The day after this book came out, one of the people I follow on my @DirigoDuke Twitter account was complaining about it. When I asked what specifically he did not like about the issue, he called it, "Another damn rape origin."
There's something to that. At least as far back as the infamous girlfriend-in-fridge incident that took place early in Kyle Rayner's career as a Green Lantern, the comics industry has been on a bit of a tear with violence against women. Look at all the rapes on this list, for instance. It weirds me out, at least in part because when I started reading comics in the early 1970s, I don't think I could have told you what sex was, let alone rape.
But the "rape origin," in and of itself, is not my concern with the new Power Ring. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'd be perfectly content to not have rape play a central role in my escapist literature for a good long while. But my issue is not so much that a rape origin is wrong, it's that it's wrong for this character.
Let's come up to speed. With the death of the original Power Ring (not really the greatest codename, ever, frankly) in Forever Evil #5, the eponymous ring went off in search of a new host. In the previous issue of Justice League, it found Portland, Oregon, resident Jessica Cruz, who was described as a "prepper."
This makes a great deal of sense, character-wise. While the GL power rings in "our" universe seek out bearers who are without fear, by the Bizarro rules of Earth-3 (if we can still call it that) that ring wants a bearer who knows nothing but fear.
For that reason, a prepper would seem to be the perfect host. They prepare for and, in many cases, obsess over the potential break-down of society from any number of sources, real or imagined, including the sometimes simultaneous belief in contradictory collapse scenarios. In other words, they fear everything. Now, depending on your political predilections, you may see preppers as folks acting sanely in an insane world, or as wack-a-doodle coo-coo birds. But that only adds to the power of Power Ring as a character.
In this issue, Geoff Johns does a masterful job portraying Lex Luthor as someone who not only believes himself to be in the right, but who actually sounds as if he just might be. As Luthor explains his reasons for wanting to join the Justice League, even though we know him to be a villain, even though we now he's all about self-interst, even though we suspect he's up to no good, tension is created and sustained because we can't help thinking that, at any moment, Batman might blurt out, "Okay, sure, that makes sense." Or, even if we know he won't, a part of us wonders if maybe he should.
A similar parallel could have been played with the new Power Ring. Sure, stockpiling food and weapons sounds goofy, but, deep down, won't you wish you had done the same if fresh fecal matter ever does come in contact with some oscillating object?
But instead, Johns misses the point with this particular villain. And, yes, I get that it's the height of fanboy douch-baggery to say a writer missed the point of his own creation. But my point is this: Instead of being someone afraid of everything in a general sense, as a matter of personal philosophy, who probably would have accepted the evil ring willingly, shades of Frodo, we get a character who's holed up in her apartment as a reaction to a very specific incident, who then has the ring forced on her. At that point, the prepper angle is completely lost, being nothing more than the an expression of the fear that cause the ring to home in on her. From that point on, she's "just" a rape victim.
Now, again, I don't mean to trivialize rape by suggesting that it's anything but a horrific, life-altering experience. Someone might very well become so fearful of the world after such a heinous act that she would refuse to leave her apartment for several years. What I am saying is that Jessica Cruz could have been a very ordinary young woman before the rape, for all we know. But her phobia is born of a single incident, and that as an adult. With therepy, she could well live a normal life once again. Or at least we'd like to think so. But a prepper, I think, could not be so easily "cured." It's not a matter of helping a person come to grips with one terrible attack, you'd have to essentially resculpt his or her core personality.
I imagine Johns wanted us to sympathize with Jessica, and that's the problem, we feel nothing but sympathy for her. While we may have been at least slightly sympathetic with Power Ring's prepper motivations, if written as well as Luthor is in this issue, and not as a stereotypical right-wing redneck, we can feel only sympathy for Jessica. Or, to put it more bluntly, we pity her. After all, when the ring forces itself on her, it's essentially a second rape. And just like that, I'm not interested in what Power Ring might do next, or her rational for doing it — I just want the poor girl to get better. And I don't think that's a good foundation for a recurring comic book villain.
It's a lot different from, say, Lex Luthor. We may feel bad for him that he lost his hair due to Superboy's inexperience (at least pre-Crisis), but he's the one who had an irrational reaction. And while you may sympathize with him to a certain extent (at least when he dedicates his giant brain to good works), we never lose sight of his villainy because of that reaction. Think of the excellent Batman/Luther debate in this issue. Would that have worked even a fraction as well if your underlying response to Luthor was that you feel sorry for him?
Power Ring should be a character for whom, like Luthor, or Namor, or R'as al Ghul, or Dr. Doom (the latter under certain writers anyway) you're primary reaction is, "Yes, I see your point, but . . . "
With Jessica Cruz, her entire origin, and thus her central character point, is hung on the basis of being a victim. And you can't just write off her villainy, or her prepper lifestyle, as an irrational reaction to an terrible incident. Because, and I think I've mentioned this, she was raped. Twice.
In my opinion, being a prepper was enough. That mentality alone would have made her an excellent villain and/or anti-hero. That alone is what Power Ring needed to be. As a rape victim, she just makes me uncomfortable, hoping with every panel that the ring will somehow let her go.
Using that sort of cringe-inducing reader discomfort can work for some kinds of storytelling, even some kinds of comics, but I feel strongly that it's both the wrong device (in general) for super-hero comics, and, most especially, the wrong choice for this particular character.
There is good dramatic tension, and bad. The Luther/Batman debate is the good kind. But for serialized fiction, with recurring characters, the tension inherent in this version of Power Ring does not work, because the character constantly cries out for resolution. And with every appearance that goes by without some kind of denouement, every time we're told the ring chose Jessica because of her rape-born phobias, it will be as if Johns is saying, "Be careful how you dress when you go out girls. Not only could you get raped, you could become a super-villain."
But, as they say, your mileage may vary.
A few other quick thoughts — and I hasten to add that, even with these criticisms, this is, on balance, and certainly compared to most everything else being published these days, a pretty good comic.
However, I do hope Johns will explain before this story is over exactly why the ring needs a bearer at all. It seems pretty darn sentient and awfully darn powerful all on its own. My thought as I was reading its rape of Jessica Cruz was, "Dude, why not just go do it yourself if you're so hip for global genocide?"
Not much happens with Jessica's plot line in this issue. Plot synopsis: The ring forces itself on Jessica. Period, the end. To Johns' credit, he does at least return to her plight at issue's end. Too often these days, writers will start an issue with a prologue or scene of some kind and then drop it. Oh, they'll return to it in subsequent issues and the whole story will read well enough when several issues are consumed in one sitting, or else in a collected edition. But as a reading experience in one single issue, the unpracticed comic book reader can be excused for wondering, "Now what the hell did that have to do with anything?"
The scene with SHAZAM was cute. My problem, and I admit that this is my problem, is that this is not how Captain Marvel was written when I was a kid. I guess that's why it bothers me when writers and artists try and get across that this is now not a boy turned into an adult, but a boy in an adult body, by pounding away at the point with a Mjolnir-sized hammer, depicting him as if he's not 16, but six. And not only that, but the kind of six year old who enjoys reading the lobotomized books of the Johnny DC line, although he finds them to be a bit challenging.
The routine with the ping-pong table was funny, although I have to say this new idea that SHAZAM not only has powers based in magic, but that he's also an honest-to-good pull-a-rabbit-out-of-my-hat magician, is disconcerting. But again, I'm old school.
As I noted above, the Luthor/Batman bit was excellent. My critique is that it took up entirely too much of the book. There's one page, for example, that has just three panels, with one being a lot of black shadow around a Bruce Wayne head shot. There can be meta-textual data in a shot like that. A panel like that could, for instance, conveying a sense of Batman being suddenly awash in a sea of confusion. But I don' think that's what's going on here. I think Mahnke got a script calling for three panels and did the best he could.
I'm also not convinced that Batman kicking Luthor needed to be a full-page splash, or that we needed such large panels of the grandfather clock — although I like the idea of using them to both foreshadow Luthor's discovery of the Batcave and to convey how time seemed to stand still in a moment of suspense. But those panels, could have been a lot smaller, the kick done as a half-page or quarter-page panel, and other pages could have been consolidated as well. Giving the reader the same amount of information from the Luthor/Batman subplot, just in fewer pages, would have allowed more plot movement for the Power Ring arc in this issue.
One reason I don't think the kick needed a full page is that it was not, in my opinion, a very dramatic action shot. On his now-abandonded blog, Jim Shooter once recalled how Stan Lee criticized a protege of Neal Adams, saying a panel of a guy getting punched was too static, that the puncher needed to be drawn all the way back for the swing, or else depicted as having followed completely through, with the punchee flying ass over teakettle. I thought of that impromptu lesson when looking at this page.
I also was a bit confused on the page with the clock panels. The fight sequence makes it look like Luthor reaches up to try and grab Alfred's gun away, but because of where the panel border cuts off the image, it's a bit hard to tell, especially given the sleepy look on Luthor's face.
The art generally is quite good, however. Except for those two layout issues. My only other critique is the panel with Superman and Wonder Woman, which seems be in a different, heavier inking style than most of the other pages. My guess is that page, or at least that panel, was done primarily by Alamy and not Champagne.
Oh, and one final thought. While the Luthor/Batman stuff was generally excellent, in script and mostly in layout, except where noted, there was one moment that truly broke my suspension of disbelief.
Having Luthor discover the grandfather clock entrance to the Batcave is cool, but having him do so because he "felt the slightest draft" on his neck and the "stench of stale air" — seriously?! That might have worked on a Batman story back in 1939, but are we really to believe that with all his marvelous toys in the modern age, Batman can't build a proper air circulation system into his manor + cave, or that he can't figure out how to get the entryway to seal when closed? Should we believe that Batman, with his 80-octillion dollars, can't go to the hardware store and get a $4 roll of weather stripping? Are we really to believe the clock just sits on a couple of hinges so loose that a breeze just keep whistling though as a matter of course, such that anyone might cause it to fly open just from the draft of walking by? It might have been different if we had seen the clock not get shut properly because of Luthor's sudden, unexpected arrival, but that did not happen. What did happen was that I got suddenly snapped out of the story with a monster-sized roll of the eyes.
Okay, I said that would be the last thought, so I'll not delve into the excellent Captain Cold scene, where he gets tempted by positive reinforcement. I also won't say too much about the last-page splash of the New 52 Doom Patrol. I did find it interesting, however, that of the six super-hero comics I bought last week, five of them had this exact same style of ending, with a surprise full-page revelation of the next issue's antagonist and/or guest star.
But, because this review has already gone on WAY longer that usual, I won't expound on why I don't expect much of this new/old Patrol line-up, or why I believe the Doom Patrol is doomed to failure with every relaunch.
I'll prepare a separate "Thought Bubble" post on that topic, instead.
Winter Solder: The Bitter March #5 (of 5)
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