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DC Universe Surgery

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Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

22:44 / 09.09.05

How did The Joker lose his job as the Iranian Ambassador?

Denny O'Neil realized it didn't fit the character and never allowed anyone to refer to it again. In fact, since you brought it up, you are in danger of being shunted to an alternate Barbelith by Hypertime.

In continuity, once he was put back in Arkham Asylum, Iran appointed a different ambassador.

07:20 / 10.09.05

Yeah, now he's the Iraqi Information Minister.

08:23 / 14.09.05

Does anyone know how much Bruce Wayne gives to charity per annum? And wouldn't it be better if he used his fortune to tackle some of the root causes of crime in Gotham city - poverty, deprivation, corruption - rather than buying fancy gadgets to help him beat up petty crooks?

08:41 / 14.09.05

Actually, he does. There was an issue of the O'Neil/Breyfogle Detective Comics where Wayne is trying to get a group of street kids away from the Street Demonz bike gang employing them as drug dealers... That's the only example that springs to mind, but I understand that as Bruce Wayne, he throws his weight behind Commissioner Gordon, and is at loggerheads with the Tobacconists' Guild.

10:07 / 14.09.05

By the way, who in the blue hell wrote the story with Joker becoming Iranian ambassador? What a racist piece of shit.

12:11 / 14.09.05

Why would it be racist?

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:29 / 14.09.05

Well, we could say that it represented the Iranian state as so evil that it would employ the Joker as foreign minister, and thus while not necessarily racist in pure terms certainly presenting a view of the world that supported Reaganite presentations of the Middle East.

However, as Barbelith's leading expert on terrorism, religion and the Middle East, you're probably better positioned to comment on that, eh?

12:32 / 14.09.05

That sounds like the end of A Death In The Family. After Joker's various attempts to flog off a nuclear weapon and steal medicine in the middle east he gets an offer to assassinate the UN by Iran, who give him diplomatic status in order to get it done.

Not really rascist, but like a lot of comics at the time they portrayed places like Iran and the USSR in a negative light.

(Not sure who the writer was, but should be easy to track down).

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:45 / 14.09.05

Jim Starlin wrote "A Death in the Family", btw.

12:57 / 14.09.05

Are Batman, Green Arrow, and the ilk considered metahumans by the governments of the DC-verse? Is there any kind of metahuman registration act in place currently?

13:02 / 14.09.05

And it was definitely Iran, not Qurac, DC's Iran/Iraq substitute?

I remember a bit from 'Death..' with him in native dress. Yeah, Jesus.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:06 / 14.09.05

Not only was it Iran, but he was hired by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself, of whom he said "We have a lot in common. Namely, insanity and a great love of fish". The treatment of the Middle East in general in the story was a source of some discomfort.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

14:38 / 14.09.05

Sax Does anyone know how much Bruce Wayne gives to charity per annum? And wouldn't it be better if he used his fortune to tackle some of the root causes of crime in Gotham city - poverty, deprivation, corruption - rather than buying fancy gadgets to help him beat up petty crooks?

In one of the non-storyline specific Batman collections there's a story from somewhere in the early years of Batman's career where he basically has a 'Christmas Carol' night and so sets up The Thomas and Martha Wayne Charitable Foundation to assuage his guilt.

08:12 / 16.09.05

I'm curious- how much do the current versions of D.C. characters remember of the Crisis? Barry Allen is still dead, is that remembered by them as a Crisis thing?

08:22 / 16.09.05

Everyone remembers it as the Anti-Monitor attacking just the one universe (which Our Heroes successfully repelled).

12:35 / 16.09.05

(Except Animal Man and the Psycho Pirate.)

Don't think anyone else is privy to the true nature of the crisis?

13:39 / 16.09.05

Wasn't Lady Quark from one of the pre-crisis universes? Pariah saved her, or something.

13:54 / 16.09.05

Yeah, DCU's a mess.

Donna Troy's the easiest example of Pre/Post Crisis Frankenstein Universe. Then you got Power Girl/Woman, Psycho Pirate and the Animal Man adventures, Lady Quark, Harbinger, Pariah, John Byrne's Polly Wonder Woman, the Crime Syndicate of America...

No real answers, and every pass just worsens it.

And DCU's idea of "fixing things" with another Crisis is making Princess Diana of Paradise Island a cold-blooded murderer?

14:28 / 16.09.05

now people have hinted darkly about this donna troy business before

anyone want to fill the rest of us in?

14:59 / 16.09.05

The basic problem with Donna Troy was that her original origin had her being rescued, as a child, from a burning home by Wonder Woman. After the Crisis, however, Wonder Woman was "reset" and was shown to be just arriving in the DC Universe at that moment in time* -- but Donna Troy was already present and grown-up. So an extraordinarily complicated backstory was created in which, instead of being rescued by Wonder Woman, she was rescued by the Titans of Myth, who lived on a crescent moon out in space and were worshipped by many alien races as gods. They've turned out to be not so nice, and Donna (who was resurrected by them after dying a while back at the hands, or more precisely the eyebeams, of a rogue Superman robot) is currently breaking out from under their control over in the RETURN OF DONNA TROY miniseries.

There's a lot more to it than that, but I'm fuzzy on the specifics. I'm not sure whether or not she was ever meant to have lived on Paradise Island anymore at all, or indeed when, precisely, the whole Wonder Woman angle comes into her life at all.

*One of the key misunderstandings some people have about the Crisis is that it completely restarted DCU continuity -- I always kinda thought that. It's not true. Only some things were rebooted, while some, ostensibly, continued over from the books published before Crisis. As time goes on, more and more pre-Crisis material seems to be getting supplanted by new origins told post-Crisis.

15:18 / 16.09.05

John Byrne managed to make Diana and Donna "sisters" through a retcon that rendered Donna, literally, made of glass. She was a mirror reflection of Princess Diana given life through magic spell, so that Diana could have a friend her own age to play with. One day, the reflection girl was kidnapped by one of Polly Wonder Woman's enemies, and everybody on Paradise Island figured the reflection girl spell had faded... and life went on. The reflection girl was magically cursed to be the only character aware of her own billion retcons - she was "cursed" to live thousands of "tragic" lives. She'd die, and then her soul would go back in time and live again and again, resetting the timeline thousands of times. The Donna Troy we know and love was "cursed to die tragically" in the fire as an infant and reset the universe AGAIN... but Rhea - the Titan goddess, sensing the godly essence in the baby, saved her and took her back to the crescent moon HQ of the Titans.

15:29 / 16.09.05

Diana isn't really cold blooded though. She had a choice between killing the guy and letting him play Godzilla with the hardest bloke on the planet. Easy!

15:36 / 16.09.05

Yes, as readers, we know that. But for some reason, the heroes and civilians of the DCU thinks she's become an Evil Baddie. And that the awesome shock of that is sposed to scare the crap out of us, and the DCU at large.

Tie yerself up, Di. Tell em the truth, roll your eyes, and move on. Sufferin' Sappho, the Sheeda are here!

18:14 / 16.09.05

Well, if I remember correctly, there used to be stories with Superman. And then, for the fun of it, they also made stories with Superboy, who was obviously Superman as a child.

Some writer decided to do the same thing with Wonder Woman. Suddenly, there were stories with Wonder Girl, and even Wonder Tot. And sometimes, through the magic of time travel or whatever else, Diana, Wonder Woman would team up with her past selves and fight evil. So you would have stories with Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, and Wonder Tot all together.

When someone was first creating Teen Titans, they wanted another woman or something. And someone stuck Wonder Girl in, without realizing that she was not a separate character. Thus, Donna Troy had to be created to explain the massive cock-up. And her origin story has been screwed up ever since.

At least, that is how I heard it.

18:58 / 16.09.05

Read about that um . . . mishap here

20:43 / 16.09.05

Donna Troy's origin was fine until Byrne got a hold of it. DC seems to be taking the tack that the stories he wrote happened, but they'll never ever refer to it again.

Phex: Dorset Doom

21:00 / 16.09.05

(The latest in my long line of 'what's the deal withs')

What's the deal with: The Ultramarines?

Now, I know they were created by George Morrison during his nineties Justice League run, as part of some U.N plot to kill the JL. One of them is a kind of British Batman (called 'Dark Knight' or something, and his Robin is 'Squire'), what's his story?
They were most recently attacked by Neb-uh-loh, brainhijacked by Sheeda parasites and got beaten up by Batman's Justice League robots. Then, as punishment for being heroes-who-kill they got shunted out of the DCU into a universe that didn't have heroes. Wait... THAT WAS OUR PLANET! YOU MANIACS!
(ahem)
So what are their stories? Where do they fit into the big picture?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:59 / 17.09.05

What do you mean? If you have the JLA issues and the JLA Classified issues then you pretty much have their appearences, it's just that, by having a big fuck-off city floating above Venezuela or wherever it was, they offered that any supes that wanted to could come and live with them, between JLA and JLA:C a few more supes obviously did.

10:18 / 17.09.05

And DCU's idea of "fixing things" with another Crisis is making Princess Diana of Paradise Island a cold-blooded murderer?

I wouldn't call her a cold-blooded murderer. Max Lord had control of Superman and was planning on using him. That's actually worse than someone standing with his finger over the Big Red Nuclear Button and taunting you about how he's going to nuke Detroit. Given the situation, I think it's hard to argue that Diana did anything other than act in defense of life, swiftly and decisively. It's totally in character for her and, to my mind, really her only option.

Mind you, I'm far from convinced that turning Max Lord into a budget version of Lex Luthor, and putting Diana in that situation to begin to with, were sound storytelling decisions, but given that that's the situation, it's certainly not WW's actions that I take issue with.

11:14 / 17.09.05

The only other thing you need to know about the Ultramarines is that many of their members were originally in a group called the Global Guardians, which was a sort of UN of superheroes (one from Greece, one from the Netherlands, etc) Fire used to be a member.

13:07 / 17.09.05

Yes, as readers, we know that. But for some reason, the heroes and civilians of the DCU thinks she's become an Evil Baddie. And that the awesome shock of that is sposed to scare the crap out of us, and the DCU at large.

Diz, I know. Di's my fave of the big three. If anything, this whole Max Lord scenario is making Bruce and Clark look like whiny idiots.

15:24 / 17.09.05

, by having a big fuck-off city floating above Venezuela or wherever it was

Uruguay. Superbia was the replacement for Montevideo wich became a crater thanks to Vandal Savage.

17:45 / 17.09.05

Well, we could say that it represented the Iranian state as so evil that it would employ the Joker as foreign minister, and thus while not necessarily racist in pure terms certainly presenting a view of the world that supported Reaganite presentations of the Middle East.

I read the story for the first time a few months ago. I thought it was ridiculous but didn't think that it crossed the line into racism.

Phex: Dorset Doom

18:18 / 17.09.05

Our lady: Actually I don't have the JLA issues, I just read the blurb on the back of a TPB, so I only have a faint idea of what happened.

As for the Joker/Iran thing: Although it seems like a pretty ham fisted way of resolving the plot, making the Joker an Iranian ambassador wasn't racist per se; for a start, Iran is a state, not a race, and showing it's leader working with the Clown Prince of Crime doesn't imply that it's citizens would agree with it. In fact, having some generic middle-eastern country seems even more racist in a way, because it generalises evil and nuclear-weapon-buying to all Arabs instead of just Iran's leadership.

02:28 / 19.09.05

Not to be particularly difficult, but on reviewing JLA, DCU One Mil, and the Hourman series by Tom Peyer, I got to trying to sort that robochronocrusaderaider's personal, subjective history. Things went out of order, between the worlogog-gifting, future-virus-infecto-bombing, Humazo, and WWIII (where he shows up in about two whole panels) and I'm not particularly good at chronology, having an amazingly shit time-sense.
Anybody?
Oh, and DC comic, eighties, better-than-average paper stock, cover with guy, shirtless, red horned demon head, holding up either someone else's head or a gun or something, up inna air. Minimalist, etchy art of that gritty eighties atmo. Title, plot, was it even really DCU or just published by...?

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