Credit Where Credit Is Due

Hey, DC threw me a bone!

Up to now, my reaction to the whole Flushpoint "New 52" has been one of faint ennui, because after all of DC's declarations of "history making" and "reshaping the industry," it seemed to me as if most of the "new" books we got were mostly same old, same old.

25% of the output Bat-books? That's taking a chance.

Deathstroke? Yeah, he was edgy...30 years ago, and he just had his own team a month ago.

A team led by the Demon? Yes, because we haven't had the Demon star in any titles over the past decade.

Wildstorm characters in the DC Universe?? Well, let's see--those titles and/or characters were all created by the man who is DC's "co-publisher," so yeah, real risky. It would have been a far bigger surprise if Grifter et. al. hadn't been incorporated.

No, despite all the chatter about "we really want to inject new life in our characters and line," 95% of the "new" 52 is the exact same characters they were already publishing, just with new clothes and botox and all adult relationships stripped away.

But then, at SDCC, Geoff Johns revealed who one of the "mystery" characters in Justice League was: Lady Luck!

Now, I've written about Lady Luck before, so I won't bore you with the details...

Oh, hell I won't!

Lady Luck was created by Will Eisner, and ran as a regular back-up in the Spirit newspaper insert. Quality Comics began reprinting those stories, and for 5 glorious issues, she took over Smash Comics as the title character!! (And then the mag was cancelled. Ah, well...)

Of course, Quality never seemed able to settle on a slogan for Lady Luck. From the covers of her 5 issues:





A few more issues, and I think they would have had it!!

Anyway, even though this new Lady Luck sounds like she has pretty much nothing to do with the Golden Ager except for the name (and hopefully her taste in lingerie), I see it as vaguely promising. It's an example of DC's brain trust actually thinking outside the box for 5 seconds, the first concept from the New 52 that wasn't created by one of their Golden Boys or an attempt to latch onto 80s or 90s nostalgia. A small thing, yes...but something.

One of DC's greatest but most under-utilized strengths is the ridiculously ENORMOUS amount of characters they have buried in their vault after absorbing Quality and Fawcett and Fox and...well, virtually everyone. But since Roy Thomas stepped away, there's been almost no attempt to revive/recreate any of these properties...except for cameos and name drops in Starman, or to be gratuitously slaughtered off in JSA so we'd understand that Nazis were evil.

But just look back at my Golden Age Idol series. Hell, just look back at Fawcett 1941 Week or Quality 1941 Week earlier this month to see dozens of characters from just one month's comics that are lying around, unused, even though DC (theoretically) owns the rights to them.

So props to DC for finally extending their institutional memory past the books they read when they were adolescents. It's a small step, but one that should be applauded.

Especially if it leads to reviving this guy.