Crisis Weekly, the tenth.

Crisis Weekly #10.

I don't necessarily have a lot to talk about this time, except to note that Jack Ryder as depicted here is being inspired by Tom Hardy's Eddy Brock in Venom.  Bloodwynd, too, as revealed last installment, is inspired in part by Cormoran Strike, the amputee detective in J.K. Rowling's Robert Gailbraith mysteries (who is himself inspired, I'm sure, by Rowling's own "Mad-Eye" Moody from the Harry Potter books).  And, since we're talking inspiration here, some of Rachel "Bulletproof" Rogerson's arc is inspired by the movie Isle of Dogs, which I love.

So there's that! 

Crisis Weekly, nine installments completed.

I was barely a dozen years old when Superman died.

Nowadays, it's almost difficult to remember, the seismic impact a fictional event like that had, even if there have now been two animated and one live action movie adaptations of the story.  Sure, DC had created a media frenzy over the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd, a few years previous.  But sensational superhero deaths became almost a matter of course in later years.  Captain America died, in the aftermath of the original Civil War comic, and that got some pretty good coverage.  Johnny Storm died, and his passing merited a special black bag edition of Fantastic Four, much like Superman's.  It started to seem that if you wanted the public to pay attention to comic books, you had to kill off a major character.

Because the death of Superman was huge.  It coincided with a massive boom in comic book buying.  Marvel had struck big with comics drawn by artists who somewhat promptly left to start Image.  A whole speculator market flooded the medium, and of course the bubble burst, and really, comics are still struggling to emerge from the fallout.

The story everyone remembers, though, from that time is the death of Superman.  Like I said, I was a kid at the time.  I can't say that I was emotionally affected, but it was a powerful formative experience, a touchstone event right there near the beginning of my reading life.  It's impossible for me not to think of it in relation to Superman and comics in general.  The story itself quickly segued into another grand adventure, four impostor Supermen appearing only to make room for Superman himself, returning from the dead.  Lots of people now like to believe it happened at all as a crass publicity stunt, but the creators insist it was a way to delay the wedding of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, since the TV show Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was about to launch, and the comics had only just got around to letting the silly lovebirds approach a happy ending to their decades-long romance, and they didn't want to get there before the show could.  So they threw a crisis at Superman, the biggest imaginable.

The comic book creator most synonymous with the whole thing is the guy who wrote and drew the pivotal issue, Superman #75, Dan Jurgens, and he's freely returned to the story whenever he's had the opportunity over the years.  But I figured there was still room to play around with it.  So this edition of Crisis Weekly begins to make clear how this particular story dives into that one.

Crisis Weekly, eight weeks completed!

Wow.  So I've just posted Crisis Weekly #8.

I say "wow" for a couple reasons.  The first is that this week's script is double the length of previous ones, sixteen script pages as opposed to eight.  This is because I'm hedging my bets about how next week will turn out.  I've been writing these scripts on Saturday, but next Saturday I'll be participating in a mini family reunion, so if I don't get a chance to write something before then, I'll at least know I've got the script numbers where they should be (old NaNo habit). 

The second is that I finally got around to something I've been itching to write since I started this thing, which is to say the first of two spotlights on Bloodwynd's origins.  This week is the origin itself, which I've revised.  It was previously detailed in the pages of DC's '90s Showcase comics.  I decided that it would be interesting, given the confusion some fans still have about this, to have Martian Manhunter help explain it, because these fans think Martian Manhunter is Bloodwynd, which I again reference in the script.  Probably won't get around to actually exploring that, although I certainly have ideas.  Likewise, I obliquely reference Firehawk's origins, but probably won't be getting back into that, either, but it's nice to mention, something I remember from DC's '90s trading cards, where I first learned about Firehawk at all.

And for once, action fills the story, and that felt nice, too, a change of pace, and getting into the thick of the White Martian plot, which will continue to ramp up in the weeks to come.

The next script, whenever I get around to it, will continue Bloodwynd's origins, and I'm very much looking forward to writing that one...

Crisis Weekly, seven down!

That's Sparx!  She makes her Crisis Weekly debut this week.  Donna Carol "D.C." Force debuted in the '90s, during an attempted new wave of superheroes, most of whom drifted comfortably into immediate obscurity, some of whom stuck around for a while.  Sparx stuck around for a while.  She ended up as a featured character in Superboy and the Ravers, one of the less-heralded of the many teenage superhero books that were in publication that decade (including Generation X, Gen 13, Young Justice, and of course several iterations of Teen Titans and Legion of Super-Heroes).

My favorite was Superboy and the Ravers.  This was a team composed of damaged individuals like Half-Life, half of whose body was literally exposed skeleton covered in ectoplasmic goo.  Take that, X-Men!  This was a dude oozing with angst!  There was also Hero, a rare gay superhero who also happened to have possession of a power vest and later the H-Dial (as in "Dial 'H' for Hero").  Then there was the Qwardian warrior Kaliber, who had a near breakout moment during the Genesis crossover event.  And Aura.  And Rex the Wonder Dog.  And the Flying Buttress! 

But mainly, I loved seeing Sparx get a chance, because she was a fun character, and unlike the rest of the Bloodlines generation, she seemed packaged for greatness, part of a whole family of superheroes but powerless until alien parasites attack her.  There was always a ton of potential in her, and so yeah, of course I was going to have to include Sparx, too, in this crazy adventure, even if she isn't immediately a featured player (time and space will tell).