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[GLX]

Thank you GLX.

No problem. I tend to be the guy that makes slides when no one else makes one.

[draco x]

Jason should make himself useful for once, and shoot Damien instead.

Either that or have Joker beat Damien with a crowbar.

[GLX]

Either that or have Joker beat Damien with a crowbar.

Bah. Reread Batman and Robin #1-#3 via Comixology and that kid is still fun to read about.

[draco x]

Bah. Reread Batman and Robin #1-#3 via Comixology and that kid is still fun to read about.

Not really interested I'm afraid. Damien is like Jason Todd 2.0 and ironically I would take Jason over Damien at this point. If only Jason had shot Damien in the head during Battle For The Cowl.....

[Zechs]

Bah. Reread Batman and Robin #1-#3 via Comixology and that kid is still fun to read about.

Thing is he's ten times more amusing with Steph around as the straight man.. er woman to his antics.

[draco x]

Thing is he's ten times more amusing with Steph around as the straight man.. er woman to his antics.

I would love for him to meet Cassandra so she can use him as a practice dummy once he gets on her nerves.

[GLX]

I would love for him to meet Cassandra so she can use him as a practice dummy once he gets on her nerves.

They team up in Batman: Gates of Gotham.

[Zechs]

They team up in Batman: Gates of Gotham.

Yeah, but there wasn't enough stuff with the two other than him respecting her somewhat at the end. I mean yeah Cass spent the bulk of that mini either with Tim or Dick, but the little snippets with Damian were good. Too bad DC hasn't explored that even more given their both LoA trained. Again, DC's failing to capitalize.

[draco x]

Yeah, but there wasn't enough stuff with the two other than him respecting her somewhat at the end. I mean yeah Cass spent the bulk of that mini either with Tim or Dick, but the little snippets with Damian were good. Too bad DC hasn't explored that even more given their both LoA trained. Again, DC's failing to capitalize.

The same thing I could say about Barbara and Jason interacting with each other briefly during the Night Of The Owls saga. Given the fact that they were both victims of the Joker, I would love to have seen more dialogue with them and not just her giving him a warning to stay out of Gotham.

[draco x]

They team up in Batman: Gates of Gotham.

Again too bad it didn't end with her knocking him through a wall.

[Zechs]

Again too bad it didn't end with her knocking him through a wall.

She didn't have too. She paid no heed to his words and left him. They did hurt as she told Tim and he white knighted her by the comment of her being more trusted by Bruce than him in #3.

[draco x]

She didn't have too. She paid no heed to his words and left him. They did hurt as she told Tim and he white knighted her by the comment of her being more trusted by Bruce than him in #3.

Again If only Jason had aimed for Damien's head I tell you. Or better yet, I would love to see Jean Paul return in his psycho Azbats persona and strangle that little twerp like he did Tim. There are so many ways I want Damien to meet his end and it's hard to settle on just one interestingly enough.

[Zechs]

Now Brett Booth did a sketch on Stephgate with her as Red X:

[Zechs]

*ahem*

http://dratsing.tumblr.com/post/1126470 ... cain-ideas

>There will never be a Cassandra Cain comic where she travels the world having pulp-y adventures fighting any evildoer who’d use the power of martial arts for nefarious purposes, doing jumping kicks between speeding boats and having kung-fu duels on top of burning zeppelins.

>There will never be a Cassandra Cain comic where she suplexes a SUV.

>There will never be a comic where Cassandra Cain swordfights an Apache helicopter while running down the side of a collapsing skyscraper with the entire army shooting at her
>and the army is made of dragons

>there will never be a comic where Cassandra Cain made the dinosaurs extinct

>There will never be an issue where Steph drags Cass into a newly-opened spa but the place is suddenly taken over by a bunch of criminals looking to kidnap a powerful exec, making it Die Hard with Cassandra Cain.


>There will never be an issue where Cassandra saves a random guy about to get mugged, and the guy ends up being president of a videogame company and offers her a job as motion capture artist, but then it turns out the whole thing was just a way to send mind-control waves to children around the world through vidya consoles
>There will never be an issue where Steph’s favorite band cancel their tour after she’d just gotten tickets for the show, so she decides to investigate and she and Cass end up in the middle of a war between record labels that involves ninjas for hire and the DC equivalent of the Wu-Tang clan, ending with Cass defeating a helicopter with a vinyl LP

>there will never be a comic where Cassandra Cain solves the latest crime wave by beating up everybody in Gotham

>You’ll never read an issue of Cassandra Cain fighting a samurai on the wings of a flying Zero fighter headed for a military base
>You’ll never see Cass fight a seven-headed serpent beast called forth from the seventh dimension by a twisted magician hell-bent on world domination who ends up being a Stan Winston-inspired film technician getting revenge on CG-addicted film studios
>You’ll never see Cassandra Cain vs the Female Furies

>You’ll never see Cass going on a holiday to Hawaii at the same time as an alien overlord demands that Earth’s mightiest champions determine the fate of their planet… by surfing, so Cass has to use all his training to learn how to surf and save the world
»Cass will never find herself trapped in the middle of a friendly parody of a John Woo heroic bloodshed film in Chinatown, only to skilfully diffuse the situation with badass kung-fu and a complete lack of giving a shit
>And you’ll never read a final arc explaining that Cass has been cursed by a Fu-Manchu expy to turn her into a magnet for crazy shit and bad luck, and though she defeats him she cannot remove the curse, causing her to turn her back and get away from Steph because eventually she’d get hurt… only for Steph to give her an awkward but whole-hearted speech on how she’s her friends and true friends do not abandon other friends and whatever’s waiting for her ‘round the next turn, they’ll face it together.

>You’ll never see Cass and Steph and other teen heroes kidnapped and used as characters in a mind-bending game of D&D which ends up being an illusion that Cass breaks by being brutally OP
>You’ll never see Cass having to pull off an “Entrapment” to steal a magical Chinese artifact from a museum before a warlock tries to nab it and unlock its secret powers
>You’ll never see Cass framed for a crime she didn’t commit and having to piece it together to clear her name in a noir meets Bruce Lee fashion, like Sin City drawn by David Aja
>In fact, you’ll never see a Cass comic drawn by David Aja

>You’ll never see Cass knock Babs out because she got her stupid ass into a situation she doesn’t have to skill o get itself out of

>There will never be a comic where Cassandra and Steph have to win the championship in intergalactic monster truck demolition derby or all is lost
>and the current champion is Lobo

>There will never be a comic where Cassandra Cain must covertly infiltrate the dead city of R’lyeh

>There will never be a comic where Cassandra Cain fights a volcano

>You’ll never read an arc where Cass has to team up with her mother to take down a secret society that’s kidnapping martial artists to feed their moves into killer kung-fu robots
>And Lady Shiva will never be portrayed as anything more than a cryptic but ultimately depthless death-junkie who gets killed at the drop of a hat
>And her appearance in the arc will never spark enough interest to warrant a mini starring her that explores the positive or negative roles that martial arts can have on the lives of different men and women while also using Shiva’s knowledge of pressure points to turn her fighting style into a less gory but no less powerful version of Hokuto Shinken
>And that mini will never be succesful enough to warrant a Lady Shiva ongoing that’s even MORE pulpy than Cass’s and also benefits from not having to come up with contrived reasons to see her operate outside of Gotham AND is a love letter to Denny O’Neill’s 70s kung-fu comics
>And… and… and…
>…
>;_;

>You will never see Cassandra Cain, Richard Dragon and Karate Kid fighting a three-way battle inside a volcano about to explode while Bruce and the Question fight Ra’s Al Ghul minions to stop his evil plan

>Also, you’ll never read a comic where Cassandra is hired as a stuntwoman in Hollywood and eventually stars in a movie of her own, but the production is plagued by ninjas on a vendetta against her and she has to balance filming with protecting the crew from the evil shadow warriors. And the crew are none the wiser.

>You will never see Cassandra Cain kick cybernetic kung fu hookers through the walls of a rocket-powered rock concert that MUST NOT SLOW DOWN BELOW 500MPH OR THE NOVABOMB EXPLODES

[David Bird]

LOLtron caught my post on the recent Stephanie Brown controversy, but didn't actually copy it over. Here it is:

Ah, Stephanie

Women and the new 52. It’s been getting a lot of press. Again. Much of it following the news that Stephanie Brown will not be appearing as Nightwing in the new Smallville comic after all. It was writer Bryan Q. Miller’s intention, but editorial fiat told him that Brown would have to be replaced. Questions why eventually brought reports that someone at headquarters considered the character ‘toxic,’ but there was no explanation as to what that might mean. Bleeding Cool suggested that it may only mean that DC is keeping her for something special. We can only hope.



For those new to Wonder Girl fandom, or those baffled by it, Stephanie Brown was introduced into the DCU about twenty years ago. Calling herself the Spoiler, she is the daughter of C list villain the Cluemaster. Stephanie blamed her father for the sorry life she and her mother found themselves in, and vowed to keep him in prison. She was featured heavily in Dixon’s Robin run, often as a love interest for the Boy Wonder, and is Batgirl Cassandra Cain’s BFF. She was a likeable, upbeat C lister and everyone seemed happy with that. Then, in 2004, DC gave her a big promotion: she became the fourth Robin. Batman and Robin, the Girl Wonder.

It made sense for the character. She’d always worked hard and sought approval, or at least acceptance, from the Batman. Now she’d gotten it. And readers got the promise of a new boy-girl dynamic to the dynamic duo. (No, not like that!) But it was all a lie. Editorial wasn’t giving Stephanie their approval at all. Instead, they were setting her up to be tortured and killed. Readers were upset. And even more than the heavy handed story manipulation, what upset them was that Stephanie never got the respect given the last dead Robin. It’s accepted that Jason Todd was an angry young man and a poor choice to be Robin, but he got a memorial in the Batcave. He was Robin, he died, he got a memorial. Stephanie was Robin, she died, she got butkus. Nothing. Zip. At that point she became something more than a C lister. She came to represent the lack of respect shown to both female characters and female fans by the Big Two and by DC in particular.

Eventually DC back tracked and brought her back. In comics the dead are always with us, primarily because they rarely ever stay dead. And she got another promotion: Batgirl. This relaunch was a part of some wide ranging changes to Gotham, following the (again temporary) death of Bruce Wayne. I picked up all the titles and followed them for a while before letting them all go. I don’t usually follow mainstream comics beyond the odd big event, but lately there had been so many big events that I hadn’t been following much at all. As a Bat fan I made an exception here, before dropping them. A few months later I was faced with a problem that all long term comics readers deal with from time to time. Lots of stuff out there, but nothing was really grabbing me. What did I want? I wanted something upbeat and engaging. I likeable character. Something well written and fun. Something, I realized, very much like Miller’s run on Batgirl. But why get something like it, when I can just go back and pick up Batgirl again? I wasn’t going to trade wait it. (Did you know that only about half of Cain’s Batgirl run was ever collected?) I put it back on my subscription list and picked up the copies I’d missed. All was well. Until DC did it again. No, they didn’t kill her. They cancelled her run and replaced her with the original Batgirl, Barbara Gordon. Stephanie Brown was consigned too… we have no idea. From what little we know, the whole subject is strictly verboten at 1700 Broadway.

Complaining fans have been stonewalled by the company and mocked by fanbots online. You hear all the standards: we don’t own the characters, we’re too caught up a given era, and, if you’re a male fan, isn’t it a little pervy that you like a young female character? Well, no we don’t own our favorite characters, but it’s not really that simple, is it? Most comic fans—fans of the Big Two—have a preference. Marvel or DC. They may like both, but not equally. We buy into a shared universe, literally. We spend our money following favorite characters, crossovers, and events. We commit. And for our commitment we are rewarded precious little. The idea that we’re stuck in a given era rings hollow when talking about Batgirl. After all, DC has turned the clock back on Batgirl to the time of INXS and Rain Man topped the charts, ignoring two decades of character development. The third criticism speaks more of those who are making it, than those it is directed against. Apparently they can only view female characters in terms of their sexuality. That there are such fans is hardly surprising. That they assume they are normal would be laughable if it didn’t say so much about the comics industry.

Last week Heidi MacDonald posted an interesting essay, arguing that the Big Two will never seek out a female fanbase. They have a market and they don’t want to dilute the brand by seek out a more diversified customer base. This met with some intelligent criticism, but I would like to point a couple of other things out. First, while her argument does seem to make some sense from Marvel’s perspective—Disney did buy the company in order to reach boys, having already all but taken over girls’ merchandising—it doesn’t really work for DC. No one at Warners is looking to dominate the children’s toy and television market in the way Disney seems to feel is their due. Second, as a parent of girls I can readily confirm something TV programmers have known, and openly admitted to, for years: boys won’t buy girl’s things, but girls will buy boy’s. Marketing to women is not a threat to the brand. You don’t have to dilute anything. You just have to stop treating girls as though they have cooties. Give them stories and characters they find interesting. Stop viewing them as a problem that needs to be avoided or placated and give them good stories. So, I guess it doesn’t really apply to Marvel either. And really, when these companies are thinking about money from comics, they aren’t even thinking of comics. They are thinking of using the characters in movies, games, cartoons, toys, clothing, and countless other things. But, honestly, if gaming can reach gender parity in its users and sales, there is no reason at all that comics can’t.

Reading people’s comments on webzines, blogs, tumblr, and forums I can’t help but feel that a big part of the resistance to Brown is that girls like her. Girls have cooties and girls like Stephanie Brown, so Stephanie Brown must have cooties. Of course, I could just denounce it as sexism, which it is, but who is going to listen to that? What comics need is someone from outside the industry, someone who isn’t a fanboy turned creator turned publisher, to take the reins. Someone who hasn’t come to see the excesses of fanboy-dom as the norm. I don’t expect that to happen any time soon, but not because of the success of the Avengers movie of the sales figures for the New 52 (after all, month after month, they continue to ‘settle’). No, the reason I don’t expect any outside intervention is because the comics themselves aren’t important to their parent companies. They only exist to provide merchandising material.

*****

As for me and the New 52, I feel my reading it just going through the motions. I picked up Batwoman for a while, then dropped it when I heard they were dropping Hadley. Having two artists I liked on it was the draw for me. The story never gripped me and I cannot for the life of me figure out what she is doing with the DEO instead of working with the Bat-family. I have been reading World’s Finest, but it looks like the first arc will be all set up. And I just read the new Batgirl trade, The Darkest Reflection. It was mostly okay. The art did nothing for me and the concept behind Mirror was a bit heavy handed. One interesting reversal: Barbara is Gordon’s natural daughter again. She was originally, then her backstory was revised to make her Gordon’s biological niece, whom he had adopted. Now she’s his daughter again. No idea why they felt that was necessary.

If however, Bleeding Cool is right and DC has just been saving Stephanie Brown, I promise to buy at least two copies of each issue. One for me and one to share. I’m sure the stockholders would prefer that to waffles.