#if DC editors were doing their jobs

[zahri-melitor]

Yeah no I'm still not cool with the pet situation. A character's pet is for the animal's life, not for [one emotional scene].

Titus makes sense. There have been several generations of Ace the Bat-Hound over the decades. There was at least one when Dick was Robin. There's another when Tim is a young Robin, back in Knightfall era (he hid out in the tunnels with Harold while JPV was Azbats!)

Bruce, trying to win Damian's affection and teach him how to connect and bond with others, to give him a responsibility and someone who will love him unconditionally, getting Damian a dog? Makes 100% sense. He clearly thinks kids should have a dog, they're set up to have a dog, they're familiar with having a dog, particularly large working breeds that protect the property.

And Tomasi & Gleason use Titus several times, in several different comics in the run, for emotional beats.

Alfred the Cat exists entirely for the emotional beat of Alfred giving Damian a cat that swipes at him, then Damian in the next comic 'winning' the cat's affection while feeding him and playing with him, showing as a character the cat (and by parallel Damian) has changed in his time at the Manor. I get the comparison. It's cute, but I don't see the point in doing this immediately before killing Damian, particularly when Titus, who was established earlier, is right there in the scene and doing...nothing.

A similar moment of Damian appearing like a child playing with his puppy and looking innocent could have occurred, and it would feel less like Damian's affection is hoarding and transitive - he can only care about his latest animal, the earlier ones are present but forgotten in the glee for more and newer pets.

Batcow is completely superfluous beyond being a visual joke. Nothing about her holds up in any way.

"Sure, you can keep the cow," says Bruce through his gritted teeth, because he wants his son to like him and not run back to Talia. Despite that being a plot point well established as not likely to happen, as we've been over it before during Reborn and Damian rejected Talia and the League of Assassins, and we're at the start of a story where Damian's going to choose to go to his mother to save Gotham while the rest of the family are desperately trying to protect him from having to face her, because they're worried she'll kill him/end the world.

"Sure, we can have a cow living in the Cave. It's not like we know any farmers with superstrength and flight who could take a meat-raised cow off our hands and care for it in better circumstances, who you could still visit occasionally."

[hannibalismos-jaaneman]

what is the point of putting out the final cut before the director's cut like why y'all trying to hang the editors for the producers' crimes lmao.

[garkgatiss]

{{esquivalience}}, The Auteur, and Doctor Who the TV Show

alright so this novella.

First, its provenance: I was googling the Twist at the End song last week because it's catchy as hell. I ended up on the Tardis wiki and realized that there was a song by the exact same name that appeared in a licensed DWU novella that was published April 9th. As in, last month. Which is weird. It's hard to say how weird, but given the timing, it either has to be a) pure coincidence (lol), b) someone who worked on the show abusing their advance knowledge of plot details for personal gain, or c) intentional coordination between showrunner and novella-writer, a la Joe Lidster writing John Watson’s blog for BBC Sherlock.

The likelihood of (a) is decreasing by the week. I feel like I have to entertain the idea of (b) happening, but it's hard to square why a DWU-writing supernerd who is also involved somehow with the production of the show would risk a lifetime of blackballing from DW for a bit of cheap promotion for their extended-universe tie-in novella. I am so sorry to be saying this, but I think (c) might actually have legs.

The novella's title is {{esquivalience}}, which is a fake word invented in real life by editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. The invented word means "deliberate shirking of one's official duties", and it was added to the dictionary to protect the copyright of the electronic version. In S9, Face the Raven showed us a “trap street", i.e. a fake street drawn on a map by a mapmaker to identify any copyright infringement of said map -- a dictionary entry for a word made up by the dictionary editors operates similarly as a copy-trap. The definition is apt for a copy-trap as well, because anyone illicitly copying a dictionary is themselves shirking a job they ought to be doing themselves... it's clever, it's very fun, we're off to a great start.

{{a crash course in esquivalience below the cut}}

THE STORY:

The unnamed protagonist applies for a custodial job at this library that serves basically as a databank for the history of everything in the universe. If a book about something is thrown away, that something ceases to have ever existed. Exhibit A: Protagonist works in the Dead & Dying Language Department. They throw away The Book of Belgian Dutch, and a) a couple coworkers with Belgian Dutch heritage either disappear or get completely different names/family trees, and also b) everyone quickly forgets that Belgian Dutch was ever a thing to begin with.

The librarians cover for this accidental deletion of reality by copying/fudging a new book on "Belgian Gerench", their name for what they replace Belgian Dutch with. They try to catch most of the people who were deleted, bring them back, and fit them into that new language/culture/ethnicity bucket they just made up.

(The narration explains that because both Belgian and Dutch still exist separately as concepts, there aren't too many knock-on effects in terms of loanwords in other languages that needed to be modified/recovered. It also explains that time-traveling back to make an exact copy of The Book of Belgian Dutch wouldn't work because of the universe's copyright laws or something.)

Protag then comes after the head of their department, the Head Dictionary Contributor, or Head DC. They find him in a hidden room called the Internal Reference Room. Instead of languages, the books here hold the life stories of every employee, which auto-update as the person lives their life, but can also be edited or destroyed to alter that person's reality. Protag sits down with the Head DC's lifebook and starts adding and erasing things.

It turns out that Head DC knows how wrong editing these books can go from personal experience. Years ago, wanting to leave his mark on the universe, the Head DC chose to add his own copy-trap into The Book of Dutch -- the fake word "esquivalience". This action seemingly created the concept of cutting corners at your job, leading to the insufficient vetting of Protag for this job and therefore their subsequent hiring, which results in Head DC's eventual death.

Head DC pleads with Protag for his life, but Protag is undeterred. They finally tear out the final page in Head DC's book, which kills him. Protag then writes themselves in as Head DC. Settling into their new role, they turn their attention to The Book of English (8th to 25th Century). They first look up the dictionary entry for “esquivalience”, which says it came to English from Dutch, and then flips to the entries for “ravel" and “unravel”, described as contranyms from Dutch roots, both “meaning variably to tangle or to fray”.

This is the central story of the novella. There is also a Prelude and Postlude that describe the lives of two young men, first in a reality in which they never meet, and then in a reality in which they do meet and fall in love (their meeting is enabled by one of them skivving off work in time to make it to see the movie where they first meet -- esquivalience!)

Just before the Postlude, there is also printed the lyrics to a song (see below), and an excerpt from The Book of English, this volume covering the 4th to 5th billionth centuries of history. This excerpt again gives the definition of “unravel”, but refers the reader to an appendix for the full list of definition, and notes they are “largely in usage as reference to Unravel, The” and “N.B. to be used with extreme care and caution”.

NOVELLA-SHOW CONNECTIONS:

Mavity [Wild Blue Yonder]: Mavity happened all the way back in Wild Blue Yonder, so it's not necessarily surprising to see it in a novella published in April 9, 2024, but there's a whole scene establishing that the M has seemingly replaced the G in all Romance languages, while Domhantarraingt in Irish-Gaelic is unaffected.

Rope [The Church on Ruby Road]: We're all learning the vocabulary of rope now! The Unravel is what the novella calls the meta-historical revisions caused by making edits to the books. There are also rope/weaving metaphors everywhere. Again, the rope themes of the TV show predate the April 9 novella just far enough that in theory it would have been possible for the novella to have taken inspiration from the 2023 Christmas Special. Except. The wiki page for The Unravel credits ownership of the concept to Jamie H. Cowan, the author of the novella. Not just that, but The Unravel was used – with credit to Jamie – in a DWU short story collection published December 26, 2023 – the day after The Church on Ruby Road aired.

Dot and Bubble [Dot and Bubble] : At this point, “Dot and Bubble” is a contextless episode title to me, first announced on March 31. In the novella, we get this:

The Twist At The End [The Devil’s Chord] : Just before the novella's Postlude, there are the lyrics to a song called “The Twist At The End”. Just listed there, no context, like an azlyrics.com entry. They are not the same lyrics as the song in The Devil's Chord, but then, meta-historical revision would kind of be the point, wouldn't it? There's just this sentence to connect it to anything happening in the narration: "Somewhere, in the far distance, as ______ continued to erase, an old 1960s Earth tune began to play."

EDITED TO ADD: @corallapis has pointed out to me that not only did the existence of the song "Twist at the End" by John Smith and the Common Men leak, but the novella's author tweeted about it in December 2023.

The Chumerian languages of the planet B’llauit, for instance, needed much consideration. Particularly Krulvan. There was still a great deal of work to be done in compiling the post-technoweb aspects of Krulvan. Like how most emotional words and phrases contracted more and more, until finally, they were little more than abbreviations. The old dot-and-bubble effect.

A parent’s love was no longer expressed post-technoweb as “Kal-at lur amoi”, but instead as merely “KLA”. Which needed to be carefully distinguished in the relevant encyclopedia from another abbreviated Krulvan phrase “Kal’ati Lepr’en Acrumpsal” – which was something rather equivalent to the expletives of other languages like “D’Arvit”, or “Bleno”.

It's only a brief mention in the book, so it's possible in theory that it was added after the episode titles were released, or even after the novella’s publication (Amazon allows post-publication changes up to 10% of the text, and it’s not possible to track those changes). I’ve included the second paragraph because it’s interesting that the example they’ve given is the word for a parent’s love, which we can see as a running theme in this season of DW (though Moffat has said before that the only thing he writes about is a parent’s love, so who knows).

Not the strongest evidence of two-way coordination, but we may learn more when the episode airs.

Dutch [Space Babies, Boom]: Yeah, as in, the Dutch language. The words “spoor” & “smelt” both get a "oo, good word!" callout, spoor in Space Babies and smelt in Boom. These words both have Dutch roots. Splice, the daughter's name in Boom, is not only from a Dutch root, but also means the joining two pieces of rope. I read this novella just before Boom dropped on Disney+, so I can personally confirm that this is not a post-hoc addition to the novella. It hardly could have been anyway, this element is much more integral to the novella’s narrative than any of the other pieces.

The Auteur

This is where this all becomes relevant to the “Doctor Who is a TV Show” theory.

While the Protag is shredding the Head DC’s book, the Head DC is in the room, and what follows is an extremely meta narrative-aware pre-death monologue from the Head DC. He's pleading with Protag to stop changing things in his book, but he also refers to an "It" whose power surpasses them both.

He held eye contact with them as they looked up, “You didn’t pick up Belgian Dutch by chance. It’s how it plays. In weaving coincidences.”

“Just stop reading. Stop changing things. Stop, and we can be spared. Be free! If you keep going, then it will get what it wants. It is a happening [sic]. Out there, and in here in the basement. Everywhere. It will win if you keep going.”

“One day, you’ll make the same mistakes. Goddamn, you will. Because it’s all already written. It has already written it all. The paths, the choices. Rewrites, erasures, and even the contradictions. If you don't just... stop... it will... Unravel us all."

The "It" in question is presumably the author. Like an author writing a story, "It" plays by weaving coincidences, "It" gets what it wants when we keep reading, "It" has already written everything.

The Head DC mentions a special disposal chute, which had recently appeared as if by magic, which enabled Protag’s destruction of Belgian Dutch. Head DC’s references to this “It” suggest that his decision to create a word meaning cutting corners caused his eventual death, not by inventing the concept of cutting corners, but by creating a set-up that the Auteur, a godlike being that cares only for the rules of narrative, was compelled to write a satisfying follow-through for. The Auteur changed reality in order to weave a narratively-satisfying coincidence.

The Auteur is a character from the DW-spinoff series Faction Paradox. The creator of the Faction Paradox universe describes it as “on the surface an SF universe, but it works on the same principles as traditional folklore.”

I am but a humble Moffat scholar, so explaining the character of The Auteur is immediately getting into lore that I cannot even begin to decipher.

But it seems plausible that in the show we’re dealing with a godlike being, someone along the lines of Maestro or the Toymaker, but instead of caring only for the rules of play, cares only for the rules of narrative.

And this being, The Auteur, is altering reality and creating the narratively-satisfying coincidences in 14’s and 15’s timelines, possibly starting all the way back with the coincidence of 14 regenerating as David Tennant and immediately bumping into Donna Noble.

And it seems plausible that this season was created in cooperation with these DWU authors to whom concepts like The Auteur and The Unravel are licenced, and the novella is a tie-in text full of references to the current season to lead savvy superfans on a merry chase that foreshadows the season’s big bad.

Because I... don't really have another explanation for the existence of this novella at this point.

[mallas28]

Why Mechanical suit makes no sense in MHA ending? I will try to explain.

Many in fandom can't get over messed up ending of MHA. I got messages from people who are upset. And i can get their feeling. In this post i will try to explain why Mechanical suit given by All Might in the end doesn't make sense at all. Lets get started.

1. Ruined message of all manga. During all manga narration show us that hero could be everybody and id doesn't matter what quirk you have or your status. All you need is ure hard and hardworking. 430 chapter totally ruined that. Telling us that unless you have strong quirk or millionare friends you will be a loser with no friends and job where you unhappy (remember how in 430 chapter Izuku still have sad face and look unhappy). More interesting is that Izuku doesn't do anything to be a hero without a quirk ( Hello spinoff with a better plot). He just walks with sad face with no friends no goal in life. Until SUDDENLY All Might appears and give him a suit out of nowhere. Do you get what i am trying to say? OFA Izuku earned and it was shown in manga. Mechanical suit Izuku doesn't earn at all. He doesn't even try to be a hero without quirk.

Also, Izuku looks like a big hypocrite to that boy Dai(i forgot his name). He just tells Dai he can be a hero with a weak quirk in order to get a millionare suit, immediately abandon his job neing teacher and join his friends....Wow. Izuku...you hate your job so much? Dai, sweetie, i am sorry for all that. You could be a hero, if Horikoshi has a better writing skills or better and strong editor.

2. Horikoshi makes all looks like his favorite comics DC and Marvel and doesn't aknowledge the writing background.

So many people see that Izuku become new Iron man of MHA. Horikoshi several times stated that he loves Marvel Spiderman and Tony Stark. He wants to make MHA just like Marvel and DC and thats the major problem. He doesn't want to analyze writing background his favorite characters has in Marvel. He just copied and added without questions.

The same thing with Mechanical suit. Horikoshi just thinks that it would be a good thing to make Izuku new Tony Stark. Now let me explain why it doesn't work. What writing background Tony Stark has

1. Tony Stark is a billionaire with high Intelligence. No Fairy GodMother appear out of nowhere and give him suit. Tony Stark literally make his first suit out of trash by his own hands!!!! He literally make himself a hero by using his brain. It works in narrative.

Izuku on the other hand as i mentioned above, just has a Fairly Godmother aka All Might who give him suit.

2. Tony Stark has a several breaking points. I saw in fandom that many people were craving for Izuku has a breakdown moment. Izuku doesn't have that. He just walks with sad face, pretending to be happy. But nothing....

Tony Stark was fighting with alcoholism!!! Because of stress being Iron Man and his inner demons!!

3. Most Important detail. Mechanical suit given by Izuku was inventing by 8 f%%$ years! One suit!!! Do you see a problem here?

Lets imagine that Izuku faces villain who can control technology. What could he do in that moment? Or lets imagine that Izuku faces villain like AFO (with strong quirk i mean) and his suit is crushed. What he is gonna do next? Walking with gloomy face again waiting for another 8 years for All Might to appear? Do you see problem? Mechanical suit doesn't make sense. Even All Might example proves that..because his Mechanical suit handle 1 fight!!! 1 fight Carl. And was total crushed!!!

Add to this Izukus self-destructive behavior and you will understand that this Mechanical suit will have a very short life. These billions dollars could be given to poor ill children instead it would be more heroic than this

Tony Stark on the other hand has 100500 suit that were crashed!!! Yes! Tony Stark has several versions of suits. Many were crushed! But as i mentioned before Tony Stark is highly intelligent character by himself he is independent and him wearing suit is a logical thing. Unlike Izuku...

To summarize, i am very disappointed by ending and by Izuku getting that damn suit. Horikoshi is a terrible writer. But smth tells me that he planned totally different ending but Jump forbidded and he was forced to make a different ending. Because 430 chapter so wrong written, whith ZERO edition, with no sense at all. That i feel it was written in one week literally or one day. But original ending was thrown out of windows. Thank to Jump.

[thatsastepladder]

also on Comics Reddit I've been seeing lots of statements - even from people like Tom Brevoort at Marvel - that continuity doesn't matter and that people shouldn't care about it, that writers should take it as a loose suggestion and write whatever they want

as a resident continuity nut, that offends me. part of the charm of Marvel and DC as big shared universes is that readers are (well, were) rewarded for paying attention to continuity. if I were an editor at Marvel (and thank God I'm not) I'd make it a top priority - I'd assign a Kurt Busiek type to make sure that things are airtight, that there's a timeline and a universe bible that dictates how things work and then tell my writers they have to stick to it

none of this loosey-goosey Bendis-style throwing caution to the wind and making shit up that contradicts older stories. if Ms. Marvel breaks her arm fighting Graviton and it's in a sling the next issue, her arm should be in a sling if she cameos in another book that month, with an editor's note pointing to the issue it happened in. if the Avengers are in space on a mission, then they shouldn't be showing up in other books that take place concurrently. it should be easy to trace how characters get from status quo A to status quo B, or at least there should be a plausible explanation given of what they've been doing since we saw them last.

but no, they broke it. they had a good thing going and shitty editors letting superstar writers have a blank check to do what they want in the 2000s broke one of the greatest experiments in Western literature to the point where it's unfixable short of entirely cleaning house of all the old guard.

it's asinine that the best reference materials for Big Two comics to this date came out in the 1980s. people go apeshit for that kind of thing these days and yet they subcontract the job to DK to make shitty "encylopedias" rather than a new Official Handbook or Who's Who series, or hell, a good official online resource

because nobody cares. comics are broken, and nobody cares.

[threewaysdivided]

How Different do you think Young Justice Season 3 would have been had Jay Olivia and Michael Chang returned?

[For context, we’re referring to this post where I broke down the major writing/directing credits for each episode of Young Justice Season 1 and found that former Teen Titans 2003 directors Jay Oliva and Michael Chang had handled over 75% of the episodes in Young Justice Season 1 before vanishing from the credits of all later entries, and this post where I summarise how those later entries actively destroyed the arcs, themes and narrative of the original season.]

TBH it’s kind of hard to tell.  I have a few ideas, but like I was saying in that first post, it can be unwise to pedestal one or two members of a creative team when there are so many factors that can impact the final quality of a work.

Here I think it’s important to mention what a director does.  In situations where the director and writer are separate roles, the job of the director is to adapt the script to a visual form – working with the writers/editors to make changes as needed.  Directors direct how scenes are constructed, presented, acted and “shot” – which affords them a great deal of subtle influence over the pacing, focus and framing of a story.  The visual language of film can do a lot to control what information the audience prioritises as important, and how they interpret/perceive it.  Unsurprisingly, when you have bad, fragmented or inconsistent directing, you end up with stories that lack direction.

While Chang and Oliva having such a presence in the direction of Season 1 definitely lent it some of their specific personal creative flavour, I also think a lot of the major benefit came purely from having two people (and likely others who formed part of the S1-specific creative team) who were experienced in working together and had direct input/oversight of more than 75% of the season from start to finish.  That kind of creative cohesion makes it easier to track and maintain the continuity and progression of a narrative.  Compare and contrast with Outsiders, where you have a rotating shift of three less-experienced directors and a huge revolving door of new writers, with no-one working on more than a single episode in a row, the same directors almost never getting paired with the same writer twice, and a general sense that the story was being produced episode-by-episode with very few people having a clear sense of what had come before or would follow after.

One of the challenges is that the declining quality from Season 2 onwards points to something being fundamentally broken in the creative process at DC Comics/ Time Warner productions.  Young Justice Season 3 was the straw that finally broke my trust in Detective Comics Comics but it came on the heels of things like the original Suicide Squad movie (see this Folding Ideas video for an excellent dissection of those production and editing issues) and the transparently marketing-driven disaster that was Batman vs Superman.  It feels rather like modern-day DC is producing the in-house equivalent of shovelware: underinvesting in the timing and budget that its creative teams need for proper writing, editing, revisions and post-production in favour of churning out superficially saleable high-profit-margin products to cash in on recognisable IP’s and existing fandom markets.  Faced with that kind of incentive structure and production-crunch it can be very hard for a single (or handful of) creative team members to make course-corrections.

That isn’t to say that good media can’t be produced under tight conditions, but doing so generally requires a well-thought-out creative plan for the project.  And unfortunately, that kind of plan is something Greg “I don’t write endings” Weisman is notoriously bad at both creating and sticking to.  This was one of the problems I ran into when doing my YJ: Invasion autopsy: while you can correct some of the surface level problems, the root issue lies in a core story that’s bad from base principles and fundamentally incompatible with what came before.  Again, this can be overcome if other production team members are given enough time and creative authority to review and revise that story-core, but that doesn’t seem to be the production environment S2+ was allowed.

With all that said, I think it’s safe to conclude that, under the circumstances, Young Justice: Outsiders was likely always doomed to be a mess.  The combination of a lack (or even discarding) of a clear show-bible to act as a guide, a lack of clear project-plan (or, at least, plan-communication) from the showrunners,and a lack of pre-/post-production time for other team members to figure out what story they were even telling is pretty much a guaranteed recipe for narrative failure.

However, assuming that a pair of Oliva/Chang-like directors had been on the revival team, with input into most of the episodes, I think we might have at least seen some improvements to execution:

Firstly, we may have seen better cohesion and focus.  In the multi-layered onion of bad storytelling decisions that is the later seasons, the outer layer that many people seem to have bounced off is that it’s hard to care about what’s happening.  YJS2+ are boring and badly paced on rewatch, and a not-insubstantial part of that is bloat.  There is a plague of random new characters, exposition and world-details that don’t meaningfully contribute to the narrative (and for the record, I should clarify that ‘narrative purpose’ is a lot more than just ‘plot advancement’ – the problem here is that these elements are actually purposeless to the point of being distracting), scenes and ‘jokes’ that overstay their welcome due to a lack of proper substance, and ‘twists’ that exist for expectation-subverting ‘shock bait’ rather than moving the story. 

At a surface level, the later seasons desperately needed someone to ask: both ‘what is the focal point?’ AND ‘what is the purpose of this moment/scene for the story?’ and actually make Greg Weisman give them a coherent answer beyond ‘just trust me, it’ll be totes smart when you (read: I) figure it out later’.  Like I’ve said before, there’s a lot of fat that could have been trimmed; shallow scenes that could have been reworked to serve characterisation and themeing, ‘references’ that could have had their screen-time reduced to passing easter-eggs, and other wasted time that could have been better allocated to developing a core cast of ‘focus characters’ with an understandable dynamic to help anchor the broader character web in a relational status quo.  Considering what we saw of Season 1’s character-focus, and Oliva and Chang’s previous involvement in Teen Titans 2003 (which was also very good at prioritising, reinforcing and maintaining characterisation/ character dynamics) I think some improvement in story-focus, especially towards characterisation, could have been achievable.

The other gain we could have potentially seen is more sensitivity and tactfulness in the presentation of certain story beats/ characters.  For this I want to highlight framing:  whether something is respectful or offensive comes down less to the inclusion/exclusion of particular elements and more to the way in which those elements are presented to the audience – the priorities, assumptions and worldview revealed by the delivery.   

Let’s do a couple of case studies just to get our heads around the idea:

For Example One, we’re going to make the point by jumping straight in the deep end of sexual assault and fanservice in media feel free to scroll to the next paragraph if this is a no-fly topic for you.  Our contrasting studies will be The Millenium Trilogy (a noir series I’ve previous referenced in contrast to the YJ revival) and the shounen anime Sword Art Online, both of which contain assault and rape scenes.  Millenium’s depictions of assault keep the perspective on the victims, focusing on the pain/ powerlessness/ degradation/ anger they experience during and after the violation, and examining their reluctance/ aversion to reporting these crimes, while maintaining a respectful detachment towards describing the acts themselves.  In contrast SAO contains an infamous scene where an arc villain attempts to rape the female lead, while the camera fixates on the fanservice of her breasts quivering as he tears her shirt off (in addition to a concerning amount of other fanservice scenes where female characters are penetrated, groped or “peeped on” in ways that are clearly nonconsensual and unwelcome).  From this we can conclude that the issue isn’t inherently with sexual assault being present in a story – how it’s framed makes the difference.  The Millenium Trilogy respects the autonomy of its female characters, using assault scenes as an important narrative device to confront the audience with the violence of systemic sexism and condemn the cowardly entitlement it enables as part of its wider critique of misogyny; Sword Art Online degrades, objectifies and disregards the autonomy of its female characters by using narratively unnecessary sexual assault as a vehicle to ‘reward’ its target audience with fanservice.  What matters is how the subject is handled: is the sexual assault of women treated as a serious problem in need of criticism or as a guilty-pleasure ‘treat’ for boys to enjoy?

Moving to a gentler and more home-field example, let’s compare how pregnancy is handled in Young Justice Season 1 vs Outsiders.  It’s easy to overlook in the wake of the brick-to-the-face that was “you got a baby in there!” but Season 1 also included pregnancy as a plot-beat; Queen Mera announcing the news that she is “with child” during the episode Downtime.  However, there’s that difference in framing:  after it’s announced, Downtime quickly moves past the physicality of Mera’s pregnancy to focus on why it’s narratively important - because Mera and Orin are the royals of a hereditary monarchy and their child will be first in line to the throne of Atlantis.  Despite this being her only episode in Season 1, Downtime also gives Mera multiple characterising moments outside of child-bearing; introduced her first as a Queen and teacher/mentor to the students of the Conservatory, and later demonstrating her power as a battle-mage during the Manta-trooper attack – her pregnancy being almost a footnote outside its narrative-relevance.  By contrast, I think the reason that “baby in there” line from Amistad gets memed so heavily is because it highlights Outsiders unnecessary fixation on the physicality of female characters being pregnant, in addition to a disproportionate tendency to depict female characters as married, pregnant or mothering in the absence (or even at the cost) of narratively meaningful plot or character development – reducing these characters to little more than “pregnant sexy lamps” (as @mimeparadox so eloquently put it in their recent review of similar issues with the Gargoyles revival).  Again, the difference is execution: where Season 1 used pregnancy in a character-specific and narratively-relevant way, Outsiders not only assumes but enforces it as the expected path for female characters – sacrificing both characterisation and screentime for a subtler form of fanservice: one that reinforces and validates a specific worldview of gender (and which has been increasingly revealed to lurk beneath the surface of performative ‘feminists’ like Eric Schneiderman and Joss Whedon).

At this point, I think it’s worth noting that Jay Oliva and Michael Chang are both Asian-American men (i.e. less likely to be blinded by privilege a problem that Greg Weisman has always struggled with), that Chang himself was lead director on TT2003’s anti-bigotry episode Troq and that TT2003 on the whole is often praised for its respectful depiction of female characters (and also Victor’s cyborg status).

Given this, I think similar direction could have resulted in more respectful depictions of non-white and disabled characters.  As it exists, the revival at large (and Outsiders in particular) has a HUGE issue with unnecessary and disproportionate violence towards and villainization of characters-of-colour in a way that inadvertently reveals the bias of the creators; shock-value violence towards marginalised characters being treated as more acceptable and less needing of commentary because they clearly weren’t expected to be as relatable or worthy of empathy as the “main” characters.  Different direction could have seen some of the more needless violence removed in favoured of equally-shocking-but-more-narratively-purposeful elements, some of the narratively-justified violence reframed in a way that was more empathetic to the personalities and bodily autonomy of the victimised characters, or - given more time for revision - used to make a critique of in-story bigotry by presenting the disproportionate targeting of marginalised protagonists as being the product of systemically prejudiced antagonists (rather than casually-bigoted producers).

Similarly, I think better direction could helped respect female/femme characters more.  From Season 2 onwards Young Justice has an increasing problem with the male gaze in how it frames and poses women; Outsider’s borderline-fetishistic obsession with depicting late-term pregnancies again being a particularly egregious example.  Many of these scenes either didn’t need to be included (hence the meme-potential of wasting screen time on a toddler explaining how pregnancy works to a mature audience) or could have been made more narratively meaningful by prioritising specific characterisation over generic ring-fingers and pregnant bellies.   This male gaze issue was at its most insulting with Halo; even if different directors couldn’t change the incredibly disrespectful character-design decision to vacuum-seal a nonbinary, hijab-wearing minor inside a boob-socking, ass-grabbing, wasp-waisted super-suit, they could have worked to preserve Halo’s modesty and gender identity with posing and camera choices that minimised the attention drawn to Halo’s sexual features, and presented their body-language and posture in a less-feminising way.  

This likely wouldn’t have fixed the underlying biases baked into Outsiders’ plotlines but I think there was the potential to soften the execution to the point that they could have felt more like a “missed the mark” than the farcical offensiveness that we got.

That said, I don’t think anything could have truly saved this series.

As I said at the start, I think the thing that ultimately doomed Young Justice was the lack of a long-term story vision; the ego and overambition of showrunners trying to build a story that runs on teasing twists, mysteries and future-resolutions while also openly wanting it to go on forever.  Those two elements are fundamentally incompatible if you want a satisfying experience, and without a clear guiding plan you can’t expect the underlying creative team to successfully find a story’s identity during a rushed pre-production.  You can’t provide direction if you don’t know where you’re going.  It would be like trying to invent an entirely new plane and build it as it’s taking off: a crash is inevitable, the only question is the extent of the damage.

At best, I think we could have seen another Invasion-level non-story: a few isolated good character moments bogged down within a season that, while not overtly offensive, was still thematically confused, overstuffed with characters, driven by contrivance and insulting to the intelligence of anyone actually trying to follow the narrative.  A slow zombification, riding out a few extra seasons on plausible deniability, rather than Outsiders’ rapid crash-and-burn seasonal rot into an offensive cash-grab parody of itself.

And, in a way, I’m kind of glad that Oliva, Chang and the other Season-1-only creative team members didn’t come back for that.  Because, even if it would have resulted in a more palatable product, it would have come from forcing a group of marginalised creators to salvage a privileged dude’s mess.

I’ve spent far too many words over the last few years trying to unpick the layers of why Young Justice is such a narrative failure post Season 1 and now I feel like Benoir Blanc.  Because these problems are a glass onion and at their clear centre, Greg Weisman is an idiot.  He’s a demonstrable bigot, who had a publisher back away after he trashed their franchise with misogynistic queerphobia.  He’s a sex-obsessed loser who tried to launch a Not-Safe-For-Work production company writing Gargoyles Parody Porn while wearing an eye-patch and pretending to be a ‘fan collaborator’.  His writing reveals a consistently toxic attitude towards abuse, consent, boundaries and power dynamics.  Based on some of the creepier things he’s said/written, he could be potentially unsafe for certain fans to be around.  And even setting all that aside (and it’s a lot to set aside) he’s just obviously a hack: he claims things that are neither present in or even supported by the text, he promises future developments and fixes/explanations that he rarely if ever delivers, and he uses those holes as a springboard to pitch separate-purchase side-content that also seldom delivers, in a way that suggests he either has no idea what he’s talking about or is intentionally lying to grift his fans.

And, look, this problem is far from exclusive to Weisman: it certainly didn’t start with him, and it’s not even exclusive to the arts.  Across industries we are currently realising that we’ve let privileged guys who can talk a good game coast by on an assumption that they were qualified to hold their positions of influence, even as we held them to far lower standards of scrutiny than we would equivalent people of any other demographic.

Young Justice was never going to survive long-term (any more than the Gargoyles revival is) because the creative load was always resting on that rotten core.  I think we as a fandom were very lucky that Season 1 had both a sincere creative team and the production schedule needed to overcome it and give us something as good as they did.

I wish we could have seen that quality continue. But, at the end of it all, I’ll make peace with the disaster we got.  Because it was at least a somewhat honest reflection of its lead creator, rather than enabling him to keep failing upwards on the back of his colleagues' contributions.

So yeah. Better directors would probably have resulted in better surface-level polish... but you know what they say about polishing turds. No matter how much sugar they added, Outsiders couldn't be turned into a brownie. You'd still be being fed crap.

And frankly, whether it’s his characters, his audience or his co-creators, I’d rather not continue the pattern of letting Weisman shove the burden of dealing with and correcting for his bullshit onto less-privileged people.

[fancoloredglasses]

[RERUN] Crisis on Infinite Earths, issue 11: “Aftershock” (Same great universe, now 80% smaller!)

[All images are owned by DC Comics, please don’t sue me]

PREVIOUSLY ON…

A being known as the Anti-Monitor has destroyed all but 5 of the universes in existence) with a single survivor on Earth-6 (Lady Quark) and Earth-Prime (Superboy) along for the ride)

Unfortunately, the process was unstable, meaning that time has merged (meaning mammoths and futuristic aliens are among modern skyscrapers) in the areas where the Earths are merged (which are called “Warp Zones”)

The Anti-Monitor’s last three attempts to destroy the multiverse have been thwarted (at the cost of many lives, including Supergirl and Earth-1’s Flash)

The Anti-Monitor’s fourth attempt brought the battle to the Dawn of Time, where the Anti-Monitor attempted to destroy the multiverse before it began, but his efforts were thwarted by the Spectre.

…or were they? As the pair fought for control, reality shattered around them and the assembled heroes!

Now, on with our story! If you would like to read this issue, it (along with the rest of the series) has been collected in graphic novel form and is available (or can be ordered) at your favorite comic shop, bookstore, or online retailer…or on Read Comic Online.

[WARNING: Things are gonna get a bit weirder and more confusing than they’ve been to this point (and that’s saying something!) Furthermore, the jokes could be a bit thin here. I’m not certain if you’ll call that a bad thing or not]

We open on Clark Kent (Kal-L) as he wakes up from a bizarre dream. His wife Lois obviously let him sleep in…and redecorated? He heads to his “day job” as managing editor of the Daily Star. He enters his office and is about to get to work…

…when Perry White barges in and demands to know who’s in his office. That’s when Kal-L noticed Perry’s name on the office door. In barges Clark Kent (Superman) who apologizes to Perry and introduces his “Uncle Clark” before escorting Kal-L from the building.

On the top of the Daily Planet, they guess that somehow after the Spectre’s fight with the Anti-Monitor, they both were transported to Earth-1. They fly to the warp zone in New York…

…only it’s not there. What’s more, no one remembers there ever being anything weird in the area (though they do remember Supergirl’s death).

They then fly to Central City, where the Flash (who is still considered “missing”, as no one was present for his sacrifice) stored his cosmic treadmill…

…only to see the twin cities of Central City (home to Earth-1′s Flash) and Keystone City (home to Earth-2′s Flash) Sure enough, Jay Garrick (Earth-2′s Flash) and his wife Joan greet the pair. Joan doesn’t remember what happened, but Jay does. They fetch Kid Flash and start the cosmic treadmill and break through the dimensional barrier

…to a void; Earth-2 isn’t there! What’s more, Kal-L feels the void calling to him, like he belongs there…though the Flash doesn’t feel the same call!

They return before Kal-L can run to the void, and everyone reaches the same conclusion: there is only one universe now, but obviously elements of the old realities are different from the new reality…and some elements never existed!

While the four contact as many heroes as they can find to discuss the ramifications, we switch to deep space. Rip Hunter’s time sphere (carrying Hunter, Adam Strange, Captain Comet, Dolphin, Atomic Knight, and Animal Man) encounter Brainiac’s ship adrift.

They board to investigate and discover the corpse (if a robot can have a corpse) of Brainiac.

Back on Earth, many of the heroes have gathered at Titan’s Tower, where they’re all checking each others’ math to make sure everyone has put two and two together. Huntress and Earth-2′s Robin explain that they, like Kal-L, don’t exist in this “new Earth”. Superboy-Prime is shocked when he finds out his Earth never existed either (that’s what happens when your universe was written in just so it could become a victim. Just ask Lady Quark)

Suddenly, Harbinger appears (having somehow regained her powers due to the new reality) and confirms this fact, and explains that some elements of each individual earths’ histories no longer existed (though reality seems to have conformed around Earth-1 primarily. I guess DC would have lost a lot of readers if it conformed around Earth-X), meaning only the modern versions of the “duplicate” heroes (like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) are part of this new reality, while heroes that share a name, but not a past (like Flash, Green Lantern, and Atom) exist alongside their younger counterparts. 

Kal-L flips out at this news, as it means that he will never see his wife Lois again.

As Kal-L flies off in a streak of self-pity, we switch to the Spirit Realm, where the Spectre lies unconscious, severely weakened by his battle with the Anti-Monitor (I’m sure this will be important later)

Back on Earth, the heroes continue to compare notes. It seems the villains don’t remember the multiverse (since they weren’t at the Dawn of Time), but it seems that Power Girl (Kal-L’s cousin) is remembered. No one is sure how that works.

Suddenly, the weather turns ugly, just as it did when a universe was about to–

Uh-oh…

Earth has been pulled into the Anti-Matter universe!

…dedulcnoc eb oT

[docgold13]

Serious question: is Vita Ayala a bigot and what was the whole deal with that situation?

this is the difficulty in the digital era where ideas voiced in the moment of passion are trapped in amber and made permanent.  It often leads to people doubling, tripling even quadrupling down on feelings to the point that they become extreme and controversial.  

So Vita Ayala, who is a talent writer and an interesting new voice in the realm of comics, made a tweet referring to a job opening for a content editor at DC Comics.  They said that Black and Brown people should apply for the job because the industry could benefit from greater diversity at the editorial level. 

I agree.  This is a totally normal and sensible statement.  Greater diversity at the editorial level certainly would benefit the industry.  

But then the trolls came out and started tweeting back at them nasty replies.  And it started to spiral out of control to the point that Ayala tweeted that only non-white, non-sis people should have this job.  Which is a ridiculous thing to suggest and has resulted in their being labeled a bigot… 

I have never been in a position where I was being publicly slammed with a constant torrent of hateful shit.  Who am I to say that I wouldn’t respond with something extreme and nonsensical were I in such a situation?  

No I don’t think Vita Ayala is a bigot.  I think they tweeted something poorly thought-through in the heat of the moment after being barraged with aggression.  People who are the public eye need to be much more careful with twitter because that shot will haunt you forever.

Ultimately, we need to adjust to the new reality of the digital footprint.  States aren’t always traits.  Feelings are fluid and malleable whereas tweets, texts and emails are static and frozen in time.  We are in danger of ending up with complete thought-stoppage and mental paralysis if we’re made to own up to every random thought or feeling that comes to mind.  

Wisdom can only be accrued through experience. If we are never allowed to make mistake then we're never going to do or say anything and wisdom will become extinct.

[augustheart]

DC Pride 2023 Tribute to Rachel Pollack

This is a transcription of the text that appears at the end of DC Pride, written by a variety of authors in memory of trailblazing writer Rachel Pollack. I've done my best to copy everything exactly as it was written, and I apologize for any errors. It's over 3,000 words, so I'm going to put it under a cut outside of the foreword. The rest of the tributes are in plain text and not italicized except in places where they were by the original authors.

(If you would like a PDF of the following transcription, one is available here.)

“On April 7, 2023, the legendary writer and Tarot expert Rachel Pollack passed at age 77. Her work for DC's Vertigo imprint—including the celebrated Vertigo Tarot deck and a long run on Doom Patrol that was a deep influence on the property's recent HBO Max series—was profoundly meaningful for generations of comics fans. She was a trailblazing trans woman in comics and sci-fi communities that were frequently male-dominated, and her lifelong love of both superheroes in particular and the comics medium in general allowed her to confidently turn their storytelling tropes inside out, truly queering her comics in every sense of the word.

In the months before her passing, the editors of DC Pride were speaking to Rachel about writing a new story for this very issue, and her enthusiasm for the project was boundless, as she planned to return to her themes of the superhero and the secret identity, of the "kink" of costumes, and of the revelatory freedom that she found in these characters. Unfortunately, just as work was set to begin on the script, completing it became impossible for her. In the absence of that last great work, but with gratitude for the incredible stories she did give us, we've opted to turn the pages we reserved for Rachel's story over to her friends, and to the fans whose lives she changed, to share their memories of her.”

—Unspecified Author or Editor

“I met Rachel Pollack in 1985, at a convention, where I was interviewing her about Salvador Dali’s Tarot, and then I met her again a couple of days later at the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference, and we became friends fast. She was smart and funny, she was a brilliant writer, and she was the first person I’d met who knew more than I did about obscure Jewish mythology.

She told me off for writing a line of dialogue. ‘But that’s the only thing in the whole story that’s actually true,’ I told her, and she explained that art truth and reality truth were two very different things. And I knew she was right.

I don’t know how much I learned about writing, but listening to Rachel and Gwyneth Jones and John Clute and Lisa Tuttle and the rest of them, I learned so much about reading, and what I learned would change me as a writer.

Rachel was my friend. I had never met a person who had transitioned before and I had so many questions and, patiently, she answered all of them. She decided I needed to know Roz Kaveney, and Roz and I have been friends for decades now.

In 1988 I was writing Books of Magic and knew I needed a Tarot reading in the comic. Rachel was in London, and I asked her what the reading should be. She took me out to buy a Tarot deck that spoke to me, and I saw what happened when Rachel Pollack walked into a Tarot shop. It was a little like what happened when The Beatles went on Ed Sullivan. And then she gave me a beautiful reading of four cards, which encapsulated the whole of the story I was trying to tell.

She won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1989 for Unquenchable Fire, and I read it and suspected Rachel was creating her own school of fiction, her own brand of magical realism.

We argued, gently, about Wanda’s fate in A Game of You, and Rachel did what I wish everyone who had an argument about art would do, which is she took what she wanted to say and put it into a comic. Tom Peyer had asked her to write Doom Patrol after Grant Morrison left, and she did a remarkable job. I loved the delirious joy of her comics, the magic and the sense of fun, in Doom Patrol and in the comics that followed Doom Patrol.

I was thrilled to see Rachel when I moved to Upstate New York, and then I didn’t see her for years. I did that thing where you think you’re in touch with your friend, but really you’re just on social media at the same times. I was stuck out of the country during COVID, and Rachel had cancer. I was thrilled when I returned to hear that she had beaten the cancer, and then I was going to see her and she hadn’t beaten the cancer. A whole new cancer had turned up on the day she had beaten the first one.

I got to see Rachel more in the past few months than I had in the previous few years. She was as funny as ever, as sharp and as wise. I got to know her wife, Zoe, and to appreciate their love. I got to tell her bad Jewish jokes that, I suspect, I’d probably first heard from her. ‘Everywhere I went, people said ‘Look at the schmuck on the camel!’’ Some people die well—not necessarily bravely, necessarily, but gently and wisely and kind. Rachel was going to be one of those. She asked me to come to her funeral, and I said that I would.

Her funeral, several months later, was in the sunshine. It was filled with friends of hers from comics, from fiction, from Tarot, from writing, from teaching, from family, from the world, and Rachel lay above the grave on a wooden plank, wrapped in white winding sheet. We said true things about her, and we were funny and honest and there was so much love, and then we shoveled the earth on her, and cried, and said our goodbyes.

I’ve never met anyone like her. I’m glad she was my friend.”

—Neil Gaiman

“Rachel Pollack and I had the same favorite comic book—why, Doom Patrol, of course—and for a while she was its writer and I was its editor. She followed Grant Morrison, whose name was big and growing even then, and for years it seemed like Grant’s era might totally eclipse hers in memory. But DC released her Doom Patrol omnibus in 2022, and in the process unwrapped the radiation-proof bandages from her work, exposing the piercing and radiant appreciation that so many fans felt for it. On top of that, this year Dennis Culver and Chris Burnham, the creators of the excellent Unstoppable Doom Patrol, paid a moving in-story tribute to Rachel’s cast of broken-but-healing heroes.

I’m glad she got to see the omnibus, and I’m grateful for the chance it gave us to relive her perceptive, ironic, unsettling, and revelatory run. It was known for being strange and surreal, but there was so much more going on. Doom Patrol had been weird before, and funny, but never quite as wise or kindly meant.

A story that I always think of when I think of Rachel featured yours truly. At the end of my time as an editor—I had decided I wanted to write full-time—I called the creators I worked with to let them know I was leaving. Most of them, quite understandably, reacted with some implied variation of ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ It made me start to think I was being horrible and selfish. But when I called Rachel and nervously told her what I had decided, there was a silence, and then she said, ‘Quitting is good for the soul.’”

—Tom Peyer

“I met Rachel Pollack in the late ‘90s at WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention where we were both guests. It was the first day of the con, and they were introducing all the guests. I had read Rachel’s Doom Patrol comics and at least one of her books, Unquenchable Fire, and was excited about meeting her. She must have felt the same about me, because when the introductions were over, we headed straight toward each other as though we’d been magnetized, and we became friends immediately.

We lived on opposite sides of the continent, so we didn’t get to see each other that often, but thank the Goddess for email. I visited Rachel’s house once and she visited mine once. Her house was nicer. She took me to visit Hyde Park, Franklin Roosevelt’s old home, now a historic site—we were both FDR fans—and I taught her a Yiddish World War II song. We were both into our Jewishness, but from different angles. Rachel was interested in the mystic side, and I was into Yiddishkeit. Rachel had a bat mitzvah, and I studied Yiddish.

Rachel and I discovered we had the same birthday—August 17, which we shared with Mae West and Davy Crockett. So we sent each other birthday cards that also included happy birthday wishes to Mae and Davy.

I knew Rachel had written many books on the Tarot, so when one day I found a complete set of Tarot cards lying in the street, I decided the Goddess wanted her to have them, and I sent them to her on our birthday. After that, the Goddess would put out Tarot cards for me to find almost every year, often just in time for Rachel’s birthday presents. In return, she sent two Tarot cards that she had drawn for me when I was being treated for cancer. (I’m cancer free now!) I saved them and put them away safely—somewhere.

Last year a neighbor who was a collector of stuff died and left his collections to us, his neighbors, to take for free. Among all the stuff in his stuff-filled rooms was an unopened set of Tarot cards. Shortly after I found the cards, my Romani neighbors who lived around the corner put a book on Tarot out on the street, so I took that for Rachel. I mailed the book and cards to Rachel for our birthday.

For the first time, I got no answering card. I didn’t know that Rachel’s lymphoma had come back.

And somehow, it all got away from me.

Periodically, I would think, ‘Phone her—must phone Rachel,’ but something would come up and I’d forget to phone, or it would be too late to phone because of the time difference between New York and California. Damn it!

I miss you, Rachel. In our next lives, I’ll try to be a better friend.”

—Trina Robbins

“I first met Rachel Pollack when I was the assistant editor on The Sandman and she was the new Doom Patrol monthly writer. I shared an office with Tom Peyer, who was Rachel’s editor, and when Rachel swept in like a redheaded bohemian priestess, I always wound up putting aside my own work so I could chat a bit with Rachel as well. She had the rare gift of wielding her considerable expertise about comics and mythology in a way that made the person talking to her feel smarter.

After I left DC Comics to write full-time, I moved to Rhinebeck and discovered that Rachel lived there, too. We formed a small writing group that met once a week, usually in my kitchen. Always as kind as she was insightful, Rachel spent more time celebrating what worked than critiquing what didn’t. She did a lot of celebrating, of others’ writing and of her own, delighting in the words and worlds that moved through her.

She was, pre-pandemic, a frequent guest at my Passover Seder, the only person besides myself and my mother who knew all the Hebrew and all the traditional melodies. Her vast knowledge of midrash and Kabbalah made her comments more delicious than the charoset she made, and let me tell you, that was pretty damn good. 

In October, when she started to get really sick and I started to visit more frequently, often with Neil Gaiman, Rachel defied any expectation of how a dying person ought to act. She cracked Borscht Belt jokes and talked about writing and writers, and then I went with her wife, Zoe, to pick out a grave. We discussed the Tarot, which I had belatedly begun to study along with her seminal book on the subject, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. I asked, ‘What does it mean when you get an auspicious card in a place that means it’s negative?’ ‘It means that’s what you’re struggling with,’ she replied.

I am struggling with this turn of the cards. I cannot fully fathom that she will not be sitting at our favorite local café, writing, but ready to put down her antique fountain when she sees me. Yet when I turn back to her writing, I feel her still with me: Doom Patrol Rachel, Writing Partner Rachel, Rachel of the Passover Seder, Rachel Poet, Rachel Priestess, Rachel Friend.”

—Alisa Kwitney

“Rachel Pollack loved comics.

When we first talked about comics, it was about her own. Eight years ago I asked Martha Thomases if the Doom Patrol run after Grant’s was worth checking out, as I hadn’t heard much talk of it. She said ‘Yes. Read it.’ I adored the run and reached out to Rachel via email to let her know. To my surprise, I heard back from her within 20 minutes.

Over time we talked about the comics and creators that she loved. Carl Barks and the Duck comics, particularly the characters of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, meant a great deal to her. Little Lulu was high on her list. And The Fox and the Crow inspired a whole arc of her Doom Patrol run. The works of Jack Kirby (particularly on Fantastic Four and the Fourth World saga), Steve Ditko, and Gene Colan were brought up often, as were series including Xambi and Promethea, which she revisited often. She had even reached out to Marvel back in the early ‘70s inquiring about writing opportunities, two decades before writing at DC. 

Rachel saw the inherent queerness in superhero comics back in the Silver Age. One example she would reference was “The Town That Hated Superboy!” from 1967’s Superboy #139. In it, the citizens of Smallville turn against Superboy for nearly two pages. What stood out to Rachel was how Ma and Pa Kent pretended to hate Superboy out of fear that if they didn’t, those around them might suspect that Superboy was really their adoptive son, Clark. Though taking this sequence and relating it to an idea as heavy as the violent consequences of inadvertently outing someone by simply treating them with kindness was unlikely Otto Binder’s intention, the subtext was picked up on by many queer comics readers at the time in addition to Rachel.

Through the years I got to have a greater understanding of Rachel’s unbelievable kindness as well. She saw the world as a positive place and held out hope for just about everyone. Rachel discussed how attitudes with London’s Gay Liberation Front turned against the trans community in the ‘70s, but she would also talk about how some of the same people came back around and were vocal advocates for trans rights by the ‘90s. Whereas most, understandably, would allow themselves to be bitter and resentful, Rachel’s capacity for love and compassion was too strong for that.

I was devastated knowing just how many projects Rachel had in the works and how many stories she still had to tell. But after taking time to think on it, I know that no matter how long she stayed here with us, her work would never be done. Her stories will continue through those who love her and those who haven’t found her yet but will love her just the same. 

I love talking about Rachel’s work and her kindness. I plan on doing so for the rest of my life.”

—Joe Corallo

“‘It’s so cool that you created the first trans superhero,’ a very nice person told me recently. Writing feels like stuffing a message in a bottle and lobbing it out into the open sea, so to meet someone who had caught one of my bottles and read what was inside was extremely exciting. Unfortunately, I am a nerd first and a lover of accolades second, so I had to correct them. 

Galaxy, the character I created, is not the first out trans superhero in the DC Universe. Kate Godwin, created by Rachel Pollack 30 years ago, is. Kate is important, but more than that, she’s important to me. 

I was a teenager 30 years ago. That’s also important.

There’s a lot of talk of firsts in superhero comics, most of it meaningless. Dick Grayson absolutely deserves the ‘Sensational Character Find of 1940’ label trumpeted on the cover of his first appearance, Detective Comics #38, but you don’t need to read it, even as a die-hard Robin fan.

You can’t say that about Doom Patrol #70, the first appearance of Kate Godwin. That issue changes everything. That issue changes lives. Because Kate, a kind and funny woman, with an amusing power set and questionable taste in superhero outfits, who is beautifully, unapologetically trans—Kate is the viewpoint character.

Imagine the power of that. Holding up a trans woman—a lesbian trans woman, at that!—and saying ‘This, this is who you, the reader, should identify with.’ To have a trans woman be smart and pretty and likable, and not an object of scorn or pity, or a side character. She was the hero! I can tell you from experience, that is a tough sell now.

Reading that comic in the 1990s felt like a lightning bolt from heaven.

It was too powerful for my teenage self to handle. It was radioactive, and yet I would read my copy ragged to bask in its glow. I can call up its panels from memory. When I finally began my transition, many years later, I wore a lot of black tank tops and jeans, unconsciously aping Kate’s unofficial uniform. I didn’t put it together until recently, rereading those 30-year-old stories that I had imprinted upon like a baby bird. Early on, I wasn’t sure of the kind of woman I was, but clearly I knew the kind of woman I wanted people to see. Someone like Kate Godwin.

I never got the chance to meet Rachel Pollack and tell her how I had received her message in a bottle. How I had held it close to my heart until I finally found the strength to absorb its message. How she showed me I wasn’t alone, and I could be a hero, even if that just meant saving myself.

But I hear people say those words to me, having read about Galaxy. Which will have to do.

Thank you for being first, Rachel.”

—Jadzia Axelrod

[chernobog13]

Batman and Manhunter (Paul Kirk) by Walt Simonson.

This version of Manhunter has a rather confusing history. Originally, Paul Kirk was a private investigator, created by Ed Moore, who starred in his own serial in Adventure Comics (vol. 1) starting with issue #58 (January, 1941). The feature was titled Paul Kirk, Manhunter, but that was just a description of the job he did, not a nickname he used, nor was he ever called that.

The Paul Kirk, Manhunter feature ended in issue #72.

The final appearance of Paul Kirk, Manhunter, from Adventure Comics #72.

Adventure Comics #73, April 1942)* saw the debut of a new, costumed Manhunter feature by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.

The new Manhunter was Rick Nelson (no, not Ozzie and Harriet's kid), a former big game hunter who decided he should put his skills to use hunting down criminals. He donned a costume and began his career as a crimefighter.

The cover of Adventure Comics #73, the new Manhunter's first appearance, and page 8 from his initial story. Obviously, no one at DC editorial knew that Manhunter had a blue face mask, which is why the colorist went out of his way to create a mask for the character.

Adventure Comics #75, wherein everyone is finally on the same page about the mask, except now his ear is blue as well.

As you can tell from these images, the new Manhunter definitely was in no way related to the previous feature with Paul Kirk.

Except by his second appearance in Adventure Comics #74 the character's name was changed from Rick Nelson to Paul Kirk. I don't know why made that decision, although many sources point the finger at DC's editorial staff. Anyhow, that led to the original Paul Kirk getting completely retconned out of DC continuity.

Simon and Kirby left the Manhunter feature after Adventure Comics #80 (November, 1942), although they were still doing the Sandman feature in that book. Manhunter's final appearance was in Adventure Comics #92 (June, 1944).

Writer/editor Archie Goodwin and artist Walt Simonson revived the Manhunter character for a series of 8-page back-up stories in Detective Comics (vol. 1) #473 (November, 1973).

The new Manhunter by Walt Simonson. The figure is from a DC house ad.

This new Manhunter was a revived and revised Paul Kirk. Kirk had given up the costumed crimefighter gig and returned to big game hunting. He was mortally wounded during a hunt, and that would have been the end of him. But an organization called the Council found him, used their super-science to heal him, and gave him a genetic enhancement that gave him advanced healing. They also cloned him enough times to create a small army, of which Kirk was leader.

Goodwin and Simonson were going to make their Manhunter a completely original character. However, they used Simon and Kirby's version of Paul Kirk so that they did not have to spend their limited comic book pages to create a back story for their hero.

Kirk eventually realized the Council was up to no good and began working to take the organization down. He gained some allies along the way, including Batman. Together they brought an end to the Council, although Kirk lost his life - for good this time - when he caused the Council's HQ to explode.

Jack Kirby tried to revive his Joe Simon's version of Manhunter in 1st Issue Special #5 (August, 1975).

The main character was Mark Shaw, not Paul Kirk, but the costumes were very similar. Jack also established an ancient organization that picked worthy individuals to act as a Manhunter to take down the criminals and gangs that the police could not - or would not - touch.

Unfortunately, Jack never got to finish that story. Instead, Steve Englehart took the concept and ran with it in a totally different direction during his brief tenure as the writer on Justice League of America.

That was not the end of the Manhunter character, of course, which has been revived several more times (including twice by surviving clones of Kirk). But that's a post for another day.

(* In March, 1942, one month before Simon and Kirby's Manhunter debuted, Quality Comics introduced their own Manhunter in Police Comics #8.

This guy was Dan Richards, a police rookie who graduated at the bottom of his academy class. A friend of his got framed, so Richards donned a rather dull costume (sometimes without pants, and the footprint chest emblem didn't last long) to fight crime. He was assisted by his faithful dog, Thor.

This Manhunter outlasted DC's version by a good stretch, until August, 1950's Police Comics #101.

Shortly thereafter, DC bought all of Quality's characters. Eventually all of them were incorporated into the DC Universe. The two different Manhunters finally met, post-Crisis On Infinite Earths, in All-Star Squadron #31.)

[novastories]

Running Up That Hill

Title and chapter loosely inspired by the song “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush.

Summary: Aurora ends up back in the field to help with a case. She starts coming to terms about her self-worth, but at a cost.

Warnings: Mentions of guns, bombs, cancer, and death/suicide.

Word Count: 6.2k

A/N: I’m so sorry for the cliffhanger from the last chapter! 😬This one also contains another cliffhanger so…🫣 I’m so thankful that people are enjoying the story and loving Aurora and Bradley as much as I do 💖

Btw, I have a note for the people I tag at the end of the chapter, so if you’re tagged or want to be tagged, please read the note after the chapter! 💜

Thankful always for my beta reader and editor @reginleight 

As always, likes are great and all, but comments, reblogs, and feedback are highly appreciated and loved! 🤭

Previous | Next | Masterlist

A few hours earlier

“You want me to do what?” Aurora looked at her boss with a confused look.

“I want you back in the field. Just for this case. It’s all hands on deck, and I trust you to be out on the field,” her boss looks at her. Agent Daniella Hopkins knew her agents' capabilities, that’s what made her a good boss.

“You know this case better than anyone,” she adds.

“That’s only because I was transferring the case into the computer, since I am on desk duty. I just help put the reports in the database,” Aurora sighs.

There were many cases and reports that got put on her desk, which she helped with typing and filing them into the system. The downside of desk duty. 

“And you know those reports will help the case. It’s an advantage so we don’t have to put another agent in the field who has no idea what’s going on.”

“But why me? I’m supposed to be on desk duty for a reason.”

“Because, I know you Artemis. As much as you’re doing well behind the desk, you’re itching to go back out in the field.”

Aurora stood in front of her boss, fidgeting with her bracelet behind her back.

“That, and you were requested by the team that’s on the case.”

“What team?” Aurora questions.

As if on cue, the doors to Daniella’s office opened, and Aurora turned to gape at who had walked in.

“It’s good to see you, Artemis.”

Aurora smiles, and walks over to give Gibbs a hug.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Aurora smiled at him before noticing Ziva and Tony behind him.

“It is an all hands on deck case, Artemis. Who else better to have on this case than you?” Ziva smirks as Aurora turns to pull her into a hug next.

“I never thought I’d ever say this, but I actually missed you for a moment there, DiNozzo,” Aurora chuckles. Tony rolls his eyes and simply greets her with a hug of his own.

“I don’t know, little probie. I kind of miss not having a knife being thrown at me,” he tells her.

“McGee and Abby are getting set up in the lab and we’ll set up in your office.” Gibbs interrupts their conversation to inform her of the situation.

“The fact you went from a cubicle to your own office is just unfair,” Tony shakes his head.

“Let’s catch you up to speed, Artemis,” Ziva beckons Aurora out the door. Aurora turns to look at her boss, to which she nods.

—

“I still can’t believe you have your own office. If I ask for a transfer here, think I’d get an office too?” Tony looks out the window of Aurora’s office before getting smacked on the head from Gibbs.

“This isn’t a social call, DiNozzo. We have a job to do.” 

McGee and Abby got to say their hellos to Aurora before Abby had to start working on some evidence for the case, while the team got settled in their temporary space in Aurora’s office.

Aurora was sitting on her desk facing the TV screen, while Ziva stood next to her. Tony went to sit at her desk (and began snooping), while Gibbs sat in the corner chair, sipping his coffee.

McGee was getting the TV screen ready to prep the case for Aurora.

“Alright, let’s catch you up to speed, Artemis.” Gibbs gestures to McGee to start.

“A petty officer in DC was found dead in a hotel room. Turns out, the San Diego office had put a nationwide BOLO search for him for his involvement in drug and weapon dealing. His name is Noah Ward.” McGee stated, showing the file up on screen for Aurora to see.

“I recognize the name,” Aurora stares at the profile on the screen. “He was in San Diego to help pay for his sister’s hospital treatments, but got caught by some local LEOs selling cocaine. He was about to turn the name of his supplier over, but he escaped before he could say anything and we lost track of him. He didn’t have any friends, and his only living relative left is his sister, Karli, who also didn’t know anything because she’s currently in a coma.”

“Well, now he’s dead,” Tony states.

Aurora turns to him. “No duh, DiNozzo. How did he even end up all the way in DC?”

“Fake ID got him a plane ticket to DC. He fled all the way to Washington DC to get out of San Diego, but died instead. We caught the killer, but it turns out he was just a hired hand, a hitman,” Ziva informs her.

“And did the hitman say who hired him?”

“Gee Artemis, now why didn’t we think of that?” Tony sarcastically replies. 

Aurora gave him a murderous look to which he turned pale and continued on to what he was going to say.

“All he said was that he was contacted via email and that all the money was wire transferred to his account.”

“I tracked the email to San Diego, but that’s about as far as we got. We can’t even get a fix to which area of San Diego, so we figured that it’s best we find whoever it was that hired the hitman since it is still our case,” McGee explains. 

“I wonder what was the reason to kill him,” Aurora thought out loud.

“Tying up loose ends most likely,” Tony shrugs as he starts touching things on Aurora’s desk. 

“You’re just assuming this, we don’t even know if it’s his supplier, anyone could have had a grudge against him. And stop touching my stuff, DiNosy!” Aurora exclaims, slapping his hand off of a photo frame of her, her brother, and Bradley.

“Aurora’s right. Right now, we need to find out where he was getting his drugs from and go from there,” Gibbs concludes.

“DiNozzo, you and Ziva go over his cellphone records and bank statements. McGee, keep working on that email. You and Abby can work on that in her lab she has set up. Artemis, give me any files you have on the petty officer, the ones you’ve put into the system and the ones you have yet to type up.”

“Yes, boss!” They all reply while moving about to their destinations Aurora hops back into her desk chair to get started searching for more background on this guy.

“And Artemis,” Gibbs pauses at the doorway before turning back to Aurora.

Aurora turns her head towards him.

“Glad you’re back on the team for a bit.”

Aurora smiles. “Just like old times, boss.”

—

“Work has been so weird without you,” Abby tells Aurora as she sips her Caf-Pow.

Aurora didn’t have any luck with finding anything in her files or reports, so she had decided to take a snack break and visit Abby and McGee in the lab and bring Abby a Caf-Pow and McGee a coffee.

McGee was currently on his computer typing away, while Abby multi-tasked and had a program running in the background while talking to Aurora, who was seated on a stool next to her.

“Gibbs didn’t even want to find a replacement, so the team feels empty without you in it. But we’ve been getting by,” Abby continues.

“I miss you all too. It definitely feels weird being at the desk most of my day, but at least it gets me home at night,” Aurora shrugs. “Unlike when Gibbs called us at 3am for a dead body and we have to work 46 hours straight,” She sighs at the memory, munching on her chips. 

“Oh, yeah! That case took way too long, I remember you were so tired you accidentally fell asleep in the elevator and Tony decided to wake you up with an airhorn.”

Aurora cringes at that memory. “And then I kicked him in the shins.”

“Fun times,” Abby nods while sipping her drink. “How’s your panic attacks by the way? Any bad ones since you’ve left?”

“A few, but not like how they used to be. So not too bad. Bradley helped calm me down, which was the latest one.”

“So about Bradley, please tell me you’ve made a move!”

“Abby!”

“Oh, c’mon! I can tell you’ve been anxious about something, you’re eating hot cheetos again.”

Aurora looks down at the bag of chips she’s been eating from and at her red dyed fingertips. Hot cheetos have been her staple snack when she’s anxious or overthinking, especially when she didn’t have her bracelet on her wrist during those times.

The team had seen her go through so many bags, especially when working a case. She had once made the mistake of doing paperwork while she was anxious and had to redo it because she’d accidentally gotten red powder over it.

“It helps me think!” Aurora whines.

“So, you’re telling me, you and Bradley haven’t had a moment or like made out yet?”

“Well, I mean there was this one moment-”

“Oh my gosh!”

“-but my brother accidentally interrupted us.”

Abby groans. “Rory, you just need to walk up and kiss him already! I don’t know how much more of your pining I can take.”

“I’m not pining!”

“Please! He so wants you!” Abby exclaims. “Like you both live together! How do you NOT have the temptation to like, do it right on the kitchen table?!”

“I didn’t say I haven’t thought about that!”

“Uhh, guys, I’m still here,” McGee pops his head out from behind the computer he was working on.

“Shush McGee, the women are talking here,” Abby sasses him.

“Not right now you’re not,” Gibbs walks in, coffee in hand. “Any luck with the background?” he asks Aurora.

“Nothing we don’t already know. Sister’s in a coma from a car accident for almost a year, Ward couldn’t keep up with the payments, so sold cocaine and weapons on the side from an unknown source up until he was caught, was then dishonorably discharged and was supposed to be tried until he escaped and that’s all the intel I have,” she informs him.

“I have a lead!” Tony exclaims as he and Ziva walk in.

“WE have a lead,” Ziva corrects him.

“Yeah, yeah whatever,” Tony dismisses. Ziva rolls her eyes.

“Anyways, we found the supplier,” Tony continues. “One of Ziva’s contacts owed her a favor and we found out that the supplier is a small group of people that operate in a warehouse near the edge of the city. They’re called the Dark Renegades.”

“I know of them. They've been on NCIS San Diego’s radar because they’ve been known to recruit officers who have been dishonorably discharged by the Navy,” Aurora pipes in.

“Why haven’t they been caught?” McGee asks.

“Because they kill their dealers and keep everything tied shut. The fact that Ziva’s contact found out the location is such a big deal.”

“Let’s go check it out. McGee, you stay here, send the warehouse floor plans to us when you get them. Artemis, you’re with us,” Gibbs orders.

“Good luck! Stay safe!” Abby calls out, as Aurora trails behind Ziva, Tony, and Gibbs.

“Are you good to be out on the field?” Gibbs asks Aurora in the elevator as they ascend floor levels to gear up.

“I’m ready, Gibbs,” Aurora reassures him. Gibbs gives her a small look of concern before he nods.

Ziva gives her shoulder a light squeeze before they all exit the elevator, Aurora letting out a sigh before she starts to get into her gear. 

—

They arrived at the warehouse and made sure the coms in their ears were working. Tony was suggesting an attack plan, but none of them liked it.

“I’m just saying, if we came from the roof, we’d be like ninjas, they’d never see us coming. It’s like in the movie-”

“We don’t even have the equipment for that,” Ziva interrupts him and sighs at his stupidity.

“We can use rope!”

“I’m not dangling from a rope just to enter the warehouse.”

“But that way is more efficient,” Tony points out.

“No, that way is stupid and would get us killed,” Aurora corrects him.

“According to the floor plan McGee sent us, there’s a couple of side windows we can look inside to get a visual,” Gibbs interrupts them as they exit the car, which they park a block from the warehouse so they wouldn’t hear them coming.

“There’s also a front and back entrance. Ziva and Artemis, you get the back entrance. DiNozzo, you check out the situation from the window, I’ll cover the front until we have a plan.”

They agree before splitting to get into position.

“You good, Artemis?” Ziva turns to her, making sure the girl is doing alright.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Aurora nods, gun in hand.

“You know, I missed this. You, back on the team. Us, the unstoppable duo.”

“I miss this too, Ziva,” Aurora smiles at her.

“Aww, they’re having a girl moment,” Tony teases over coms.

“You know what Tony-”

“Enough chit chat. What’s your visual, DiNozzo?” Gibbs interrupts.

“I have 6 men, armed, scattered around the warehouse,” Tony asses. “No wait, no. Scratch that, 5 more men, also armed, just came out of the back office.”

“On my orders, Ziva, Artemis, you go in quietly. Tony, you and I will take the front when they’re in position.” Gibbs orders them.

They were silent, knowing Gibbs would take that as their answer as they prepared to enter from different places in order to quietly infiltrate. Tony moves to meet Gibbs at the front entrance.

“Okay, Ziva, Artemis go.”

Aurora opens the backdoor for Ziva to slip inside, while Aurora covers her. Ziva quietly navigates through the back part of the warehouse, with Aurora behind her, making sure there were no alarms or any threats behind them. 

They silently enter the warehouse until the two come to a stop by a stack of crates, blocking them from the men, but getting a visual.

“Aurora and I have 4 men in sight, they all have automatic weapons on them,” Ziva whispers into her coms.

“Alright, you know the drill. If they start shooting when we go in, you shoot back,” Gibbs reminds them.

“Got it, Gibbs,” Aurora whispers. 

“Alright. Ready, DiNozzo?” Gibbs asks him over the coms.

“Ready when you are, boss.”

A few seconds pass until Ziva and Aurora hear the front door of the warehouse get kicked down.

“Federal agents! Drop your weapons!” Gibbs yells out.

The men in the warehouse start shouting and automatically shoot at them so Gibbs and Tony take cover.

At that signal, Aurora takes out the man closest to her with a shot of her gun, hitting his shoulder. He goes down instantly and Aurora takes another shot at the man next to the guy that went down, immediately taking cover after knowing that they would soon retaliate with firepower of their own. 

Ziva also starts shooting from her vantage point, not missing her marks, already taking down 2 men. Gibbs takes one man down on his side, while Tony hits one as well.

The rest of the men took cover and tried to shoot back at the agents.

Aurora moves slowly from her cover of boxes and peaks around to see two men aiming to shoot her. She quickly covers herself as they rain a bunch of bullets her way. 

“Artemis!”

Ziva yells out, gesturing for Aurora to move to her left. There was a big gap between the crates to where the shooters could get her if she wasn’t fast enough.

Aurora takes a deep breath and starts to move towards Ziva. Aurora slides out from her spot, left leg out, right knee down as to help stabilize herself as she takes her two shots. Both shots end up taking down the two shooters that were cornering her.

Still sliding, she ends up next to Ziva, safely behind the crates. 

“Nice move,” Ziva praises her.

“Nice shooting,” she replies back. “How many left?”

Ziva takes a glance, seeing that there was one guy left.

Before she could reply, Tony takes him down instantly with one shot.

“I think that’s it, but I think Gibbs is working on one more.”

Looking over and seeing who Aurora assumes is the leader, he was currently in the middle of hand to hand combat with Gibbs. Eventually Gibbs hit him in the stomach, then the throat, taking the man down.

“Clear here!” Ziva yells out from their spot.

“Clear!” Tony calls out.

Gibbs puts his handcuffs on the leader before lifting him to his feet.

“Let’s take him back to the office, hopefully we got our guy.”

“Don’t jinx it, Gibbs. I’m ready for this to be over,” Aurora sighs.

—

“Gibbs jinxed it! All of that and it turns out to be a dead end?!” Aurora groans, laying her head on her desk. 

Turns out, no one in the Dark Renegades even knew that Noah Ward was dead. They were working on a big shipment of weapons that they were getting ready to sell.

No one in the group even had the technical skill of being able to block a trace. Basically, they weren’t smart enough to block a trace via email, therefore they weren’t the ones to kill the petty officer.

Gibbs had just finished interrogating the leader, who was now being charged and sent to jail.

“Well, at least we took them down,” Ziva reassures her.

They were all back in Aurora’s office, trying to regroup to see what they had missed.

“Now we’re back to square one on finding whoever hired the hitman,” Tony speaks up from his chair, hissing from a bruise on his face that he was currently icing. He accidentally ended up hitting the side of a crate earlier during the shootout.

McGee and Abby were still in the lab, trying to crack the email trace. Gibbs was updating both Director Vance and Agent Hopkins about the situation.

“What if someone had a grudge against Noah Ward? I mean, he was selling drugs, maybe someone wanted him to pay?” Aurora theorizes. 

“Yeah, but who? He didn’t have a client list that we could go through. And even if he did, his list would be long,” Tony points out.

McGee rushes into Aurora’s office and puffs out air.

“Guys, I think Abby and I found a lead.”

They rush into the lab to where Abby and Gibbs were waiting.

“We were finally able to trace the email address to an Adam Lewis,” Abby pulls up his file. According to his file at glance, Adam Lewis was a Marine, honorably discharged a few years ago.

“He doesn’t seem like the hiring hitman type,” Ziva profiles from his photo.

“That’s because he wasn’t, but up until two years ago when he lost his daughter,” Abby switches his profile to the daughter’s profile.

“His daughter was another Naval petty officer that also happened to serve with Noah Ward. Her name was Isabella Lewis. She died from a drug overdose, cocaine was the source,” McGee informs.

“She was a drug user?” Aurora asks.

“That’s how she got dishonorably discharged, and then a few weeks after her discharge, she was found dead in her house. Her dad was the one that found her,” McGee answers.

Aurora’s heart broke hearing that. No father should see their child dead.

“So, I’m guessing Noah Ward was the one supplying her drugs?” Tony inquires.

“And you’d be correct,” Abby nods her confirmation. “But he wasn’t charged for her death because no one knew who supplied her drugs because Noah Ward wasn’t caught until a few days ago.”

“What’s the background on the father?” Gibbs questions.

“He’s currently working as one of the Navy contractor’s for IT support,” Tony reads from the profile.

“Which would explain why it took so long for his email to be cracked,” McGee points out.

“But get this when he was in the Corps, he didn’t just work in the communications unit, but also an EOD technician,” Tony keeps on reading out loud.

“EOD as in Explosive Ordnance Disposal,” Ziva confirms. The team stills at that information.

“That doesn’t sound like a good thing,” Aurora mumbles. Her phone beeps and she takes it out while Gibbs gives out orders.

“We need to find him. McGee, phone records and bank statements. Tony-”

“Oh my gosh,” Aurora interrupts him. They all turn to look at her. 

“What is it?” Gibbs asks her.

Aurora, without a sound, moves to Abby, to which she moves and lets Aurora use the computer. She pulls up a live news feed and everyone freezes at what they see.

The news was reporting live that someone was holding hostages at a local coffee shop near the navy base by way of a bomb threat. About 20 people were in there, and that the criminal holding them hostage was the person they were looking for, Adam Lewis. 

“No time to waste, everyone let’s go! Abby, you stay here!” Gibbs orders the team.

Gibbs, Ziva, Tony, McGee, and Aurora rush out, hoping they were able to make it in time to save the hostages.

—

“What’s the status of the situation?” Gibbs questions the lead officer in charge.

After explaining that the suspect inside was an NCIS suspect, the San Diego Police Department were more than willing to let NCIS be in charge, especially since they were still waiting for the bomb squad to arrive.

The police department had set up a ways away, with a few medical tents and a barricade in place.

“We can’t get a clear visual on the bomber,” A police officer on scene reports to them.  “He took out all the security cameras and closed the blinds. We can’t send a man in there without him threatening to blow the place up if he doesn’t speak to NCIS. We did a scan of the area and it looks like he put the bomb in the basement of the coffee shop, which is their storage space. If we don’t take any action, he will blow himself and the hostages up,” the officer answers.

“What’s the bomb trigger?” Gibbs asks.

“Remote detonation, he has the remote in his hand, but we can’t find a way to trace or jam the signal from the remote to the bomb.”

“How many hostages?” Ziva inquires.

“27, men, women, and children. Most are Navy dependents. We figured that he was targeting them because of their connection.”

“Okay, Ziva, McGee, I want you to secure the perimeter, see if there’s any other way to get a visual without compromising yourselves,” Gibbs begins issuing out orders.  “DiNozzo, you and Artemis stay here and wait for the bomb squad. I’ll go in and try to get him to talk.”

Aurora stays rooted in her spot before realizing what had to happen.

“Gibbs, I think I should go in,” Artemis speaks up.

“No, not an option,” he shuts down the idea quickly.

“Think about it, Gibbs. If I go in, he’ll see another woman that’s like his daughter. He’s more likely to be sympathetic towards me and let me release the hostages then. 

“No! Absolutely not, Artemis. You could get hurt.”

“This is the job, Gibbs! Please, let me do this. It’s the only way he’ll release them. I’ll keep him talking while you guys find a way to take the shot without triggering the bomb,” Aurora pleads to him.

This was Aurora’s shot to prove that she can get the job done. She needed those hostages out of harm’s way from the crazy guy and his bomb. She needed to prove self-worth. And to keep everyone safe. But at what cost?

Gibbs stood there thinking about what she said. Tony, Ziva, and McGee look at him in disbelief that he would even think about it.

“Gibbs, this is insane,” Tony hisses.

“She raises a good point. She gets him talking enough to distract him, and we attach a live feed camera on her vest so we can see the detonator,” the lead police officer inputs.

“Gib-,” McGee argues but gets interrupted.

“You distract him until we can take the shot and disarm the bomb. And if it gets bad, you get out. You get out fast and run away even if he tries to blow himself up, got it?”

“Understood, sir,” Aurora nods.

“Alright, McGee, hook a camera up to her so we can get a visual inside. Tony and I will coordinate with the other police officers right now to get any more information about the situation. Ziva, stay with her.”

They all get to work quickly. Gibbs and Tony rush out, while McGee leads Aurora setting up a camera small enough to stay on her vest.

“I can’t believe you offered yourself like that, Artemis. That was stupid,” McGee mutters as he starts setting up the camera.

“I have no choice. If it was Gibbs, would you say the same thing?” Aurora defends herself. McGee stays silent while Ziva coaches her.

“You ask him to release the hostages and get him talking and distracted while we figure out a solution. You may have to try and talk him down so he doesn’t detonate, can you do that?”

Ziva was nervous for Aurora. She’s  been in many situations like Aurora, but the fact that she’d now be watching Aurora go through it, didn’t sit right with her.

“I’ll be fine Ziva,” Aurora reassures her. “Can you actually do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

Aurora takes off her charm bracelet, her hands trembling.

“No, Art-”

“Ziva, just listen to me. If anything happens to me, I need you to give this to Bradley.”

Ziva brings her hands on Aurora's shaking hands that were clasped on her bracelet.

“Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“I know, but please, just in case,” Aurora pleads to her as she slips the bracelet into Ziva’s hands.

Ziva solemnly nods as McGee pulls Aurora away to put the camera on her. Ziva grips the bracelet tightly, before tucking it away into one of her vest pockets for safety.

“Alright, signal is receiving, audio is working,” McGee reports just as Gibbs and Tony come back.

“You ready, Artemis? You don’t have to do this,” Gibbs assures her.

“I do, we need to get those people out before anything happens,” Aurora affirms. She was determined to get this over with, but she was nervous. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

“Alright, approach the door slowly, and just listen to me in your coms, got it?” Gibbs asks.

Aurora nods. She takes a deep breath before leaving the area and walking past the barricade, towards the door to the coffee shop. She opens the door slowly.

“Identify yourself!” A voice yells out.

“I’m NCIS Special Agent Aurora Benjamin-Mitchell. I heard you wanted to talk to NCIS,” she replies, slipping into the coffee shop.

She took in her surroundings and saw people scattered around the shop, all huddled, crying and scared.

In the middle of the shop, Adam Lewis sat in a chair, his right hand holding a gun, the left holding what looked to be the remote.

“So, you finally came. Took you long enough,” Adam scoffs. He sat confident, but Aurora could tell he was nervous.

“Let the hostages go, Adam. They don’t need to be here. You got what you want,” Aurora tells him.

“No! What I want is for NCIS to admit that it was their fault my daughter is dead, and that you should have done better.”

“Even if I said that, what good would it do? It won’t bring your daughter back!”

“Artemis, keep him talking, we think Ziva found a way into the basement of the coffee shop to try and disarm the bomb," she heard Gibbs say in her coms.

“Look, release the hostages, and we can talk about this, “ Artemis continued, trying to persuade Adam. He hesitates, getting a good look at her facial expression. She was determined to get the hostages out, but scared about his next actions.

Adam saw the determination in her eyes to do her job and get the hostages out safely. He saw his daughter in her eyes. 

A few seconds later, the front door to the coffee shop opened and the hostages came running out. Children were clinging to their parents crying, while some of the police officers were helping lead them to the ambulances and medical tents they had set up.

“She did it, boss,” Tony proudly says from next to Gibbs.

“She’s not done yet, DiNozzo,” Gibbs corrects him. “Status update, Ziva.”

“This bomb is way too sophisticated for me to disarm, I’ve never seen one like this before.”

“He is a computer tech. He made and disarmed bombs for a living. Makes sense why it’s probably hard to disarm it,” McGee speaks up from his laptop.

Just then, Gibbs’ cell phone rang and he answered it, putting it on speakerphone for Tony to hear.

“Yeah, Abs?” Gibbs asks on the phone.

“Okay, so I was looking up his background, Gibbs.  I found his bank statements and it turns out he spent most of his money on the hitman, and the rest went to a charity for veterans.”

“A charity? Why would he give away all his money?” Tony wonders out loud.

Gibbs was lost in thought before he was interrupted over his coms.

“Gibbs, I think there’s a timer on it,” Ziva informs them.

“How much time is left?”

“3 minutes and 23 seconds.”

“Try to disarm it, and if it reaches 1 minute you run out of there. Tony, what’s the status of the bomb squad, where are they?” Gibbs demands turning toward the other man.

“Won’t get here in time boss. They’re 7 minutes out.”

“Damnit!” Gibbs cusses, worried for his team.

He had Aurora talking to Adam Lewis and Ziva in the basement trying to disarm the bomb, he could only hope that Aurora would be able to talk him down, or Ziva disarms the bomb. He couldn’t lose either of them.

“Why would he bring a bomb to a coffee shop?” McGee asks from his laptop.

“Turns out, he and his daughter used to go there almost every Sunday since her mother passed away from cancer. It was the one place they shared together,” Abby answers.

“So what is his endgame? Why bring a bunch of hostages in and blow up the coffee shop?” Tony wonders.

“Should we inform Artemis of the situation?” McGee asks Gibbs.

“Not yet, if we tell her now, she’s going to panic. Which might cause him to panic and pull the trigger, remotely.”

“Boss-” Tony worriedly tries to talk him out of that decision, but Gibbs made up his mind.

“We wait until the last minute,” Gibbs orders, firmly.

“Look,” Aurora had her hands up, showing she wasn’t a threat. “I get that you lost your daughter, and I’m sorry about that. I know what it’s like to be scared that you lose your loved ones. I-I can’t even imagine how that feels when you found out what happened. She was a good person from what I read on her file, Adam.”

Aurora still stood near the door of the coffee shop. She had no idea what the status was on the bomb that Ziva was disarming or about why he was even threatening to blow up the coffee shop.

Adam looks at her sorrowfully. “You remind me of her, my daughter. Empathetic to strangers, brave, knowledgeable.”

Aurora stood silently.

“Tell me, agent. Do you have family who serve?” Adam wonders.

Adam could feel her sympathy radiating from her. He recognized the feeling anywhere, the hurt and pain of having someone that you love serve in the Navy. It was the same feeling he felt when his daughter had left on deployment.

“You can call me Aurora,” she replied, hoping to help build rapport with him, “And I do, my dad, best friend, and two of my godfather’s are Naval aviators. My brother is an aviation mechanic, also in the Navy. I almost lost my godfather in a training accident when I was little, and my other godfather to cancer.”

“Then you understand the pain when they leave, not knowing if they will ever return. But you never lost anyone?”

“I’m fortunate enough to never have felt that loss. I’ve lost many friends working at NCIS, losing a family member? I can’t even imagine. I wake up every day grateful for them to be alive, but your daughter Isabella wouldn’t want you to do this.”

“You didn’t know her! You don’t understand what it’s like!” Adam shouts. “To have someone ripped away from you forever and never see them again!” He was growing agitated.

Aurora stays silent. She had felt that feeling, she grew up with that feeling every time her dad left for a mission. The worry that he would never return. She felt that feeling the first time Bradley and Peyton were deployed. But losing someone to death, that was something she knew would break her, and she was lucky to never have known that.

“If only you had done your job, she would still be here! I had to hire a hitman in order to get the man that killed her! I got my revenge!” He screams at her, waving his gun around.

Aurora drew her gun out as a response. “Sometimes things don’t work out like that, Adam. Sometimes we don’t get the bad guy until it’s too late. There’s nothing else we can do. You blow us both up, and what will you have achieved?!” She cries out at him.

“I had him killed because I needed to make sure he was gone! I just want to hold my daughter one more time.” he starts crying, the grip on his gun loosening.  “It should have been me that died.”

Aurora’s aim falters as she hears this.

“How much time do we have left, McGee?” Gibbs asks as Ziva had left the basement and ran back to the team and the officers. They were behind the barricade in case the bomb was going to go off.

“Less than a minute left, boss!”

“Artemis, get out of there! That’s an order! There’s a timer on the bomb!” Gibbs yells into his coms.

Aurora’s eyes widened as she heard this. “It’s on a timer?” 

“I’m sorry, Aurora, I am. But I have to do this,” he cries. Adam just wanted to see his daughter one more time.

Then it dawned on Aurora. He was tying up loose ends. He hired the hitman in order to kill the man that caused his daughter’s death. Blowing up the coffee shop would put an end to the pain he felt losing his daughter.

This was his end game.

“How do we disarm it?” she worriedly asks both Gibbs, via her coms, as well as Adam.

Adam shook his head. “You can’t. I’m sorry.”

Aurora hesitates. She knew she should run, but she didn’t want to leave him. 

Adam looks at her. “Go,” he whispers.

“I-“

“Go! For your family, Aurora, get out of here!” he cries out.

Aurora quickly rushes out of the coffee shop.

Adam closes his eyes as she exits, waiting for the bomb to take him. A tear leaks from his eyes as he smiles. He could finally be at peace.

Gibbs spots Aurora running out of the coffee shop and yells for her, but before she could even reach them, the bomb goes off.

Everyone braces and covers themselves. A few seconds later, Gibbs rises from his barricade to get a glimpse of Aurora.

“Artemis!”

Aurora was a few feet away from the barricade, sprawled on her right side and laying limp in the grass. She was barely conscious, bleeding from shrapnel that hit her. It didn’t look good.

Gibbs, Ziva, and Tony rush to her, while McGee yells for a medic. Aurora moans in pain as they rolled her onto her back, waiting for the medic to reach them.

“Artemis, c’mon, stay awake,” Ziva encourages her.

“Medic! Where’s the medic!” Tony hollers at McGee.

“They’re on the way!”

“Hold on, Aurora. C’mon kid,” Gibbs brushes her hair away from her face.

She coughs before looking up at Gibbs.

“I just need a little rest, just let me close my eyes a bit,” she croaks out.

“No, you stay awake Artemis, that’s an order.”

“The hostages-”

“They’re all safe, thanks to you.”

Aurora soon starts tearing up. “I couldn’t save him, Gibbs,” she cries. “I couldn’t save Adam Lewis.”

“Shhh, it’s alright. There was nothing else you could have done. It was a suicide for him from the start.”

She glances at Ziva as her eyes start to flutter.

“Tell my family I’m sorry. Tell Bra-”

“You’re going to tell them yourself, Aurora,” Ziva grips her hand tightly.

“I’m tired, I’m just gonna rest for a bit.”

Aurora smiles before her eyes start fluttering closed.

“No, stay awake, Artemis…Artemis!” Tony calls out to her.

Darkness takes over Aurora and soon everything was quiet.

- - -

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—

Disclaimer: This story is fictitious. All works are written by me and only posted here. Please do not copy, repost, or plagiarize on any other platform without my permission!

[canonicallysoulmates]

Jensen Saturday Solo Panel JIB11

The panel starts with Jensen rocking out to his entrance music which is Thunderstruck by AC/DC. He says he's going to have the song stuck in his head for hours, and that he has songs stuck in his head constantly. He wishes they were the ones he chose but he has a 9yr old daughter who he takes to school everyday he’s home, and while he’s trying to expose his kids to lots of music, in fact at a point JJ asked to him if there were any songs on the radio that he didn't know cause he would sing along with the songs he would play but it's because he was secretly playing his own playlist. Now she’s old enough to know how to work an iphone better than he can and she’ll grab his phone, be on it for seconds and everything will be changed, and he doesn’t know how to get it back and he'll ask her if she can fix it and she goes no, but she’s now found Apple Music and Spotify on his phone and she’s created her own playlist and plays it on their drive to school, and he and the twins have to subject themselves to her music which is composed of artists like Harry Styles, Taylor Swift, and also the song Sunroof by Nicky Youre and dazy.

I couldn't quite catch what exactly it was that the person said but somebody in the crowd mentions Radio Company and he replies that he does force his children to listen to his music, and they do enjoy some of the songs they really enjoy Cannonball but he hasn't played a lot of their new album to them.

He says the new album is doing really well! And he takes the opportunity to thank the fans for their support saying that it gives him the opportunity to do something he didn’t think he could do or something he'd get to do which is play music. He also shares that his youngest daughter has taken to the piano quite well, she hears a song and then plays it by ear. But he hasn’t given her lessons cause he asked if he should get her lessons and was told to just let her play because she's still really young and if he forces her to play that might make her not like it. Right now she's just doing it for fun.

Getting into the questions, what did he discover about the making of a tv show that he didn't know or realize was such a big part of it prior to becoming an EP?

He answers that producing really describes all of the behind the scenes. Things that it takes to make a production come to pass, and he was always just simply part of the production process, so theres a writing process then once the script gets decided upon, which he says is way more intensive than he anticipated, then that script gets send to production, and the production then facilitates that script then that gets sent to the editors which is post production and they put it all together, all the music behind it, all the soundtracks, the effects and then that gets send out to the viewer. So, there's quite a process that happens, he was a part of one of the pieces of that puzzle, he's now been a heavy part of another piece which was the pre-production.

But even more in front of that, that he didn't realize, was that getting a show unto air is a monumental feat. That the fact that any show that you see in its complition gets completed and gets sent out to the viewer has beaten so many odds, it is an incredible winner in odds that are stacked against them because there are so many ideas, there are so many shows, so many things that get pitched to a studio or pitched to a network that get said no to, in fact he had heard recently that the safest thing a studio executive can say is no because if they say yes then it is their fault if it fails but if they say no there's no fault so it's easier to say no than to say yes simply from their job perspective.

For somebody to look at a show like SPN and say yes it's incredible odds then for that show to find an audience and be accepted- shows come and go constantly to find an audience is also a long shot and then for it to last as long as SPN did, for 15 seasons, that just doesn't happen so it's literally like winning the lottery. There's so many things stacked against you so being on the developmental process now he understands it from a different perspective and he's even talked to Jared, MC, Benedict, Speight and other fellow actor friends who have been in the industry as long as he has that the fact he and all of them even have jobs is astonishing because there are a lot of very talented people in the industry and some never get to be exposed, their talent never get to be presented and it's a shame but it's understandable because there are so many checkmarks that have to be checked off before it ever be released to an audience. And he's sure there are shows that people wonder how the hell it ever made it past anything, but it did and imagine how many failed along the way, that it's a hard business to be in, it's a business of rejecion and you gotta keep moving forward.

He shares that he's been in the developmental process for maybe half a dozen different shows but Winchesters is the only one he has gotten on the board, and there was one where the players involed were highly succesful but it just wasn't the right time, not that it wasn't good or it couldn't have been a succes but sometimes it all comes to down to just timing. That if he had an idea for a show and he had a writter come in and develop it and he pitches it to for example Hulu and they're like we love this idea but we just bought one that is similar and we don't want competing ideas so thanks but no then that's it, theres so many no's and he didn't realize that as an actor. He didn't realize how hard it is to have a program be made and then also have a program be succesful it is so difficult so now that he knows that he's very very grateful for the career he has had and hopefully the career that he will have. x

Will there be more Radio Company liveshows? No, they're not planning anything yet they just wanted to get this album out there, see how it was received, and then go from there; he and Steve have been talking about what the future holds and it’s kind of up in the air right now but it's certainly on the table, they really enjoyed themselves in Nashville so they're hoping to do something like that again soon. Where? They don't know. x

He had once commented about having an idea of making something similar to Naked Gun and calling it Naked Supernatural can he share something about that?

During probably the last few seasons of SPN, he, Speight, Benedict, Jared, and MC would all do slightly different variations of certain takes that were highly comedic, slapstick, stupid and funny. Some of those end up as bloopers but they thought wouldn’t it be funny if they did a whole episode of just slapstick. So, they started writting ideas down, he thinks he has a list of ideas that they had come up with but they're on his phone which he doesn't have on him at the time. But he says that maybe they'll just compile those together and figure out what to do with it although he feels the've almost done episodes like that already like Yellow Fever, French Mistake, Changing Channels, Mystery Spot they were all kind of irreverent, kind of lots of slapstick even though it worked within the story. He thinks there was a lot of silliness to be had and he would have always liked to do something like that but they weren't writers on the show, or producers or EP's, or network executives, or studio executives there's so many people you have to go through to get something like that done that they probably would have gotten shot down immediately. He doesn't remember any of the ideas they had for that but tells the fan that he'll get back to them on that when he gets his phone. x

Did he have any fight experience or training before he become an actor? And what has been his favorite fight scene?

No, he never had proper training for any kind of fighting discipline. That being said he has worked with people who have had extreme experience with fighting disciplines, and he tends to just ask them to show him what they would do in the situation and then they would do it and he would mimic them; he played a lot of sports growing up and he feels he's a fairly athletic person so when somebody challenges him with something physical he always thinks that he can do it, wether or not he can actually do it is another thing but like when somebody says 'hey can you do this particular move or this fight sequence' he will try his hardest to do exactly what they envisioned. So like fight coordinators, or stunt coordinators who are responsible for the entire stunt team, they are responsible for the actors when they're doing stunts, and for the stunt performers, and the stunt rigors- they're the head of the deparment. He will say the stunt coordinator on SPN Lou Bollo was old school stunt guy, one of those stunt guys that throws himself off of a galloping horse but the stunt game changed during his career. It became less about falling off a horse or getting hit by a car and it turned more into martial arts and John Wick stuff and Lou adapted very well but he eventually decided he was going to pass it off and he passed it off to Rob Hayter.

Rob Hayter came in and did amazing things the last few years of SPN and he brought in a discilpline of martial arts into the characters that fans may or may not have noticed but some of those fight sequences were really intricate and they were done so in a way that were supposed to be real life but also camera friendly and film friendly. Jensen says he was fortunate enough to have two stunt doubles throughout his carrer on SPN, Todd Scott, was his first one he had also worked with him on Dark Angel then he got too popular, he became Jason Momoa's stunt coordinator but Jensen says he still talks to him to this day. Then in stepped, Jesse Blue, who came from a martial arts background and Jensen believes he has like 30 different disciplines and he has his own dojo but he had never done on camera work with stunts so it was a great mix of Jensen understanding what's gonna look right on camera and Jesse saying what you would do in real life so Jensen would take what a real person would do in a situation and make it camera friendly, make it film friendly. Becaue Jesse's stuff was so tight you would never see it from the camera, it would look like they were hugging when he was dislocating someone's jaw so Jensen would say he understood but they would need to put space in between and it's gotta be big hits. That they worked really well together in bringing what Jesse knew and what he knew and tying it together and then bringing it forward.

His favorite stunt sequence was in an ep he directed, Atomic Monster, the beginning sequence where dream Dean was fighting his way through the bunker. That wasn't in the script he just wanted to do something fun and that's what they came up with, Rob Hayter as the stunt coordinator, and Jesse as his double who didn't get to do a lot of work that day because he's a realy good teacher and he thought Jensen how to do all of those moves and he was able to execute them cause he wanted to so that was one of his favorite stunt sequences.

Then he also mentions that on The Boys, the stunt coordinator, John Koyama, who he says is not just an incredible stunt coordinator, and an amazing leader but also a wonderful human being to get to work with him on those fight sequences, he had like two weeks of rehearsal to do some of the stuff they were doing on The boys where on SPN he'd get 20mins of rehearsal before they had to shoot. So he got to really get in there and give his imput and he will say, and he can say this because Koyama wasn't just giving him lip service, but he really enoyed Jensen's creative input to the fight sequences, he was coming up with different moves and different actions and Koyama implemented so many of them that he started calling Jensen the fight coordinator and so much so that when Jensen went to Big Sky, the stunt coordinator Al Goto on that show is actually friends with Koyama and he called Goto ahead and told him he was getting one of his best fight coordinators. So, Goto made Jensen a Big Sky hat that had fight coordinator on it. Says he does like his stunts but he is also getting a little older and the falls are getting harder to get up from but he's gonna keep doing it that if Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise are still doing it at their age he has a lot of stunt years ahead of him. x

By this point somebody has taken his phone to him, and he tries to look up his list of ideas for the Naked Supernatural thing so he can get back to the fan but he can't find it.

He takes one last question, favorite Disneyland or Disneyworld attraction? The parking lot. I'm guessing he's not a big fan of the mouse 😂

Jensen Saturday Solo Panel JIB11

[artbyblastweave]

So for Christmas (Merry Christmas) I got this self-published anthology of superhero vs zombies short stories (helpfully titled Superheroes vs Zombies. Possibly the other way around, I don’t have it in front of me.) For the most part it wasn’t good. I mainly wanted to see why it wouldn’t be good. If you want, like, a competent and involved examination of Superheroes vs Zombies, one where editors got involved, Ex-Heroes is right there.

That said. One of the two (count em, two) actually good stories concerned a former supervillain with a Valefor-type powerset defending the town he retired to from a zombie outbreak- by mind-jacking eight or nine local toughs into forming a competent, fearless firing line instead of running for the hills. A Khepri light situation. The other one concerned a trio of battered street-level heroes attempting to defend a refugee convoy from an infected teleporter who keeps dropping mobs of zombies on them whenever they have to stop the convoy.

I mean, not high art! But they’re both solid short-piece concepts, zombie stories that you basically couldn’t tell without involving superheroes. And they both illustrate one of the core difficulties of trying to write a Superhero Vs. Zombie piece, which I’ve discussed before; half the fun of pitting superheroes against zombies, conceptually, is that you’re swinging a necrotic bat at a setting where the precedent is that the heroes always save the day, and then.... very much not having that happen. And then you run into the difficulty of actually establishing that precedent within the story proper, establishing a classic cape setting just to annihilate it, and if you do a remotely good job of it, you end up thinking to yourself, “Jeez, what a waste of a cape setting.” 

These two stories mostly dodged this problem by being hyperspecific vignettes that imply a larger (dare I say Wormlike) cape setting but don’t do a ton to flesh it out beyond the immediate situation. The way Ex-Heroes dodged it was by having the superhero setting get cut off at the knees by the zombie apocalypse, a setting that could have ballooned to the scale of Marvel or DC smothered in its crib (while the cast is still manageable.) And the third thing you can do is just do a zombie elseworld with an established setting. This is what most of them do.

So, if I was gonna do an original superhero zombie thing, I think step one is that I’d make it a book of loosely interconnected vignettes, like World War Z, or like this book if all the stories were good instead of just two of them, and I think that would allow me to bridge the worldbuilding gap, mostly focusing on extremely specific situations but clearly implying the skeleton of the larger, “classical” superhero setting. I think step two is that instead of writing original fiction, someone should just write a bunch of fanfiction vignettes about the Worm setting undergoing a zombie apocalypse. That’s right, this was a Worm post the entire time. Specifically we should cajole @crazydreamercycle into doing this. He writes good fucked-up OC parahumans vignettes. Or Foxtail-Lavender (not sure what her name is on here) because she actually did write that one Vista-centric zombie AU, Waif. 

[godstaff]

I thought you were joking when Lois abandoned her son in outer space and returned to Earth to pursue a scoop..but no-she really did and lol what’s her problem? Did anyone really like jon? Because why did Superman not care at all? 🤣

I'm sure DC is pushing Lork so hard because they have contractual obligations with the Siegel estate, because if Lois isn't front and center of every Superman story, they will take her away.

In any case, that being the situation, writers are doing a lousy job at making the readers like her. Lois became a burden to the Superman franchise. A burden heavier and heavier a decades go by. She's a one trick pony: she's an investigative, brazen, rude reporter and nothing else. They keep the obsolete Daily Planet because only there she can shine, forcing Clark to remain in Metropolis for her. They tried to make her the exemplary mother to Jon, a Superwoman, now the chief editor of the Daily Planet. She just doesn't have the charm. The other thing in which she excells is annoying people, but it is backfiring since she started annoying the reader. Only Some disgruntied and malcontent fans of hers keep popping now and then to defend her long lost cause when they feel attacked. They only feel attacked when SuperWonder is mentioned, because, DC made sure of it, nothing else can interrupt Lork ideal family...they forgot they are making Lork being its worse enemy. People won't respect Supes as long as he's the doormat of Lois and he can't be with Lois unless he keeps being the doormat of Lois. The situation is turning ridiculous and unsustainable. Some asshole editor of DC once said "every good story about Superman is a story about Lois..." Yeah...how is that working, boys? The creativity invested by DC in justifying her omnipresence is greater than the creativity they put in writing the character. That must mean something.

As for Clark, even artists understood the only way to depict the character and make it believable was to turn it into a cartoon, a caricature of itself:

instead of a dashing, reflective hero he used to be

It suits what she sees in him: a unidimentional hillbilly dude called Clark Kent, instead of Kal-El. Clark Kent or Superman he really is.

Lois is close to her death as a character. There's not much their enablers can do to instill life into her. She's a character unable to evolve: if she evolves, she dies. If she doesn't, she dies. She's dead anyway.

Some Superwoman, huh?

[davidmariottecomics]

How I Got Here

Hello,

And happy birthday to me! I got you a present! It’s a blog!

Thanks for joining me for what ought to be a somewhat unusual blog. This one’s both addressing something I’ve been asked many many times and, with luck, maybe helping me sort out a few things for myself. I’m going to be honest… I started writing this in like a fit of imposter syndrome (it’s not just a Sonic mini-series) and depression.

I struggle a lot with my confidence. I think I’m pretty good at what I do and at being a good person, but y’know, between mental illness often not being in line with reality and living and working in the same place most of the time now with a lot of my socialization being online or just through text and just sometimes really burning out from the stresses of my everyday–both personally and professionally–it’s hard. It is hard to be a person right now. It is hard to reasonably do almost anything.

That’s maybe getting away from the point, so to try to bring us back on track… I am a person in a small industry working in what is in some ways an even smaller subsection of that industry–freelancers, people creating comics on their own, outnumber the people working behind the scenes at comic companies making comics many times over. When you have a job like mine, where I work in comics and I work on some beloved properties and I have hiring power and the ability to help people get their foot in the door, you’re frequently asked how you got there? What was your path to success? How’d you become an editor or writer or artist or whatever?

The answer is always different for each person you ask, but a central thread seems to tie us all together: determination, some level of hard work over years, and a whole lotta luck.

So, this is how I’ve ended up where I am.

The Early Advantage

A disclaimer for this whole update: I am an old man (ish–let me have it, it’s my birthday). So, let it just be said that I’m working off of old information. Some combination of half-remembered facts, family lore, and stories from my childhood, that may or may not be fully accurate as I’m not fact-checking them and I may not have always fully understood.

But let’s start when I was very little. Itty-bitty even. One of the first people to know that I had been born–not the first, but certainly within the first couple dozen–was my dad’s boss… Then Wildstorm founder, and now DC Comics publisher, president, and CCO, Jim Lee. Not a bad guy to know practically from birth if you’d eventually like to get into comics. Not that I work with him, but I do and have worked with some former Wildstorm folks and I think this is very indicative of the advantage I had growing up.

So, from birth practically, I was steeped in comics and books. My dad was working at Wildstorm, where he worked in marketing and then in editorial and did his fair share of writing. My mom co-owned Mysterious Galaxy, the San Diego genre-fiction bookstore institution. I was frequently in spaces with people who would later be my peers.

It also meant that I had a lot of access that other people never had or will. I remember being in the Wildstorm offices some days as a kid, and a few years later, in the old IDW ones too. I got to go to DC back in the NY years a couple times. I got to talk to heavyweights in comics and pick their brains and look ‘em in the eye and tell them that some day I’d have their jobs. I got to grow up surrounded by comics and books and the people who made them and to get some real insight to how they work. But, I knew that to make it, I’d still have to work for it, because I saw how hard the people in my life worked too.

One specific story from that time that I think is kinda fun: I was in probably first or second grade and I did that assignment a lot of kids do about “what do you want to be when you grow up?” And while I was probably more in the know than a lot of kids at that age, I wasn’t entirely clear on the nuances of writer vs. artist vs. cartoonist. I knew comics were made by people, and that sometimes the people did one thing and sometimes they did everything, but I wasn’t super clear on what made the difference. And I remember starting that assignment wanting to describe being a writer like my dad, but not fully being able to uncouple the idea of doing the art too. And after it, when I had a clearer picture of what the distinctions were, I think that’s when I really settled into wanting to be a writer.

Gifted Kid

Do you have a period in your life that you struggle to remember? I find that to be the case with a lot of my childhood. It’s one of those things that’s probably nothing, right? The older we get, the less we remember from our youth, and the more it gets filtered down to key events and details–the things that have some major significance or that have been told to or by us enough time we feel we can’t help but remember them. But sometimes I do worry about it. I worry that hindsight isn’t as 20/20 as we say it is and that there are things that’re just slippery–that some part of me thinks I should remember, or that sometimes my mom will talk about like I do remember–but that I just don’t. And when I don’t remember these things, well, it’s frustrating even if it’s not a big deal.

Like, does it matter that I don’t remember the time in my life when I primarily wore sweatpants and cowboy boots? No, though I am retroactively embarrassed for myself. I remember wearing sweatpants–to bed or when exercising, same as I do now, though otherwise I primarily wear jeans (as an aside, since we’re getting personal this time around, my butt has gotten too big and keeps tearing my jeans in the back). And I certainly remember wearing cowboy boots–which I just don’t do anymore. I don’t have a pair, but I do still have a lot of love for a good pair of boots in the right setting. But in spite of how little I know it matters in the grand scheme of my life, I also know that it makes me worry that I can’t remember something like that–the same way I worry when I can’t remember anything. I was talking with Becca recently about feeling like my memory was worse and was it an effect of getting covid and not realizing it, and as they pointed out, it’s probably mostly the fact that I’ve been stressed out kinda non-stop for like… 3 ½ years.

Can you tell I wrote that while feeling more depressed? Anyway, to the topic at hand, what I do remember from this time in my life and that is relevant to how I got to where I am, is that I was a gifted student. I know I have a few international regular readers, so I’ll elaborate in case your school system is substantially different. When we moved from bustling San Diego to the middle of nowhere, Arizona, I went from private school to public school and two very different educational standards. I remember, as an obnoxious, snotty kid, saying at some point that it seemed like the expectations for me through 6th grade in Arizona weren’t any different than the expectations I had already met and exceeded in San Diego in 4th grade.

Shortly after I started at my first AZ school, I tested for gifted and talented and was found to be gifted. What that actually meant was that I tested really well. I had a higher reading level than my peers. I needed more of a challenge in my work–again, likely largely influenced by different standards coming in, and which I think I must’ve gotten, but truth be told, with a small staff in a small town, I don’t really remember getting that much extra attention or challenge to my assignments. I wasn’t a super genius needing to skip a bunch of grades and ready to do complex physics or whatever, but I was needing a little more because I could handle it.

Then I went to high school. I traveled about an hour each way every day because I needed to go to the bigger high school in the bigger town because they had the most honors and AP classes–a way of continuing that “gifted” education and receiving early college credit because of it. There, I ended up having a similar experience. When I graduated, I wasn’t valedictorian or salutatorian, but I was in the top percentile of my class and got to give a speech. It was… a high school graduation speech, alright.

My point, such as it is, is that I spent years working in a school system that kept telling me I was smart–or succeeding in a way my peers weren’t, needing resources that they didn’t–and then rewarding me for good performance. With the benefit of hindsight, sure, it probably wasn’t great that I was being told I was special and different and tying a lot of my self-worth to academic performance, but hey, that’s the American school system for ya!

The critical story from this time period I know I’ve told before. I think it was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, so when I was really starting to look at colleges and get out applications. I was at San Diego Comic-Con and was at a party with former DC writer, editor, president and publisher, Paul Levitz (one of the people that in my childhood I had once told I would have his job someday). I was talking with Paul about my college plans because I knew that he did some teaching on the side and, well, I figured it’d be good to know how to move forward so I could get his job someday. And I told him that I had been looking at schools with strong creative writing programs and journalism programs and what few schools offered comics programs and he told me that his advice as a person who taught creative writing was you can’t be taught creativity. You can be taught how to refine your writing, and there are some programs that put the emphasis on focusing your skills and helping you improve your storytelling, but there are a lot of people who enter creative writing hoping it’ll foster their creativity, and you can’t teach an imagination. His advice was to pursue something that I would be able to write about–things that I could know and always refer back to as a basis for ideas. I decided to pursue journalism because I had some stories that–fingers crossed, might still get told someday–I thought knowing the real ins and outs would be helpful for. I also figured, journalism is about learning how to research and learning other people’s stories and how to tell them. It ended up being a good fit.

College Daze

It’s kinda funny. I’ve been in comics for 7 years now. Celebrated my 7th IDW anniversary in late August. Most of the people I know and interact with on a regular basis are comics creators, or other creators, artists, readers, fans, people in the community at large. But sometimes I get that shock of no matter how mainstream comics may seem, for a lot of folks, they’re still a novelty. Like when I got my haircut last and the stylist had no real idea what my job was. And without a doubt through my own doing, I had a reputation even through college as “comic guy” because both to people with a shared interest and people who barely knew me, that was the fact they knew about me.

College was probably the first time in years that I had made a full comic. And the ones I made were not very good. But, over my years there, I took a few classes that involved comics heavily (including a really amazing comics geography class that was examining comics as a tool of non-fiction storytelling) and in the course of those, made a couple little comics. Y’know, one or two page things as assignments, but something that I had to write and draw and letter all by myself. Having to do that made me really start to think about the tools of making comics. I had never stopped reading comics, I had never stopped thinking about comics, I had to read Understanding Comics and the other Scott McCloud books like 5 times for different classes, but I had so fully bought into being a writer that I hadn’t tried to make my own comics really in a long time.

I had a couple false starts as a writer. I had a series I was working on with my dad that ultimately didn’t go forward and my only regret about that is not having had the chance to work with my dad. I did a comic script as my honors thesis. I got a surprisingly good grade on it considering how weak I think it is. I have not chosen to revisit it because in hindsight, it was not a good script and was a pretty flawed premise.

But what I really got into in college was editing. In my journalism classes, and working on the Daily Wildcat, I got to spend some time learning editorial skills and in the trenches. And, as it turned out, for as much as I loved writing for myself, I also was pretty good at helping other people find their stories, find their angles, clean up and clarify their copy, check their facts, etc. It was also around that point–and around the point of my first *real* job in the home department at Dillards that I realized editorial also had the perks of regular paychecks and healthcare.

I didn’t focus on editorial in an official capacity. It’s not like I have a degree in journalism with an emphasis on editorial or anything, but I knew it was something I was increasingly interested in pursuing and really busted my chops to try to get good at it. For as difficult as it is to bust out an article in a daily paper because someone blew their deadline or turned in something unpublishable, it is actually far harder to adjust on the fly in comics because I can’t just write something and plug it in.

The other major influence on me and comics in college is, of course, it’s where I met and fell in love with Becca. When we first met, they liked comics, but had largely given up on that part of their ambitions. Like, they were a political science major that had danced around also doing theater because they loved acting and maybe wanted to be a politician and maybe wanted to be an actor and maybe wanted to be something else, but being an artist, much less a comic artist was not a thing they were really thinking. And now, that’s what they do and what they work on so much of the time and with me sometimes and y’know, I could not do what I do now without them in my corner and vice-versa, I don’t think.

My Real Secret to Success: A Broken Car

Those are the factors that really led me to comics. I grew up in it. I had connections. I learned about it myself and in school and throughout my life, and was rewarded for the work I put into learning about comics and learning everything else. I fell in love, and I fell in love with editing. And so I graduated with a journalism degree with a minor in gender and women’s studies and was ready to face the world… by briefly kind of illegally living in my friend’s back bedroom for a few months because I was unemployed and unemployable!

In the middle of the hot Arizona summer, I get a message from my friend Shannon Denton. He’s working on the Alan Tudyk webseries Con Man and they’re shooting the finale and need people for a fake comic convention and he’s heard Becca’s interested in acting. It’d be background stuff, but it could be a little something–a first step, first gig in LA. Plus, we’d get to see each other!

And so, 4th of July weekend, Becca and I drive out to LA for filming! Now, to backtrack (and forward and sideways) a little… I have not great luck with cars. My first car of my own was an old family car that was gifted to me and was rear ended only a few months into owning it. It was messed up–not actually undrivable, probably, but the extent of the damage was more than the rest of the car was worth, so it was deemed totalled. And because it was a car of little value, I took my little payout and bought another crappy car. It was fine for what it was. Except when it started giving me the check oil light. I took it in to get the oil changed and apparently brought it to the dumbest, worst mechanics in town. I say this because…

Back to LA. We’ve been there a couple of days, but the car’s starting to drive a little funny and make some funny sounds and the check oil light’s back on. So, we stop at a mechanic and say “hey, can you look at this? I just had it in the shop!” And the mechanic looks at it and does his whole thing and says that whoever looked at it last screwed me over. The cap to the oil tank was shattered, so it wouldn’t screw in properly and the car could no longer safely hold oil and the oil that had been in it had now gotten into all sorts of other parts of the engine and the engine would have to be replaced, which once again, would’ve been more than the value of the car.

Now, stepping back again for one second. We’re staying with our friend Henry Barajas while we’re in LA. And while I’m at Henry’s place, I see a job posting for an editor gig at IDW (I would later learn that it was to replace John Barber). I go through it and I’m not qualified at this point. But, Henry encourages me to apply, so ultimately he’s like making dinner and conversation with Becca while I sit at his kitchen table and fill out this application, certain I’m not going to get the job.

The mechanic sees the AZ plates and asks if we’re local or if we’re staying with anyone. I tell him that my mom lives in San Diego. He says super, that’s about as far as you can go. You cannot drive back to Arizona with this car, it will not make it there. And be careful if you’re driving this down to San Diego. Becca and I do it. We drive it down, park it in the driveway of my mom and stepdad’s place, and that’s where the car died and was eventually picked up and donated from. But through some pretty convenient timing, I hear back from IDW. I am right, I’m not qualified for the editor position. But they haven’t yet posted that they’re also looking for an editorial assistant–a ground-level opening. And if I can make it there, I can do an interview with Chris Ryall. So it was that my car dying set me up to be in San Diego and do the interview.

It went well. Chris and I knew each a little, from my dad’s time at IDW, though obviously very different with me as an adult rather than a kid. It went well, and I eventually went back to AZ and waited to hear back. I got to San Diego Comic-Con and very nervously approached the IDW booth one day and talked to Chris and he said I had it, just had to finish up the paperwork on their end, and within a month, I had signed the papers and started at IDW.

And now I’m here. I've been trained by amazing people and have worked with so many fabulous creators (and still have such a wishlist of people I'd like to work with one day). I spend 5 days a week (though honestly, sometimes it seems like more) doing editorial work, and trying to write on top of and between that. I’ve got a couple comic series under my belt and lots of stories I’d still like to tell. And I bust my ass every day to bring people comics. Being in editorial, it is a sometimes frustrating job. A job that does not get a lot of credit. And a very difficult job. But it’s my job, and the highs are the best thing in the world.

I still struggle. I think that’s evident, even in how I tell my story about whether I’m actually justified in being here and doing this and if I’m any good at it. I told a friend recently that I have an easier time inviting my peers to my wedding than asking them if they’d like to work on a silly little story with me because for some reason, it feels like that’s going to be a bother or they’re not going to treat me as a serious creator. But that’s my comics story and I expect there’ll be a lot more to come from me in the future.

Thanks for reading. Amended features below!

David

What I enjoyed this birthday: Birthday cards, gifts, art, and messages! People who bought my Kofi mystery bundles (last call)! People who subscribed to my Patreon (mystery bundles til Halloween at $10+, plus a Wreckers #1 script dissection coming this weekend)! People who sent me $$$ because it's my birthday because, boy, I need 'em (see Kofi link above...)! Blank Check (Podcast), Solve This Murder (Podcast) , Craig of the Creek (Cartoon), One Piece (Manga), Pokemon Violet (Video game), The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (Book), Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links (Video game), The Traitors (TV show), Mothership (This funky space "tiki" bar in town! It's themed around having crashlanded on an alien planet, so like half the bar is what's left of your ship and the other half is like the natural cave formation and the weird irridescent plant life and stuff. It's really cool). 

New Releases today (10/18/2023): No new books from me this week. :C But maybe spend the money you would've spent today on a mystery bundle or Patreon membership or something in my shop or something from Becca (remember, there's even more on Becca's Patreon and itch and other things accessible via their contact page)! 

Or put your money to something good like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, Doctors Without Borders, or UNRWA. It's hard because a lot of this money is anticipatory given the situation in Gaza (and the West Bank) and at time of writing, resources are being extremely restricted, if getting through at all. Or if you want to feel like you're having more immediate action, there're still plenty of ways to give for relief in Ukraine, which is also still under siege. 

Or if money is a big ask, which, like, I get it, maybe you can give some time to something important. The Jewish Voice for Peace Action has made an easy to fill out form to write your representatives to encourage defunding and deescalating the Palestinan genocide. You can still submit your comments on "Generative AI" to the copyright office (they've actually extended the submission period). You can write to your reps to tell them to stop KOSA. You can get involved with your local library, or attend a legislative session of some sort, or otherwise take action in what you believe in because, again, things are bad right now and there is so much evil and injustice to stand up against, be it book bannings (and publishers giving in to extremists) or transphobia or worker exploitation or all of the above! 

Announcements: It is my birthday. See above! 

Pic of the Birthday:  I will post actual birthday pictures when I have them, so this weekend's blog. In the meantime, final plug for my bundles! 

[soullessjack]

How'd it go!!!!

It was amazing!!!!!!!! Alex was so lovely and funny to meet and such a sweetheart. I was also at Mark Sheppard’s panel and he is fucking hilarious, I almost got a headache from laughing so hard. He should seriously consider standup.

I sat through Rob and DJ’s panels as well before my meet and greet with Alex, they are both just so absolutely amazing and wonderful. And the meet & greet!!!! So much fun!!!! We were all really nervous, even Alex, so the conversations kept bouncing around but it was very much enjoyable! He started it with a whole bit about being a corporate bringing us in to fire us and give us a compensatory pizza party (also a funny bonus, we got on the topic of worst jobs and one of the people seated said “corporate hell,” and Alex said “but isn’t that all corporate?” love it so much).

I ended up missing the photo ops for lunch of all things lmfaooo, but we did a group photo with the meet and greet and airdropped the photos from other phones. If I ever get the chance to meet him again at another con I’m completely committed to getting a selfie with the stupidest angle possible tho.

I wish I could relay what he thought of the gifts and the written messages note but I could only be there for the day, so it’s possible we’ll never know unless he brings it up today or at another con. But I think he seemed to like it! He seemed most interested in the books I gave him, The Westing Game and an essay collection about identity psychology called Who Am I.

I also gave him ice wine teabags because that’s one of my most favorite teas ever and it’s actually ironically a Canadian brand! And he told me that ice wine is like a Canadian dessert drink but he didn’t know about the tea. And at his panel I grew enough balls to take the mic and actually ask him something! I can’t remember the full wording just from sheer excitement and exhaustion but it was something to the effect of, “Firstly I wanna say I really appreciate how much passion you have about what you do, and it really means a lot to me as an artist that you still care, so from one artist to another thank you for caring about your work, and what are some other things that inspire you to keep caring.” Sadly I don’t remember what he’d answered, but I’m sure once the panel goes up on YT I’ll find it again and be able to absorb it in the quiet peace of my cave

(It’s honestly a little embarrassing how much of this I actually don’t fully remember, but supposedly that’s a natural experience for people going to such exciting events like concerts or cons. Too much excitement and joy it all just blots out in your brain or something).

I truly enjoyed every bit of it, but for me the absolute highlight of the day was just being given his bracelet in exchange for what I’d given him. Not even kidding, I sobbed over it in my brother’s car almost six hours later after we’d left. And towards the end of the M&G (which was sort of rushed to make time for Osric’s panel but that’s ok) I asked if I could hug him and let me tell you. Hugging is one of my favorite forms of love language ever, and I’ve been told that I give very good ones, and I’ve wanted to give him a hug (I’ve wanted everything in this day practically) for nearly six years, so it was just amazing.

I never once doubted anyone who’s said he’s a sweetheart, but really being there and seeing him and talking to him and seeing that in the flesh. . It’s something else. I also had some very lovely and interesting conversations with some stand runners, like this one guy who has a comic series about the first werewolf and we got into a convo about Superman and BTAS vs STAS and actually met the first black writer/editor/artist/everything for Superman in DC, Christopher Priest, and a wonderful old lady and her (presumably) daughter who sold exclusive-yet-expensive figurines and made their own sterling silver SPN jewelry for JIBCONs. Artists meeting artists. Loved every minute of it!!!

I also talked to this sweet attendee lady who’s been to eight conventions beforehand and got some wonderful con advice from her. And one woman in the meet and greet circle who makes kandi bracelets and gifted me one of the many SPN themed ones she’d made! Right after the M&G finished I met my brother on the balcony and he’d been talking to another attendee from Canada who told me about her meeting alex yesterday and how sweet he was with her! She hugged us both and wished us a safe travel and yeah.

Overall it was such a wonderful experience and I can really see why it’s considered its own family and such a staple of the fandom. If I could ever go to any more in my life or even have my own stand set up someday I would honestly be set for life!! I hope you and anyone else who’s never gotten to go to one before has the same chance, because it really is so life changing and amazing. I talked to maybe like, 12—20 people of the entire attending population but I still felt so…connected with everybody there.

♾️/ 10 would absolutely no hesitation impulsive decision reckless spending do it again, especially to meet Alex again!!!!!!!