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fractualized · 1 year ago

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Three Jokers Are Not Better Than One

(or, cheap twists don't make a good story)

Would you look at that? It's time to bitch about Three Jokers!

(spoilers for a 3-year-old comic ahead)

Gotham War got me into hater mode, so I figured it was time to take a second look at Three Jokers, written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Jason Fabok. I first read it when the issues came out, and I thought it was possible that the story isn't as bad as I remembered. I don't know why, since for the past three years I've been haunted by the possibility of it being deemed canon.

Of course, at the time of conception, Three Jokers was intended to be canon. Johns set up the premise in the Darkseid War storyline of the 2011 Justice League run, in issues published in 2015/2016. Batman takes control of the omniscient Mobius Chair, and he tests it by asking who killed his parents. Then he asks a second question, which Hal Jordan presses him on several issues later.

[Justice League (2011) #42 & Justice League (2011) #50]

Four years later, when Three Jokers was set to be released towards the end of 2020, Johns did at first confirm it would be canon despite being released via Black Label, where books are not meant to be part of the larger continuity. In later interviews, however, this assertion got walked back in favor of saying the canonicity is up to each reader, which is kind of a wild thing to say. "Look, this story merely proposes that one of our most popular characters has actually been three different dudes the whole time, which totally has a negligible impact on how that character should be seen and has interacted with the world. Take it or leave it!"

But then, DC's idea of canon has been pretty squiggly of late, especially with the increasing multiverse shenanigans. In the final issue of Dark Knights: Death Metal in 2021, the reader is told, "with our past finally set, myriad new futures are opening up. And as hypertime heals, we'll likely experience flashes of them– and even alternate pasts– in pretty epic fashion." Infinite Frontier followed, with a press release declaring, "When our heroes saved the Multiverse from Perpetua in Dark Nights: Death Metal, everything was put back where it belonged… and we do mean everything. All the damage from all the Crises was undone [....]"

I have a lot of thoughts about this, revolving around what the heck does it mean for storytelling and how we should understand characters that apparently, somehow, everything is canon? How are we supposed to take this as anything other than the omniverse being an excuse for DC Editorial to wave off responsibility for a legible timeline? "Batman can be in two places at once because, uh, the Monitor sneezed?"

But this too-long essay is about Three Jokers, so I'll narrow my concern: if character histories can simply change with a multiversal glitch, in whatever overwrought way those are usually explained to us, then it sure feels like it doesn't matter that Three Jokers was published under Black Label. It sure seems like, at whoever's whim, Three Jokers can still get locked into the main storyline. I mean, Zdarsky still hasn't explained what that three Jokers shit in Batman #135 is about. On the other hand, we know that the explanation for the two Jokers in The Man Who Stopped Laughing does not involve the multiverse, and Joker is supposed to reunite with Batman over in Zdarsky's story when that story closes out, so… I actually have no reason to be confident that means anything.

"But why would Three Jokers getting canonized be so bad?" you may ask if you've never read Three Jokers (or if you fully enjoyed it).

Speaking for myself, it starts with the premise: taking a character and saying, "actually, this is not one complex guy but three different guys, which fractures the character's motivations and relationships over the last several decades." When that character is one you enjoy very much, this twist is not fun. It's a fundamental change to who they are.

Then five months before the release of Three Jokers #1, Johns and Fabok did an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Some things the pair said raised red flags:

1) Three Jokers' story would focus on the trauma that Barbara, Jason, and Bruce suffered at Joker's hands, per Johns. "If you suffer some trauma, you don’t just get over with it and move on with your life, it changes who you are. Sometimes it changes you for the better, sometimes it changes you for the worse. You can heal right, and you can heal wrong. That’s really what the book’s about: Healing right, healing wrong, and surviving."

2) Johns also said of the story: “It goes back to the beginning when Batman first encountered the Joker, but it’s also The Killing Joke and A Death in the Family that speak to the book and that we’re building off emotionally." And Fabok mentioned that the book's look would be based on the aesthetics of The Killing Joke: "I really want it to feel like it could be a spiritual sequel, at least artistically."

These remarks foreshadowed a disconnect. A key part of The Killing Joke itself is that both Joker and Bruce experienced terrible trauma ("one bad day"), but in responding to it, they made different choices: broadly, Joker choosing to hurt people versus Bruce choosing to help people. Johns excluding Joker from his comments about trauma felt like a sign that he ignored a key part of the character, despite Joker being a core part of a new tale "emotionally" inspired by TKJ.

(We're setting aside "you can heal right and you can heal wrong" for now. Ohhh, we'll get back to that.)

Johns' blind spot was confirmed a few months later when he was quoted by the DC Nation Twitter account: "There are very few characters that are, to me, as irredeemable as The Joker. There is nothing in him that is good."

Wow, what close analysis from Mr. Emotional Build.

Look, I don't need Joker to be redeemed or woobified. (Ask me about the "Pushback" storyline from 2004 and hear my gnashing teeth crack a filling.) But I would like the full breadth of his character acknowledged, especially when you're claiming you're writing about trauma, especially when you're creating a "spiritual sequel" to one of best known Joker stories (if not the best known one).

Then Three Jokers finally came out, and over three months it proved to be neither an examination of healing nor very interesting, at least not in an enjoyable way. What it has to "say" about trauma, for any of the characters, is no different than the limited conclusion made in previous Batman books: mainly the drumbeat of fighting off the darkness by being a bigger person— or at least not killing your enemy. Making Joker into a role played by three different people adds nothing; it amounts to little more than a gimmick.

Hell, even as a gimmick, it's flawed. Theoretically, the three Jokers represent phases of personality the Joker has embodied over the years— but the representations we get don't make sense. Here they are summed up in Book 3:

Sorry, what? The Criminal is less interested in theatrics? In what time period was the Joker ever not interested in making a big show of things in one way or another? Maybe this is supposed to be an "early" Joker in terms of the Rebirth/InfiniCrisisDarkCarnateTier/whatever more recent conception of him, but I'll wager that's not what people think about when they think of Joker at his start. They think about Golden Age Joker doing goofy shit and laughing maniacally. They're not expecting this morose man.

The other thing is that, in Book 1, the narrative "assigns" each of our three protagonists to a Joker: Bruce to the Criminal, who appeared at the start; Barbara to the Comedian, who shot her; and Jason to the Clown, who killed him. Now at first I thought Johns was saying one Joker took over after another, but since Barbara's attack and Jason's death happened 9 months apart in 1988, which are not different Joker eras, I think we're supposed to see them as sort of… cycling on and off depending on the needs of the scheme? Maybe? But the descriptions above are still confusing. Why am I supposed to see the Joker who got carried away with the fun of beating Jason with a crowbar and successfully blew him up as less sadistic than the other one?

Johns does appear to lampshade this confusion in the middle of Book 1, when we get all three Jokers in a cabin in the woods. The Clown and the Comedian have this exchange:

This and a later panel with the Comedian actually imply that he and the Clown are interchangeable, even though they're supposed to be different. So are they or not? Is there an actual reason we need three Jokers, or did Johns just think it was a neato idea and then spend four years trying to figure out a "layered" justification for it?

The other thing about this cabin scene, and about the Joker trio largely, is that it should be fun and it's not. There should be chaos! Zaniness! At the very least, all the narcissism in the room should generate a competitive friction, make their interactions more dynamic. (Really it should generate bloodshed and end with one man standing within like ten minutes, but I'll grant the choice to save that for Book 3.) Instead it's almost mundane. The cabin isn't even decorated! It's dark and dreary, like the Jokers are dark and dreary. If we're gonna have three Jokers, can't they at least be Jokering with each other?

The same thought comes when I consider the very beginning of Book 1. It all starts out like a typical Batman story: three deadly crimes are committed in one night, the Joker seemingly responsible for all of them, and Bruce, Barbara, and Jason are drawn together as they try to figure out what's up. Of course, thanks to the Magic Chair, Bruce already knows there are three clowns, but Barbara and Jason are thinking that Joker is working with two look-alikes to create confusion. And considering the basics of what happens in this story, what the Comedian's larger plan is meant to accomplish, why couldn't this have been written with just two look-alikes? I mean, yeah, it would require Johns to forget about his continuity bomb, but maybe the story would have been better (and shorter). Again, the creation of other Jokers isn't doing much for what the plot is getting at. The three crimes that start us off would still serve the function of reminding Bruce of how Joker's been a constant in his life. The taunting of a convincing Joker look-alike is enough to set off Jason's anger and sadness about what happened to him, and his fears of what he could become. The climax with Joe Chill would have to be redone, but the threat of him being Jokerized isn't the crucial plot point; the Comedian's film of him is. Bruce doesn't even have any substantial thoughts about there being three of his nemesis.

But, alas, the story goes how it goes. And as it goes, we also see that Jason behaves more cruelly in his search for Joker than Barbara and Bruce. For example, Jason attacks and threatens one of Joker's victims to get information, feeling justified because the guy has a rap sheet, while Barbara scolds him and Bruce tells the victim, "I'm sorry this happened." What I find notable about this is that while comics regularly present Jason as hot-headed and Barbara as reasonable, Bruce… uh… If you gather a random selection of Batman comics, you'll find that his level of violence is all over the place. This story, however, requires a more somber Bruce, whose violence is more reactive, because Jason and Barbara serve Johns' dichotomy of "heal right" versus "heal wrong." We can't have Bruce on the sadistic side of the scale fucking that up, and besides, Jason's long been the posterboy for healing "wrong."

That notion comes to a head at the end of the issue. The heroes have encountered and subdued the Clown at the aquarium when Jim Gordon calls. The GCPD found another Joker, and Bruce leaves Jason and Barbara alone with the Clown to assist.

Goodness me, who could have predicted Jason might kill a restrained Joker? Not Bruce, who absolutely should have. Barbara is there to talk Jason down, sure, but what else is the Clown gonna do but needle Jason to kill him?

The Clown cackles then, declaring that Red Hood is his Robin, for the very reason of his violent impulses and how much he upsets the Bat, and of course Jason shoots him in the head, because oof.

Honestly, on this second read I found this scene a smidge too oof. Jason was a determined little Robin, dedicated to saving his awful mother to the very end, and him cracking and declaring that he'll work for a criminal… I don't know. I don't think it's impossible, but it feels superfluous. I don't think such a reveal is necessary to get Jason to fire. I think the Clown focusing on how the new Red Hood is actually quite similar to the old, as well as how Jason matters less than the neverending battle between Batman and Joker, is enough emotional stress to get to the same end result.

But that's a minor quibble; we've got bigger fish to fry! Such as the specter of the "healed right/healed wrong" dynamic that reappears as Barbara and Jason argue over the Clown's corpse.

Barbara leaves angrily after this, but man. I wish the story overall took more cues from this scene, that in a Black Label story we could stray from the simplistic idea of how a Good One would save Joker and a Bad One wouldn't. I want to explore Jason's assertion that Barbara didn't do her best to uphold Bruce's one rule. I want to know if maybe she's tired of being the fucking Good One.

Hell, let's go further: what if we were surprised by Barbara killing the Clown before Jason could? The Clown's taunting about Jason could have gotten to her too. We could have a story about how being put on a pedestal as a Good Victim is a cage, about Barbara struggling with falling from that position, about Jason feeling unsure if he should commend her for an act that obviously hurts her or comfort her for something he would have done himself. That's an actual examination of the struggle to process violent trauma— that you don't need three Jokers for!

But the story we have never gets back to Jason's suggestion that Barbara let the murder happen, not in this issue or the following two. This issue just ends with Jason hoping that the Clown was the actual Joker and that he didn't kill the wrong guy, which is a pretty "LOL oh yeah" line when you remember that he and Barbara don't know there are three Jokers yet.

Book 1, truth be told, isn't that bad. On my reread, I started to wonder if my only real issue with the story is that it's not as engaging as all the hype insisted it would be.

Then Book 2 starts, and goddammit. GODDAMMIT.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: why can we not have more DC writers having fun with Joker's multiple-choice backstory? Why did Johns read The Killing Joke and decide his interpretation would be this?:

Ugh. UGGGHHH.

I don't recall the issue, but there's these panels that circulate sometimes of Harley Quinn encountering Joker in Arkham or prison, in which they exchange words about their relationship and he's a creep and she kicks his ass. I have no problem with Harley kicking Joker's ass. He deserves it. My problem is that those panels play out like an empowerment scene in a generic Lifetime movie. My problem is that it doesn't have the flavor of Harley and Joker. My problem is that it's lazy.

And that's my problem with what Johns does with Joker's backstory in TKJ. He could take it anywhere, and he goes gritty without an ounce of nuance. Because hey, this is Joker, and "there is nothing in him that is good," right? We'll just ignore that one of DC's all-time classics, the one this garbage is ✨inspired by✨, has Joker reflecting on a past for which he is an unreliable narrator, but in which he laments how his comedy dream put his growing family in a bad spot, in which he desperately aligns with shady people so his family can be secure, in which he's devastated by losing the only person he has in the world and their growing baby. And these memories could be distorted or entirely fake, but what's interesting in TKJ is that Joker never tells anyone else about them, even in his big speech to Batman. The flashbacks are not part of an attempt to manipulate anyone or convince them his world view is correct. It's a tale in Joker's head that, regardless of the truth, deeply affects him. It's what drove him to go to horrendous lengths to prove his point, even if the point is wrong.

But fuck that, right? We're going lazy! We're going cheap! We're going with the Jeannie backstory, but actually Joker was only terrible to her. The Comedian fondly fantasizes about terrorizing her and their son, because he's 100% an abuser, because he must have always been that way, with not a single appealing quality that we need to reckon with as we so often do with toxic people in real life. Even the freaking stutter Joker had as he struggled with stand-up comedy is given to Jeannie. Seriously?

I cannot emphasize enough: fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck this "take."

On the other hand, when the Comedian is brought out of his stupor, we do finally get something super funny:

At least we'll always have this panel of Joker eating cat food.

The Criminal only interrupted the daydream because he's mad the Clown is dead, and the Clown was so eager to be dead I thought it was part of their plan buuuuuuut I guess not. Then we jump to Bruce figuring out that the "Joker" that Gordon cornered is just another victim, a dead judge. Barbara appears to tell Bruce what Jason did, and they discuss it over comms on the road.

Bruce, shockingly, says that they can't really do anything about what Jason did.

Pretty sure the guy who batarang'd Jason's throat rather than let him kill Joker would have a more intense reaction than this?? Or any reaction other than sober understanding? Maybe Bruce is still coping with finally dealing with three Jokers at once and will flip his shit when this all resolves. Or maybe he's just thinking, "it's okay, I still have two emotional support clowns left!" I don't know. He's so weirdly passive in this story.

What's more aggravating, though, is the other aspect of this conversation, that Jason "healed wrong." It would be one thing as a pat judgment Bruce is making, but we know from that interview that Johns positioned "healed right versus healed wrong" as the story's theme. It's not good. It's way too glib a framing for evaluating how people who've gone through trauma are dealing with it, in any context. Sure, there are better and worse coping mechanisms, better and worse outcomes, but healing is an ongoing process that can be so individualized. Reducing it to "right" and "wrong," saying that one is "strong" and implying that the other comes from some sort of deficiency… I hope Johns just spoke poorly and he does understand that it's not that simple.

Now, is it a stretch to apply that critique to Jason killing criminals at his whim? Sure, deciding that you personally should play the role of judge, jury, and executioner is not a good way to deal with trauma. But that's not exactly what's happening here. This "healed right versus healed wrong" framing is being applied to Jason Todd going after the Joker. Obviously, I like Joker, but can we be real about this? Can we be real in a Black Label book, the imprint where comic books (allegedly) have room to take things more seriously? Can we take the question of, "In this fictional world where Joker is an unstoppable fatal mayhem machine— now THREE machines— is it completely out of bounds for someone to finally kill him?" and be like, "Errr…not really?" When this story explicitly denies Joker even one teeny redeeming human quality, are we seriously still going to say, "Well, you know, if Jason takes the life of the man who murdered him and millions other people, because he doesn't want him to kill more people, which Joker will absolutely do and we all know it, doesn't that say something awful about Jason?" Are we really??

Plus the judgment about healing is put into the mouth of a man who— say it with me!— regularly dresses as a bat and beats the ever-loving shit out of people because his parents were murdered. Toning Bruce down in this particular story doesn't hide that.

Although, what I think is intended as a flawed assumption on Bruce's part is his other line, "Jason's suffering." It implies that Barbara still isn't, but we are shown Barbara reflecting on her paralyzation, even now when she's "strong" and has healed "right." And the story will get into this a bit later, but it absolutely does not let Barbara and Jason escape the dichotomy. To the story's detriment, their interactions go in a wild direction, but we'll get to that.

First, Bruce and Barbara's investigation leads them to Blackgate, because the fingerprints on the murder weapon for the dead judge belong to none other than Joe Chill. However, we learn that Chill has been in the medical wing for two months because he's sick with cancer.

Meanwhile, Jason's investigation leads him to a closed athletic center. The pool inside is filled with the chemicals stolen from Ace at the start of the story, as well as dozens of pale naked bodies with green hair. Jason's attempt to contact Barbara is interrupted when one of said bodies bursts to life and grabs his ankle, asking for help. Jason reacts with hostility, kicking the poor guy, and I'm not sure if it's because he's unnerved by a room of floating Jokers or if it's pretty normal for him to not keep his cool even for the sake of an obvious victim of a horrible crime. A Gotham City vigilante can't be that shocked by one guy being alive in a pile of bodies, can they?

But that's all setup. When the guy falls unconscious, the Criminal and the Comedian ambush Jason and drag him away, one saying, "He'll be perfect."

It's a line that meanly gets your hopes up, poking at a subject that could make all this more interesting.

Jason awakes, strapped to a chair and as naked as the bodies in the pool. The Criminal says he and his pals have spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect candidate for a new Joker, and he repeats the question of what's up with Jason taking on the Red Hood moniker.

It seems that, like DCAU Tim Drake in Batman Beyond before him, Jason Todd will be transformed into a fourth Joker! But it won't only be because it will wreck the Batman. It'll be because Joker already sees himself in Jason. This is something new to explore! There are places to go here; other comics hinting at Joker's past point to him having a childhood not dissimilar to Jason's, of growing up on the street, experiencing abuse, and learning unpalatable ways to survive. We could see Jason struggling with the possibility that he has more in common with Joker than he wants to think about!

But we won't. Inexplicably, the Criminal turns around and says that despite their similarities, despite Jason hating Batman as much as he does, despite the Comedian (presumably) saying Jason is perfect, and despite getting Jason ready for the pool, Jason actually isn't good enough, not "bright" enough. (Because all the Jokers we have in this dour story are so bright?)

And then the Comedian just beats the hell out of Jason (saying it's more fun than the first time, in another annoying nod to how he and the Clown are the same damn Joker) and says they're leaving Jason alive because maybe he'll prove them wrong and he'll become a new Joker after all? But the current Jokers aren't really going to go for it. Their interest is just abandoned.

The point is only to freak Jason out, so when Bruce and Barbara arrive, fight a horde of Jokerized victims, and find Jason alone and naked and vulnerable, he does not react well when Bruce tries to ask if he's okay. Jason turns on him and blames him for setting him on this path, for leaving him in the dirt, for replacing him easily. He lashes out at Barbara too, asking if she's going to lock him away, but ultimately it's easier to take comfort from her.

A direct reference to Return of the Joker here, focusing on the shadow Batman casts over the lives of his partners, the responsibility he bears in how Joker targeted them to hurt the Bat, and how poorly he offers comfort himself.

It does segue nicely into the next scene, when Bruce and Barbara get Jason to her apartment to rest. Bruce leaves to keep investigating, and Barbara is pissed because this is the exact lack of support that contributed to Jason going his own way. Support is highlighted again when Jason wakes in Barbara's room and looks around.

Aside from Barbara seeking out books to deal with her physical and mental struggles after Joker's attack, the old calendars show the help she received from her father and health professionals.

And this scene does get into something that's missing from TKJ, in which Bruce tells Joker that no, not everyone will retreat to madness like he did. How we react to trauma is greatly affected by the resources available to us.

This scene is nice. It's nice to come from the action to some place quiet and for someone to say this Jason, something he's wanted to hear. It's late in coming, but it's pain validated.

And then Johns fucking ruins it.

Man. Just. Ugh. Yeah, I know people seek comfort in moments of vulnerability, but… the reader knows. The reader knows moments like this aren't included to be like "oh, this was an isolated blip of human behavior! The story won't call back to it later!" Johns apparently wants Barbara/Jason to be a thing. And if you want a solid reason for that… well, we don't get any good ones.

Meanwhile, Bruce is in the cave, and I'm only mentioning that because these folder labels are incredibly funny:

Then the issue ends with Joe Chill kidnapped from Blackgate by the Comedian, who has a video camera and asks him to talk about why he really killed the Waynes. Dun dun dunnnnnnnn! Is that a twist on the way?! Well, yeah, but not really the one you think and it's incredibly stupid.

Finally we are at Book 3. Jason is suited back up, and he and Barbara have met up with Bruce in the cave to figure out how the Jokers plan to create another, better Joker.

Soooooo Jason and Barbara had that whole conversation. Jason was shaken by what the Jokers said to him. But now he's completely back on track. Allllllrighty.

Jason and Bruce then have an argument rehashing everything that Barbara said she was sorry Jason experienced, with Bruce saying of course he'd love to kill the Joker, and Jason pointing out that he obviously hasn't. Jason also says he thinks the only reason Bruce isn't turning Jason in for killing the Clown is to protect Batman's identity. Barbara just tries to de-escalate with her doe eyes. They're back to the status quo, and it sucks, which is the point. When they try to get back to the investigation at hand, Bruce pauses and attempts to apologize.

And again, with this blatant TKJ reference, it feels like we need to dig into the parallels between Jason and Joker! They both insist it's too late! They won't take help! But surely Jason isn't as far gone! There's something to chew on here.

But nah, this story is heading toward a big ol' revelation, foreshadowed here:

🎶 Why the fuck you lyin'? 🎶

Finally they get the alert that Joe Chill was kidnapped, and on investigating his cell, Bruce finds a bunch of letters addressed to… himself, Bruce Wayne. He seeks out the prison reverend.

Which is unintentionally hilarious, because in the storyline that started this whole three Jokers nonsense, there's a Batman Darkseid War one-shot where Joe Chill's behavior does not remotely align with this.

Lol comics are fun.

In the middle of Bruce investigating the letters, we get Jason being all repentant with Babs again.

You just said? You totally were?? Gonna kill more clowns??? How is this supposed to come off as genuine? Granted, Jason doesn't try to kill the other Jokers after this, but the apparently impetus for reversing course is... uh... we'll get there.

Anyway, among Chill's letters are tickets to the Monarch Theater, so the heroes all head over for whatever the Jokers have set up for them, which of course includes another horde of failed Joker zombies. During the fight, the Comedian's interview of Joe Chill plays on the screen, and the Criminal reveals they have Chill tied up in a chair suspended over a vat of green chemicals.

As Chill on screen explains that he killed the Waynes out of hatred and envy for how much they had, and how much he regrets his actions, the Criminal explains that he considered both Jason and Barbara as strong candidates for the new Joker. And wait. WAIT. Mr. Johns, sir, are you telling me it crossed your mind to write a story in which Barbara becomes the new Joker? That's so much more interesting than the bullshit we're getting! Imagine it: Barbara dealing with the dissatisfaction of being the "good, strong victim" and just losing her shit. You could combine that with how uneasy Jason is with his similarities to Joker, and maybe Jason is the one who convinces Barbara to turn back. This is Black Label! This could've been anything! Anything!

But we've got Chill. And the Criminal goes on to say the reason he wanted to make a new Joker at all:

Are… are you? I'm pretty sure Joker is pretty well fucking defined. He's a murderer with a very dark sense of humor who is obsessed with Batman. That's been a pretty good through-line.

Also, Joker pretty clearly means a lot to Batman, as that middle panel with Jason seems intended to remind us, but the Criminal does clarify that he wants to be "everything" to him, which is why he's pulling Bruce's parents' murderer into all this. I guess I can't blame him for reaching for the stars?

Cue big fight scene. The Chill recording continues to explain his regret, and soon the theater is on fire. Batman saves Chill and knocks the Criminal unconscious. Chill thinks Batman is going to kill him, but Bruce saves him from a falling brick wall instead— before the Criminal revives and tries to set off a bomb to kill them all, maybe. There's a BOOM flag sticking out of the dynamite a few panels later, after the Comedian shows up and shoots the Criminal in the head. TWIST!

The Comedian surrenders, and after a scene with Jason picking the most awkward time to suggest he and Barbara try being a couple and Barbara looking pissed she has to tell him no, we jump to Bruce and the Comedian in the armored police car.

As a batjokes shipper, looking at these pages is weird, because they are good food for the brainworms. The Criminal wanted to engineer a Joker who meant the most to Batman, but the Comedian wanted to be that Joker. It's a weird plan, considering that Joker prefers Batman over Bruce Wayne, so he would be more likely to not want to heal Bruce's wound lest the healing lead to less Batmanning, but still. This crazy plan is all about maintaining Batman's attention.

But I can only enjoy these panels out of context, not just because I'm pretty weary of insanely elaborate plans that manage to work out, but also because there's just so much to hate in the rest of the story, especially the real twist that closes it out.

Before we get to that, though, we're thrown back into the Jason/Barbara nonsense with a very gross letter he writes to her.

"Dear Barbara, I want to make a change. But I can't do that without you. I know I've come across cold and distant…"

1) Look, love can help people heal. Barbara could be a good friend advising Jason on what might help him. She could help bring him back into the batfam fold. This letter is not that. This letter is pushing someone to be in a romantic relationship with you for the explicit purpose of getting them to heal you. That's not how love works. That's using someone as a tool. It's supposed to be sad that Barbara never sees the letter but it's good, actually. Don't put that shit on her!

2) This romance came out of freaking nowhere and now we get Jason insisting he can simply stop being Red Hood for the sake of it— but only for the sake of it, apparently! Does Jason think his worldview as Red Hood is an impediment to healing or not? This is just surface-level melodramatic nonsense. And I wish that was the point, but no. Again, the letter getting swept away is presented as sad.

3) Speaking of which, who tapes a confessional letter that exposes your vigilante identity to a door where anyone can see it? You'd slip it under the door at least. Johns couldn't figure out any other way for the letter to vanish? Get out of here with this contrived nonsense. There should've been panels of Jason rereading the letter, realizing how unhinged it is, and throwing it away himself.

4) Is the "Funtime Cleaners" guy in his purple uniform supposed to be Joker? Or representative of Joker's influence on their lives? If yes and it's him, he's a goddamn hero. If it's symbolic, what does that mean, that even when you reach out to others… elements out of your control will keep you alone? 'Cause that sure is bleak for a book allegedly about healing.

With all that done with, now we get to the big twist, the dumbest fucking part of this story, the end, the takeaway. Of course it involves more crimes against The Killing Joke, which I'm increasingly convinced no one at DC has actually read in the past thirty years.

Bruce drives up to Alaska, and we get this reveal.

Do the kids still *headdesk* nowadays? That's what I'm doing. There will be a blood stain.

1) So Bruce has known the Joker's identity, or at least the Comedian's, basically the whole time. We're just retconning that the Joker question he asked the Magic Chair wasn't for information; it was a second test question. And all this is in the face of Bruce lamenting many times over the years that he doesn't know who Joker really is, of him lamenting it in The Killing goddamn Joke. "I don't know him, Alfred. All these years and I don't know who he is any more than he knows who I am. How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?" We're just. Fucking excising that. A line alluding to Bruce's motivation for visiting Joker in TKJ's opening scene.

2) We're rounding out the lazy revisions to the TKJ backstory with some copaganda! Geoff Johns doesn't think it's possible for Joker to have been anything but a horror to his family, but he does think it's possible that random officers in the friggin' Gotham City Police Department— in early Batman lore no less, when they were at their most corrupt— would fundraise for a "lady" they clearly don't know to get her out of the city to safety. Also, what was the plan for when Joker asked to see his wife's dead body?? Congrats, you've come up with something dumber than "Pushback."

3) This scrawls more highlighter on how bad the premise of there being three Jokers is, because the flashback in TKJ happens before Joker starts out. Like that's how Bruce always recalls it; he didn't meet the Joker until after what happened at Ace Chemicals. So isn't Jeannie then actually the Criminal's wife? Because the Criminal is the one who behaves as Bruce remembers Joker was at the start. So is the Comedian obsessed with the Criminal's wife for some reason? Or is the Comedian actually the first Joker, and the Criminal came later and used to be more wacky? What is going on here?

Under all these questions, per the final page, the point of Three Jokers is still visible: ultimately, his victims matter more than he does. But that's a hilarious point to a story that revolves around three of the guy, with very little payoff to the gimmick, and when part of the plot is that the heroes still shouldn't kill him.

And again, just because a story makes reference to healing, it doesn't mean it's "about" healing. The most we get is the knowledge that Barbara and Jeannie received support from other people. There's no discussion of how long it took either of them, of why Barbara came out the other side not wanting to kill Joker, of anything Jeannie has done since she left Gotham. The possibility that Jason could find connection is promptly throttled by a forced romance. It's implied that the Comedian's plan worked for Bruce, as we see Bruce at Chill's deathbed, holding his hand, and at Chill's grave. You might be interested in Bruce's thoughts as he juxtaposes Chill's repentance against the fact that his parents are still dead, so you can assess if this really would affect the feeling of loss that drove him to his lifelong mission, but you won't get them. The "how" of healing is up to the reader— who is never asked to extend the same thought process to the Joker. And you personally do not have to give a crap about Joker, but again, if this book is supposed to be about responses to healing, about Jason's response versus Barbara's, then taking an actual look at Joker feels relevant!

So there we are: fourteen pages of me venting my little heart out, hoping the premise of Three Jokers never gets looped into canon. I'm well aware that my personal attachment to a character means nothing against DC's incentives to promote stories with Big Twists (and endless events and multiverse bullshit), but then again, those incentives are based on what people will buy. So if I can add to the voices saying that Three Jokers is bad, and you should not spend your money on it or books like it, maybe I can be one vibe of many that keeps the Joker as one single bat-obsessed murderclown...

Though if not, I can always retreat to older comics. I still have plenty of those to get through.

#three jokers #the killing joke #batjokes #batman #joker #bruce wayne #barbara gordon #jason todd #analysis #my jibber-jabber #tl;dr three jokers is just usual batman stuff with a dumb gimmick #and jaybabs thrown in for the lulz

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kryptic-psychotic · 8 months ago

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"Essential Reading"

"We are Robin (2015) #1-12 written by Lee Bermejo, art by Khary Randolph

Robin War (2016) written by Various Writers, art by Various Artists

Dark Days: The Forge (2017) #1 & The Casting (2017) #1 written by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV art by Jim Lee, Andy Kubert, and John Romita Jr.

Batman and The Signal (2018) #1-3 story by Scott Snyder, written by Tony Patrick, art by Cully Hamner

Immortal Men (2018) #1-6 written by James Tynion IV, art by Ryan Benjamin & Jim Lee

Batman & the Outsiders (2019) #1-17 written by Bryan Edward Hill, art by Dexter Soy & Veronica Gandini

Dark Nights: Death Metal - Robin King (2020) #1 [the back-up] written by Tony Patrick art by Danial Sampere

Tales from The Dark Multiverse: METAL (2020) #1 written by Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly art by Karl Mostert

The Next Batman (2021) #1 & #3 written by Brandon Thomas art by Sumit Kumar

Batman: Urban Legends (2021) #8 & #9 written by Brandon Thomas art by Cian Tormey

Batman: Urban Legends (2022) #18 & #19 written by Brandon Thomas art by Alberto Jimenez Alburquerque"

#duke thomas #The Signal #Batman #Robin

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tomoleary · 1 year ago

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Jerome Opeña - Dark Nights: Death Metal #2 (2020) Lobo

Source

#jerome opena #dark nights #death metal #lobo #original art #Jerome Opeña

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spinef0ryou · 2 years ago

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Interview with Ville Valo in Metal Hammer magazine, words by Alexander Milas. Transcript under the cut

It’s a gloomy November evening in London and inside the crystalline bowels of the Universal Music tower there are dark goings-on under a winter moon. An arcane gathering of power-brokers, decision makers, and tastemakers, has convened to hear the first, dulcet tones of a new record in its entirety - a lyrical and melodious exsanguination called Neon Noir. Less an album, the subject of tonight’s attention is more like a swan song played in reverse or a departed loved one’s voice playing in the wind. We’ll get to that.

There are no robes here, such vestigial ornaments long since done away with to provide anonymity on public transportation, but the importance of these proceedings is in no way diminished. This is how the music industry in all its mysterious dealings determines where and when its various powers are to be invoked - an Illuminati-like network of aligned hands is this rogues' gallery of journalists, label managers and festival promoters. Even the helmswoman of the gazette you hold in your verv hands can be seen lurking in the shadows.

At the centre of the dim chamber stands a lone, flat-capped figure, his chiselled visage peculiarly, vampirically unchanged by the many years since he first graced the cover of an international publication such as this, and let it be said that he was never a stranger to these folios.

If anything can be said of Ville Valo's appearance it's that he could teach anyone half his age a thing or two about self-presentation - and, for the record, they'd be 23 at time of publication. Svelte, casually besuited and elegantly understated in his attire - all different hues of black, obviously - he's been affably chatting with the gathered conclave with such fluidity and confidence that anyone would think it's something he does every day, and anyone who knows his incongruous penchant for reclusiveness when off the stage would suspect that maybe he's changed since we saw him last.

For the record, he does not, and he has not. Ten long years have passed since His Infernal Majesty's final release, the career summation that was 2013's Tears On Tape, and it has been five years since Him played their final note on the second of two sold-out nights at the London Roundhouse in December of 2017. Their concluding song was the aptly chosen, syrupy dirge of When Love And Death Embrace, and the mortuary pallor of its refrains couldn't have been better matched to the forlorn mood of that distinctly funereal moment.

For many, it was a farewell to one of life's few constants: Him were less like a band and more like a comforting gothic world to those who fell prey to its blackened enchantments, and as if further affirmation is needed, no one in the field of music has since emerged to even remotely fill the heartagram-shaped hole left in Ville's wake. As the lights in the venue went up to reveal no shortage of streaked mascara, it would have been impossible to surmise whether we'd ever hear from Ville again - such was the finality of that tour and the deathly vibe of that night.

More desolate still was the long silence that ensued after the 26-year adventure he spearheaded under an iconic banner designed by his own hand. Eight records, ten million sales and countless fans getting heartagram tattoos of variable quality were the tallies of Ville's musical ledger.It was over. Him was dead. Their founder was gone. And then, quietly, headless blooms began to flank his headstone.

First came the news that he was blowing off the cobwebs to undertake a tour of Finland to record and perform songs by the late, beloved Finnish singer-songwriter Rauli 'Badding' Somerjoki, with Somerjoki's old band, Agents. The project smashed the charts in Finland before they eventually disbanded.

More silence followed until March 2020, when an unheralded EP was released under a new banner, VV complete with an updated reimagining of the famed heartagram. A portent of what was to come, Gothica Fennica Vol. 1 was far from alien to anyone familiar with Him's long-established sound, but it also bore the hallmarks of a songwriter unbound by the restraints of collaboration or co-writing. As the world smouldered, it was a hopeful omen that perhaps not everything had been lost to the pandemic.

We retreat from the listening session to a quieter room to shine to shine a neon light on the story of the rebirth and toil that followed, a res-erection-

Ville shoots a look as if to say, 'You're not gonna write that, are you?' Well…

“‘Promo tours are like Bullet-point for my Valentine.”

Ville has sunk into his armchair, a body deflated. We've just been talking about the sometimes less-than-rock'n'roll demands of album promotion, and how while just 10 years have passed since Him's final release, a lifetime of change in the industry's inner workings has followed. It's Thursday and Ville's already done the rounds in Berlin this week, plus a big photo session, too - rumour has it that a smoke machine for a cover shoot triggered a confrontation with security here yesterday. Whoever the photographer was that bolted the door shut so the shoot could continue remains a mystery at the time of going to press.

But despite Ville's tiredness after two days of media-based pokes and prods and his first international flight in five years, he's still exhibiting a remarkably playful way with words: the product of voracious reading and self-confessed Anglophilia that can make it easy to forget this is his second language, although as we'll soon discover there are some words that resist translation.

We're reflecting on how many times he's appeared in the pages of Metal Hammer. I produce a photo from many years gone by, taken by Mick Hutson. It's Ville, looking like a goth deer caught in headlights, sitting in the back of a limo between the late Dimebag Darrell and Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx on his way to the Metal Hammer Golden God awards. He smirks.

"It was a playground, wasn't it?" he says of the Ville of yore. "Oh my god, that was a weird one. I remember Dimebag - he'd been up all night, and there's me stuck in the middle. I gave my Golden God award to Zakk Wylde's daughter. He told me she was a huge fan and I'd had a sip too many, so…”

And let it be said that by the time Him went stratospheric - a runway stretching between 2000's Razorblade Romance and 2003's definitive Love Metal - there were few publications that weren't peppering their pages with images of Ville. photogenic but, more importantly, hilarious, his wry and dismissive self-regard tempered the styled polish of his many covershoots. In a time when emo was king, Ville brought something current but gleefully out of step with fashion, musical and otherwise, but he persevered because, arguably, beyond the music he possessed that rare quality that escapes so many whose trade is on the road and in music studios. He was interesting, and Him and their legion of fans were their own movement. For a time, if you ever stood at the back of one of their sold-out shows, it looked something like Beatlemania directed by Tim Burton.

“What would you say to yourself back then?” He smiles and takes a moment before replying.

“It isn't a horror movie thing, but my oldest self has whispered to my younger self many times. You know, I could have done stuff way wiser in the sense of trying to become more successful in terms of money, listening to record companies or whatnot, because people had a damn hard time trying to figure out what we were all about. I wouldn't do anything differently because then I wouldn't be here - that's the beauty of it."

And, tracing the course of what Ville did, what he's doing now, there's little to suggest that anything has changed in terms of his resistance to the common methods of self-promotion. In a time of compulsive micro-blogging and algorithm-feeding content, the official 'Heartagram' Instagram account posts at roughly the same rate as the Vatican. Be it about the preservation of mystery or a refusal to play the game, let it never be said that he didn't do it his way.

“I’m a slow learner. I only learned about the eggplant emoji yesterday! But as for those whispers, it's something to do with the nonlinearity of time," he continues. "I had some foresight to the pandemic, though, and found myself a house with a photography studio which I turned into a music studio. It's one big room that enabled me to spread around all the weird pieces of kit from all eras - sort of my creative central. During the pandemic, that's all I did. There was no rhyme or reason, I just thought it was time to move on and do something different. It could have been my older self whispering to my younger self in the middle of the night, like, 'Now's a good time. You'll understand it better in a few years.' So yeah, it could be one of those things."

We notice a white wall in the corridor is covered in dozens of Sharpie signatures from fellow artists who’ve passed through. Some are small, while pop groups Bastille and Westlife have gone big with huge cubital letters. Unimpressed, Ville reaches for a glow-in-the-dark V sticker from his breast pocket and wryly sticks it up at the top. Always a rebel.

Was it hard to decide which direction to go in after Him?

“Musically, I'm a pair of bell-bottoms," he says. "If you want to follow hits, you're always going to be too late. Music and art is essential for my wellbeing, it's the air that I breathe - it's natural for me, but at times I've felt like a human among the lizard people, an infiltrator from another galaxy. The only thing I can do is the thing I can do."

Of course, it raises the question of how VV and indeed Neon Noir came about. That Ville has always presided over every detail of his music is no secret - there's never been a doubt as to whose vision it all was, and the ending of Him is just as important as the beginning we're here to discuss. As anyone who's seen the end of a relationship will know, the signs of impending demise can appear long before the cracks emerge, and the conclusion of Him was no different. To paraphrase a singer named BB on the prologue to VV, the thrill was gone...

"Expiration is funny when it comes to bands," he says matter-of-factly. Whatever wounds may have been inflicted, they have long since closed, and he's at ease when prompted on what went down.

"It didn't happen overnight - we'd started having trouble after Tears On Tape. Gas (Lipstick] had left the band and we found a new drummer, which was fantastic for a time, but we just couldn't find it in ourselves - a new album. We started working on ideas, but they didn't sound very good. The adult way to approach things is that if it's something you really do love, you have to love them enough to let them go when the right moment comes. The spark was no longer there, so timing-wise, it was good - I wouldn't have minded it to happen a little earlier because now I see the end of my own career in the distance. I never wanted it to feel like a job. You'll see bands touring where it quite clearly is. Something so central needs to be full of passion and laughter and joy and tears - dramatic, like a pint of milk."

Dairy funny. Have you been in touch with the guys since then, we ask?

"I haven't been in touch with Gas in more than 10 years," comes the reply. "And Linde [Mikko 'Linde' Lindström, guitarist] is quite a solitary fellow who's not a big talker anyway. But Mige [Mikko 'Mige' Paananen, bassist] was a bit of a Rick Rubin on the album. He was like this weird guru that came by every three months and gave me a stamp of approval, like, 'Yeah, this is fine.' He's one of my earliest childhood friends and one of my best mates still, so we keep in touch - that's rare. It's been 35 years or something..."

It was that relationship that provided something of the lifeline that Ville needed. He describes the feeling after Him's final show as something akin to phantom limb syndrome, where amputees report sensation in appendages that are no longer there.

"I felt like an outsider, an outcast," he says. "[I felt like] I didn't understand myself, and that the world doesn't understand me or that I didn't belong. It's a profound feeling, you know, to existentially feel that you don't understand the world or your place in it. Funnily enough, how I got through that was writing. The pandemic really painted everyone into a corner. I wasn't suicidal, but there was a tinge of depression as well, not seeing tomorrow or the worth of the day after tomorrow. People reacted in different ways. I forced myself back to music, and music gave me the gift of song once again. I was able to pull off a couple of Sabbath rip-offs, so that made me feel better. That was a big deal."

Ville will go on to animatedly recount how the loss of purpose and trajectory coupled with the worldwide shutdown was in some sense the perfect reset post-Him, and while he hit a very low ebb, it was precisely the kind of downtime he needed and hadn't had since Him's formation when he was just a teen.

"There was no scheduling, nobody to communicate with about what I was working on, so it was very unfiltered intuition, straight to tape or whatever recording medium, and I found myself having goosebumps like I'd never had before. Well..." his eyes impishly go to the ceiling, "musically, at least. I'm scared of stuff being really repetitive - it's nice to enjoy a binge watch on Netflix, but you're never gonna get the time back. That doesn't mean, 'Don't do it! But enjoy the now, take advantage of the time. That's what we'll be doing when we go on tour with the band next year, challenging myself to do lots of things and not step into a sort of zombified existence. People are so distracted…”

At the beginning of the Divine Comedy, the main character - Dante Alighieri's Pilgrim - wrote of finding himself in a dark wood halfway through the walk of life; the straight path, lost. It was a roundabout way of describing the confusion that can come with middle age, but in his mid-4os and with the deep shadows and brilliant highlights of an illustrious career in the rear-view mirror, I wonder aloud if the same could be said of the current predicament.

Dante's come up because, as is often the case with Ville, the subjects of language and literature are never far away. I ask him to elaborate on that tinge of depression he's mentioned, and he says one thing. and lets it hang in the air: "Kaiho."

Sorry?

"Kai-ho," he says again, slowly. It's a Finnish word, he explains, that defies direct translation but describes the twist of emotions he was detangling in the wake of a lifetime on the road and in the limelight. "It isn't a negative feeling. It's a bittersweet reverie. I think Finnish people find it profoundly positive as well, because it also means that you have lived, you have loved and that you experience things that actually make a difference, at least to you personally, hopefully, for the people around you."

Did you struggle?

"I had a month where I didn't get out of bed," he states.

"Around that long, at least. I was pretty worried about it. I forced myself up and back to music through conversations with mates, you know, getting my spirits up a bit, but it was a weird feeling. It's not like you can't get up. You just don't want to get up. You don't want to do anything and you can't really do anything: just super-tired, some form of post-traumatic stress after all the years. It could be that it took a while for it to hit, and it coincided with a pandemic. I wasn't able to do anything, so my body and my mind told me to get the sleep I missed back in the day. Thankfully I slept it off, but life doesn't get any easier. It's getting more complicated, more bittersweet - a tough combo. A pint half full, half empty…”

Of course, the wrought-iron melody of Neon Noir's various paeans to love and loss wouldn't seem correct if they came from a place of emotional buoyancy, but if the slump Ville describes really was just making up for lost sleep-time, he's making no bones about his desire to get back to work.

"I'm not thinking about the end, but what I do realise is that, thinking in logical terms, it's going to be really weird if I'm 60 and still in it, which means that I have less than that in terms of album cycles. It starts to get a bit scary because I've done music all my life, but then again, thinking like that makes me smile."

So how does a 46-year-old's vision of love change from, say, a 20-year-old's?

"Well, maybe we haven't had that 'one true love' in the traditional sense in Shakespearean drama: the overwhelming one that takes over everything. You can't compare relationships and you shouldn't - different times, different people, different chemistry, different reasons. Music is still at its best when it's a soundtrack to important events."

So how does Neon Noir reflect your own life?

"It's very sincere - it encapsulates things. The indecisiveness on whether I belong to the camp of Black Sabbath or Depeche Mode, the constant struggle with good and evil. Run Away From The Sun is the first song I wrote and I didn't know if I had a song in me at all, but I had to start from somewhere. I had all these ideas. I started to do it and follow my intuition. I wasn't in a rush, I had no deadlines - I didn't even know if I was going to continue, and that was the most fruitful ground, because it felt real and unadulterated by pressure…”

As new as it all is for Ville, there are some things that have remained unchanged, or perhaps present is a better word. The heartagram was, after all, the gothic bat-signal of the early 00’s onward...

"It was everything Him stood for," he says. "I just wiggled that one line and realised it has my initials, and that was the reason I called the project VV, and I liked that it had a 'V for Victory' kinda vibe to it, and visually it had the traditional aspect to it, a current iteration of the same idea. It's symbolic, because I didn't want to force myself to take a completely different route musically. I'm not an actor, and Him all happened very organically. I was finding my voice, or whatever you want to call it, through Type O and Black Sabbath back then, and I still am."

From the mood in the room it's a welcome return indeed. It seems that for the first time in a lifetime he's found his path -with the help of a little neon to hold back the darkness.

LIGHTS OUT

Ville Valo reveals the dark secrets behind new album Neon Noir

01: ECHOLOCATE YOUR LOVE

"I was enjoying a documentary on the navigational skills of bats and imagined their nocturnal courting calls bouncing eerily between the walls of the abyss in a gothic ping pong-fashion. To make sure I was communicating this musical vision clearly, I included a cowbell in the middle eight, just because whenever one can, one should."

02: RUN AWAY FROM THE SUN

"The light at the end of the tunnel can sometimes shine so bright it’s scary, and my running-away skills have been highly developed over the years by sweeping most of my issues under the carpet. There are also a few church bell samples ringing among all the 80s-inspired synth sequences, only to make sure the ever-fickle balance between good and evil doesn't err on the side of Skywalker."

03: NEON NOIR

“ A cheerful memento mori if there ever was one, and my first guitar solo on record. The working title was 'Vangelis Halen' and I think I managed to get fairly close in marrying the claustrophobic beauty of Blade Runner with the reckless abandon of VH, in a sort of funeral-car-crash-in-slow-motion-type setting.”

04: LOVELETTING

“ An ode to the setting sun and a tale of dancing on the razor's edge between holding on and letting go. A moribundle of joy in a patchouli garden, with handclaps."

05: THE FOREVERLOST

"The Finnish tourism board should definitely include ‘Nyctophile Shangri-La' as a tagline promoting Finland from now on instead of the worn-out Santanic slogans of yore. A menace-à-trois between Andrew Eldritch, Jaz Coleman and Peter Hook.”

06: BABY LACRIMARIUM

“Quite a traditional love song written by someone who takes the Poe in poetry a wee bit too seriously. A study on blocked tear ducts and The Cure."

07: SALUTE THE SANGUINE

"None of the ways out are easy, so taking the road less travelled is always the preferred method. 'If I could only say the same about the music,’ mutters the little Devil on my shoulder."

08: IN TRENODIA

"A world-building exercise at its bleakest, 'Trenodia' representing a highly modified utopia lit by every shade of blue, with a suitably melancholy soundtrack played at the wrong speed."

09: HEARTFUL OF GHOSTS

"Heartful Of Ghosts is essentially a heart-wrenching tale of paranormal love and supernatural betrayal. Sonically, this lies somewhere between a lava lamp and acupuncture... with fangs.”

10: SATURNINE SATURNÁLIA

"Saturnine Saturnalia is romantic doom and gloom at its very finest, and probably the most Sabbathian moment there is on the album. I dug out my Excalibur - the deranged fuzz pedal and vintage army flask-combo that Mige of Him built me many a moon ago - and tended to my tinnitus with gusto.”

11: ZENER SOLITAIRE

"Imagine if this was Phil Spector's ghost reinterpreting Goblin's soundtrack for Dario Argento's movie Suspiria in glorious lo-fi."

12: VERTIGO EYES

"When you meet someone whose eyes are as hypnotic as watching the Vertigo logo spinning on your turntable, you're either in love or your drink has been spiked. This is a nod to the ghosts of the past, present and future, and a suitably hallucinatory way to end the record."

#ville valo #him #his infernal majesty #neon noir #interview #interviews

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manuscripts-dontburn · 3 months ago

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Horrorstör

Author: Grady Hendrix

First published: 2014

Rating: ★★★★☆

I don´t really dip my toes into horror often, because I am a scared baby. But much like Hendrix´s My Best Friend's Exorcism this one was very readable, quick and with imagery disturbing enough to entertain me without the risk of me not being able to go to the loo a night. Might look at some big stores differently from now on though.

Silas Marner

Author: George Eliot

First published: 1861

Rating: ★★★★★

A perfect classic for any classic beginner! It has everything I love about Victorian literature. Family secrets, dirtbag relatives, treachery and redemption, the question of class and money... and it is all presented in a compact and easy-to-read short volume.

The Phone Box at the Edge of the World

Author: Laura Imai Messina

First published: 2020

Rating: ★★★★☆

A beautiful book about grief and coping with the death of those we love the most. What matters in it more than the plot itself is the meditation upon that painful subject and the many various forms it can take, as well as the suggestion of possible ways of finding the strength to go on.

Moonstone

Author: Laura Purcell

First published: 2024

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Something about this book felt very "classical" as if it had actually been written at least a hundred (or more) years ago. Laura Purcell has shown her metal as a writer and storyteller before and this, her latest offering, is not at all bad. Yet her decision to venture into the YA genre was unnecessary, stripping the story of the darkness it could have had. My problem was that very early on any reader can tell what the big mystery is and it takes way too long for the main character to come to the right conclusion. Fine but fairly predictable is the verdict.

Rozpůlený dům

Author: Alice Horáčková

First published: 2022

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

To nejsilnější, co kniha nabízí, je téma.: sudetská rodina, částečně německá, částečně česká, v tragickém období první poloviny 20. století. Bohužel tato rodina nikdy v knize nepůsobí jako rodina a na počátku je stejně tak hrozná a dysfunkční jako na konci. Jediná z postav není sympatická, což samo o sobě by nemělo být tak důležité, ale přeci jen bych čekala, že budu s někým soucítit a soucit se vůbec nedostavil. Kniha nenabízí nijak zvláštní zápletky ani zamyšlení, natož prozkoumání bolavého a dodnes kontroverzního tématu. A co především: toto není krásná literatura, ale zkušebně psaný filmový scénář. 80% textu jsou úsečné dialogy, rychle se střídající scény navíc vůbec nadávají možnost zastavit se, zamyslet, zůstat s nějakým pocitem. V módě je zjevně syrovost a "styl ledovce", ovšem ani jedno ani druhé jsem nikdy ve svých knihách ráda neměla. Rozpůlený dům si už našel své nadšené čtenáře, já se bez obav se svým názorem vydávám proti populárnímu proudu.

Ordinary Wonder Tales

Author: Emily Urquhart

First published: 2022

Rating: ★★★☆☆

I suppose the biggest hurdle for me was the fact that I had hoped these would be essays about folklore, instead, they are mostly personal recollections to which the author then draws some basic folkloric parallels. Quite well-written and definitely very intimate.

The Misadventures of an Amateur Naturalist

Author: Ceinwen Langley

First published: 2021

Rating: ★★★☆☆

A romantic and soft retelling of a famous fairy tale, a sapphic one at that too! I quite enjoyed it, though I thought it took too much time to get moving and consisted mainly of endless talking in the second half. But not bad at all.

Lessons in Chemistry

Author: Bonnie Garmus

First published: 2022

Rating: ★★★★★

A book any woman should read to remember you can be anything you want. And that we should never forget there were times we couldn´t. The tone of the book seems light throughout even when it deals with some sad, even tragic events. It is extremely easy to fall in love with the characters.

The Honey Witch

Author: Sydney J. Shields

First published: 2024

Rating: ★★★☆☆

The first half of this book is really just vibes and man, was I happily vibing. The honey, the bees, the woods, the meadows... I was eating that shit up. Then we left the cosy magic for some romance and I was OK with it for the most part, though it lacked the previous enchantment for me. But then it went all topsy turvy near the end when SPOILER the horny lesbians masturbate together only for one of them to die from it (yes, you have read that right) so we call on the magical bees who collectively sting the dead girl back to life. END OF SPOILER The action near the finale was the weakest part of the book and the ending left me unsatisfied. I am giving this book VERY generous 3 stars because I genuinely enjoyed half of it (and even that, admittedly, had some minor issues).

Carrie Soto is Back

Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid

First published: 2022

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Everything I enjoyed or loved with Evelyn, Daisy and Malibu is gone. No twists, no surprises and frankly no literary goodness as to the use of language. Character development happens in the last 10 pages. The book is predictable and really boring in its repetitiveness. It got to the point that I would skip all of the tournament descriptions and only read how they ended because I could not care less. Blows my mind this one is so popular because I find it mediocre at best. I did finish it so I guess that´s something.

The Poppy War

Author: R.F. Kuang

First published: 2018

Rating: ★★★★★

Please point me in the direction of the nearest bench on which I can sit down and scream into the void over this book.

Matrix

Author: Lauren Groff

First published: 2021

Rating: ★★★★☆

This is what I call an interesting book. The author plays with language in a way that feels very intimate but still holds a certain detachment. She has chosen a supremely fascinating woman about whom we in fact know next to nothing. The book is a fictional biography of sorts, but rather than a biography of a person it captures the existence, the growth and trials of a community of women. One of those books you fall into as if through a suddenly opened window.

#booklr #wrap up #July 2024

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call-me-oracle · 5 months ago

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dickbabs post-rebirth reading list

*note - not all of these issues feature dickbabs together, some are just laments about the current situation of their relationship or them working as a team!

current ongoings

nightwing (2016-): issue #3, #10, #15, #44-47, #50-51, #54, #57-58, #68, #72-75, #77-; annual #1, annual #2, annual 2021, annual 2022, annual 2024

detective comics (2016-): issue #1047-1051, #1053-1058

batman (2016-): issue #99, #127-129, #136-138, #145-146, #148

batman: the brave and the bold (2023-): issue #4, #13

titans (2023-): issue #1-2, #6-7

catwoman (2018-): issue #45

former ongoings

batgirl (2016-2020): issue #7, #9, #14-17, #25, #27-28, #39, #44, #50

batgirls (2021-2022): issue #2-3, #7-8, #19, #12

batman: urban legends (2021-2023): issue #2, #6, #9, #22-23

the flash (2016-2023): issue #787

superman: son of kal-el (2021-2022): issue #10

limited series

dc vs vampires (2021-2022): issue #2-8, #10, #12

dark crisis on infinite earths (2022): issue #3

titans: beast world: issue #1-6

the boy wonder (2024): issue #1

event tie-ins

dc vs vampires: hunters: issue #1

titans: beast world tour - gotham: issue #1

knight terrors: nightwing: issue #1-2

anthology issues

dark nights: death metal - the last stories of the dc universe: issue #1

dc's how to lose a guy gardner in 10 days: issue #1

#it's done!!!!!#hopefully it is good lmao #aside from their solos #i don't really remember instances of them being together prior to 2020 #when they officially start dating again #but i could be wrong!#so let me know if i am #this really does take you through the slow burn though #if you click on it the link at the top takes you to a locg reading list #if you prefer it organized better that way #but it's not as clean as it is in this post #barbara gordon #dick grayson #dickbabs #dickbabs reading list #dc comics

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weeklyriddler · 2 years ago

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Daily Riddler 5/5

Dark Nights; Death metal (2020-2021) The riddler (with long hair!)

#dark nights death metal #the riddler #dc riddler #the batman #edward nygma #batman #daily riddler

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a-silent-symphony · 2 years ago

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Nightwish's Floor Jansen: "Life is short. Time is not endless"

Floor Jansen opens up on her battle with breast cancer, going solo and what we can expect from the next Nightwish album

It’s Friday April 22, 2022 at Nokia Arena in Tampere, Finland. Fifteen thousand Nightwish fans await a much-delayed live taste of their heroes’ ninth album, Human. :II: Nature., released as the world shut down in 2020. Anticipation is high. The stage will soon be engulfed in enough fire to obliterate a small village. Aside from a handful of dates in Finland in 2021, this is Nightwish’s first full-scale show in more than three years.

Backstage, Floor Jansen feels like death. In her stage armour she looks fearsome – a tattooed Boudica for the modern age. Such a gig wouldn’t normally faze her. Floor, 41,has been fronting metal bands since she was 16. But just now she’s come down with a virulent stomach flu at the worst possible time, and she’s wondering how the hell she’ll get through the next two hours onstage.

“It was unlike anything I’ve ever done,” she says of the stomach flu that almost derailed that post-Covid comeback. “I mean, you get sick now and then, but this was brutal. I don’t know what kind of virus I picked up, but it was a very violent one. I was up all night, and then I still had to travel from Berlin to Tampere. It was horrible.” She shrugs. “But yeah, what can you do?”

It’s not hard to see why Floor gets called a ‘powerhouse’. Part opera singer, several parts rock star – with the dynamism of both – she exudes indestructibility. If Bruce Dickinson had a daughter with Xena: Warrior Princess, it would have been Floor. But there are other sides to her: different personas that reveal a more complex, interesting picture of a ‘powerhouse’ lead singer.

There’s the animal-loving homebody. The thrillseeker. The proud vegetarian. The whiskey drinker. The metal icon with a solo pop album on the way. The Highly Sensitive Person, whose hyper-stimulated sense of the world shines through her performances. The person who, just three weeks before headlining Wembley Arena with Nightwish, underwent surgery for breast cancer.

“I’m always myself,” she summarises, simply. “So whether I run around in jeans fixing a fence, or ride my horse, or go onstage in warrior outfits… it’s all the same. It’s just a different side, as you can see.”

We meet Floor over Zoom in December, as she wrestles with dodgy wi-fi backstage in Milan. “Is it noisy for you, in the background?” she asks in perturbed Dutch tones. “It’s basically one big open box here…” Dark-eyed and slightly frazzled in a grey hoodie, Floor has a business-like streak that softens as talk turns to things like her solo music, her bandmates and the cigars she enjoys with her husband, Sabaton drummer Hannes Van Dahl.

On another day she might have come in from feeding the horses at her rural property on Sweden’s west coast. You wouldn’t fuck with her, but you’d gladly go for a drink with her. Out on the road with Nightwish, there’s a decent amount of the latter. The band “wobble” around Christmas markets drinking gl��hwein. They rate vegetarian food in Indian restaurants as part of a longstanding curry club. The shows themselves have been jubilant affairs.

“Last night we were surprised with some bottles of champagne,” she grins, “which we then drank, and became very happy…”

It’s all so far removed from lingering notions of Nightwish as some sort of dictatorship or soap opera, with singers driven away by its founder’s maniacal demands. They seem like friends – as in, actual friends.

“It’s absolute genuine fun,” she nods. “We’ve always had that. And there are always ups and downs; it’s like a big marriage. But we’ve been longing for this tour a lot. Especially after the pandemic, we don’t take it for granted at all.”

For Floor, the isolation of lockdown reinforced her ties to the band, but it also kickstarted her solo work. She’d begun to think of it in 2019, following an appearance on Dutch TV show Beste Zangers (‘Best Singers’), but she was still very much a band person, with a new Nightwish album cycle around the corner. Come March 2020, for the first time in her career, she found herself separated from that group mentality.

She spent time with her husband and daughter, now five. She grew vegetables and looked after her horses, cats and enormous Irish wolfhound. She worked on her online profile, communicating with her fans on a regular, down-to-earth level. At the same time, she began working with collaborators on solo material. An alternative, poppier sound started to brew.

In spring 2022 she appeared on Germany’s Beste Zangers equivalent, Sing Meinen Song, for which she sang in German (one of the four languages she speaks in addition to Dutch, English and Swedish). Gradually, a standalone Floor Jansen was evolving.

“My desire from the get-go was to find a sound that fits with me, not something created around me. But how do you do that? So I used up a large part of the pandemic in a trial-and-error search for this sound.”

It wasn’t easy. Ten years of bringing Tuomas Holopainen’s visions to life had left her with phenomenal vocal skills, but limited songwriting practice. Her first ideas, she says, “weren’t that great”.

“I’ve done it [songwriting], but I haven’t been doing much in the last 10 years,” she admits. “Plus I’m in a band with someone like Tuomas. It makes me feel very small, like, ‘What do I have to add to a world full of music?’ So from that insecurity I had to find my way and accept that I am more limited, and that I have different ideas.”

Teaming up with Dutch producer Gordon Groothedde (Snoop Dogg; Katie Melua; Floor’s previous band, After Forever) was a turning point. The first song they wrote together was Fire. A darkly atmospheric, orchestral swirl of intelligent modern pop, with the grandeur of Florence & The Machine’s cover of 1986 dance hit You’ve Got The Love, it ignited Floor’s confidence as a creator in her own right.

“I have a really hard time with love songs,” she says. “I know the majority of pop music is about love songs, and that’s also why I find it boring to listen to. So I wanted to create something that still has a message.”

Accordingly, her solo album, Paragon, shuns frothy clichés in favour of meatier subjects. Fire is about returning to life after lockdown. One song, Invincible, was written for the injured war veterans at Prince Harry’s Invictus Games – originally planned to take place in 2020 in the Hague until the pandemic got in the way.

“It’s inspired by the idea of being physically or mentally wounded, after you’ve just given everything you have,” she explains, “and something that’s left of you has to pick up life, and recover from something that you never really wanted to recover from. I want to raise awareness of the fact that this happens so incredibly often, but also to empower them. Like, ‘You already went through Hell, now you’re on your way back, you are invincible.’”

It’s hard to hear this story now without thinking of Floor’s recent health issues. Diagnosed in October 2022 at a routine mammogram screening, her breast cancer came as a total shock – two weeks before Nightwish were due to fly to South America.

“They [the doctors] said, ‘We want you to come back.’ And the thing I thought, in my naïve brain, was, ‘Oh, they fucked up something with the pictures.’ Never, ‘Oh, they found something.’” She shakes her head. “Not a single moment. Until I was there.”

Surgery was planned for the day after they came home. Until then, she says, the intense business of touring Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico proved a good distraction. The pace of it all was brutal but helpful, and reading similar stories from her fans made her feel less alone – “But at the same time, it’s an overwhelming awareness of how many people actually got this fucking disease."

“I put my emotions into the music,” she reasons, “and also had really wonderful conversations within the band, crew, management, everyone has really been there for me. It’s very tough to do it all that fast, but at the same time it helped because I didn’t have to walk around with thoughts of it too long. Because as soon as you know you have a tumour in your body, the only thing you can think of is ‘get it out’. The whole mental aspect of a cancer diagnosis is shit.”

Back at home, she had three weeks after her operation before heading out in Europe and the UK. Scarred, bruised and exhausted, she was grateful for the support of her family.

“Jesus, how I underestimated it,” she half-laughs, of the recovery process. “I was jet-lagged, I barely slept for nights after the surgery because my system was completely upside-down, you get morphine… So everyone’s been really having my back in this.”

Just a couple of days before the Wembley gig, she learned that the operation was successful. It was both a relief and a wake-up call. In Sweden, mammogram screenings start for women at the age of 40. In the Netherlands, her birthplace –and in the UK – it’s 50. Now looked up to by many, as a public figure as well as a musician, she’s determined to persuade more women to go for their scans.

“On a purely personal level it’s a bit weird, because I’m just me,” she says, of her role-model status. “But from this position, I have the power to make a difference every now and then. I wanted to make sure it has this function by saying, ‘Go and get your mammogram done.’ If I had stayed in the Netherlands, this entire thing would have gone undetected. It was so small when they took it out, but it was growing, you know? I’m very lucky.”

Cancer casts a pervasive shadow, even when it’s caught quickly. For Floor, who (when we speak to her) still has three weeks of radiation therapy to complete, it’s realigned her priorities. “It’s not like I think ‘I’m gonna die’ all the time,” she explains, “but I realise how life is short. Time is not endless. We have it now.”

To that end, Floor is making the most of 2023. After her radiotherapy is finally over, she’ll join Nightwish for 70000Tons Of Metal in the Bahamas. Festival shows will follow. In the summer the band will head to the Röskö campsite in Kitee, Finland, to record the next Nightwish album (which will be released at some point in 2024).

Part three of a trilogy that began with Endless Forms Most Beautiful and continued through Human. :II: Nature., the new album will return to themes concerning our planet and our mortality. Sonically, Floor suggests, we can expect aheavy palette.

“I would say it’s a pretty heavy album,” she muses, “but once again, it’s the multicolour diversity that is Nightwish. It’s all there. It’s going to once again take you by the hand through beautiful stories – whether they are stories from this Earth or stories about this Earth. They’re beautiful.”

Creatively, Nightwish is still Tuomas’s brainchild, though there’s a sense of collaboration around this record. Armed with his demos, the band have been working up different parts and exchanging ideas on tour – in hotel rooms and dressing rooms across the world. For Floor, this has been a happy arrangement.

“I think Tuomas has a unique view on the world and has a unique way of putting that into words,” she says, “and I think he’s outdone himself on that end once again. And also visually, the ideas that are bubbling are going to be of a next level. So yeah, there’s lots to look forward to.”

Meanwhile, along with the release of Paragon, she has solo gigs planned in Europe. “And of course it would be wonderful to go to the UK,” she adds, “we are working on that as well.”

If all goes to plan, Floor Jansen could be a name that reaches well beyond metal circles – paving the way for a new kind of pop star with a darker heart. Once again the ‘powerhouse’ label feels apt, with all the truths and misconceptions that come with it.

“Power is often connected to, especially women…” she searches for the words, “…it’s like, ‘powerful women are bitches’, you know? Maybe that’s the misconception of the century. But a powerful woman is also a woman who is intouch withher emotions, and one who can have absolute soft sides and embrace them. The idea that high sensitivity would be a weakness? That is actually the absolute misperception.

“And that goes for men, too: for men to be in touch with their feelings and to be able to communicate them… that is a bigger strength than [makes growling, macho noise]. That’s going to bring us a whole lot further.”

Between travels, Floor will recharge at home in the Swedish countryside. On cold evenings, she and Hannes sometimes retreat to their grillhouse, light the fire and relax over single malts and a cigar – things that bonded them when they first met on tour with Iced Earth. Small connections between worlds.

“I can say that my happiest place is home, but that’s not true because after half a year I’ll claw up the walls,” she laughs. “I can say it’s on tour, but after a month I really want to go home. I can say it’s onstage, but then putting my daughter to bed is equally amazing at times. The ultimate thing is to have the luxury of both.”

#Nightwish #floor jansen #2023 interviews #metal hammer

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odinsson2021 · 2 years ago

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Here's the Playlist of my Tonight's Show!

I hope you liked it!

Stormwitch-Rondo ala Turca-Eye of the Storm-1989-(Hot Blood Records)

Kansas-Carry on Wayward Son-Leftoverture-1976-(CBS Records)

Journey-Wheel in the Sky-Infinity-1978-(CBS Records)

Foreigner-Hot Blooded-Double Vision-1978-(Atlantic Records)

Mats Karlsson-Beautiful Life-Mood Elevator-30.06.2023-(MK Music)

Poison-Valley of lost Souls-Flesh&Blood-1990-(Capitol Records)

Phil Campbell and the Bastard Sons-Bite my Tongue-We're the Bastards-2020-(Nuclear Blast Records)

The Pretty Reckless-Death by Rock ‘n’ Roll-Death by Rock ‘n’ Roll-2021-(Century Media Records)

The New Roses-Can't stop Rock ‘n’ Roll-Nothing but Wild-2019-(Napalm Records)

Night Ranger-White Knuckle Ride-Hole in the Sun-2007-(Frontiers Records)

Skew Siskin-Life's a Bitch-What the Hell-1999-(Steamhammer Records)

Skid Row-Youth gone wild-Skid Row-1989-(Atlantic Records)

Slash feat. Myles Kennedy&The Conspirators-April Fool-4-2022-(Snakepit Records)

Slaughter-Reach for the Sky-The Wild Life-1992-(Chrysalis Records)

Tyketto-Sail Away-Don't come Easy-1991-(Geffen Records)

Gloryhammer-Holy Flaming Hammer of Unholy Cosmic Frost-Return to the Kingdom of Fife-02.06.2023-(Napalm Records)

Helloween-Eagle fly free-Keeper of the Seven Keys Pt. II-1988-(Noise Records)

Primal Fear-I am Alive-Metal Commando-2020-(Nuclear Blast Records)

Frozen Land-King's a Bitch-Out of the Dark-16.06.2023-(Massacre Records)

Helstar-Conquest-Remnants of War-1986-(Noise Records)

Herman Frank-Eye of the Storm-Two for a Lie-2021-(AFM Records)

Savage Grace-Barbarians at the Gate-Sign of the Cross-05.05.2023-(Massacre Records)

Night Legion-The Hound of Baskerville-Fight or Fall-30.06.2023-(Massacre Records)

Hellryder-Sacrifice in Paradise-The Devil is a Gambler-2021-(Rock of Angels Records)

Burning Witches-World on Fire-The Dark Tower-05.05.2023-(Napalm Records)

D.C. Cooper-Dream-D.C. Cooper-1999-(SPV Records)

High Tension-Hot Legs-Under Tension-1986-(Hot Blood Records)

Metal Church-The Dark-The Dark-1986-(Elektra Records)

Blind Guardian-Mr. Sandman(Single)-1996-(Virgin Records)

#hard rock party #hard rock #youtube #rockchicks radio #rock #rock of ages #rock music #rock n roll #rock party #classic rock #70s rock #blues rock #garage rock #heavy metal #metal music #progressive metal #thrash metal #metal #death metal

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usagirotten · 2 years ago

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After The Dark Crisis Event This Is The New DC Multiverse

Another Crisis has come and gone, and the DCU is altered because of it. The events of Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths remade DC's infinite multiverse concept, sending out ripples across realities and causing disturbances all along the Divine Continuum. Fortunately, Crisis vet Barry Allen is here to make sure all is well, and he’s bringing two DC vets along to help. This week DC Comics will publish Dark Crisis: Big Bang, a new one-shot derived from the Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths event in the hand with a script by Mark Waid and drawings by Dan Jurgens with Norm Rapmund, will try to paint the panorama of the new DC Multiverse. As you will remember in Dark Crisis, the Multiverse was recovered after the Omniverse was the reigning concept after the end of Dark Nights: Death Metal. In this sense, with a frame that deals with the search for the Anti-Monitor by Barry Allen / The Flash, Dark Crisis: Big Bang will show us how the new DC Comics Multiverse was after the fight with Pariah. Dark Crisis is the third act of a larger story that Williamson's been building since DC relaunched its entire superhero line in the wake of the conclusion of 2020’s Dark Nights: Death Metal. In the closing pages of that series (by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo) the fictional DC Universe was restored to a condition it hadn’t enjoyed since the mid-'198'0s, as the multiverse was once again recreated, with all continuity published by the company restored in some form or another to canon.

Barry Allen details all the Earths he has found so far and they include everything from worlds based on old comics to Earth 33, which would be our world. Below you can see the list that includes some of the comics that show those Lands: - Earth 0 - Described by Barry Allen as his Earth and home of the Justice League, it is apparently the main universe of the current DC Comics continuity - Earth 1 - This would be the Earth from titles like Superman: Earth One and is described as a world with young variants of the Justice League that are just beginning to operate as heroes. - Earth 2 - The world of the Justice Society. The reference material cited is The New 52 - Earth 3 - This is the Earth of the Crime Syndicate. - Earth 4 - Described by the Flash as a world with variants of the Question, Blue Beetle, and Captain Atom. The reference comic is Multiverse: Paxamericana. - Earth 5 - Here are the Shazam Family variants as in Multiversity: Thunderworld Adventures. - Earth 6 - This is the world with the Justice League variants of Earth 0 that correspond to the version of the DC Universe that Stan Lee (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four) devised in Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating the DC Universe . - Earth 7 - This was Thunderer's Earth, but it was destroyed. Reference comic Multiversity #1. - Earth 8 - The world known as Angor is identified as the home of The Retaliators (characters based on the Avengers from Marvel Comics) - Earth 9- The world of The Tangent Heroes, the characters from DC's Tangent Comics (1997) label. - Earth 10 - The home of The Freedom Fighters - Earth 11 – The world where variants that are of opposite genders to the heroes and villains of Earth 0 inhabit. - Earth 12 - This is the futuristic Earth from Batman Beyond. - Earth 13 - Barry Allen describes this world as an Earth based more on magic than science. It is the home of Superdemon. - Earth 14 - The home of the defunct Justice League assassins seen in Superman #15 (2017). - Earth 15 - Here is The Cosmic Grail - Earth 16 - The home of the famous sideckicks known as The Just (seen in Multiversity The Just) - Earth 17- A world destroyed by nuclear war in 1986. It is the home of The Atomic Knights. - Earth 18 - The fall of The Justice Riders, a frozen world in the Old West. - Earth 19 - The world of Gotham by Gaslight, described by Barry Allen as the world of "steampunk" heroes. - Earth 20 - Home of The Society of Super-Heroes and their pulp magazine-style adventures. - Earth 21 - The world of JLA: The New Frontier, where the Justice League was created during the space race. - Earth 22- This is the Earth from Kingdom Come. - Earth 23- The Earth of Calvin Ellis, President Superman. - Earth 24 - The world of DC Comics: Bombshells with heroines fighting in World War II. - Earth 25- This is where Tom Strong and his friends live - Earth 26 - The World of The Zoo Crew - Earth 27- A world where the Justice League exists but its members are dinosaurs (seen in Jurassic League ) - Earth 28- A world where heroes fight using mechanized suits (seen in DC Mech ) - Earth 29- The Bizarroverse - Earth 30 - Superman's World: Red Son - Earth 31 - This is the home of Leatherwing and the pirate heroes from Detective Comics Annual #7 (1994) - Earth 32 - Defined by Flash as a world with "random combinations of the heroes of Earth 0". The comic cited as a reference is Batman: In Darkest Knight, the 1994 comic where Bruce Wayne becomes Green Lantern. - Earth 33 - Apparently this is our world, where you are reading this note and attentive to what will happen with Dark Crisis because Earth 33 is "the world where superheroes are fictional characters." Flash #179 (1968) is cited as a reference. - Earth 34 - The world of The Light Brigade. - Earth 35 - The world of The Super Americans. - Earth 36-This is where Optiman and his friends live. - Earth 37 - "A dark world of rapid technological advances" as in Batman: Thrillkiller (1997). - Earth 38 - This is the Earth from Superman & Batman: Generations, featuring multi-generational and older versions of the Earth 0 heroes. - Earth 39 - The world of Agents of Wonder. - Earth 40 - The Earth of the evil versions of The Society of Super-Heroes (from Earth 20). - Earth 41 - Here live Spore, Dino-Cop and Nightcracker. - Earth 42 - "Chibi" versions of the Earth 0 characters. - Earth 43 - Vampire versions of the Justice League as in Batman & Dracula: Red Rain (1991). - Earth 44 - Robotic versions of the Justice League. - Earth 45 - The world of the artificers of Superdoomsday. - Earth 46 - Described as home to "a young Batman with a unique and unrecognizable rogues' gallery). It is the world where Batman: The Gargoyle of Gotham takes place. - Earth 47 - The home of The Love Syndicate of Dreamworld and The Inferior Five - Earth 48 - The world of The Forerunners - Earth 49 - The Land of Injustice (2013) - Earth 50 - A world ruled by the tyrannical Lords of Justice. - Earth 51 - The world of Kamandi, where an "accelerated timeline" caused a Great Disaster. - Earth 52 - The home of the heroes known as The Primate Legion. - Earth 54 - Here lives Tommy Tomorrow, a world of humanity arrived on Mars in 1960. - Earth 55 - The world of DCeased with the virus that turned the heroes and villains of that Earth into zombies (Earth 0 similes). - Earth 59 - The Flash defines it as "the first known parallel Earth", the home of Wonder Woman Tara Terruna seen in Wonder Woman #59 (1953) - Earth-63 —Overrun with vampire counterparts of Earth-0 heroes (DC vs Vampires) - Earth-66 —Batman and Robin face exceptionally benign villains (Batman '66) - Earth-93 —The Dakotaverse (Icon #1 et al.) - Earth-96 —Teenage students Batgal, Bumblebee, Supergirl, Zatanna, and others (DC Super Hero Girls et al.) - Earth-98 —Home of Green Lantern Tai Pham (Green Lantern: Legacy) - Earth-100 —Home to Teen Titans Raven Roth, Garfield Logan, Damian Wayne, and others (Teen Titans: Raven et al.) - Earth-118 —Medieval versions of Earth-0 heroes (Dark Knights of Steel) - Earth-124 —Home to Wonder Woman. Wonder Girl, and Wonder Tot (Wonder Woman v1 #124) - Earth-148 —Earth-0 counterpart heroes are villains and vice versa (World's Finest Comics v1 # 148 et al.) - Earth-162 —Superman and later, Batman divided into two separate beings (Superman v1 #162) - Earth-183 —Superman raised by apes (Superboy #183 et al.) - Earth-216 —Home of Superman. Jr. and Batman, Jr. (World's Finest Comics #215, et al.) - Earth-387 —No divergences in history other than every inhabitant is a werewolf (Adventure Comics #387) - Earth-789 —Superman and Supergirl are Earth's only powered heroes; Batman's parents killed by the joker. (Superman '78, Batman '89) - Earth-898 —A Justice League without a Superman (JLA: The Nail) - Earth-1956 —A teenage Superman (Superboy) and his dog, Krypto, are Earth's first super-heroes; later, home of the Super Friends - Earth-1996 —Mysterious "amalgamated" (?) heroes; requires further investigation? - Earth-2020 —Three generations of Supermen (Superman v1 #354 et al.) Read the full article

#cómics #DarkCrisis #dccomics #DCMultiverse #InfiniteEarths

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