Category: Entertainment

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While working on my Flash site last night, I noticed something interesting: several of the Flash’s classic Rogues Gallery have children.

The Trickster was the first: he discovered he had a 12-year-old son by an ex-girlfriend. (Neither Billy nor his mother has appeared since this story, which was part of 1998’s “New Year’s Evil” event.)

The Weather Wizard was next. Early in his run on the book, Geoff Johns introduced an ex-girlfriend of Wally’s who had an infant son with lightning-based powers. He turned out to be the result of a rebound one-night stand with the Weather Wizard (in his civilian ID, of course) just after she and Wally had broken up.

And now, with Identity Crisis, Captain Boomerang has a long-lost adult or teenaged son… who looks like he’ll be taking over the “family business.” Who his mother is remains to be revealed, though the next issue of either IC or The Flash seems likely.

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With the Top‘s history featuring prominently in the current Flash tie-in to Identity Crisis, I realized it’s possible to narrow down just when the flashbacks in IC take place. I’m not very familiar with the satellite-era Justice League, but I have tracked down, read and, yes, catalogued the entire Barry Allen run of The Flash.

In Identity Crisis #2, Green Arrow states that it was a few months after Iris died. Iris died in Flash vol.1 #275, and the storyline wasn’t really resolved until #284, when Barry trapped her killer on the wrong side of a time machine. In Flash vol.2 #215, Barry writes about an event that took place a week after the Top’s ghost was excorcised from Barry’s father. That storyline ran from #297 (the car crash in which Henry Allen’s heart stopped) to #303 (getting rid of the Top). Since this was clearly after the *ahem* incident, we can narrow it down to taking place between Flash #284 and Flash #297.

(This has got to have been the most fanboyish post I’ve made here…)

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The current tenuous situation with Fallen Angel reminds me of one of those curiosities of the comic book market: the relationship between episodes in magazine form and longer stories in book form.

Most comics in the US/Canadian market are released as individual issues, with maybe 22 pages of story and a bunch of ads. Longer works are often released as trade paperbacks (TPBs), but often don’t sell as well because, let’s face it, $19.95 is a much bigger chunk of change than $2.50. However, many series are collected into TPBs once the publisher figures the original issues have mostly been tapped out, often adding additional material like sketches, character designs, or occasionally an entire epilogue. (Kingdom Come and Death: The High Cost of Living both used that trick.) Advantages: they fit on a shelf, they’re often better paper and more durable, you can get an entire 6-part story in one chunk… and most importantly, they can fit on bookstores’ shelves, bringing them to an entirely new audience.

During the 1990s, only the most popular storylines would get the TPB treatment, but as the graphic novel market has grown, the trend has been toward collecting every issue of a series, so that whether you get the original issues or the collections, you still get everything. This has led to two controversial phenomena: writing for the trade and waiting for the trade. Continue reading →

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Marvel is suing City of Heroes’ makers for copyright and trademark infringement. What’s that, you say? The game doesn’t have any Marvel characters or lookalikes built-in? Of course not—they’re suing because it’s technically possible for players to design a character with a similar costume and use a similar name. Sure, it’s against the terms of service, and they try to stop it when they find it, but people do it anyway.

But note: the game makers aren’t the ones doing the infringement. As I understand it, the character designer is rather like HeroMachine: you pick a body type, colors for different parts of the costume, accessories and masks, etc. So sure, you can create a brick, make him green and give him purple shorts… but it’s not as if they built in textures and symbols specifically to make a Spider-Man costume.

I’ve only read about half the comments on the thread where I found this, but many of them seem to misunderstand the situation as if CoH were the ones designing or providing patterns for the knock-off characters. If someone puts out a “How to Draw the X-Men” book without authorization, then sure, you sue them, but if they sell “How to Draw Super-Heroes” and people can apply those skills to Wolverine, you don’t have a case… and you definitely don’t sue the people who made the pencils and paper!

Follow-up posts: A judge dismissed half the claims in March, and the suit was settled in December.

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