RatCreature's Journal

I was feeling grumpy and depressed, because I'm home alone with my cold (yeah, still *grumble*), and wasn't feeling up to going out, but then I decided that lying in bed, zapping through 24 hours news channels who intercut terror alert news ^(*) with New Year's celebration pictures wasn't the way to go for New Year's Eve, and I should really start New Year on a more positive note.

So I thought about what I could do to improve my mood, and I decided to take a look back on one of the most fun things for me in 2003, which was getting into Batverse fandom. It's my newest main fandom, and I'm still feeling the squee a lot.

I'm still feeling very much as a newbie too, but I've learned a lot about the universe, the characters, and DCU continuity, though I was (and still am) puzzled and confused a lot. So I present you A Newbie's Journey into Batverse Comic Fandom, and hope it conveys a bit of the fun I had this year with discovering this cool fandom.

( A Newbie's Journey into Batverse Comic Fandom )

Now that I'm in a much better mood, I wish a cheerful: Happy New Year! to all of you.

(*) There was some kind of "intelligence" on a supposed car bomb threat against a military hospital here, which led them to close off the whole parts of the hospital's neighborhood, complete with armed security forces, armored vehicles, car searches and other fun stuff (still ongoing), and now local and federal authorities are squabbling whether that is an overreaction or not, i.e. the federal authorities argue that the reaction now lowered the chance to catch the two people they suspect of planning that attack, whereas the locals argue that they had to react as precaution,...and it doesn't help that they're from different parties either.

After the Neal Adams & Denny O'Neil run on Green Lantern / Green Arrow caught my interest in that Superheroes Unmasked documentary, like I posted a while ago, y'all knew of course how it would end. Once I covet a comic (and can find and afford it, or at least find it and beg others for money to afford it *g*) it's only a matter of time until it finds its way into my greedy little hands. That I have more than twice as much shelf space filled with comics than with books without even counting the ten or so boxes filled with US comic books is ample proof of that.

Anyway, I got the seven reprint issues from 1983 at a very fair price on ebay, and the package with them arrived yesterday. I have read some of the stories, but not yet all, because I think they're best read in smaller doses. They're not bad or anything, but wow, they are preachy, like, really, really preachy. I don't mind fiction about issues as such, though my preference is for a somewhat subtler approach, and I definitely can appreciate those GL/GA comics in their historical context. Still, there's only so much of being all about the ISSUES that I can stand at one time, even with Neal Adam art to distract me.

Still it is fun to read about GL and GA doing this road trip to discover themselves and the true America or whatever. And please, someone tell me that there is GL/GA slash set during this? I don't mean necessarily a romantic relationship between the two, but I mean they are in the 70s and on a hippie self-discovery road trip, they seem to develop a real friendship despite their different outlooks, and at least GL questions pretty much everything he previously believed to be true without questioning, so it's not a huge step to assume he might question his sexual orientation as well (and hey, it would fit with the ISSUES *g*). So I can definitely see some "experimentation" going on between the two. And there are some scenes that are at least open to a slash interpretation, like for example in the issue that was Green Lantern #78 originally, I think, when GL tells GA he should forget about Black Canary, who was brainwashed by the cult leader, only they don't know that yet, but GA suspects something, yet GL tells him "Chum, it's tough... but you've got to swallow it -- she just doesn't dig you -- " Okay, so GA then hits GL, but hey, surely you can reinterpret the aggressive response...

( I also made a few Green Lantern and Green Arrow icons from these issues, if you want one, just comment, I'll customize them with text on request, too... )

As I research how to proceed with my plan towards world domination getting an overview of recent Batman canon and continuity (heh, the level of difficulty is about the same), I'm accumulating a lot of notes (both paper and electronic) on which stories are published where, what the main events are etc. And of course I continue to promptly misplace or loose them almost as soon as I gathered the information.

So I have decided to post this in my blog, sort of as a "note to self", well a rather public note, but after all there may be other people for whom such an overview might be interesting and more importantly it won't be some obscure text document lost in the unorganized mess that's my hard drive but neatly indexed and visibly posted in my blog, where I can find it.

I don't own most of these comics (yet), so I'm relying on information provided on web sites. My sources are the The Unofficial Guide to the DC Universe, this continuity page, this timeline, this German DC fan page, and information on issues and trade paperbacks provided by various online comic stores.

For now I started with the Cataclysm/No Man's Land time frame.

Corrections are very welcome.

( Overview of how the TPB compare to the single issues. )

( I ramble about how tv fandoms are somehow easier, about the malaise of prioritizing sprawling canon sources, when faced with inadequate means to obtain the whole, about the difficulty of talking about the source and the characters while having nagging doubts regarding the own competence to make any statements, about how weird it is for me to collect these comics even though I don't love their artwork... )

I guess you could summarize this entry as "the state of my descent into Bat-comics as of roughly six weeks after its beginning".