Who Was Who Is Who #4

So for want of anything better to write about on a Monday, and with DC's New 52 well under way (how long are they keeping that title do you think?) I'm going to go through all my copies of Who's Who and see who's made it over to the new DCU, who might make it and who hasn't got a Big Bear's chance.

BEAUTIFUL DREAMER - oh, Jack Kirby you old hippy. Beautiful Dreamer, along with the rest of the Forever People, are great examples of how embedding characters' looks, behaviour and speech patters in a particular time frame utterly date them. I can't see any of them coming back any time soon.

BEN BOXER - another Kirby character, this one's tied in with Kamandi and the Great Disaster so unless he turns up on Earth-51 as part of Mutiversity, I don't think we'll be seeing him, either.

BIG BARDA - with the first villain of the relaunched Justice League's title being Darkseid, there's a good possibility that the New Gods may be viable characters once more. That is unless some version of Final Crisis took place between the start of the League and the current Year 5 or so which is when most DC titles are taking place. If Final Crisis didn't happen (and I hope that's true) then the New Gods aren't dead - and yes, that includes Beautiful Dreamer - and so could be brought back, which means Mr Miracle and Big Barda could be back in business. I'm going for a possible on this one.

BIG BEAR - same applies here as with Beautiful Dreamer above: the Forever People really are just too dated a concept to be brought back, I think.

A Little Research Needed

Back in the late 80's, well before the success of 52, Trinity or *cough* Countdown, DC's experiment with weekly comics wasn't as well received.

Action Comics, the one that launched Superman and could be said to have started the whole superhero thing, took their main character and, between #601 and #642, squeezed him into a two page spread while the remaining pages were filled in an anthology style with stories starring other characters. Oh, and they published it weekly.

Action Comics Weekly was an odd title - it had it's minus points like the time when Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show; or there was the laboriously plotted and dreadfully illustrated Black Canary tale Bitter Fruit; but it also had some plus points.

One of them was the gorgeous Mike Mignola cover of #614 shown on the right but there was also that time when Deadman met D.B. Cooper  (who turned out to be the Devil/an alien astronaut); it had Blackhawk doing what he does best (flying planes and trying to pull anything in a skirt); and had Catwoman frame Holly Robinson's husband for the murder of two security guards which she threw out of a hotel room window to their deaths, all in retaliation for him killing Holly.  That's right - Holly died and Catwoman killed people.

Re-reading them recently, though, I did come across something that made me chuckle. I've picked up the woeful attempts of American writers to come up with believable British dialogue before in the Cor Blimey Guv'nor posts and while this isn't speech, it's the same sort of thing:

That's Speedy and Nightwing rushing to save the life of an ambassador who's attending a rally for the Labour party. That's Labour party.

See, over here, we spell that L-A-B-O-U-R.

Don't even get me started on using the Union Flag as a symbol of Labour . . .