Your DC-Only controversial opinions...

[FanboyStranger]

Birds of Prey are lame. Contrived and cheesy.

Actually, I think Birds of Prey was an inspired idea. Unfortunately, I don't think it works without Oracle as the central character. Also, I don't think many actual BoP issues truly rose up to the potential of the book, which was often hampered with some questionable artist choices after Chuck Dixon left.

[Old Man Ollie 1962]

I want more diversity in comics, but I find discussions on the issue to be boring and circular from both perspectives. It feels like less of a discussion and more of a screaming contest.

For the record, I'm totally guilty of participating in them, too.

You're right. When it comes to discussing race/gender/LBGT issues, passion often turns to anger--even rage. I suppose that can be said of most issues.

[t hedge coke]

I agree with these. I get it, americans, you're having problems with retarded identity politics. Can you fix it already and get back to good comics? Diversity has become a obsession. DC and Marvel should stop buckling to the SJWs.

I do not understand the american obsession with diversity. Then again, I'm brazilian and therefore a foreigner. Who knows what the foreigner thinks? )

You were saying something about "retarded" identity politics? Seems like you're just a little bit obsessed with labels for someone who isn't playing the game.

But, don't worry, I'm sure if you complain a little more about how you are this and they are that, you'll get your social justice and all the comics in the world will be made just for you and the parameters you feel are okeh.

I prefer Black Lightning who's DC's first black hero with his own title. He has interesting, iconic powers. They should stop treating him as the Bat's bumboy and start treating him as a hero in his own right. There's a reason "Electric Black Guy" is a trope. Also, a high-intelligence teacher/intelectual who goes crime-fighting while jive talking like someone out of a blaxplotation movie is hilarious. Also, he has two super-powered daughters, that's the start of a Heroic Dinasty (TM Scipio Garling) right there. I would put Dwayne McDuffie to write it if he was alive (RIP).

I can't imagine Dwayne McDuffie happily writing a straight superhero title that way. A one off parody of that style, yes. Doing it nonstop because someone else feels that a jive-talking blaxploitation parody is hilarious... there's a few bits from Damage Control watching the movie of themselves that come to mind. "Oh god."

[Slaughter]

Here's another one:

I think that Green Lanterns worked better with the Yellow Weakness than without.
Seriously.
I know that the yellow weakness is frankly ridiculous, ridiculous easy to exploit. At least kryptonite is rare now, you just need a can of paint to challenge a green lantern.

With the impurity, Green Lanterns could be as cheesy and ridiculous powerful as they wanted, yet they would be vulnerable to yellow. They could time-travel, dimensional-travel, create wormholes and fuse/fission atoms, use the ring on themselves to become younger, faster, stronger, heal diseases, become invisible and intangible, etc... but they would always be vulnerable to yellow.

Now without the yellow weakness, Green Lanterns have to be a) morons b) barely know how to use their own rings c) get punked by enemies that any yellow-vulnerable lantern could fight, only because they're - oh the horror - immune to the green light. Which any pre-Rebirth GL worth his salt was able to fight through anyway.

So we get most Lanterns using the ring like a Legion Flight Ring with PEW-PEW LAZORS!

The big problem is that bringing back the yellow weakness = Sinestro Corps will #REKT the GLC in five minutes. Sinestro got a free pass before because he was one, and the Corps was 4300.

One wacky idea would be bringing back the yellow impurity... but instead as THE GOLD IMPURITY. Green Lanterns are now vulnerable to gold. So they can be shot with gold bullets, their light repealed by armor made of gold, attacked with solutions made of gold, etc, etc. You can even do some nice symbolism here. Also I think I just gave a good reason for Goldface to exist. Criminals even in space rob gold as anti-GL kryptonite. Entire planets and asteroids are mined for gold in case of rogue green lanterns. Governments hold gold in vaults against Green Lanterns, and Batman has the world's most pimp batarang in case GL goes rogue. Its slightly more believable than YELLOW PAINT MAKES ME INVULNERABLE TO SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY!

(it would be better if made rarer, say, only gold recently created in the core of a star?)

[t hedge coke]

Gold's too rare. The fun, for me, of yellow (or wood) is that it's just everywhere. Makes them need to work smarter.

[SmokeMonster]

No offense, but two to four women who work in the same specialized field teaming up is contrived but a gender-bent, gayed character to avoid any more alien women in the JLA (how many have there even been?) isn't contrived?

Story contrivance usually means nonsensical conveniences in the story itself. Characters would logically wonder why the team members are exclusively female and usually have to do with birds.

With a new continuity with race/gender changes, there's no actual strange phenomena in the story itself. I think the phrase your thinking of is 'feels forced'.

[Old Man Ollie 1962]

Story contrivance usually means nonsensical conveniences in the story itself. Characters would logically wonder why the team members are exclusively female and usually have to do with birds.

With a new continuity with race/gender changes, there's no actual strange phenomena in the story itself. I think the phrase your thinking of is 'feels forced'.

Isn't "forced" a synonym of contrived?

[SmokeMonster]

Isn't "forced" a synonym of contrived?

Ahh I'd rather not quibble over semantics. Lets just say I find the BOP concept really cheesy, but I'm all for some Halle Jordan.

[Old Man Ollie 1962]

Ahh I'd rather not quibble over semantics. Lets just say I find the BOP concept really cheesy, but I'm all for some Halle Jordan.

Point taken.

[t hedge coke]

Story contrivance usually means nonsensical conveniences in the story itself. Characters would logically wonder why the team members are exclusively female and usually have to do with birds.

With a new continuity with race/gender changes, there's no actual strange phenomena in the story itself. I think the phrase your thinking of is 'feels forced'.

They don't call themselves "Birds of Prey" for several years into their being comics called that. It's the title of the book, traditionally, only late in the game a name for a team. Very few of the team members are bird-themed, overall. Of course, there's a baseball team called The Orioles and not a single damned bird-themed player on, most of the time. All men, too.

In the relaunch, they're called Birds of Prey and have bird names because it's two founding members got their bird aliases working the same job together. It's written write into the origin of the team.

But, what's contrived about two to four women in the same field working together? "Characters would logically wonder why the team members are exclusively female"? Really? Characters would logically wonder why four American women in the same field work together on occasion? Do they also question why the JLA is traditionally almost exclusively men? Or that the Earth GLs are all men?

How can two to four women in the same small field knowing each other or working together any different than two or three Earth GLs working together, or two or three journalists in the same city going out for drinks once a week and happening to be all women?

[Slaughter]

You were saying something about "retarded" identity politics? Seems like you're just a little bit obsessed with labels for someone who isn't playing the game.

But, don't worry, I'm sure if you complain a little more about how you are this and they are that, you'll get your social justice and all the comics in the world will be made just for you and the parameters you feel are okeh.



I can't imagine Dwayne McDuffie happily writing a straight superhero title that way. A one off parody of that style, yes. Doing it nonstop because someone else feels that a jive-talking blaxploitation parody is hilarious... there's a few bits from Damage Control watching the movie of themselves that come to mind. "Oh god."

Labels exist so we can identify things. That's what words are for, unless you like talking vaguely all the time.
The obsession with DIVERSITY is getting pretty ridiculous.

You know that the jive talk was a secret identity thing, right? Who would suspect that jive-talking afro-wigged super-hero Black Lightning is actually teacher and athlete Jefferson Pierce? I think the idea has A LOT of milleage, involving stereotypes, and misconceptions and exceptions, etc etc. I think it would need someone like Dwayne to write it.

Gold's too rare. The fun, for me, of yellow (or wood) is that it's just everywhere. Makes them need to work smarter.

Problem is Sinestro Corps, if the yellow vulnerability is in then the greens will get destroyed in no time.
I have a feeling Geoff Johns didn't want to discard the idea by keeping the Parallax Impurity in, but instead it affected recruits who didn't know how to bypass it and GLC members who felt fear. Most writers ignored the concept.

Gold is not that rare. But just some scientific thinking could get interesting by-effects of this - for example, if all criminal outfits afraid of the GLC had to use gold-plated armor on their things, and fire gold projectiles. Gold is mighty soft, so you're trading the use of more durable materials for garanteeded efficiency against Green Lanterns.

You know, now that I think of it, I wonder if some Alternate Universe Emotional Spectrum-equivalent could be the Metallic Element Spectrum, or the Periodic Table Spectrum instead.

[t hedge coke]

I wonder if some Alternate Universe Emotional Spectrum-equivalent could be the Metallic Element Spectrum, or the Periodic Table Spectrum instead.

I really like that. Multiversity introduced some good alternate-rules universes, like the Halloween universe, and there's traditionally been an everyone-is-evil universe, but most alternate realities end up being divergent timelines or everyone-is-a-pirate (not that I don't enjoy those, too). Playing with the GL weakness like that could really open up some story possibilities.

[Jim Kelly]

If Geoff Johns can ignore John Broome's science fiction, then new writers should have the freedom to ignore Johns. The problem for them might be that Johns has an executive position at DC.

I liked the yellow weakness because it challenged Hal. And he always found a way to work around it. So it's not really a weakness, because any GL should be able to find a work-around. After all, the ring isn't just an offensive weapon. The yellow simply gives a good writer an opportunity to come up with more interesting scenes, where the GLs are doing more than blasting their opponent with green beams.

I don't find the yellow stupid at all. It's a wavelength of electromagnetic radiation--when a GL ring is directed at radiation in that range, a fail-safe in the ring's programming causes it to shut down. But since there are literally 10²⁴ wavelengths outside that range, it's a minor weakness. It's simply built into the ring's programming to prevent Lanterns from becoming all-powerful in the universe.

If the Sinestro Corps are really such a problem to writing stories, then maybe they should be shelved--or they should be trapped in the negative universe.

This brings up another one of my controversial opinions. The world of science is fascinating and offers no end of possibilities for stories. Rather than using science, however, comic book writers prefer to use their own feeble ideas that have nothing to do with science.

[The_Greatest_Username]

I thought the yellow weakness in the Silver age comics was fun, but I'm not sure I feel like it works now. I remember an issue of Justice League of America when the Injustice Society teamed up with the Earth-1 villains and the only reason Cheetah was threatening to Hal was because her costume was yellow. It's silly, but it worked then.

[Sirzechs]

Fear works better as a weakness to GL now than the yellow.