My Powers Need Testing.

I ended my post yesterday with our niece Josceline's Batman-themed birthday party held Sunday at her house, and because the operating system I used was being a big BLEEP, I couldn't segue into the Elseworlds (DC Comics' version of Marvel's What If? series) Annual I'd picked up and read this weekend, a story I hadn't read in more than twenty years. Written by Alan Grant and penciled and inked by Tom Raney, Joe Staton, and Horacio Ottolini, Batman: Shadow of the Bat Annual #2's 1994 story "The Tyrant" veers after Bruce Wayne's parents are shot. A Gotham University lecturer named Jonathan Crane arrives at the scene, knocks out the murderer, and sees in Bruce's tragedy the opportunity to test his own theories on preventing crime by essentially suppressing violent tendencies period in everybody. And Bruce grows up to become proficient in every known fighting style and much like the Batman we know -- he and Crane are even inspired by a bat to create his alter ego!

For yes, criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot in most every world.


Bruce's first outing as Batman ends with him defeating the villain yet getting unmasked in the process. But in a complete 180 of what you might expect, Bruce Wayne who is now known to be Batman gets appointed Gotham City Leader for life -- there's a big war referred to that seems to have made most of the U.S. desert waste -- and in the succeeding fifteen years crime and other violence in Gotham City has plummeted, but particularly in the last two before this story begins. Because of Crane, whom you might if you read the comics know in the main DC universe as the Batman villain Scarecrow -- but in this world without the super villain ID, Batman's aiding and abetting the man who saved his life in using Gotham as a giant fishbowl for a social experiment that would kick crime to the curb by eliminating the choice people have. Unless the subversives, a number of Gotham criminals, and a disguised teenager known as Anarky (read: anarchy) can stop them. See above.


Is the Scarecrow a good guy in ANY franchise save The Wizard of Oz?


There's also a Marvel Comics villain by that name, but he's an acrobat with a flock of trained crows. The more I read that story now that I'm forty-four as opposed to twenty-two when it first came out, the less ... anarchic, or at least willing to change the prevailing social order while establishing at least some law, I am finding myself. I had intended to devote more time to two issues of Dreadstar (#14 and #15) I perused as well from which today's title comes, and even New Teen Titans #44. There are a few shops with comic books here in Minot, and nine out of ten (comics, not the shops) are good deals, and thought-provoking. One graphic novel I checked out of Minot Public Library didn't exactly take me out of my comfort zone, but Julie Maroh's Blue Is the Warmest Color (translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger, ISBN 9781551525143) is a romance and a coming-of-age story set in late 1990s France did get me thinking and maybe a little scared of what I was thinking.


We can stop loving, but we cannot stop love any more than we can stop time.


It's Emma's blue hair that contributes to that graphic novel's title, and she herself who contributes to Clementine's cost of growing up. This is not why I couldn't sleep last night, but I at least took advantage of the time and wrote our some notes on the novel I'm currently finishing -- it's been ten years "Victory", part three of my Progeny Cycle has lingered in some way, shape, and form between my ears and in a computer's memory and scattered throughout ... but by the time Sarah and Jeffrey start school at Longfellow on the twenty-fourth of next month, I want it d-o-n-e! I promise, it's going to look mind-blowing amazing and I need you my readers to hold me to that. Who knows, maybe I needed the last ten years to finish the story in a satisfying and cathartic way with a reasonable degree of verisimilitude.  And even ambiguity, like what you may or may not be reading in this post.


Welcome to my world.


David