bullish, adolescent approach to life. He drinks and plunges himself into ill–advised adventures to ease his naturally gloomy “weighed down by the world” temperament.

You can see it all now. The backstory suggested an unseen, Empyrean New Gods–type series from a parallel universe. What if, when Jack Kirby came to DC from Marvel in 1971, he’d followed up his sci–fi Viking Gods saga at Marvel, with a dimension–spanning epic rooted in Greek mythology? New Gods meets Eternals drawn by Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson? That was Atlas.

Samson, I decided would be a callback to the British newspaper strip “Garth.” Although you may already be imagining a daily strip about the exploits of time–tossed The Boys writer, Garth Ennis, it was actually about a blonde Adonis type who bounced around the ages having mildly horny, racy adventures.

(Go look him up then return the wiser before reading on, so I don’t have to explain anymore about this bastard – he’s often described as “the British Superman,” but oh...my arse! I hated meathead, personality–singularity Garth...but we all grew up with his meandering, inexplicable yet incredibly–drawn adventures and some of it was quite good when you were a little lad because he was always shagging ON PANEL with the likes of a bare–breasted cave girl or gauze–draped Helen of Troy.

(Unlike Superman, you see, the top British strongman liked to get naked. Lots naked. Naked in every time period he could get naked in, which was all of them thanks to the miracle of his bullshit powers.

(Imagine Doctor Who buff, dumb and naked all the time – Russell, I’ve had an idea!!!! – and that’s Garth in a nutshell.

(Sorry, I know I’m going on and the average attention span of anyone reading stuff on the Internet amounts to no more than a few paragraphs, but basically, Garth was always getting naked. In public, in family newspapers. Bollock naked. Let’s face it, patriotic Americans, have you ever seen Superman’s arse?

Newsarama Note: Well, there was Baby Kal-El in the 1978 film...

(Brits, hands up who still remember the man, and have you ever not seen Garth’s arse? Do you not, in fact, have a very clear image of it in your head, as drawn by Martin Asbury perhaps? In mine, Garth’s pulling aside a flimsy curtain to gaze at the pyramids with Cleopatra buck naked in foreground ogling his rock hard glutes...).

Anyway, Samson, I decided, was the Hebrew version of Garth and he would have his own mad comic that was like an American version of Garth. I saw the Bible hero plucked from the desert sands by time–travelling buffoons in search of a savior. Introduced to all the worst aspects of future culture and, using his stolen, erratic Chrono–Mobile, Samson became a time–(and space) traveling Soldier of Fortune, writing wrongs, humping princesses, accumulating and losing treasure etc. Like a science fiction Conan. Meets Garth.

Fortunately, you’ll never see any of these men ever again.

Newsarama: How have your perceptions of Superman and his supporting characters evolved since the Superman 2000 pitch you did with Mark Waid, Mark Millar and Tom Peyer? The Superman notions seem almost identical, but Luthor is very different here than in that pitch, and so is Clark Kent. Did you use some aspects of your original pitch, or have you just changed his mind on how to portray these characters since?

Grant Morrison: A little of both. I wanted to approach All Star Superman as something new, but there were a couple of specific aspects from the Superman 2000 pitch (as I mentioned earlier, it was actually called Superman Now, at least in my notebooks, which is where the bulk of the material came from) that I felt were definitely worth keeping and exploring.

I can’t remember much about Luthor from Superman Now, except for the ending. By the time I got to All Star Superman, I’d developed a few new insights into Luthor’s character that seemed to flesh him out more. Luthor’s really human and charismatic and hateful all the same time. He’s the brilliant, deluded egotist in all of us. The key for me was the idea that he draws his eyebrows on. The weird vanity of that told me everything I needed to know about Luthor.

I thought the real key to him was the fact that, brilliant as he is, Luthor is nowhere near as brilliant as he wants to be or thinks he is. For Luthor, no praise, no success, no achievement is ever enough, because there’s a big hungry hole in his soul. His need for acknowledgement and validation is superhuman in scale. Superman needs no thanks; he does what he does because he’s made that way. Luthor constantly rails against his own sense of failure and inadequacy...and Superman’s to blame, of course.

I’ve recently been re–thinking Luthor again for a different project, and there’s always a new aspect of the character to unearth and develop.

NRAMA: This story makes Superman and Lois’ relationship seem much more romantic and epic than usual, but this one also makes Superman more of the pursuer. Lois seems like more of an equal, but also more wary of his affections, particularly in the black–and–white sequence in issue #2.

She becomes this great beacon of support for him over the course of the series, but there is a sense that she’s a bit jaded from years of trickery and uncomfortable with letting him in now that he’s being honest. How, overall, do you see the relationship between Superman and Lois?

GM: The black-and-white panels shows Lois paranoid and under the influence of an alien chemical, but yes, she’s articulating many of her very real concerns in that scene.

I wanted her to finally respond to all those years of being tricked and duped and led to believe Superman and Clark Kent were two different people. I wanted her to get her revenge by finally refusing to accept the truth.

It also exposed that brilliant central paradox in the Superman/Lois relationship. The perfect man who never tells a lie has to lie to the woman he loves to keep her safe. And he lives with that every day. It’s that little human kink that really drives their relationship.

NRAMA: Jimmy Olsen is extremely cool in this series – it’s the old “Mr. Action” idea taken to a new level. It’s often easy to write Jimmy as a victim or sycophant, but in this series, he comes off as someone worthy of being “Superman’s Pal” – he implicitly trusts Superman, and will take any risk to get his story. Do you see this version of Jimmy as sort of a natural evolution of the version often seen in the comics?

GM: It was a total rethink based on the aspects of Olsen I liked, and playing down the whole wet–behind–the–ears “cub reporter” thing. I borrowed a little from the “Mr. Action” idea of a more daredevil, pro–active Jimmy, added a little bit of Nathan Barley, some Abercrombie & Fitch style, a bit of Tintin, and a cool Quitely haircut.

Jimmy was renowned for his “disguises” and bizarre transformations (my favorite is the transvestite Olsen epic “Miss Jimmy Olsen” from Jimmy Olsen #95, which gets a nod on the first page of our Jimmy story we did), so I wanted to take that aspect of his appeal and make it part of his job.

I don’t like victim Jimmy or dumb Jimmy, because those takes on the character don’t make any sense in their context. It seemed more interesting see what a young man would be like who could convincingly be Superman’s “pal.” Someone whose company a Superman might actually enjoy. That meant making Jimmy a much bigger character: swaggering but ingenuous. Innocent yet worldly. Enthusiastic but not stupid.

My favorite Jimmy moment is in issue #7 when he comes up with the way to defeat the Bizarro invasion by using the seas of the Bizarro planet itself as giant mirrors to reflect toxic – to Bizarros – sunlight onto the night side of the Earth. He knows Superman can actually take crazy lateral thinking like this and put it into practice.

NRAMA: Perry White has a few small–but–key scenes, particularly his address to his staff in issue #1 and standing up to Luthor in issue #12. I’d like to hear more about your thoughts on this character.

GM: As with the others, my feelings are there on the page. Perry is Clark’s boss and need only be that and not much more to play his role perfectly well within the stories. He’s a good reminder that Superman has a job and a boss, unlike that good–for–nothing work-shy bastard Batman. Perry’s another of the series’ older male role models of integrity and steadfastness, like Pa Kent.

NRAMA: There’s a sense in the Daily Planet scenes and with Lois’s spotlight issues that everyone knows Clark is Superman, but they play along to humor him. The Clark disguise comes off as very obvious in this story. Do you feel that the Planet staff knows the truth, or are just in a very deep case of denial, like Lex?

GM: If I had to say for sure, I think Jimmy Olsen worked it out a long time ago, and simply presumes that if Superman has a good reason for what he’s doing, that’s good enough for Jimmy.

Lois has guessed, but refuses to acknowledge it because it exposes her darkest flaw – she could never love Clark Kent the way she loves Superman.

NRAMA: Also, the Planet staff seems awfully nonchalant at Luthor’s threats. Are they simply used to being attacked by now?

GM: Yes. They’re a tough group. They also know that Superman makes a point of looking out for them, so they naturally try to keep Luthor talking. They know he loves to talk about himself and about Superman. In that scene, he’s almost forgotten he even has powers, he’s so busy arguing and making points. He keeps doing ordinary things instead of extraordinary things.

NRAMA: The running gag of Clark subtly using his powers to protect unknowing people is well done, but I have to admit I was confused by the sequence near the end of issue #1. Was that an el–train, and if so, why was it so close to the ground?

GM: It’s a MagLev hover–train. Look again, and you’ll see it’s not supported by anything. Hover–trains help ease congestion in busy city streets! Metropolis is the City of Tomorrow, after all.

NRAMA: And there’s the death of Pa Kent. Why do you feel it’s particularly important to have Pa and not both of the Kents pass away?

GM: I imagined they had both passed away fairly early in Superman’s career, but Ma went a few years after Pa. Also, because the book was about men or man, it seemed important to stress the father/son relationships. That circle of life, the king is dead, long live the king thing that Superman is ultimately too big and too timeless to succumb to.

NRAMA: There is a real touch of Elliott S! Maggin’s novels in your depiction of Luthor – someone who is just so obsessive–compulsive about showing up Superman that he accomplishes nothing in his own life. He comes across as a showman, from his rehearsed speech in issue #1 to his garish costume in the last two issues, and it becomes painfully apparent that he wants to usurp Superman because he just can’t be happy with himself. What defeats him is actually a beautiful gift, getting to see the world as Superman does, and finally understanding his enemy.

That’s all a lead–in to: What previous stories that defined Luthor for you, and how did you define his character? What appeals to you about writing him?

GM: The Marks Waid and Millar were big fans of the Maggin books, and may have persuaded me to read at least the first one but I’m ashamed to say can’t remember anything about it, other than the vague recollection of a very humane, humanist take on Superman that seemed in general accord with the pacifist, hedonistic, between–the–wars spirit of the ‘90s when I read it. It was the ‘90s; I had other things on my mind and in my mind.

I like Maggin’s “Must There Be A Superman?” from Superman #247, which ultimately poses questions traditional superhero comic books are not equipped to answer and is one of the first paving stones in the Yellow Brick Road that leads to Watchmen and beyond, to The Authority, The Ultimates etc. Everyone still awake, still reading this, should make themselves familiar with “Must There Be A Superman?” – it’s a milestone in the development of the superhero concept.

However, the story that most defines Luthor for me turns out to be, as usual, a Len Wein piece with Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson– Superman #248. This blew me away when I was a kid. Lex Luthor cares about humanity? He’s sorry we all got blown up? The villain loves us too? It’s only Superman he really hates? Genius. Big, cool adult stuff.

The divine Len makes Lex almost too human, but it was amazing to see this kind of depth in a character I’d taken for granted as a music hall villain.

I also love the brutish Satanic, Crowley–esque, Golden Age Luthor in the brilliant “Powerstone” Action Comics #47 (the opening of All Star #11 is a shameless lift from “Powerstone”, as I soon realised when I went back to look. Blame my...er...photographic memory...cough).

And I like the Silver Age Luthor who only hates Superman because he thinks it’s Superboy’s fault he went bald. That was the most genuinely human motivation for Luthor’s career of villainy of all; it was Superman’s fault he went bald! I can get behind that.

In the Silver Age, baldness, like obesity, old age and poverty, was seen quite rightly as a crippling disease and a challenge which Superman and his supporting cast would be compelled to overcome at every opportunity! Suburban “50s America versus Communist degeneracy? You tell me.

I like elements of the Marv Wolfman/John Byrne ultra–cruel and rapacious businessman, although he somewhat lacks the human dimension (ultimately there’s something brilliant about Luthor being a failed inventor, a product of Smallville/Dullsville – the genius who went unnoticed in his lifetime, and resorted to death robots in chilly basements and cellars. Luthor as geek versus world). I thought Alan Moore’s ruthlessly self–assured “consultant” Luthor in Swamp Thing was an inspired take on the character as was Mark Waid’s rage–driven prodigy from Birthright.

I tried to fold them all into one portrayal. I see him as a very human character – Superman is us at our best, Luthor is us when we’re being mean, vindictive, petty, deluded and angry. Among other things. It’s like a bipolar manic/depressive personality – with optimistic, loving Superman smiling at one end of the scale and paranoid, petty Luthor cringing on the other.

I think any writer of Superman has to love these two enemies equally. We have to recognize them both as potentials within ourselves. I think it’s important to find yourself agreeing with Luthor a bit about Superman’s “smug superiority” – we all of us, except for Superman, know what it’s like to have mean–spirited thoughts like that about someone else’s happiness. It’s essential to find yourself rooting for Lex, at least a little bit, when he goes up against a man–god armed only with his bloody–minded arrogance and cleverness.

Even if you just wish you could just give him a hug and help him channel his energies in the right direction, Luthor speaks for something in all of us, I like to think.

However he’s played, Luthor is the male power fantasy gone wrong and turned sour. You’ve got everything you want but it’s not enough because someone has more, someone is better, someone is cleverer or more handsome.

Newsarama: Grant, a recurring theme throughout the book is the effect of small kindness – how even the likes of Steve Lombard are capable of decency. And Superman gets the key to saving himself by doing something that any human being could do, offering sympathy to a person about to end it all.

Grant Morrison: Completely...the person you help today could be the person who saves your life tomorrow.

NRAMA: The character actions that make the biggest difference, from Zibarro’s sacrifice to Pa’s influence on Superman, are really things that any normal, non-powered person could do if they embrace the best part of their humanity. The last page of issue #12 teases the idea that Superman’s powers could be given to all mankind, but it seems as though the greatest gift he has given them is his humanity. How do you view Superman’s fate in the context of where humanity could go as a species?

GM: I see Superman in this series as an Enlightenment figure, a Renaissance idea of the ideal man, perfect in mind, body and intention.

A key text in all of this is Pico’s ‘Oration On The Dignity of Man’ (15c), generally regarded as the ‘manifesto’ of Renaissance thought, in which Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola laid out the fundamentals of what we tend to refer to as ’Humanist’ thinking.

(The ‘Oratorio’ also turns up in my British superhero series Zenith from 1987, which may indicate how long I’ve been working towards a Pico/Superman team-up!)

At its most basic, the ‘Oratorio’ is telling us that human beings have the unique ability, even the responsibility, to live up to their ‘ideals’. It would be unusual for a dog to aspire to be a horse, a bird to bark like a dog, or a horse to want to wear a diving suit and explore the Barrier Reef, but people have a particular gift for and inclination towards imitation, mimicry and self-transformation. We fly by watching birds and then making metal carriers that can outdo birds, we travel underwater by imitating fish, we constantly look to role models and behavioral templates for guidance, even when those role models are fictional TV or, comic, novel or movie heroes, just like the soft, quick, shapeshifty little things we are. We can alter the clothes we wear, the temperature around us, and change even our own bodies, in order to colonize or occupy previously hostile environments. We are, in short, a distinctively malleable and adaptable bunch.

So, Pico is saying, if we live by imitation, does it not make sense that we might choose to imitate the angels, the gods, the very highest form of being that we can imagine? Instead of indulging the most brutish, vicious, greedy and ignorant aspects of the human experience, we can, with a little applied effort, elevate the better part of our natures and work to express those elements through our behavior. To do so would probably make us all feel a whole lot better too. Doing good deeds and making other people happy makes you feel totally brilliant, let’s face it.

So we can choose to the astronaut or the gangster. The superhero or the super villain. The angel or the devil. It’s entirely up to us, particularly in the privileged West, how we choose to imagine ourselves and conduct our lives.

We live in the stories we tell ourselves. It’s really simple. We can continue to tell ourselves and our children that the species we belong to is a crawling, diseased, viral cancer smear, only fit for extinction, and let’s see where that leads us.

We can continue to project our self-loathing and narcissistic terror of personal mortality onto our culture, our civilization, our planet, until we wreck the promise of the world for future generations in a fit of sheer self-induced panic...

...or we can own up to the scientific fact that we are all physically connected as parts of a single giant organism, imagine better ways to live and grow...and then put them into practice. We can stop pissing about, start building starships, and get on with the business of being adults.

The ’Oratorio’ is nothing less than the Shazam!, the Kimota! for Western Culture and we would do well to remember it in our currently trying times.

The key theme of the ‘Dark Age’ of comics was loss and recovery of wonder - McGregor’s Killraven trawling through the apocalyptic wreckage of culture in his search for poetry, meaning and fellowship, Captain Mantra, amnesiac in Robert Mayer’s Superfolks, Alan Moore’s Mike Maxwell trudging through the black and white streets of Thatcher’s Britain, with the magic word of transformation burning on the tip of his tongue.

My own work has been an ongoing attempt to repeat the magic word over and over until we all become the kind of superheroes we’d all like to be. Ha hah ha.

Newsarama: The structure of the 12 issues involves both Superman’s 12 labors and his impending death. Do you feel the threat of his demise brings out the best in Superman’s already–high character, or did you intend it more as a window for the audience to understand how he sees the world?

Grant Morrison: In trying to do the “big,” ultimate Superman story, we wanted to hit on all the major beats that define the character – the “death of Superman” story has been told again and again and had to be incorporated into any definitive take. Superman’s death and rebirth fit the sun god myth we were establishing, and, as you say, it added a very terminal ticking clock to the story.

NRAMA: When we talked earlier this year, we discussed the neurotic quality of the Silver Age stories. Looking at the series as a whole, you consistently invert this formula. Superman is faced with all these crises that could be seen as personifying his neuroses, but for the most part he handles them with a level head and comes across as being very at peace with himself. You talked about your discussion with an in–character Superman fan at a convention years ago, but I am curious as to how you determined Superman’s mindset.

GM: I felt we had to live up to the big ideas behind Superman. I don’t take my daft job lightly. It’s all I’ve got.

As the project got going, I wasn’t thinking about Silver Ages or Dark Ages or anything about the comics I’d read, so much as the big shared idea of “Superman” and that “S” logo I see on T–shirts everywhere I go, on girls and boys. That communal Superman. I wanted us to get the precise energy of Platonic Superman down on the page.

The “S” hieroglyph, the super–sigil, stands for the very best kind of man we can imagine, so the subject dictated the methodical, perfectionist approach. As I’ve mentioned before, I keep this aspect of my job fresh for myself by changing my writing style to suit the project, the character or the artist.

With something like Batman R.I.P., I’m aiming for a frenzied Goth Pulp-Noir; punk-psych, expressionist shadows and jagged nightmare scene shifts, inspired by Batman’s roots and by the snapping, fluttering of his uncanny cape. Final Crisis was written, with the Norse Ragnarok and Biblical Revelations in mind, as a story about events more than characters. A doom-laden, Death Metal myth for the wonderful world of Fina(ncia)l Crisis/Eco-breakdown/Terror Trauma we all have to live in.

The subject matter drives the execution. And then, of course, the artists add their own vision and nuance. With All Star Superman, “Frank” and I were able to spend a lot of time together talking it through, and we agreed it had to be about grids, structure, storybook panel layouts, an elegance of form, a clarity of delivery. “Classical” in every sense of the word. The medium, the message, the story, the character, all working together as one simple equation.

Frank Quitely, a Glasgow Art School boy, completely understood without much explanation, the deep structural underpinnings of the series and how to embody them in his layouts. There’s a scene in issue # 8, set on the Bizarro world, where we see Le Roj handing Superman his rocket plans. Look at the arrangement of the figures of Zibarro, Le Roj, Superman and Bizaro–Superman and you’ll see one attempt to make us of Renaissance compositions.

The sense of sunlit Zen calm we tried to get into All Star is how I imagine it might feel to think the way Superman thinks all the time - a thought process that is direct, clean, precise, mathematical, ordered. A mind capable of fantastical imagination but grounded in the everyday of his farm upbringing with nice decent folks. Rich with humour and tears and deep human significance, yet tuned to a higher key. We tried to hum along for a little while, that’s all.

In honor of the character’s primal position in the development of the superhero narrative, I hoped we could create an “ultimate” hero story, starring the ultimate superhero.

Basically, I suppose I felt Superman deserved the utmost application of our craft and intelligence in order to truly do him justice.

Otherwise, I couldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t watched my big, brilliant dad decline into incoherence and death. I couldn’t have written it if I’d never had my heart broken, or mended. I couldn’t have written it if I hadn’t known what it felt like to be idolized, misunderstood, hated for no clear reason, loved for all my faults, forgotten, remembered...

Writing All Star Superman was, in retrospect, also a way of keeping my mind in the clean sunshine while plumbing the murkiest depths of the imagination with that old pair of c****s Darkseid and Doctor Hurt. Good riddance.

Newsarama: This is touched on in other questions, but how much of the Silver/Bronze Age backstory matters here? What do you see as Superman's life prior to All-Star Superman? (What was going on with this Superman while the Byrne revamp took hold?)

Grant Morrison: When I introduced the series in an interview online, I suggested that All Star Superman could be read as the adventures of the ‘original’ Pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman, returning after 20 plus years of adventures we never got to see because we were watching John Byrne‘s New Superman on the other channel. If ‘Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?’ and the Byrne reboot had never happened, where would that guy be now?

This was more to provide a sense, probably limited and ill-considered, of what the tone of the book might be like. I never intended All Star Superman as a direct continuation of the Weisinger or Julius Schwartz-era Superman stories. The idea was always to create another new version of Superman using all my favorite elements of past stories, not something ‘Age’ specific.

I didn’t collect Superman comics until the ‘70s and I’m not interested enough in pastiche or nostalgia to spend 6 years of my life playing post-modern games with Superman. All Star isn’t written, drawn or colored to look or read like a Silver Age comic book.

All Star Superman is not intended as arch commentary on continuity or how trends in storytelling have changed over the decades. It’s not retro or meta or anything other than its own simple self; a piece of drawing and writing that is intended by its makers to capture the spirit of its subject to the best of their capabilities, wisdom and talent.

Which is to say, we wanted our Superman story be about life, not about comics or superheroes, current events or politics. It’s about how it feels, specifically to be a man...in our dreams! Hopefully that means our 12 issues are also capable of wide interpretation.

So as much as we may have used a few recognizable Silver Age elements like Van-Zee and Sylv(i)a and the Bottle City of Kandor, the ensemble Daily Planet cast embodies all the generations of Superman. Perry White is from 1940, Steve Lombard is from the Schwartz-era ‘70s, Ron Troupe - the only black man in Metropolis - appeared in 1991. Cat Grant is from 1987 and so on.

P.R.O.J.E.C.T. refers back to Jack Kirby’s DNA Project from his ‘70s Jimmy Olsen stories, as well as to The Cadmus Project from ’90s Superboy and Superman stories. Doomsday is ‘90s. Kal Kent, Solaris and the Infant Universe of Qwewq all come from my own work on Superman in the same decade. Pa Kent’s heart attack is from ‘Superman the Movie‘. We didn’t use Brainiac because he’d been the big bad in Earth 2 but if we had, we’d have used Brainiac’s Kryptonian origin from the animated series and so on.

I also used quite a few elements of John Byrne’s approach. Byrne made a lot of good decisions when he rebooted the whole franchise in 1986 and I wanted to incorporate as much as I could of those too.

Our Superman in All Star was never Superboy, for instance. All Star Superman landed on Earth as a normal, if slightly stronger and fitter infant, and only began to manifest powers in adolescence when he’d finally soaked up enough yellow solar radiation to trigger his metamorphosis.

The Byrne logic seemed to me a better way to explain how his powers had developed across the decades, from the skyscraper leaps of the early days to the speed-of-light space flight of the high Silver Age. And more importantly, it made the Superman myth more poignant - the story of a farm boy who turned into an alien as he reached adolescence. I felt that was something that really enriched Superman. He grew away from his home, his family, his adopted species as he became Superman. His teenage years are a record of his transformation from normal boy to super-being.

As you say, there are more than just Silver Age influences in the book. Basically we tried to create a perfect synthesis of every Superman era. So much so, that it should just be taken as representative of an ‘age’ all its own.

In the end, however, I do think that the Silver Age type stories, with their focus on human problems and foibles, have a much wider appeal than a lot of the work which followed. They’re more like fables or folk tales than the later ‘comic book superhero’ stories of Superman when he became just another colorful costume in the crowd...and perhaps that’s why All Star seemed to resemble those books more than it does a typical modern Marvel or DC comic. It was our intention to present a more universal, mainstream Superman.

NRAMA: In your depiction of Krypton and the Kryptonians, you show the complexity of Superman’s relationship between humanity and Earth even further. Krypton has that scientific paradise quality to it, but the Kryptonians are also portrayed as slightly aloof and detached, even Jor-El. But from Bar-El to the people of Kandor, they’re touched by Superman’s goodness. What do you see as the fundamental difference between Kryptonians and Earthlings, and how has Superman’s character been shaped by each?

GM: My version of Krypton was, again, synthesized from a number of different approaches over the decades.  In mythic terms, if Superman is the story of a young king, found and raised by common people, then Krypton is the far distant kingdom he lost. It’s the secret bloodline, the aristocratic heritage that makes him special, and a hero. At the same time, Krypton is something that must be left behind for Superman to become who he is - i.e. one of us. Krypton gives him his scientific clarity of mind, Earth makes his heart blaze.

I liked the very early Jerry Siegel descriptions where Krypton is a planet of advanced supermen and women (I already played with that a little in Marvel Boy where Noh-Varr was written to be the Marvel Superboy basically). To that, I added the rich, science fiction detailing of the Silver Age Krypton stories and the slightly detached coolness that characterized John Byrne’s Krypton, which I re-interpreted through the lens of Dzogchen Buddhist thought, probably the most pragmatic, chilly and rational philosophic system on the planet and the closest, I felt, to how Kryptonians might see things.

We also took some time to redesign the crazy, multicolored Kryptonian flag (you can see our version in Kandor in issue #10). The flag, as originally imagined, seemed like the last thing Kryptonians would endorse, so we took the multicolored-rays-around-a-circle design and recreated it - the central circle is now red, representing Krypton’s star, Rao, while the rays, rather than arbitrary colors, become representations of the spectrum of visible light pouring from Rao into the inky black of space. In this way, the flag, that bizarre emblem of nationalism becomes a scientific hieroglyph.

Showing Krypton and Kryptonians was also important as a way of stressing why Superman wears that costume and why it makes absolute sense that he looks the way he does. I don’t see the red and blue suit as a flag or as rewoven baby blankets. There’s no need for Superman to dress the way he does but it made sense to think of his outfit as his ‘national costume‘.

The way I see it, the standard superhero outfit, the familiar Superman suit with the pants on the outside, is what everyone wore on Krypton, give or take a few fashion accessories like hoods and headbands, chest crests and variant colors. In fact, all other superheroes are just copying the fashions on Krypton, lost planet of the super-people.

Superman wears his ’action-suit’ the way a patriotic Scotsman would wear a kilt. It’s a sign of his pride in his alien heritage.

Newsarama: Although All–Star Superman ties in with DC One Million, you style of writing has changed dramatically since then. How do you feel about One Million now?

Grant Morrison: I just read it again and liked it a lot. Comics were definitely happier, breezier and more confident in their own strengths before Hollywood and the Internet turned the business of writing superhero stories into the production of low budget storyboards or, worse, into conformist, fruitless attempts to impress or entertain a small group of people who appear to hate comics and their creators.

NRAMA: Obviously, this book is the most explicit SF–Christ story since Behold the Man, only...happy. Superman/Christ parallels have existed for decades, but this story makes it absolutely explicit, from laying his hands on the sick and dying to...well, most of issue #12. You’ve dealt with Christ themes before, particularly in The Mystery Play, but outside of the comics, how do you see Superman as a Christ figure for the “real” world?

GM: The “Superman as Christ” thing is a little too reductive for me, and tends to overlook the fact that Superman is by no means a pacifist in the Christ sense. Superman would never turn the other cheek; Superman punches out the bully. Superman is a fighter.

When did Christ ever batter the Devil through a mountain?

The thing I disliked about the Superman Returns movie was the American Christ angle, which reduced Superman to a sniveling, masochistic wreck, crawling around on the floor, taking a kicking from everyone. This approach had an odd and slightly disturbing S&M flavor, which didn’t play well to the character’s strengths at all and seemed to derive entirely from a kind of Catholic vision of the suffering, martyred Jesus.

It’s not that he’s based on Jesus, but simply that a lot of the mythical sun god elements that have been layered onto the Christ story also appear in the story of Superman. I suppose I see Superman more as pagan sci–fi. He’s a secular messiah, a science redeemer with tough guy muscles and a very direct and clear morality.

NRAMA: Continuing the religious themes, in issue #10, you have Superman literally giving birth to himself, both philosophically and as a character – a nice little meta–moment showing how Superman inspires a world where he is only fiction. How did that idea come about?

GM: It came from the challenge we’d set ourselves: as I said, issue #10 had been left as a blank space into which the single most coherent condensation of all our ideas about Superman were destined to fit.

I wanted to do a “day in the life” story. So much of All Star had been about this threat to Superman himself, so we wanted to show him going about a typical day saving people and doing good.

Then came the title “Neverending,” which comes from the opening announcement – “Faster than a speeding bullet!...” of the Superman radio show from 1940, and seemed to me to be as good a title for a Superman story as any I could think of. It seemed to distil everything about Superman’s battle and his legend into a single word. And the story structure itself was designed to loop endlessly, so it went well with that.

On top of that went the idea of the Last Will and Testament of Superman. A dying god writing his will seemed like an interesting structure to use. Then came the idea to fit all of human history into that single 24 hours. And then to show the development of the Superman idea through human culture from the earliest Australian Aboriginal notions of super–beings ‘descended” from the sky, through the complex philosophical system of Hinduism, onto the Renaissance concept of the ideal man, via the refinements of Nietzche and finally, down to that smiling, hopeful Joe Shuster sketch; the final embodiment of humanity’s glorious, uplifting notion of the superman become reduced to a drawing, a story for kids, a worthless comic book.

And also what that could mean in a holographic fractal universe, where the smallest part contains and reflects the whole.

Of course the next panel in that sequence is happening in the real world and would show you, the reader, sitting with the latest Superman issue in your hands, deep within the Infant Universe of Qwewq in the Fortress of Solitude, today, wherever you are. In “Neverending,” the reader becomes wrapped in a self–referential loop of story and reality. If you actually, seriously think about what is happening at this point in the story, if you meditate upon the curious entanglement of the real and the fictional, you will become enlightened in this life apparently. According to some texts.

NRAMA: On a personal level, you’ve explored all types of religions and philosophies in your work. What is your take on religion and how it influences humanity, and the Christian take on Jesus Christ in particular?

GM: I think religion per se, is a ghastly blight on the progress of the human species towards the stars. At the same time, it, or something like it, has been an undeniable source of comfort, meaning and hope for the majority of poor bastards who have ever lived on Earth, so I’m not trying to write it off completely. I just wish that more people were educated to a standard where they could understand what religion is and how it works. Yes, it got us through the night for a while, but ultimately, it’s one of those ugly, stupid arse–over–backwards things we could probably do without now, here on the Planet of the Apes.

Religion is to spirituality what porn is to sex. It’s what the Hollywood 3–act story template is to real creative writing.

Religion creates a structure which places “special,” privileged people (priests) between ordinary people and the divine, as if there could even be any separation: as if every moment, every thought, every action was not already an expression of dynamic ‘divinity” at work.

As I’ve said before, the solid world is just the part of heaven we’re privileged to touch and play with. You don’t need a priest or a holy man to talk to “god” on your behalf: just close your eyes and say hello. “God” is no more, no less, than the sum total of all matter, all energy, all consciousness, as experienced or conceptualized from a timeless perspective where everything ever seems to present all at once. “God” is in everything, all the time and can be found there by looking carefully. The entire universe, including the scary, evil bits, is a thought “God” is thinking, right now.

As far as I can figure it out from my own reading and my own experience of how the spiritual world works, Jesus was, as they say, way cool: a man who achieved a state of consciousness, which nowadays would get him a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy (in the days of the Emperor Tiberius, he was crucified for his ideas, today he’d be laughed at, mocked or medicated).

This “holistic” mode of consciousness (which Luthor experiences briefly at the end of All Star Superman) announces itself as a heartbreaking connection, a oneness, with everything that exists...but you don’t have to be Superman to know what that feeling is like. There are a ton of meditation techniques which can take you to this place. I don’t see it as anything supernatural or religious, in fact, I think it’s nothing more than a developmental level of human consciousness, like the ability to see perspective – which children of 4 cannot do but children of 6 can.

Everyone who’s familiar with this upgrade will tell you the same thing: it feels as if “alien” or “angelic” voices – far more intelligent, coherent and kindly than the voices you normally hear in your head – are explaining the structure of time and space and your place in it.  This identification with a timeless supermind containing and resolving within itself all possible thoughts and contradictions, is what many people, unsurprisingly, mistake for an encounter with “God.” However, given that this totality must logically include and resolve all possible thoughts and concepts, it can also be interpreted as an actual encounter with God, so I’m not here to give anyone a hard time over interpretation.

Some people have the experience and believe the God of their particular culture has chosen them personally to have a chat with. These people may become born–again Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, devotees of Shiva, or misunderstood lunatics. Some “contactees” interpret the voices they hear erroneously as communications from an otherworldly, alien intelligence, hence the proliferation of “abduction” accounts in recent decades, which share most of their basic details with similar accounts, from earlier centuries, of people being taken away by “fairies” or “little people”.

Some, who like to describe themselves as magicians, will recognize the “alien” voice as the “Holy Guardian Angel”.

In timeless, spaceless consciousness, the singular human mind blurs into a direct experience of the totality of all consciousness that has ever been or will ever be. It feels like talking with God but I see that as an aspect of science, not religion.

As Peter Barnes wrote in “The Ruling Class”, “I know I must be God because when I pray to Him, I find I’m talking to myself.”

Newsarama: When we spoke earlier this year, you talked about some of your ideas for future All Star stories. Are you moving forward on those, or have you started working on different ideas since then?

Grant Morrison: I haven’t had time to think about them for a while. I did have the stories worked out, and I’d like to do more, but right now it feels like Frank and Jamie and I have said all there is to be said. I don’t know if I’m ready to do All Star Superman with anyone else right now. I have other plans.

NRAMA: You end the book with Superman having uplifted humanity – having inspired them through his sacrifice and great deeds, and with the potential to pass his powers on to humanity still there. Do you plan to explore this concept further, or would you prefer to leave it open–ended?

GM: I may go back to the Son of Superman in some way. At the same time, it’s best left open–ended. I like the idea that Superman gets to have his cake and eat it; he becomes golden and mythical and lives forever as a dream. Yet, he also is able to sire a child who will carry his legacy into the future. He kicks ass in both the spiritual and the temporal spheres!

NRAMA: The notion of transcendence – always a big part of your work. But the debate about All Star Superman is whether or not it "transcends its genre." Superman becomes transcendent within the series itself, and inspires the beings on Qwewq, but does the work aspire to more than that? Is it simply the greatest version of a Superman story, and that’s enough?

GM: That would certainly be enough if it were true.

It’s a pretty high–level attempt by some smart people to do the Superman concept some justice, is all I can say. It’s intended to work as a set of sci–fi fables that can be read by children and adults alike. I’d like to think you can go to it if you’re feeling suicidal, if you miss your dad, if you’ve had to take care of a difficult, ailing relative, if you’ve ever lost control and needed a good friend to put you straight, if you love your pets, if you wish your partner could see the real you...All Star is about how Superman deals with all of that.

It’s a big old Paul Bunyan style mythologizing of human - and in particular male - experience. In that sense I’d like to think All Star Superman does transcend genre in that it’s intended to be read on its own terms and needs absolutely no understanding of genre conventions or history around it to grasp what’s going on.

In today’s world, in today’s media climate designed to foster the fear our leaders like us to feel because it makes us easier to push around. In a world where limp, wimpy men are forced to talk tough and act ‘badass’ even though we all know they’re shitting it inside. In a world where the measure of our moral strength has come to lie in the extremity of the images we’re able to look at and stomach. In a world, I’m reliably told, that’s going to the dogs, the real mischief, the real punk rock rebellion, is a snarling, ‘fuck you’ positivity and optimism. Violent optimism in the face of all evidence to the contrary is the Alpha form of outrage these days. It really freaks people out.

I have a desire not to see my culture and my fellow human beings fall helplessly into step with a middle class media narrative that promises only planetary catastrophe, as engineered by an intrinsically evil and corrupt species which, in fact, deserves everything it gets.

Is this relentless, downbeat insistence that the future has been cancelled really the best we can come up with? Are we so fucked up we get off on terrifying our children? It’s not funny or ironic anymore and that’s why we wrote All Star Superman the way we did. Everything has changed. ‘Dark’ entertainment now looks like hysterical, adolescent, ‘Zibarro’ crap. That’s what my Final Crisis series is about too.

NRAMA (aka Tim Callahan): Continuing with the theme of transcendence: The words "ineffectual" and "surrender" are repeated throughout the book. Discuss.

GM: Discuss yourself, Callahan! I know you have the facilities and I should think it’s all rather obvious.  

NRAMA: What was the inspiration for the image of Superman in the sun at the end? (I confess this question comes as the result of much unsuccessful Googling)

GM: I didn’t have any specific reference in mind - just that one we‘ve all sort of got in our heads. I drew the figure as a sketch, intended to be reminiscent of William Blake’s cosmic figures, Russian Constructivist Soviet Socialist Worker type posters, and Leonardo’s ‘Proportions of the Human Figure‘. The position of the legs hints at the Buddhist swastika, the clockwise sun symbol. It was to me, the essence of that working class superheroic ideal I mentioned, condensed into a final image of mythic Superman, - our eternal, internal, guiding, selfless, tireless, loving superstar. The daft All Star Superman title of the comic is literalized in this last picture. It’s the ‘fearful symmetry’ of the Enlightenment project - an image of genius, toil, and our need to make things, to fashion art and artifacts, as a form of superhuman, divine imitation.

It was Superman as this fusion of Renaissance/Enlightenment ideas about Man and Cosmos, an impossible union of Blake and Newton. A Pop Art ‘Vitruvian Man‘. The inspiration for the first letter of the new future alphabet!

As you can see, we spent a lot of time thinking about all this and purifying it down to our own version of the gold. I’m glad it’s over.

NRAMA: Finally: What, above all else, would you like people to take away from All Star Superman?

GM: That we spent a lot of time thinking about this!

No. What I hope is that people take from it the unlikelihood that a piece of paper, with little ink drawings of figures, with little written words, can make you cry, can make your heart soar, can make you scared, sad, or thrilled. How mental is that?

That piece of paper is inert material, the corpse of some tree, pulped and poured, then given new meaning and new life when the real hours and real emotions that the writer and the artist, the colorist, the letter the editor translated onto the physical page, meet with the real hours and emotions of a reader, of all readers at once, across time, generations and distance.

And think about how that experience, the simple experience of interacting with a paper comic book, along with hundreds of thousands of others across time and space, is an actual doorway onto the beating heart of the imminent, timeless world of “Myth” as defined above. Not just a drawing of it but an actual doorway into timelessness and the immortal world where we are all one together.

My grief over the loss of my dad can be Superman’s grief, can trigger your own grief, for your own dad, for all our dads. The timeless grief that’s felt by Muslims and Christians and Agnostics alike. My personal moments of great and romantic love, untainted by the everyday, can become Superman’s and may resonate with your own experience of these simple human feelings.

In the one Mythic moment we’re all united, kissing our Lover for the First time, the Last time, the Only time, honoring our dear Dad under a blood red sky, against a darkening backdrop, with Mum telling us it’ll all be okay in the end.

If we were able to capture even a hint of that place and share it with our readers, that would be good enough for me.

#All Star Superman #Grant Morrison #Superman

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northoftheroad · 4 years

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The Robin 80th Anniversary Special

It's not a secret that I'm first and foremost a Dick Grayson fan, whether he comes dressed as Robin, Nightwing, Batman or something else. But I try to be charitable and be happy for fans of the other Robins that they got a pice of the birthday cake, i. e. the Robin 80th Anniversary Special.

For your enjoyment (?), here are my thoughts about the book. Spoilers ahead, obviously – don't like, don't read!

I honestly thought almost all of the stories were ok – but pretty forgettable. Marv Wolfman's spin on Dick leaving to become Nightwing, in "A little nudge" (art by Tom Grummett and Scott Hanna), is probably the only one I will remember and reference in the future. I don't know if or how it is supposed to fit into the (any?) continuity, but as far as I can see, it works nicely in the current setting.

Dick's parting from Robin and Bruce was successively portrayed as more and more hostile. When he originally left Robin to become Nightwing (1983–1984), the two still had a good relationship. This changed in comics to, first, that Bruce decided to retire Robin, and then to that Bruce outright fired Dick and kicked him out of the cave. This lead to that their relationship was portrayed as poor, antagonistic even, for a good many comics years.

The bad mood was picked up by Batman The Animated Series, where Dick left being resentful of Bruce and his methods.

I don't have a lot of good things to say about what has happened to the Bat-family after Flashpoint. But from what we've seen from scattered panels, Dick was the one who decided he wanted to leave Robin. You can read Marv Wolfman's story as confirmation of that. Which is nice.

Bruce is only a little bit of a jerk in this story, being utterly rigid about that Robin has to follow orders. Dick, however, chooses to stay with a kid that had been shot instead of following the criminals.

Dick has had it with Bruce's rules and leaves the cave, but he says "later" rather than "goodbye".

It's made clear that those strict rules were Bruce's way to say, "I know you've grown up, and you should move on; I'll be fine without you."

Batman # 408, where Bruce decides to retire Robin because he got scared when the Joker shot Dick, is firmly established in my mind as the "correct" leaving story in my mind. It was the only one I had read and knew of for many years, and the two still part on decent terms. But Marv Wolfman's 80th Anniversary version has a lot going for it.

On to the rest of the stories...

"Aftershocks" By Chuck Dixon, art Scott McDaniel and Rob Hunter.

Set during Cataclysm (a storyline from 1998) where Dick lived in Blüdhaven before he moved back to Gotham and became Batman. It's an action-filled story where (fingerstripe) Nightwing comes to Gotham after an earthquake has hit the city.

It's interesting to read this, living through the corona crisis that is going on right now. I don't know how it is where you live, but where I am, people are setting up networks to help people who can't go out to shop or walk the dog, University students are helping kids do their math lessons with the help of Facebook, people make masks for health workers etc. But when Chuck Dixon writes what happens after a catastrophe, Dick has to fight his way through masked thugs who are trying to rob an ambulance of "painkillers and tranks" when he tries to save a cab from falling with a damaged bridge. A woman is giving birth inside the car, and the story ends with that the mother wants to name the boy after Nightwing.

"Well...Robin works, right", he says.

"Team building" by Devin Grayson, art Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapund.

Well, I'll always soak up everything that has to do with Dick and the Titans – Teen Titans, New Teen Titans, Titans, any Titans...

Devin Grayson wrote The Titans 1999–2000, which is the setting of this story. Most of it takes place inside a H.I.V.E. locale, where an exasperated boss (Damien Darkh) chews out his soldiers after a fight with the Titans. But Darkh decides not to kill the lot of them, because they did distract the Titans while he stole a red crystal/power source. Of course, it turns out Dick is the soldier who has kept his helmet on; he takes the crystal with him and gives Darkh a bit of advice on team-building on his way out.

"Generally speaking, fear of execution isn't a great motivator. I've found basic team-building and morale-boosting to be much more effective. Like, I'm just spitballing here, but... You ever consider a pizza night?"

Well, it did keep me amused, and it shows us that Dick is a good leader and strategist, (and a great acrobat who manages to get out of the H.I.V.E. uniform with one hand, on the way out), although it isn't exactly a surprise that Dick was in the building when you get near the end.

"The Lesson Plan" by Tom King and Tim Seeley, art Mikel Janín.

Now, I do like some things about the Grayson run, but with a bit of distance, I've realized it was mostly the art. The sexualization of Dick and how King and Seely wrote him as a guy who jumps first and plans never got tiresome. This story is in-character for Grayson; Dick is accompanied by a girl (Paris) from St Hadrian's on a mission, and on the way, he remembers the lessons Batman gave him and imparts his own interpretation of them to Paris. As is Batman says, "plan everything", and Dick says "Improvise. Leap first... figure it all out on the way down." Ergo, classic King and Seeley. Also, it is possibly implied Dick made out with a beautiful girl that turned out to be gorilla in disguise...? Yep, vintage King and Seeley.

Other than that, I don't have a big problem with the story. Some things ring true to me – as when Dick remembers Batman saying, "At their core, people are cowardly and self-serving. Trust no one until you know them. And even then, never completely". And what Dick says is, "Give the benefit of the doubt until you gotta knock 'em out."

For my own peace of mind, I'm reading this as Dick is half-joking with his advice. It's not like we've never seen him make plans and be suspicious post-Flashpoint.

On a side note, one of the best characterizations of Dick Grayson to my mind is a panel from Black Mirror. When Dick explains he had injected James Gordon Jr with a subdermal tracer, and says about himself, "I am a softie. And I do try to see the best in people... but that doesn't mean I'm stupid."

Detective Comics # 881. By Scott Snyder, art Jock and Francesco Francavilla.

"More Time" by Judd Winnick, art Dustin Nguyen.

Jason has a cute story about him repairing Thomas Wayne's watch as a present to Bruce. He started the work as a tiny Robin (too tiny, in my opinion, but with Dustin Nguyen on art it probably couldn't turn out any other way) and finished the work as Red Hood. Jason delivers the present to Bruce on his birthday, placing it on the Batmobile while it is parked in a Gotham alley.

"Extra Credit" by Adam Beechen, art Freddie E. Williams II.

Tim has an appointment with the guidance counsellor at Gotham City High School. Tim sees a future in law enforcement (that's the first I've heard of that, but I'm no expert on Tim) and he's adopted (again, something I haven't seen post-Flashpoint). But the counsellor doubts that Tim will be admitted because he has nothing to show when it comes to extracurricular activities. It's kind of a fun few pages where the counsellor suggests things that Tim could do, and Tim thinks about what he does as Robin on his spare time.

"Boy Wonders" by James Tynion IV, art Javier Fernandez.

Tim, Red Robin, is unsure what he wants to do with his life and goes to his brothers? fellow Robins? for advice.

I know emotions have been running high because Dick tells Tim that he is "demonstrably smarter" than he is, which makes it sound as if Dick is not really smart at all.

Again, for my peace of mind, I choose to read this as I want: that "big brother" Dick is encouraging, he has always thought highly of Tim, he has no ego to preserve. This doesn't make Dick a reliable narrator on the subject, and the page ends with that Tim thinks "He was the first. He's the best. He's always going to be the role model. "So, two brothers who admire each other.

Tim also talks to Jason and Tim, and the story ends with that he tells Batman he wants to start Gotham Knights protocol, the team in Detective Comics (Rebirth.) 2016-2018.

"Fitting In" by Amy Wolfram, art Damion Scott.

Stephanie, as Robin has problems because Tim's Robin suit doesn't fit her female body. But at the end of the day, Bruce gives Stephanie her own "changing room" in the Bat-cave, because she's female.

...are Bruce and Alfred idiots? Did Dick, Jason and Tim have exactly the same body type when they were Robin? Stephanie deserved a story worth being told, not this one.

"My Best Friend" by Peter J. Tomasi, art Jorge Jimenez.

Jonathan Kent writes a school essay about his best friend, Damian. As he writes the words on his laptop at home, they are illustrated with pcitures of the two as both Robin and Superboy, and as Damian and Jon in civvies. Tomasi and Jimenez worked with Super Sons (2017–2019), and though I didn't read that, I'm pretty sure this story is an extra chapter in that series.

"Bat and Mouse" by Robbie Thompson, art Ramon Villalobos.

It's not the worst story in the book, but somehow the one I disliked the most. It is part of what is going on in Teen Titans and Bat-titles right now; we see Alfred's tombstone and how Batman and Robin have a strained relationship and difficulties in communicating. I'm not keeping up with what is going on with Damian and Bruce in detail, so I really can't say whether this story is consistent with how things have been going lately. I'll let Bruce-and-Damian fans take that ball.

To be honest, my reaction to "Bat and Mouse" is probably due to that I really, really don't like what's happened in the Bat titles lately. I firmly hope that the current situation will be changed and Alfred will be alive again, and I wish I could go back and re-read this book years from now without being reminded of this very dark time when DC seemingly doesn't want any money from me for new comics...

Being who I am, I probably take it waaaaay too seriously to try to understand where/if these stories fit in the DC continuity... The writers have probably (rightly) thought more about writing a good story than making it consistent with any grand plan for a timeline for all of the DC universe. But whatever.

The Grayson story clearly happens in a post-Flashpoint universe, as does Damian's and Tim's stories. But Tim says he's adopted, which I believe has never been said outright post-Flashpoint. And Stephanie has as far as I know not been Robin in this continuity. Chuck Dixon's Nightwing story is explicitly set during Cataclysm (a storyline from 1998) where Dick lived in Blüdhaven before he moved back to Gotham and became Batman. Post-Flashpoint, he moves to Blüdhaven for the first time in Nightwing vol 4., so Dixon's story should take place in the old continuity.

On the other hand. The last pages of the book are made to look like profile overviews in the Bat-computer and use pictures from different Robin runs. If the snippets of information are supposed to be the current continuity for the Robins, a lot from the pre-Flashpoint universe is back in canon.

Shortly, Dick was adopted (that's the word they use), formed the Teen Titans, moved to Blüdhaven and was Agent 37 for a while. Blüdhaven comes before Agent 37, but it's not explicitly stated when he first moved there. Because if Dick was in Blüdhaven before his time with Spyral, it is inconsistent with parts of Rebirth Nightwing. (Which I can live with...)

Jason's story starts as the street kid who tries to steal the tires of the Batmobile, his stint as Robin was short, and today, Red Hood has formed a tenuous alliance with Batman. Tim uncovered Batman's secret and made a bid to become the new Robin – and his new moniker "Drake" is acknowledged. Stephanie was Robin for a very short while. Damian was created with genetic material that Talia stole after a romantic tryst with Bruce, and he was bred to be an assassin.

Personally, of course, I think that Dick Grayson was worth more of an effort from DC on his 80th anniversary. But on the whole, the things we got were decent, "A little nudge" gave me something I will keep with me, and several of the covers are great.

(The cover photo is still pinched from Dan Jurgens' Twitter – I haven't bought all of the variant covers.)

#Dick Grayson #Robin #Nightwing #Jason Todd #Tim Drake #Damian Wayne #80 years with Dick Grayson

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wazafam · 3 years

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The launch of DC's Future State has already brought new and ambitious re-imaginings of the publisher's core characters. But after learning just what is in store with the Future State versions the Suicide Squad and a millenia-old Black Adam, there's no question some of the biggest surprises for readers are still on the way.

In addition to a new version of Batman or wild glimpses of DC's possible futures, the conclusion of Death Metal also brought with it the return of parallel worlds and realities many believed to be erased, or at least overlooked, from the DC Multiverse. It's those worlds that have been chosen for DC's Future State: Suicide Squad #1 arriving January 26th. With a new version of Task Force X taking a mission to Earth-3, followed by Black Adam's own mission in the 853 Century in the same issue, the stage is set for two major twists. Screen Rant got the chance to speak with new Suicide Squad writer Robbie Thompson and Jeremy Adams about both unexpected tales. The full interview, as well as a preview of both stories contained in Future State: Suicide Squad #1 can be found below.

RELATED: Superboy is Building DC's New Suicide Squad

Screen Rant: So with Death Metal setting up a new status quo, the shift from that finale into Future State obviously happened faster for readers than for you guys. Can each of you speak to the process of how you joined Future State, and landed on these particular characters, and inside the same book? I'm assuming you didn't need to be talked into an event like this.

Robbie Thompson: I was working on Teen Titans, and this was a long time ago. Usually in comics, your runway is about 20 feet, so it was quite a while back. I'm not sure when you go brought in, Jeremy, but I felt like we got a lot of time which we don't normally get. Was that your experience as well?

Jeremy Adams: No, my experience was that I was brought in under the umbrella of 5G. Then that all fell apart. I had never written a comic, and that's always been on my bucket list since I was a little child. So I thought, "Oh, it was so close. And yet again, it has crumbled before me." Then a couple months ago, my friend Tim, who's writing Teen Titans now in the Shazam Future State, mentioned me to our editor Mike Cotton. Cotton asked, "What about these guys?" And Tim's like, "Oh, Jeremy is great." So, Cotton called me up and said, "Hey, would you like to do something with Black Adam in Future State?" And I'm like, "Okay, what's that?" I really didn't have much time.

The advantage I had compared to a lot of the people in Future State is that mine is so far removed in the future to the DC One Million segment that I didn't need that much run-up, other than trying to make sense of DC One Million. Which I loved, but it's crazy. Cotton, very cleverly, is trying to weave some overarching story between the Future State titles that he's editing - which I think is very good. So, having to try to figure out how to put that into what I was doing was really fun. But I didn't have a lot of lead up.

Robbie Thompson: I guess we had somewhat similar experiences in that, although I was not involved in the artist formerly known as 5G, there was definitely a sense that I got of, "Okay, here's this big event, and here's how we can be interconnected. Here's how we can tell stories that can stand on their own," which was another big appeal to me.

I also knew I was going to be writing the Suicide Squad ongoing book, so that that was really helpful too. Because Cotton and [Assistant Editor Marquis] Draper both had a very clear idea what they wanted for that book, which made forward reverse-engineering Future State a little bit easier on my part. Just to finish the thought, I was working on Teen Titans and my job was to come in and land that plane. That's that's what I did, and that was fun. I figured, "Okay, my time at DC is done. I'm wrapped. I never got to write Ambush Bug, but it was a good time." But then Cotton reached out and was like, "Hey, what are your thoughts on the Suicide Squad?"

I was a big fan up to Tom Taylor's recent run with that crew, so I'm like, "What did you have in mind?" I'm from TV, so it's always great when editors are like showrunners and have a clear vision of what they want; it makes the job a lot easier and a lot more fun. To have a little bit more time than usual was also cool. It's not that we haven't burned through that time or changed some stuff, but to have the luxury of that was very cool.

SR: Death Metal opened the door for revisiting previous worlds and realities and storylines. For you, Robbie, that means a return to Earth 3. And for Jeremy, it's a trip it's a trip through time to DC One Million. Can you both set the stage for these return trips, if it will be the same version fans know, and what it was you found appealing about these corners of DC lore?

Jeremy Adams: For me, it's the Black Adam of it. When you read DC One Million, which is so far flung in the future, one of the things that I noticed was that there was a lack of discussion of magic. And I think that was kind of the thread I started pulling at when you're talking about Black Adam and who would that character be. Why is there no real discussion of magic, and what does that look like? Kind of hinting at what could have happened to magic, but also using that as a catalyst to get us into a bigger threat that is going to play a critical role, especially in Teen Titans Future State.

I thought that, to a degree, I had one of the easier jobs because I could be so far in the future. I don't know if I'm spoiling anything, but in one of the panels in the background, you can see Etrigan, except he has a Detective Chimp hat. I didn't have any brakes put on me, in terms of the things I could do or not do. The fact is that the DC One Million just afforded me an opportunity to play with that, and go into that world. When I first read it, I was kind of like, "I don't know..." and then I reread it and I'm like, "This is awesome!" It's really strange and out there, but it has a really great ending. To be able to play something in that time, and then try to trace it back to what might have happened in some of the other books, was really fun.

Robbie Thompson: I would say I had a similar experience, in terms of the worlds that's opened up. Earth-3 is fun and everything but, I think for me, it was more about what Cotton and the crew wanted to do with Amanda Waller. I think she's always been such an amazing character. She's both the protagonist and the antagonist of the story. And where they wanted to take her was eventually to Earth-3, which is sort of a bit of a cautionary tale. If she gets what she wants in the ongoing series, it's curtains for us. But it was really more about exploring what drives Amanda Waller.

In Future State, we see what she's doing. And then in the series, I guess, we kind of unpack why she's doing it. We're seeing her trying to do something different after having done the sort of the same for a while. And we're exploring what that breaking point was for her, and why she wants to try something different. That, coupled with the addition of Superboy to the team - he's in the Future State books, and the two-parter is centered around him and Waller. He's introduced very quickly in the ongoing story, and I was just really excited about that character.

We have a bit of a mystery with him - I don't know how much I'm allowed to say - in terms of where he's going and why he's there, but it dovetails a little bit with Walter's story. You'll see it hinted at in Future State issue 2. I was excited Earth-3 and I love the crime syndicate and all that other stuff. But, really, it was about exploring what Waller is up to, and it was kind of a means to that end. She's a means to an end kind of a character, so it felt like it fit pretty nicely.

Jeremy Adams: It's such a good high concept too, Robbie.

Robbie Thompson: I blame Cotton; it's all his fault.

RELATED: DC's New Superman Is Quite Different From His Father, Kal-El

SR: Despite the name of the book being The Suicide Squad, you're getting to assemble three teams in play at this point. The first page will pleasantly surprise people when they open the book to meet the Justice Squad, which has been glimpsed in some preview pages. You have assembled a motley crew out of some hilarious deep cuts that are guaranteed to send fans searching DC Wikis.

Robbie Thompson: Again, I have to credit Cotton and Draper, the editors on the book. When we first started talking about the book again, we initially were talking about the ongoing Suicide Squad book. There were a lot of pieces that they wanted to play around with. But the thing that was appealing to me, and I think it's the appeal of the great Suicide Squad runs that I've enjoyed, is the motley crew of both familiar faces and obscure faces. To spoil a little bit in the new series, we'll be introducing some new characters. I wouldn't get attached. I mean, it is the Suicide Squad. I literally will put that in the script. I'll be like, "Don't get attached. Two pages later. the neck bomb's going off."

But, yeah, we wanted to kind of play around you know with what a Bizarro Justice League would look like. What would it look like if Waller was assembling ostensibly her own version of the Justice League, with her squad bent on it? It led to some larger iconic characters, like Conner Kent now being Superman. But then we were like, "Okay, who's our Flash? Who's Wonder Woman..." and that led to some really just fun and frankly weird shit, getting Talon as Batman and Clayface as the Martian Manhunter.

To Jeremy's point earlier, because Cotton is weaving a bunch of these things together, we do have the futuristic version of a new Teen Titan character that will be introduced in Tim's book. It's definitely a weird group of people. I think this is in the preview pages, but much like any Suicide Squad or anything with Waller attached, I wouldn't get attached to any of these people. Pretty quickly, you see a pretty iconic character go right out the window. But that's been our MO: how do we keep this true to those classic Ostrander stories that are character-driven, but with characters that are obscure and weird and that you end up caring about? Then, of course, their heads blow up and that's the great paradigm of a book like this.

The Justice Squad is definitely a motley crew. But, like you said, we're gonna meet a couple of others. I think I'm allowed to tease stuff. If this is the new Task Force X, there's also hinting at a Task Force Z. What powers that, I think, is a cool mystery for fans. And then, of course, our last page is the Squad itself. It's always fun to build teams, but on Suicide Squad, it's even more fun to break them down - sometimes literally. The two-page spread that introduces the Squad is really just another piece of fantastic storytelling from Javier Fernandez, who's the artist on the book.

SR: A special treat is that Peacemaker is playing a major role here. He's getting a ton of buzz right now, thanks to James Gunn's Suicide Squad sequel, but you have the cool honor of introducing him to a lot of fans. Where does your Peacemaker fit in this battle of bad versus evil?

Robbie Thompson: I think the great thing about Peacemaker is in his first line: "peace at any cost," or whatever, I'm blanking on the exact phrasing. He is such a delightfully arch character in that regard. And he's such a fun contrast, especially in the later years where he got even more rigorous and how he wanted to find peace. So, I think the thing that's fun about him is that he's not really interested in good or evil; he's interested in peace. He doesn't really care who gets in his way, as you'll see in the story, and this is the story that we're gonna be telling long term with Peacemaker.

He is at odds with Amanda Waller. As you'll see in the ongoing series, he's a willing member of the Suicide Squad - as much as you can be. At least that's what he's telling himself. In terms of placing where he's at, I think what we hint at in the story is that he was working for Waller and was a believer and what she was doing, and she has gone a step too far even for Peacemaker. Waller is kind of off the rails. But what I think is great about both characters is they both can be protagonists and antagonists. They both genuinely feel that what they're doing is not only the right thing, but the good thing. In their minds, they have justified their actions to meet that questionable morality.

Yes, he's a buzzy character, because he's going to be in the movie and they're doing a TV show. And it's John Cena playing him, which is amazing. I love that guy. But it was really about finding a fun, opposite number for Waller. They're two people that might seemingly be on the same page, but then what would tear them apart? That's sort of where you're seeing Peacemaker at the beginning of this; he is none too pleased with Waller.

SR: That actually is a fantastic segue for you, Jeremy. Fans of Shazam don't need to be told how far Black Adam would climb if he was given a few hundred centuries. For that very reason, the Adam they meet in this story is not the one that they're going to expect. What led you in that direction of subverting his reputation?

Jeremy Adams: I think because Adam's trajectory from being the chosen champion of the wizard Shazam, and then that power going through his head so he becomes this kind of antihero, feels like a hollow pursuit. I think what makes him interesting is when he finally found Kahndaq, and he's like, "I have a people, and I have a mission to protect." This has extended out into the universe now, but he gives up that iron fist, and it's more about Kahndaq being a place of refuge. He mirrors that, and he's kind of stepped away when we meet him from that life of being a warrior; of being somebody that fought for things. He's almost gone the other extreme, into kind of pacifism.

And he's lived for hundreds of years. There's this perspective he has on what actually means something. That's kind of where our story moves a little bit. What would it take for somebody that's seen it all to keep wanting to live? And that's where we meet him. What brings that fire back that makes him want to fight again? Because that's not where he is when we meet him.

Related: The New Wonder Woman is Completely Rewriting DC Mythology

SR: What are your hopes for this tale? I feel like this is a very different story than people would expect from Future State Black Adam.

Jeremy Adams: Yeah. I'm in awe of many different things: the fact that they let us create some characters, which has been an absolute joy - particularly one character that I got to help create that is my favorite person ever. Also, taking something from my animation work and being able to put it into the DC proper has been really great too, and seeing how that character will have far-reaching effects in other books.

But this is my first time out as a comic writer, and I'm still learning the ropes. Mostly, when I see Fernando Pasarin's art, I'm like, "Why are we splitting it with words? This is stupid. We need to strip out all the words, and just put this incredible art there." Because he really captures the emotion and the humor and some of the insanity of it. But I think because it was my first attempt at a comic, and it was also me thinking it could be my last attempt at a comic, I'm gonna just throw the kitchen sink at it. I think it's really fun, and even the second one doubles down on the craziness of it. But I like that kind of unrestrained imagination, where I can keep putting ideas out.

Robbie Thompson: I did the same thing when I was at Marvel, I think it was issue 4 of Silk. Because I was like, "Oh, we'll get cancelled at 5." Right? But I put the Fantastic Four and Galactus in it, and there was no reason for either to be in the book. I thought, "This is it. This is my chance. It's the fourth issue."

Jeremy Adams: That's what I did when I got on Supernatural, because I knew it was the last season. "Here's a bunch of ideas!" And they're like, "No."

SR: You both are giving readers a lot to talk about with, with more than one headline-worthy twist or reveal or development. Are you prepared to see how fans react to those bombshells?

Jeremy Adams: Robbie and I have been through the crucible that is Supernatural. So, sans expectation, I'm just like, "Alright, whatever." That's not why I do it. I do it because I want to tell that story. I want to be crazy or zany or whatever. Because I'm a fan, so I write toward my inner fan.

Robbie Thompson: I mean, you're always going to have - on characters that people are so attached to, or teams that people are so attached to, or content - you're always going to have something. It's almost a fool's errand to chase it. Becaus when you do chase after the shiny thing, it's the thing that you never thought - it turns out they love this over here, and they're obsessed with that detail.

I certainly hope that people talk about it. As one of my first editors said, "It's only when they're not talking about your book that you're in trouble." I certainly hope they do, but I wouldn't say it was the intention. I really can say that on every book I've ever worked on, there's always the thing that I felt like, "Oh, this will get their tongues waggin'." And then no, it was actually this thing over here. It was this relationship that people got really invested in, that was for me just a means to a plot end, but for them it was the conduit into the book or the story or whatever. So, yeah, I certainly hope they get chatting.

SR: In that vein, can each of you speak a bit about the art teams responsible for this future cosplay? They more than deliver right from the start, and it's hard to imagine them elevating it from here.

Robbie Thompson: I'm really bare bones in my scripts. I'll just say, "This is a new version of Batman; it's Talon. Have fun?" I'm dressed like a failed lumberjack; I'm not the guy for that. Fortunately on Future State, I'm working with Javier and Eduardo on the ongoing. They're just briilliant artists. Javier took all of the ideas that we were talking about in the book and really just made his own take on all these characters. And then Alex came in with his colors and did an amazing job, and everybody just came to play in their own way. If people end up cosplaying as Talon Batman or this creepy Martian Manhunter, it's all thanks to Javier and his design work. I don't know about you, Jeremy, but seeing those new designs come in every single time is always so exciting and really fun.

Jeremy Adams: Yeah, I was a little overwhelmed by it all. Because in animation, you write something and then you got to wait a couple years before you actually get to see it. But when it comes to this, it's almost like live theater a little bit. You have a very quick reaction that you get, because these geniuses that are artists and colorist and inkers come in, and give you this magic from the little words you scribble down. I probably am a little more descriptive in certain things, just because of the byproduct of animation in general. But the fact is that everything that I had in my mind, Fernando did it times 10. It was just so detailed and so interesting. Even the coloring and the inking; everything was just so perfect.

It's a weird thing for me, because you get the pencils back and you're like, "Can we just release this? This is so good." Then you get the inks back, and you're like, "Well, this is great!" And then you get the colors back, and you feel like, "Well, I don't know why I'm here." That's kind of how I feel the entire time.

Future State: Suicide Squad #1 will be available at comic book shops and digitally on February 26th, 2020.

Future State: Suicide Squad #1

Written by: Robbie Thompson, Jeremy Adams

Art by: Javier Fernandez, Fernando Pasarin, Alex Sinclair, Oclair Albert, Jeromy Cox

Cover Art by: Javier Fernandez, Marcelo MaioloDerrick Chew

Editor: Mike Cotton,

SUICIDE SQUAD, PART 1 / BLACK ADAM, PART 1

The Suicide Squad enters the Future State era as Amanda Waller uses Task Force X to save the world and remake it in her image—but what happens when the team shows up to stop her? And in the second story in this extra-sized issue, Black Adam, the immortal one-time champion of the wizard Shazam, rules the planet Kahndaq in the 853rd century. Can he save the future from a threat rooted in the past?

MORE: Nightwing Is Becoming The Anakin Skywalker of Future State

Exclusive Preview: Suicide Squad & Black Adam Future State from https://ift.tt/3qO4evh

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the-shadow-of-atlantis · 5 years

Text

Camp Out

A/N most of the dialogue was taken from the YJ tie in comic

Tagging: @lizartgurl @thespacebuns @melyaliz @coffee-randomness @gobydana @speedypan

Read Earlier Parts Here

“Huh.”

“What?” Annabella asked as she turned to look at her brother.

“M’gann just messaged us asking if we’d like to join her and Wally to a camp out.” Dick said as he looked at his phone.

“Five bucks says he was trying to ask her out.” Annabella laughed then turned to her dad who was sitting by the batcomputer. “Can I go dad?”

Bruce turned to look at them.

“Who’s all going?”

“Looks like the whole team.” Said Dick as he looked through the message.

“Please papi?” Annabella asked giving him a hug.

“Make sure you pack what you need.”

“Yay! Come on Dick I’ll race you.”

Annabella had to make a mental note to get the surveillance photo of Wally’s face when he saw the whole group gathered there for the camp out. They set out and got the tents set up.

“Are you sure you should be setting up the fire?” M’gann asked.

“I got this.” Annabella said as she piled the wood. “My dad showed me how to make one. Besides the guys are busy with the tents.”

By the time the guys were done Annabella had the fire at a pretty decent size.

“This is fun.” She said as she roasted a marshmallow. “It’s been a long time since we’ve gone camping.”

“Is this all you guys do?” Superboy asked. “Sleep in flimsy things called tents and sit around the fire?”

“Yeah that’s pretty much about it. So if you feel like heading home I can sit out here with Ms. M… alone.” Wally said with a pout, Annabella elbowed him.

“You’re about as subtle as a train wreck, you know that?” Dick said making Annabella snicker.

“You’re not going to catch any fish unless you go fishing dude.” Wally retorded but turned back to look at Kaldur. “Sorry, no offense.”

“No.” Said Dick going back to what Superboy had asked. “Usually you sit around the campfire and tell stories.”

“Oh!” M’gann perked up. “I would love to hear your story Kaldur. Could you tell us how you became Aqualad?”

“I was thinking more of a ghost story type of thing but I guess whatever..” Dick muttered and Annabella elbowed him.

“Shh.” She scolded as she turned to look at Kaldur.

“Oh, I suppose I could do that if you do not think it will be too boring.” Kaldur smiled shyly.

“Not at all! I would love to hear it!”

“Me too.” Said Annabella giving her brother a warning look to not speak.

Kaldur nodded and began his story. Annabella’s eyes widened when he mentioned how he joined the arm at 12. She turned to look at her brother he was just 9 when he started becoming Robin. She herself was just 10 yet those two had already been through so much. Shaking her head she continued to listen smiling at the end.

“Huh you’re a bit reckless, aren't you.” She joked and caught just the faintest tint of blush on his cheek.

“Wow, So you wanted to be Aqualad?” M’gann asked.

“Yes, the opportunity arose. I could think of another path.”

“Yeah? If you think he wanted to be Aqualad so bad? Let me tell you about how I got started.”

“Ugh.” Annabella groaned. “Not this story again.”

“Shh.” Dick said mocking her.

As Wally began telling his story Annabella mouthed every word he said.

“Yeah. We’re all thrilled you’re so speed-capable.” Dick said as Wally finished his story.

“What’s the matter jealous?” Wally retorted.

“Yeah right! Jealous of you?”

Annabella pouted. “I wanna hear more stories now shut it.”

“Oh, can you tell us about how you got started, Robin?” M’gann asked.

“Ha!” Wally snorted. “Are you kidding me? Bats won’t even let him tell you his real name! I mean you’ll probably get a better origin story out of supey over here.”

“Wally if you don’t shut up I’m gonna stab you.” Annabella threatened him with her s’mores stick but turned to look at Superboy. “Do you really have no memories before they got you out?”

“I have some memories from the Gnomes.” Superboy began to explain how he only remembered the information they gave him. How he only began to think after he was out of his pod. How he only thought about destroying Superman.

“Robin did you hear what he said?” Wally asked.

“Huh what?” Her brother mumbled.

Annabella looked over at her brother frowning. You okay? She mouthed as she felt a familiar pain flutter away from him.

He nodded and they went back to conversation.

“He just said he wants to take down Superman!” Wally shouted.

“Are you serious? Superboy?” M’gann asked.

“It’s how I feel sometimes. What if that’s why I was created? What if that was the only reason I was created?” Superboy questioned.

“That’s not possible.” M’gann said.

“Yeah! Look at all the good stuff you’ve done so far!” Wally piped up.

“What would be the possible reasoning behind this thinking?” Kaldur asked.

“I just feel… I dont know what I feel. Sometimes… thoughts happen.” Superboy tried to explain.

“Those would be silly thoughts! You should put them out of your head.”

“He does have a valid point. We really dont know anything about what they did to him yet.”

“We know you were made to replace Superman but we never questioned how that would be. But you can always choose what to be.” Annabella said getting up and walking up to Superboy. “You may have been made for a reason. But your out now. You can take what your dreams mean however you want but you’re free to choose what to do.”

Superboy sighed. “Thanks.”

She led Superboy back to the fire and handed him a s’more.

“Hey! You haven’t told us about your story. What’s the dealio with you, M’gann?” Wally asked after a few moments of silence.

Annabella listened to M’ganns story but began to frown half way through it. Something about her story didn’t feel right, she was lying. Annabella wasn’t quite sure what she was lying about. Maybe she was just trying to make it seem more exciting than it really was. Annabella shook off the thought as M’gann finished her story.

“We’ll I don't know about you guys, but I think I’ve had one s’more too many. I’m going to hit the old sleeping bag.” Dick said getting up.

“”Yes! This has been such a wonderful evening but I am excited to sleep in a tent.” Said M’gann.

“I’m right behind you.” Wally said following M’gann but Annabella stood in front of him placing her hands on his chest.

“No you’re not.” She said as she pushed him towards a different tent.

“Hey, next time, you think we should go camping for real, like at a real camping place instead of just our own backyard?” Wally said slowly putting his weight on top of her.

“Wally I’ll punt you into the tent and you know I can.” Annabella mumbled almost lifting Wally off the ground.

“You don't strike me as the outdoorsy type. Tonight were sleeping about five feet from the cave entrance, maybe next time we can try down the hills bit.” Dick said chuckling a bit.

The three of them got into their tent and Annabella grabbed her clothes and burrowed into her sleeping bag.

“Why are you two so against M’gann and I becoming a thing?” Wally asked as he changed.

“You do realize she is not into you.” Annabella said from under her sleeping bag.

“I think she just doesn’t know Earth flirting techniques.” Wally shrugged.

“You keep thinking that.” Dick said.

“Coast clear?” Annabella asked.

“You’re good.” Said Wally and Annabella poked her head out. “Really? Justice league pjs?”

“Says the guy who owns a pair of Superman boxers.”

“When did you see his boxers?!?!” Dick nearly shrieked, Annabella looked at her brother.

“They were literally sticking out of his duffel bag how am I not supposed to see them.”

Dick turned and glared at Wally.

“Hey its not like she saw me in them.”

“First ew. Second not like there be much to see.”

“Rude.”

Annabella took her sunglasses off and grabbed her backpack shoving her clothes in and placing the glasses in their case.

“You think Bman is ever gonna let you come without the glasses?” Wally asked as he got into his sleeping bag.

“God I hope so. I can't believe you’ve made everyone call me Bells.” Annabella glared at Wally as she got back into her sleeping bag.

“Hey at least it was Bells and not…”

“Your utter that name out loud and I will summon a snake into your sleeping bag.” Annabella warned glaring at Wally.

“You two go to sleep.” Dick groaned as he snuggled into his sleeping bag.

“Baby.” Annabella muttered as she got comfortable and went to sleep.

Good morning!

Wake up everyone!

Annabella groaned, she had forgotten why she hadn’t gone camping in a while. Rubbing her eyes she quietly got up. She had to fight back a laugh when she turned and saw her brother dropped across Wally both of them snoring their heads off. Taking a quick picture she got up and changed for the day.

Yawning she walked slowly out of the tent with her backpack. Kaldur or Superboy must’ve put out the fire last night so she got it back up so she could brew some water. As she waited for the pot to get hot she dug into her bag and took out a bag of seeds. Taking a handful she tossed it into the dirt.

FOOD! The birds shouted making Annabella wince.

A small flock covered the ground pecking at the seeds.

You’re welcome. Annabella mumbled tiredly.

She received a small chorus of thank you’s.

She threw some more seeds before getting a cup and pouring the water in along with instant coffee and creamer. Taking a sip she sighed as she looked up at the sky, seeing the orange and pinks bleed away from the blue.

Now that’s a cub I have not seen in years.

Annabella turned and saw a brown bear looking at her. Annabella squealed.

“Sasha!! Is that you?!” She shouted as she ran to the bear and jumped on top of the bear.

Oh little cub you have grown so much! Sasha replied ducking down so Annabella could climb properly on her. Oh, and who are these people?

Annabella looked up to find Superboy and Kaldur half dressed and in defense mode outside of their tent however they stared at her and the bear confused as if not sure what form of action to perform.

“Oh, the one with the tattoos is Kaldur and the one next to him is Superboy. Guys this is Sasha.” Annabella smiled patting the bears head.

“Are you okay?” Kaldur asked carefully eyeing the bear.

He does not trust me. Sasha pouted.

“I know, its okay.” Annabella said though the guys weren’t sure who she was talking to. “Sasha wont hurt me guys I’ve known her for a long time.”

“What’s going on?” M’gann yawned as she got out of her tent.

Wally and her brother walked out of their tent soon after and passed to look at the scene.

“You really can't last one day outdoors whiteout making a new friend can you?” Wally said laughing.

“For your information Sasha is an old friend.”

“Would someone please explain what's going on?” M’gann asked eyeing the bear Annabella was casually perched on.

“Everyone this is Sasha, Sasha they will be living in the cave form now on.”

Oh they are hero’s as well?

“Yes.”

No one has lived in the cave for such a long time, I thought it was not safe.

“It wasn’t, but no one knows of this team therefore they wont be discovered.” Annabella explained.

“Wait, are you talking to the bear?” Superboy asked making Annabella looked up the team and blush.

“Oh, yeah… surprise I can talk to animals.” Annabella said raising her hands up in a tada manner.

Superboy and Kaldur blinked before turning to look at M’gann.

“What are you staring at me for?” She asked.

“Well you are the mind reader.” Superboy shrugged.

“Yes but… animal minds are much more difficult. Your mind must be very special.” M’gann said.

“Thanks?”

“Yeah its all cool and stuff until you only hear half of the conversations because she fails to state what the animal is saying out loud.” Wally explained.

Little cub.

“Yes?”

Do you have any food?

“Oh of course.”

“Like that.” Wally said gesturing towards Annabella making her stick her young out at him.

“She’s hungry.” She simply said as she slid off the bear and went back to her bag and began digging around. “I know I packed some meat in here. Ah here it is.”

She took out a tightly wrapped package. And began unraveling it.

“You seriously brought packages meat with you?” Dick asked.

“I wasn’t sure which animals would be here so I came prepared for everything.” Annabella shrugged as she tossed a price of meat to Sasha.

Thank you, boys food.

Annabella gasped. “Oh my god you have cubs?”

Sure enough there little cubs came trotting out from the tree line towards the pice of meat.

Would you like to hold them?

“Yes, come on guys you wanna pet a baby bear?” Annabella asked as she got closer to pet one.

“Is it safe?” Kaldur asked.

“Yes they won’t attack.” Annabella said.

The team slowly gathered around and took turns petting the different bears. Sasha looked curiously at M’gann and sniffed her.

Is something wrong with this one? Sasha asked making Annabella laugh.

“No she’s just a Martian, she’s not from earth.” Annabella explained when Sasha cocked her head at the word Martian.

“Huh?” M’gann asked.

“Sasha just wanted to know why you look different, she thought you were sick.” Annabella explained before quickly grabbing one of the cubs. “Hey you do not bite people.”

But he smells like fishies. The cub pouted.

“I don't care if he smells like fish you don't bite.” Annabella scolded.

“I was unaware I had that scent.” Kaldur frowned.

“You don't, you smell more like ocean breeze. He probably just got a fainter smell of the fish from the sea.”

The cub resorted to licking Kaldurs arm.

“So how does it work?” M’gann asked petting the cub that was sitting on her lap.

“Um, not entirely sure. I can just sorta hear them talking in my head. But to me it just sounds like a normal conversation I would have with another person.”

“Can you speaks to all wildlife?” Kaldur asked petting the cub that was still licking him.

“Just about, cats, dogs, birds, snakes, lizards, monkeys, etc. Even marine life like fishes, sharks dolphins whales. If I try hard enough I can sorta talk to bugs but ugh those give me headaches.” Annabella explained as she poked the fire.

“How long have you had your powers?” Superboy asked.

“Awhile.” Annabella mumbled catching the look her brother was giving her.

“How did you get your powers?” M’gann asked.

“Ah, it's nothing interesting really. One day we went camping and I wandered into the woods, the next thing I knew I woke up hearing the entire forest in my head.”

“Why didn’t you mention this last night when we were telling stories?” M’gann asked Annabella could sense she was still intrigued.

“You never asked.” Annabella shrugged.

“Well to be honest I think it would make more sense for you to be robin instead of your brother.” Said M’gann. “How come you are not a sidekick?”

“Overprotective dad.” Superboy guessed.

“That’s part of the reason, also being a sidekick just isn’t my thing. Ive grown up with superhero’s all my life I’ve seen what that life can lead to. I know the good it can do but at the same time its just not me… at least… not yet.”

“You think you’ll join us one day?” M’gann asked making Annabella glance at her brother.

“I don't know yet.” Annabella sighed. “All I know is that I do want to make a difference I just don't know what that is yet.”

Always the big dreamer, Sasha said licking Annabella’s face.

Annabella laughed and rubbed the slobber off her face. Suddenly Wally's stomach let out a loud grumble making everyone stare at him.

“What? I haven’t eaten since I’ve woken up.” He whined.

“We should probably head inside to get some breakfast.” Said M’gann.

“Good idea.” Said Kaldur.

“Okay, stay safe Sasha we’re gonna go inside now. I promise I’ll come out to visit you.” Annabella patted the bears head.

You take care too little cub, I’m glad you have some friends now.

Anabella smiled as she rubbed Sasha’s head and hugged the cubs goodbye.

#oc x yj #yj imagine #part of the team

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tessatechaitea · 4 years

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Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child

Darkseid pees out of his eyes.

"It's 2020 and Frank Miller is still doing 'Not' jokes" is the only review of this comic book you probably need.

The Joker and Darkseid are cumming in their pants over the engagement in the election cycle. I guess people who want to stop terrible politicians from making the country a living hell for a vast number of the population are simply falling into their trap! Stupid people who want a better world! Can't they see that the only way to defeat The Joker and Darkseid is to disengage from the circus of election cycles and simply live their own life without any concern for others? Doesn't the electorate know the best life to live is the life that leads to Ayn Randian defenses of their own selfish needs? Just shut up and take what they give you, you dumb fucks. I should probably finish reading this story before I continue to jump from conclusion to conclusion about Frank Miller's point. His ultimate point might simply be that the children will save us all! Or that it doesn't matter if the children change the world or not because the adults will all be dead by then so who fucking cares? Supergirl Lara confronts Darkseid by blasting him with her heat vision. He dies multiple times or something but doesn't somehow. He applauds her rage the way bad guys always do and then calmly sits down to tell all of the children a story. He's going to be sensible and rational which means it will be the truth, I think. Obviously if you have any emotional attachment to your beliefs, they're garbage beliefs. Until you can squeeze all of the humanity out of yourself, the things you believe won't hold up in rational debate! So divest yourself of your rage, children! It will only make you more logical and intellectually stronger! But also divest yourself of your joy and your despair and your other emotions I can't think of! There must be more, right? While Darkseid is distracted regaling everybody with his tale of the anti-life equation, Superboy sneaks up behind him and takes over his Omega Effect. He turns it back on Darkseid and Darkseid disintegrates into non-existence. Unless he was transported back in time. I don't really know how his eyeball lasers work. Darkseid doesn't stay dead for long. He returns as the Omega God, as the end of everything, as the final death of everything on Earth.

But maybe later, I guess?

Batwoman beats up some Jokers and shuts down Trump's ability to broadcast to Gotham. It makes Darkseid angry enough to return for some reason. Probably a metaphorical reason. Or an analogical reason. I think maybe my attention span is seriously slipping! And right when I'm getting to the part that's probably going to explain what the fuck is going on in this comic book. Superboy destroys Darkseid by calling him an old fart. Also maybe a little bit by blasting him with a new super power: neutron vision! Darkseid has now had his powers stripped so far back that a human bouncing a rock off of his head makes him bleed. But still he thinks, "I will manipulate these fools with my lofty words!" But then Greta Thunberg clenches her fist at him and Batwoman says, "You have no power here! We're thinking for ourselves now!" And then that's the end somehow. Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child Rating: I can't comprehend what I just read. Maybe the point was that we shouldn't comprehend what other people want us to comprehend? Maybe it was an anti-propaganda story? Maybe it was just terrible writing pretending to be art? It's so hard to tell because it's trying so hard to be complex! Is it's complexity real or a facade? I can't tell! Maybe I should stick to easier things to understand, like James Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Alan Moore's 1300 page novel, Jerusalem, which I finished. Maybe that's Frank Miller's problem. Maybe he just didn't have enough pages to really get to the point he was trying to make. But then if he did have more pages, how many would he waste by simply repeating the same things over and over again? For those of you who haven't read this (or Superman: Year One), he does that a lot. Not in the good way that Tom King and Gertrude Stein repeat themselves. Just in a way that makes you think, "I got it! Superboy is right in Darkseid's brain." Maybe that's a poor example from this comic book because repeating that over and over works to show how painful Superboy's presence in Darkseid's brain is. But I assure you there were many other examples that I can't make excuses for. I just can't be bothered to dig back through the comic book to find them.

#Dark Knight Returns #The Golden Child #Frank Miller #Rafael Grampa

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numbuh-7-knd · 7 years

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Jinxed Archer chapter 1, a Young Justice/Teen Titans fanfic

Summary:

TT/YJ x-over AU Jinx had the opportunity to rid herself of magic, and she took it and disappeared, Wally, blamed himself. Now his new team has a new Archer whose attitude reminds him of his old girlfriend, but never would he have imagined it was really her.

Wally, Roy, and Dick left the Titans to work with their old mentors, Garth took on a new name and continued being part of Titans East. Aqualad took on a new apprentice named Kaulder, the new Aqualad. But they were still being treated like kids, so they went rouge and saved Superboy.

Jinx got rid of her powers to move back to Gotham and take care of her disabled mother, but took on Archery, an old hobby of hers, and became a new hero, with no obvious ties to villainy

I don’t own Young Justice or Teen Teen Titans. Both belong to Warner Bros, DC comics, etc.

I only own this idea and plot

Within a bank in a city near the West Coast, a group of burglars stood, holding everyone in the bank hostage as they collected money from the safe. Sirens were in the distance but the police hadn’t shown up yet.

Just as the leader opened an emergency exit and told his crew to “Hurry up!” An unnatural silhouette with what appeared to be horns appeared in the entrance of the bank. The midday sun shining through blocking the figure from view.

“Where do you think you’re going?” The figure coolly asked with a feminine voice, surprising and scaring both the bank robbers and the hostages.

“You don’t look like a cop, what are you, some kinda wannabe hero?” The leader of the bank robbers asked with a rude tone of voice.

“I’m not a wannabe anything. What I am…” the figure walked further into the bank and revealed herself to be a pink-haired and eyed, gray-skinned young woman dressed in what appeared to be a witch’s costume.

“Is a Jinx!”

As the newly arrived hero rushed forwards and began to fight with the bad guys, the hostages watched on in fear, worry, and hope, unsure if they were being rescued, or if their savior was just another villain come to take over and take the money from the robbers for themselves.

“Is that Jinx?” asked the hushed voice of a hostage

“Who?” another answered

“Jinx, the super villain, from Jump city.”

“I thought the Teen Titans captured her gang, the Hive 5, it was on the news.”

“Dunno, maybe she escaped?”

“Well, the Teen Titans are just a bunch of kids, can’t expect too much of them..”

“Oh my, what is she going to do with us when she’s done with them?”

“Maybe this is our lucky day and she’s really a good guy?”

“No way, a zebra can’t change their stripes, once a villain, always a villain.”

Amidst this quiet discussion amongst the hostages, Jinx attacked the bank robbers, jinxing the bags of money so that they opened and spilled everywhere. Tripping a few of them, and jinxing the emergency exit shut, she faced off with the leader, a tall greasy man with a ski mask on, who eyed her appreciatively and said “So, a supervillain, eh? Don’t get too many of those round these parts, you want in, huh? Name your price.”

“I’m no villain, not anymore. And my price is you behind bars!”

“Go ahead and try it, Girlie. I’ve fought men twice your size, a little girl like you is no problem.”

“Don’t sound too cocky, you’ve never had to fight me before.”

She made quick work of him from there. A low kick to knock him over, then a blast of pink magic to knock him out. From there she hit the remaining crooks and then proceeded to tie the crew up.

“W-what now?” a scared teller turned to the pinkette and asked, causing the girl to frown.

“Now they go to prison, the cops will be here any minute…”

As she stepped towards the door, and elderly women cried and pushed her purse towards the heroine, crying out “Take it, just please don’t kill me!”

“What? Listen, Lady, I don’t want your purse, I’m one of the good guys, didn’t you notice the way I just took down the people robbing this bank, not to mention holding you hostage?”

“B-But aren’t you Jinx, the super villain?” A guy asked from next to the old lady.

Jinx sighed and shook her head, responding “No, I am Jinx, but I’ve changed, I’m a hero now, and I’ve been cleared of all my previous crimes.”

“Yeah right, she’s just telling us that so we’ll lower our guard, and then she’ll, she’ll, she’ll do something!” Stammered another hostage.

Jinx rubbed her eyes in annoyance before saying: “Look, it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not, the point is that you’re all free to go; but if I were you I’d still stay and wait for the paramedics to show up, just in case.” At this, she strutted out of the bank to wait for the police. When they arrived she approached them.

“Finally, you’re here! What took you so long?”

A Policemen frowned at her, and shouted through an (Unneeded) megaphone “Freeze, don’t make another move!”

“What… Excuse me? Freeze? I’m not the bad guy, the bad guys are inside! I stopped them and even tied them up for you!”

“Yeah right, you don’t look like a hero.”

“Well, I am one, the names Jinx!”

“Hah, do you think I was born yesterday? I‘ve seen you and your little friends on the news, Hive 5, right? You’re a criminal.”

“No, I was a criminal. I’m not one anymore, I’ve changed, and have already been exonerated for all my past crimes.” Jinx shouted as she crossed her arms.

“Yeah right, stand still, you’re under arrest until we can prove your story.”

Jinxed sighed in annoyance, but complied, deciding that it would look better for her if she did, ignoring the temptation to fight, or to do a flip to avoid the cops and run off.

An officer eyed her warily, asking a brother-in-arms “Uh, can’t she get out of these? We didn’t come prepared for metas…” he gestured to the handcuffs worriedly, however, the other officer merely shrugged, stating “Well, we gotta do the best we can to keep her subdued, till the boss tells us what to do, or calls in the big guns to handle it.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t try to escape, I’m a law abiding citizen now, I won’t try to run.” However, her statement did little to quell the officer’s fears, as he walked over and timidly asked her to place her arms behind her back, reading Jinx her rights before placing her in a squad car.

Soon enough she was joined in the car by a few of the bank robbers, the others being placed in other squad cars to be brought to the precinct for processing.

“Fancy seeing you here, mind tellin’ us what you’re in for, Pinkie?” One of the criminals, a man in his thirties who stunk of cigars and alcohol, asked.

“It’s just a misunderstanding, I’ll be out of here in no time. You, on the other hand…” She proudly responds, narrowing her eyes at the smelly man under arrest, before turning to watch the officer she had first spoken to, as he called what must have been his superiors.

He appeared to be in an argument with the person on the other end of the line for a few minutes, before finally slamming on a button on his phone, presumably hanging up, and storming over to the car, ripping the door open and saying “Get Out Girly, turns out your story checks out, but I’m watching you.” At this, she stood up and walked out of the car, the officer who had originally handcuffed her swiftly removing the handcuffs and apologizing.

She was about to leave the scene when a female cop stopped her, smiling and saying “Thanks, we don’t get many Superheroes around here, but we are appreciative of what you did, it would’ve taken us a lot longer to get them had you not shown up, and people could’ve gotten hurt. Just ignore what the captain says.”

Jinx was surprised and blinked in surprise, before saying “Um, you’re welcome. Bye!”

She jumped and used a grappling hook to get to the roof of a nearby building so that she could finish up patrol and go home.

Jinx arrived at her and Kid Flash’s temporary hideout and sighed in relief. The hideout was technically a secret safe house usually used by the Titans, which Robin had given her and the speedster permission to use as a base of operations until they found something better or choose a different locale to protect.

It had been a long day of fighting criminal’s on her own, since the Flash had needed Kid Flash’s help, and it was taking some time to get used to, even with Kid’s constant check-ins via their Titans Communicators.

Usually, he would have been at her side at all times, both because of their relationship and partnership, and because the other Titans were still slightly weary of her.

However, as of late, The Flash, whom Kid Flash had barely spoken to in over a year until recently, had been asking for Kid’s help at least once a week.

Jinx wasn’t sure if it was because Kid’s former mentor really needed his help, or if he was just trying to reach out to Kid Flash, and really, she wasn’t so sure she cared.

She knew she should be happy for Kid, but she missed the speedster when he wasn’t there, and not to mention she was still tempted sometimes to go back to the Hive Five, to go back to being evil. She especially felt that way on days like this, when she was lonely, and the repetitive task of going on patrol, taking down the same old “B-Villains” and then returning to her and Kid Flash’s base of operations to sit there and miss the old days where she at least had her old idiotic teammates to keep her company. It wasn’t too bad when Kid Flash was there since his company was both amazing and irritating enough to keep her mind occupied.

Jinx pulled her hair bands off angrily her hair falling so that it laid flat and ran down her back. She tossed them on the ground and walked over to the couch, throwing herself down onto the furniture and jinxing the remote to turn on the TV.

Suddenly a chilling and strangely familiar voice spoke out from behind her, sounding amused. “Well someone’s angry? Did your little hero boyfriend finally leave you?”

“Who are you, what are you doing here, and how did you find me?” Jinx called out in a panic as she looked into the dark shadows that normally were the kitchen area of the base, wishing she has thought to turn on all the lights when she came in.

“Oh, I’m offended, you really don’t recognize me, baby sis? It really can’t have been that long since father sent you away to that school to learn how to use those powers, right?” Here the sly voice that had been speaking gained a body as a tall, slender girl, no women in green with black hair and an ivory, grinning mask stepped out of the shadows. “Although we both know how that turned out.”

“J- Cheshire, how?! Last I checked you were still frozen in Paris after the brotherhood… No, you can’t be here! This can’t be real! You’re still frozen. Jade is still frozen, so this is either in my head or- No…” Jinx cut herself off, tied between being in shock and being confused.

“Oh, but I am real, baby sis. Dear old Pops needed my help with something, so he broke me out, and here I am.”

“Dad sent you, didn’t he? Well, you can tell him I’ve found a new family now with the Titans, and with Kid Flash, I’m not coming back.”

“Dad didn’t send me, he’s given up on you, you’re just a disappointment in his eyes. A pity, really, he and mom had such high hopes when you developed your powers. We could’ve been so much more with you there.” Cheshire had removed her mask at this point and was smirking at the pink haired witch.

“Don’t talk about Mom! It’s because of Dad that she’s dead! He killed her!” Jinx’s pink eyes were glowing by now.

“Sis, I thought by now you knew that in our family it’s every girl for herself, we can’t rely on others. Besides, who told you she was dead? Is that why you’ve never visited her in prison?” Still smirking the raven haired woman raised an eyebrow.

“W-what are you talking about?! Brother Blood told me she was dead. That Sportsmaster took the fall and let her get captured and that her injuries were too serious, that she d-died in police custody.”

“Is that why you didn’t come back? When we heard H.I.V.E. had been shut down, we figured you’d come home, but you didn’t. And then you showed up with Kid Flash to fight with the Titans.”

“Mom’s not dead? So Dad just let her be captured and take the fall? Ha, good thing I didn’t come back. At least here with the Titans, I know they won’t abandon me.”

“Oh, but isn’t that just what they’ve done? Clearly, they don’t trust you enough since you’re not living up in their fancy tower, instead, they just have you living you’re in the middle of nowhere in this crummy hole. They don’t trust you, and where is your precious Kid Flash?” Cheshire questioned.

“No, Kid and I choose to live here, this way we can handle trouble in places outside of Jump city. The Titans do trust me, if I wanted to I could live in the T-Tower or with Titans East, but I-we’re happy here. Kid is just dealing with something with the Flash, he’ll be home soon, and if you’re still here when he gets back he’ll give you a ride to the nearest prison, Cheshire!” Jinx was trying to stay strong because Kid would/ be back soon, he had to, and hopefully, he wouldn’t figure out why Jade was here, she had already worked so hard to gain his trust, she couldn’t lose it.

“Don’t worry about me, sis. I’m only here to check on my little sister, and give her a long overdue birthday present.”

“What could you have that I could possibly want?”

“Oh, nothing, just, you know… The key to being normal again…”

“What is that supposed to mean? Look, if you came here just to rub the fact that you’re normal and I’m not, don’t bother.” Jinx’s eyes were narrowing now.

“Heh, I’m sure you miss being you, and you’re probably too scared to tell your boyfriend that this isn’t how you’ve always looked…”

“What’s it to you? We both know it’s too late for me, I’m bad luck now and there’s no going back. At least now I get to do good with my bad luck.”

“But what if you could go back? What if you could get rid of your luck, and your looks, and just go back to being my blonde sister?”

“If you only came here to talk about the impossible, then would you mind leaving, since I’ve already tried everything. I can’t dye my hair, the pink bleeds through, and I can’t put a wig on because of my hair spikes through it. And don’t even get me started on my skin… I can’t tan, and makeup barely helps to cover up the gray skin. Not to mention my eyes, my magic reacts badly with contacts, and pink cat-eyes aren’t exactly normal.”

“But you can get rid of it all, with this.” Here Jade held up an amulet with strange runes on it, and a pink crystal encased in the center.

“What is it?”

“The solution. It will block your powers, and you’ll look normal again, you can be Artemis again-”

“Don’t use that name!”

“But, Sweetie, it’s who you are, who you were. Eventually, that redheaded idiot will get tired of you, when he does, put it on, come home… You know, mom’s getting out soon, I’m sure she’ll forgive you for not visiting.” Jade threw the necklace at Jinx, causing Jinx to vault herself over the couch to catch it, before realizing that Jade was gone.

“Well, that was… Weird.” Jinx got up, dusted herself off, and pocketed the necklace for later.

Suddenly she felt a breeze before finding herself in the arms of a certain speedster, who grinned at her before kissing her.

“Hey Slowpoke, miss me? By the way, why’d you leave the front door open, is something wrong?” Jinx was captivated by the caring and concerned look on Kid Flash’s face, and merely shook her head, saying “No, now that you’re back, everything’s fine.” Jinx hugged Kid Flash without another word, feeling relieved now that he was back.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and I’ve been working on it off and on since season 2 first came out. I was partially inspired by the scene where Artemis looked in the mirror when she was Tigress. I have a picture of that scene but where she sees Jinx instead floating around somewhere, but I’m not sure I wanna show that here… cause I was a horrible drawer back then and it sucks… but I have a better pic to use here…

Oh, and thanks to everyone from the Young Justice community (the old one and the new YOUNG JUSTICE one) on Google+ for your support

#teen titans #young justice #crossover #spitfire #flinx #fanfiction #fanfics #jinxed Archer

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