Crisis Weekly, the sixth week!

Just posted Crisis Weekly #6.

The whole concept of a DC crisis has rich history.  The original, 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths, remains a huge watershed moment.  It was originally designed to collapse the multiverse back into a coherent, single DC continuity, so that every superhero operated in the same world.  This was a problem since DC had inadvertently created the concept of the multiverse based on how its publishing fortunes had developed since Superman's debut in 1938.  Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman have always been DC's three most important creations, but they originally existed at the same time as the Justice Society of America, several members of which were famously reinvented at the start of the Silver Age, the second wave of DC superheroes in the 1950s.  One of them, the second Flash, met his predecessor in the famous "Flash of Two Worlds" issue, which in effect ushered in the era of the multiverse.  Eventually, the Justice Society was placed in a second continuity, Earth 2, and there were regularly team-ups between the Society and the more famous Justice League.  In Earth 2 continuity, Batman and Catwoman really did officially get married, and their daughter was Huntress, and eventually, Batman was even permanently killed off!

Anyway, so DC got fed up with competing continuities, and so Crisis on Infinite Earths happened.  But then DC decided that the multiverse was a good idea, and so Infinite Crisis happened in 2006, and later Final Crisis in 2008. 

Infinite Crisis was a story predicated on the notion that the grim nature of superhero comics that had developed roughly since Alan Moore's seminal Watchmen twenty years earlier had become toxic.  In it, the characters are fully aware that they're no longer seen in their best light.  Wonder Woman had been forced, like Superman in the real world controversy in 2013's Man of Steel where he snaps the neck of General Zod and audiences watched in horror, to murder a diabolical schemer named Maxwell Lord, and that was used as the main focal point.  DC used the opportunity to also reflect on Superman's periodic relative unpopularity, as well as the massive success of the "Doomsday" arc in which he became the most famous murdered fictional character since Sherlock Holmes. 

And Batman offers this choice observation:

Ouch!

So anyway, this week's Crisis Weekly is very much in the spirit of that particular moment.  There's a brutal verbal takedown, in this case reflecting once again the real world, where confidence in the US seems to be at an all-time low.  Fiction ought to reflect reality, comment on reality, otherwise it's mere escapism.

But this installment also bursts into "mere escapism" by finally unveiling Man-Bat, long teased, as one of the main antagonists of the narrative, thereby plunging a lot of heavy real world issues back into fiction, and as promised, beginning a full-throttle dive into more traditional superhero storytelling.  It's the first big culmination point, equal parts summary of what has come before and an illustration of what it's all meant.

And it's really just getting started...!

Crisis Weekly, five weeks in!

Did I say last week that I was done introducing the real world crises?  Ah!  Because this one features Mexican migrants...!

Crisis Weekly #5 also features obscure superhero El Dorado!

El Dorado is best known as one of the ethnic creations from Super Friends, all of whom were later dismissed as bad stereotypes.  But well before I had ever heard of the teleporting mutant Nightcrawler, and certainly before I'd ever seen X2: X-Men United, in which Nightcrawler so memorably invades the White House, I was fascinated by El Dorado's wonderful cape, which he used to transport himself wherever he pleased.

But to everyone else, El Dorado more or less never existed at all.  He's made a handful of appearances since, even made a cameo in the comics, but certainly never starred in his own series or been featured as a member of the Justice League (which, as we all know, the "Super Friends" was all along).

So of course if I was ever going to write comic book scripts, I was going to rectify that. 

In Crisis Weekly, not only does El Dorado exist, he's helping migrants cross the borders, and in his civilian identity (a name taken from his appearance in the Young Justice cartoon, because he never got one in Super Friends) even serves as Vice President of Mexico!  (Before you say so, officially that office hasn't existed for a hundred years.) 

Vindication!  Viva El Dorado!

Crisis Weekly, four weeks down!

I just posted Crisis Weekly #4.

Four weeks and four different crises, all of them ripped from the real world (a scandal, a presidential assassination, a school shooting), with the latest being...a black man is pulled over unjustifiably by a white cop. 

The only way this would've been more relevant is if the black man had been shot dead.  But the black man in this instance is one-time Justice Leaguer Bloodwynd, and the cop is Guy Gardner.  The unprovoked pullover is itself an all-too common occurrence.  The black community views it as residual institutional racism, and it's been one of the things that has contributed to the heated nature of our times.  Guy Gardner has never been portrayed as racist.  I've been playing a little fast and loose with him in Crisis Weekly.  He has been known, for most of his appearances, as brash.  What I've been doing with him isn't so much out of character as implied as highly possible if he existed in the real world.  Even if he doesn't mean to come off as racist, he's the kind of guy (heh) who could very easily appear to be, and might even be, even if just a little.  Racism in its benign form is prejudice, the inability to look beyond one's own perspective.  To be, in other words, a fairly rude individual, when confronted with strangers.  Guy doesn't care who he offends.

The other benefit of this unfortunate encounter is that it unites Guy and Bloodwynd from their experiences in the first and second installments of Crisis Weekly, begins to move along the narrative of the White Martian crisis, the fictional construct that grounds the otherwise real world problems in a familiar superhero context.  And for the third time in four weeks, there are also bats, of which we are getting closer to finding out about, too.  Much sooner than the White Martians, actually.

And this rounds out the first month of Crisis Weekly!  Wow!

Crisis Weekly...week three!

The third installment of Crisis Weekly is up. Find it here.

This week was a little bit of a departure narratively.  It's the story of a school shooting.  No bats, no mention of White Martians.  As school shootings go, I figured it was worth introducing the topic on its own.

Obviously these things have been happening.  The first time I remember one was back in 1999 with Columbine.  We talked about it at track practice.  The Matrix had opened, and people wanted to blame Neo and company for looking all swank while they shot up buildings.  But we know school shootings don't happen because of The Matrix.  The Matrix isn't cool anymore, and yet the shootings keep happening.

So I decided to include it in this story.  Yes, it's also the third crisis in a row in a series with "crisis" in the name, and a DC story, where "crisis" tends to be the operative word.  But this one seems like one of the worst crises of the modern era, and everyone has an explanation, even today, for why they keep happening.

All I knew is that I had to write about it.  I processed Katrina like that, in the unpublished manuscript In the Land of Pangaea.  And I'll probably process the recent Hurricane Michael.  I have friends who were personally impacted by that one, and I have experience in the area affected by it, and it's still weird to think about that.  Writers process by writing.  It's what we do. 

This will probably be the toughest week to read.