Originally Posted by
K. Jones
I'll give them this - sonic/sound-based powers combined with his recent focus on being a musician certainly works perfectly with my holistic approach to him, using his Herald moniker and Gabriel's Horn stuff to connect him to Morrison's Pax Dei and heavens and Silver City and such. Those angels were essentially living music, and multiversal musical frequencies and sound and "The Voice" of the entity known as God are all music based, much moreso than any of the other Fifth-Dimensional god-realms. The Angels and "heavenly" magical beings are musical, and the devils of Hell are more about discord, like Neron, but even Etrigan factors in, as he's a rhyming demon, which makes him a strange "lord" among demons. Perhaps a touch of the heavenly music lies upon the pseudo-heroic rhymers.
Obviously that means if I'd be going for a Mal Duncan who embraces the zany Morrison angel stuff and the zany Kirby Guardian stuff, he'd have to have an encounter with Jason Blood and Etrigan, some of the properly zany Kirby Hell-based stuff. Links then to Seven Soldiers' Guardian Jake Jordan but also Klarion the Witch-Boy seem very easy to make once that happens.
Not that I'd be having Mal summoning angelic hosts or anything, though. I dunno, it'd be weird - I'd still kind of want to keep him street level, so like ... more focus on Jason Blood himself. More focus on the Guardian's street-level heroics if Jim Harper or Jim Harper 2.0 show up. Various Newsboy Legions could tie into Kirby Cadmus Cloning, obvs. Maybe Etrigan himself has some thoughts about cloning.
It would be a weeeeeeeird book.
But kind of perfect. And very black. There's a lot of great black culture that could be front and center in those concepts - the famous singing of black churches, for instance, would tie in perfectly to a musician with a heavenly connection. And Kirby-style cloning being used and maybe agents from heaven or hell in "street guise" trying to help or hinder freaky deaky cloning stuff would just heavily reference "The Omen", or maybe stuff like "The Prophecy". Only maybe imagine you've got like, a real young Tony Todd in the lead role - very sort of academic and "talky" in his approach to tackling weird supervillainous stuff. Sure, it's a smidge like Morrison's Mister Miracle series (also part of Seven Soldiers), but it works better here, I think, even than for Shilo.
So I could see a weird story where there's a good guardian angel like Zauriel - though I'd say it's gotta be Gabriel himself, incarnate in a Harlem resident, then the archangel Azrael (where Mal got the horn from - not to be confused with J.P.V.) is incarnate and is villainous, then Jason Blood represents the more demonic side of things. And it plays out with the original and incredibly aptly named street gang that featured in Mal's introduction to the Titans - the Hell Hawks. I mean their name has "Hell" right in it!
There's a lot of solid movies out there with this sort of iconography, where angels and devils are warring but the characters appear human. The Devil's Advocate, so on.
Oh a team-up with the Guardian of Manhattan, Cyborg, Black Lightning, and Shilo Norman would just be kick-ass, too.