1) Involuntary mindwipes are a cruel violation of a person's autonomy, regardless of what they did. As Diana stated, killing would have been the better option if they were so terrified of him raping Sue or anyone else again.
2) The mindwipe didn't work.
3) Mindwiping Light erased evidence of his crime which made the League guilty of covering up a rape.
Taylor didn't render Wonder Woman radioactive. When OP says radioactive, I'm seeing something like Hawkman or Frontier's mention of Beechen's Cass writing being so **** that it led to a chain of events that ultimately took the character off the board for a number of years.
Yeah I still think the broad strokes retcon of the Justice League's Hawkman having been Carter Hall coming out of retirement was the most elegant, but they went and needlessly overcomplicated that too with the Thanagarian spy stuff.
It's one of those problems that could have easily been fixed by a '10 years ago' caption. All they needed was to change was when Hawkman arrived.
Our mileage varies. The ongoing broke up one of the only consistently non-disfunctional couples in comics, and created continuity tangles that DC struggled with all the way through the Nu52 (where he got really awful). The stories were pretty good, if they'd been in a world of their own rather than part of DC's main continuity. I did have some minor quibbles with the Truman revision, slug-thrower technology weapons in an FTL technology culture, the inelegant look of the wing design, Shayera becoming the identical-in-name-and-look daughter of Katar's old, dead squeeze (ick), but on the whole, I liked it. It's the ongoing where things broke down, and every handwave to fix it accelerated the problem.
First, the Dr. Light IC presented was indeed horrible and deserved horrible things.
However, I wasn't crazy about completely recreating a character to fit a story. Dr. Light was created to be a schmuck, from day one. There were other candidates, like Amos Fortune that might have fit better, but Meltzer wanted maximum shockage, so he elevated the horribleness of both Dr. Light and added horribleness to Jean Loring.
On top of that, the story had characters cross lines they would not have crossed. The JL has consistently been presented as seeing itself as a field-leveler for the authorities, not authorities unto themselves, which is what doling out punishments made of them.
Ultimately, IC is what I most dislike in some of today's writers: the characters become whoever the writer wants for the story the writer wants to tell. That can work in cases where the character comes through a transformative journey and is a more viable IP afterward. Moore's Swamp Thing and Miller's Daredevil are probably the best examples of it on record. However, nobody mis-characterized by IC benefited from it.
Radioactivity has a half-life. Given time, reboots and fading memories make even the most messed-up characters useable again.
After his post-Zero Hour title was cancelled, Hawkman's continuity was such a mess that he was legit radioactive for a while (seriously, I asked Waid at a Comic-Con during this period when Hawkman was coming back, and he literally used the word "radioactive"). But eventually he came back.
Solstice and New 52 Kid Flash in that time travel story from New 52 Teen Titans that made him “Bar Torr” and had her kill a judge to be with him. We haven’t seen her since then, and Bart replaced Bar Torr pretty blatantly without complaints, even as the Young Justice comic failed.
And DC may have intentionally pulled this on New 52 Superboy when they brought back Scott Lobdell to declare him a murderer with Harvest to “make way” for Jonathon Kent.
They definitely tried to make her as a hero radioactive there, but I actually think that her “radioactivity” wound up being almost entirely an enforced status quo by Didio and others; unlike with those New 52 Titans members I mentioned, for whom the final story was more like a last straw for already troubled characters, Cass still had enough creator and fan support to have her turn to evil rejected and even survive further attempts to banish her away from Didio.
I mean, didn’t we have it confirmed that DC editorial themselves labeled her and Steph radioactive in the early days of the New 52 even though guys like Scott Snyder and Grant Morrison were 100% willing to still use them?
Don’t get me wrong; Beecher certainly did his best to make her radioactive. I just think it speaks to how roundly his story was rejected and how strong her brand still was that her radio activity was still more the result of Didio and others going out fo their way to enforce it.
Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?
I wrote a book with them. Outlaw’s Shadow: A Sherwood Noir. Robin Hood’s evil counterpart, Guy of Gisbourne, is the main character. Feel free to give it a look: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asi...E2PKBNJFH76GQP
Infinite Crisis and both Superboy Prime and E-2 Superman. Will never forgive Johns for this.
Assassinate Putin!
Maybe I'm in the minority on this one, but I never really had an issue with Superboy Prime or E2 Superman turning "evil". Really, they just wanted to go home. Superboy going full psycho was a little off, but he kinda worked as the "Jason Todd" of the Superman mythos. However, E2 Superman's death was in bad taste.
On another note, I still don't know why Dr. Light or Sue needed to be dragged through the mud in Identity Crisis (or why it needed to have such a controversial plot). They could have used blanks to fill those roles, but they decided on established niche characters—bad move.
Last edited by Citizen Kane; 07-29-2021 at 03:54 PM.
Was Firestorm ever radioactive? And I don't mean literally.