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The month of June shaped up to be an interesting one in comics. Let's take a look at what went on and get my reactions on it.
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Wedding Bells and More
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June shaped up to be the time of a wedding at Marvel and of a character coming out at DC. Frankly I was tired of all the press that those two things received at the end of May and the beginning of June. Archie Comics already had the interracial gay marriage thing so Marvel is not breaking any new ground there. "But..." you might say "Northstar is a mutant, shouldn't that count for something?" No, I'm sorry it does not. Making the marriage happen between a mutant and regular human makes me care less about it. I can see Kevin Keller marrying his long term boyfriend and seeing how that can be applied to real life. Meanwhile, Northstar marrying some human I cannot get behind because there are no "mutants" in the Marvel sense in the real world. In the real world there are men and women serving in the military who are gay and have spouses who face all kind of issues. Northstar's spouse is going to be used just like Mary Jane was used in issues of Spider-Man when she got married to Peter Parker; as fodder for enemies to go after and cause cheap conflict. I don't think that Northstar getting married is going to get half as much venom spewed on them as a couple as when it happened in Archie Comics. Maybe because Kevin's spouse was in the military and DADT was revoked at about the same time as it was announced is why all that venom was spewed into that comic that made it sell like gangbusters. Meanwhile who, outside the people that read the X-Books and may have read Alpha Flight back in the 80's and 90's, know who Northstar is? Ultimately Marvel might see a boost in sales, but they will fall to or below A vs X levels a few months after that. As for Alan Scott coming out as a gay male in the DC comic Earth 2 #2; when it was announced everyone had their suspicions on who it was. I honestly thought that it was going to be one of the Watchmen or Plastic Man. One of the Watchmen because I thought that they would do that sort of thing to P.O. Alan Moore even more than usual. As for my thinking it being Plastic Man I just thought I would throw that out there based on what DC Editorial said at a convention back in May. Though Dan DiDio did misdirect us by saying that the character had not been reintroduced in the New 52 Universe when in fact he had back in Earth 2 #1. When I read that comic I had a pinging on my comic book Gaydar that he might be that way, but my Gaydar has been wrong in the past. Plus, I am a bit slow on the uptake from time to time. I think it took me about two months of issues in Countdown to Infinite Crisis to realize that the Pied Piper from The Flash's Rogues Gallery was in fact gay. Didn't change my enjoyment of the book at all and I really liked that subplot out of the whole series while the others I could take or leave. I had to explain to my 60 year old mother when she saw the headline on the ticker of the local news that basically said "Green Lantern is Gay" that it was not the Green Lantern she knows from seeing the movie commercials from last year, but the Golden Age Green Lantern, Alan Scott. Not that it would have made much difference to her because she does not keep up with comic books or popular culture. That is something that I wish that the news would clear up, it is not the Green Lantern that was in the movie last summer, but the original Green Lantern that was not surrounded by a corps of aliens and whose weakness was wood and not the color yellow. This whole thing with Alan Scott being gay does throw a monkey wrench into things because he was originally married to a woman in the old continuity and had a couple of kids. I guess that is out the window now. This is what is good about the New 52, you can take characters and give them a whole new direction if you wanted to and not have to worry about decades of continuity getting in your way.
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Zero Issues
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In September, DC Comics, instead of releasing issue #13 of most of their New 52 books, they are instead doing zero issues. This was confirmed by DC early last month and with the solicits they had some of the covers for the books. There's a young John Constantine on the Justice League Dark cover, and various representations on the others. The one revealed for Green Lantern caught me by surprise. Really you are going to have a supposedly Muslim Green Lantern on the cover of one of your flagship titles holding a pistol. Is this really a stereotype you want to perpetuate DC? Muslim superheroes as pistol packing vigilantes? Plus why is he not using his power ring? The costume seems to remind me of the one that they had for the Green Lantern movie with all the unnecessary ridges on it so it is not helping the case either. Watch the zealots on Fox News grab a hold of this story and make it into something that it is not. Like when in May DC said there was going to be the gay character revealed in a New 52 book and Fox News took it to mean that Superman was going to be the character. When it was revealed that it was in fact Alan Scott as the gay character Fox News did not retract their story at all. What the heck is going on that you feel you need to do zero issues DC? All of a sudden I am having flashbacks to the 1990's when zero issues were put out by companies and I walked away from them all. Next year are you going to do . . . #1 issues where you go deeper into the five years that have passed? (I'm sorry about this in advance if this happens because I put it out into the world.)
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