Real Women? Not In The Tenebrian Dominian

Last week's Green Lantern: New Guardians Annual had Star Sapphire Carol Ferris being introduced to a bunch of smugglers in a hive of scum and villainy. This being comics, they all had their code names:

And yeah, the only woman among the crew has a name defined by physical attributes, but at least she owns it (as I believe the phrase goes):

Ouch! That's gotta hurt.

Trouble is, just a couple of pages later we get to see Wide Load walking with Carol:

And instead of a woman proud of her "real hips" we get another generic superhero female whose figure looks pretty much the same as Star Sapphire's.

There's no point in Keith Giffen making note of her hips if Scott Kolins and Andrei Bressan are then going to ignore them.

Who Was Who Is Who #43

So for want of anything better to write about on a Monday, I'm going to go through all my copies of Who's Who and see if I can predict who will make it over to the new DCU by the end of 2012, who might make it and who hasn't got a Stiletta's chance.

STARFIRE - no, not the one you're immediately thinking of but the swords and sorcery heroine on the left there who surprised us all by showing up in the pages of Time Masters: Vanishing Point just before the whole Flashpoint thing. Don't think she'll be making an appearance again, though.

STARFIRE - okay, so this is the one you're thinking of with the metal bikini and all the controversy following her first appearance post-Flashpoint. For better or worse (I've not read them) Starfire's in Red Hood and The Outlaws so gets in the in place column.

Who'd Like A Cocktail? #196

Always trust your scarab, that's what I say.

Rise Of The Third Army

DC have released a little more information about their forthcoming Green Lantern crossover tale, Rise of The Third Army.

It's been teased for some time - basically the Guardians of the Universe, those once benign blue little munchkins who pretended to have a handle on cosmic affairs, have been getting meaner and meaner over the last year or two and have decided to do away with the Green Lanterns and replace them with a Third Army, the First being the Manhunters and the second the Corps. Of course, they're not counting the space cops that preceded the Corps...

One of the main things released in the news item is a marvellous picture by Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Albert Oclair, and Rod Reis which forms the four inter-connecting covers for issues of Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern: New Guardians and Red Lanterns:

Click the above for a slightly bigger version, but the original article has a huuuuuuge version of it.

Notable by their absence from the pic are Hal Jordan and Sinestro; couple that with the similarity between the original promo pic in the top left there with that used for the Death of Superman storyline and it seems possible that one or both of them die. Sinestro's death would prevent Jordan from being in the Corps - he's currently dependent on a ring created by Sinestro - which would explain why they're missing, but the inclusion of the new, masked Green Lantern seems to imply that it's Jordan that dies. Why else would the ring choose "our newest Green Lantern from Earth"?

I also couldn't help but notice that Carol Ferris as Star Sapphire finally gets to cover more than 12% of her body - about time, I say.

Oh, and a happy 4th of July to my American readers!

Retroactive - The 90's Part 1

As DC Comics are celebrating the creators that made an impact in the 70's, 80's and 90's, I thought I'd wander through the same decades and pull out my favourite comic of each year.

And here we are, finally in the 90's.