The Adventures Of Batman And Marcia

People are all aflutter about nuBatman and nuCatwoman having steamy, kinky nuSex in the nu52.

Well, it's not the first time Batman has had a girlfriend. No, not Bruce Wayne--Batman!

You see, once upon a time, Gotham City obviously didn't have enough of a nightlife to entertain bored playgirls:

Just as obviously, there's not a lot of crime in Gotham tonight, because this is a job for Batman!!


And there's only one cure for her:


And severe public humiliation is very effective, because the very next night:


Ah, to hell with Robin--this was the birth of a beautiful partnership, as the Caped Crusader and his pistol packin' mama take on Gotham's criminal element:

And of course, two such gorgeous and rich people can't work closely together without...falling in love!

Unfortunately:

Because GCPD has nothing better to do than deliver Dear John letters...

And now, the saddest Batman panel of all time:

Awww...flash forward, a few years later, when a mysterious lady is about to be killed by a mob hitman using bow and arrow:


Yes, Batman can lasso an arrow in mid-flight. (Don't tell Ollie!)

Of, the woman is revealed to be...


Oh, what a joyful reunion.

Except...she's really a super-villain (complete with henchmen!) who's teaming up with Eclipso to frame Batman for...oh, just look:

But she's really just doing it to protect her dad from the international criminal organization CYCLOPS, and...

HANEY!!!

This was, sadly, Marcia Monroe's only appearance, as Queen Bee (no, not that Queen Bee) or as herself. Hey, Grant Morrison, since "every story counts" in your grand Batman theorem, I expect to see her turn up in Batman Leviathan.

From Brave And The Bold #64 (1966), as reprinted in Super-Team Family #5 (1976)

Again With The Klingons?

So, I'm perusing DC's February solicitations, when I come across this:

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #54
Written by JAMES ROBINSON
Art by BRETT BOOTH & NORM RAPMUND
Cover by BRETT BOOTH
1:10 Variant cover by DAVID MACK
“The Rise of Eclipso” begins here as the dark energies that have surrounded Earth are harnessed once more to usher in the great Lord of Darkness! And it looks like the corruption of all mankind starts with the members of the Justice League! When things go dark, which teammate poses the greatest threat to mankind – Obsidian or Jade?

Sigh....

It immediately put me in mind of this:



I mean, hasn't Eclipso been played out yet?

The problem is, DC essentially destroyed him as an interesting villain by constantly upping his power levels, to the point there's nothing to be done with him. He started out as a silly Silver Age lark, a Jekyll & Hyde riff in standard super-villain drag.

Then he was the basis for a line-wide crossover event, which retconned him into an evil vengeance demon, rather than just Bruce Gordon's dark half--a demon who was able to tempt and possess every single DC hero. He had just been "posing" as a B-level villain all those years to keep of the big guns' radar, you see.

Enough? No? Well, then they retconned him further, so that he wasn't just any vengeance demon; no, now he was the first embodiment of God's wrath. Yes, he was the Spectre's predecessor, the force that caused Noah's flood, pretty much all-powerful evil embodied.

Oh, and then it turned out that Darkseid created him. Because that's apparently way scarier than God's exiled Wrath.

Anyway, I'm not sure where else there is to go with Eclipso. Just looking at the solicit, we've already seen Eclipso possess the DC heroes; we've already seen him fight the Spectre (and seduce the Spectre...ewwww). He's already done the corruption of all mankind shtick. So what else is there? Where else can you go with an all-powerful evil who exists by corrupting? It smells like a re-run...again with the Klingons!

Then again, I'm older than dirt, so I know all these stories, while there's an awful lot of comics readers who haven't experienced this before, so this may all be new to them.

And maybe every generation is entitled to its own Eclipso story.

How Not To Have a Surprise Ending.

OK, OK, we're all sick of ragging on Countdown. And I promise this is the very last time I will blog about it (*editors note: due to a necessary impurity in snell's emotional makeup, this is very likely a hideous lie).
And I should note, this post is a massive SPOILER ALERT for all 12 people who a) still care about Countdown, and b) still haven't read #32. But then again, it's not really a spoiler at all.

I should make clear, although I'm going to rag on the storytelling in this issue, I'm not dissing Dini/Bedard/Giffen/Barrionuevo per se. Rather, I'm giving a scathing review to how the marketing of this portentous mini-series is helping to destroy the actual (somewhat pathetic) telling of it.

We have known, for literally months, that Eclipso was going to tempt Mary Marvel into evil. We've known because we've been told again, and again, and again. It's been part of the promotional material. And not just somewhere more "obscure", like an interview in some magazine or a random comment made at a con. Nope, this is stuff that has been inside the very comics DC has had us reading for months.

*It's been in promotional posters (WWMMD?), and on two page spreads ("and there shall come and ending...").

*More than 2 months ago Dan Didio spilled it in a DC Nation column.

*Last week, Elisabeth Gehrlein did it again in the DC Nation column.

*As if that weren't enough, the 2-page center book promo spread, also in this very issue of Countdown (not to mention available at comics shops for weeks), shows it explicitly.

So there's no way any sentient being could be reading DC comic books could not already know that Eclipso is tempting Mary Marvel.

And what does DC give us as the "surprise reveal," in a full page splash, no less, on the final page of this week's Countdown?

Oh my God. You mean Eclipso is back? How could we ever have known? What. a. shocker. Oh, wait, no it's not, THE AD IN THE VERY CENTER OF THIS ISSUE ALREADY TOLD US, you putzes!!

Deep breaths, Brian, deep breaths.....

As I said, maybe Dini et. al. didn't know DC would be blowing the so-called surprise. Then again, they've been doing it for months, so it's hard to credit that. So we're left with these options:

*Dini et. al. didn't know the shock ending was spoilt, and nobody in DC editorial bothered to say, "Um, guys, this really isn't going to be a surprise...maybe you can punch up a slightly different ending."

*DC editorial didn't know Dini was going to end the issue that way (given the state of editing at DC these days, it's pretty certain editors aren't even reading a lot of the books before they go to press...).

*Everybody knew, but didn't give a hairy rat-fart about whether the ending worked or not. Countdown has become the Contractual Obligation Album of comic book series. We know it doesn't work, we're not even going to try, but the contracts have been signed and we have to finish this, so let's just do it with as little effort as possible. Seriously. If this series were so important to DC, they would have taken the same care to avoid spoiling the end of this issue as they did the Arrow/Canary Wedding Special. Yeah, that wasn't great, but at least they cared enough not to give away the surprise twists in all the ads and advanced solicitations. With Countdown, they just didn't give a damn, and disrespected the story and the fans.

It's bad enough that absolutely nothing happens (and VERY SLOWLY) in this series. But when something finally does happen, it's something they've spoiled themselves months ago. Bravo, DC. Well played.