Hello, I'm A Marvel. And I'm A DC.

You could say that like the Apple advertising campaign commercial does -- and I know of a YouTube parody video that does that -- but for today I choose the title because yesterday I focused on a Marvel book I read. Today I've got three DC (the House of Batman; I was about to say House of Superman but he doesn't appear in any of these) works in mind. One has that full imprint -- Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke: The Deluxe Edition (originally 1988, but for this 2008 edition ISBN 9781401216672), and since I remember Moore better for Watchmen and V For Vendetta I found myself expecting segues -- or rather, screen wipes inspired by the Star Wars movies -- from one scene directly into the other. Obviously Batman's in this story, but you could argue that he's not the protagonist even though he's the hero. NO, that dubious honor, the character who sets things in motion, is perhaps the penultimate Batman baddie, the one with the clown face, the Joker.


The one who admits that if he must have a past, he prefers it be multiple choice!


It's supposed to be a game-changing story. Essentially, the Joker kidnaps Commissioner Gordon and seeks to drive him as mad-crazy as he is, and shooting his daughter formerly Batgirl goes a long way toward that, and as Batman's getting to where he's being held we're treated to a possible ... well, up to the point where the man who became the Joker fell into a chemical vat with his red hood on as nearly all sources agree on that, origin. What would push a man to go mad-crazy (as opposed to mad-angry) as the Joker's proven, or maybe even pretends to be, over the decades? The Joker posits, and it's up to Gordon and Batman to disprove this, one bad day. I read this when I was forty-four and the story debuted when I was sixteen, so it's hard for me to give it accolades. But having finally read the story in the comic book original -- it's only forty-eight pages, but it is really NOT for kids -- I have to admit ...


The last page of the story makes us question its being canon. But if it's not, what is?


Another story I've started reading that definitely isn't canon for DC is Brian Vaughn and Pia Guerra's Y:The Last Man. I've read the first two collected volumes in their Deluxe Editions (ISBNs 781401219215 and 9781401222352) about a 2002 plague that wiped out every male of every species on Earth save Yorick Brown, a twenty-year-old escape artist and Ampersand, a Capuchin monkey, and its consequences. I read the title again and I'm reading it as "Why, The Last Man?" Why is it Yorick, and why is he proceeding cross country with a geneticist and a secret agent through a vastly changed and in some ways vastly adapted landscape? The cause of the plague is never really defined in the series -- I've still got three volumes to read, but they'd better wait -- but everywhere you can see the effects. Losing 48% percent of the world's population at once, all the men, will do that.


Gendercide. It's called "gendercide".


Again, it's really not for kids. So why am I willing to read it? Well, first I'm NOT a kid despite what some people seem to tell me, and it's not as if the Bible which my faith in God the Father, Jesus His Son, and the Holy Spirit is completely devoid of personal violations and madness and slaughter. I can think of one radio commentator who could see a movie with King Herod's Massacre of the Innocents (from Luke 2, where he attempts to kill every child two and under to get rid of the Child prophesied as King of the Jews) graphically portrayed and still give it stars for "family friendliness". The older I get the harder it is to not hear that term and have battle stations go off in my head. Some people tell me I ask too many questions of that. Me, I think I'm asking at least parts of the right ones.

Remembering Malachi Constant,

David