Mindless Ones

THIS IS HOW IT’S GOING TO WORK. Plenty blather in recent weeks about the reactionary impulses at work in DC’s decision to get rid of all its Bronze (I call it ‘Early Dark’ but ‘whatever, Steve Trevor’)/Dark/Prismatic Age legacy heroes and replace them with the resurrected Silver Age versions, in a bid to placate the SEETHING, ever-chubbier fanman and his desire for everything to be just like it was when he was a child.

(Minus the constant stream of free electronic NUDITY, I’m guessing.)

[Please note we fully accept the non-existence of the Legion of EviL Fan-Men stereotype. With the cultural dominance of the superhero over the early 21st century very well secure, these arguments, these embarrassments, are very much a relic of another age, and performed here very much in the spirit of a historical battle re-enactment society (and don’t get me started on those losers, with their ‘going outside’ and ‘hanging around with other people’ and ‘getting some fun and healthy exercise’). The caricature is being deployed in the current post merely for cosmic effect, a convenient and pitiful rhetorical ghost to lazily lob some poor jokes and manufactured anger at. To reiterate: It’s just a bit of fun. I am as ill-shaven and portly as anyone, and as will become all too apparent my opinions on superheroes are both delinquently partial and barely worth the (very) spare calorie it takes to type them. With those caveats safely in place, read on, if you’ve got the arse for it.]

As a straight, white, solvent Anglo Kelt – pure oppressor class, the enormous invisibilities of privilege weighing featherlike on my shoulders – I feel un-uniquely well qualified to weigh in on the whole ‘is it racist?’ issue. The answer, to anyone with the slightest ability to look themself in the eye without VOMITING at the sight of one’s moral laxity, is ‘of course it’s racist’. Why on earth would a sane person even waste time considering that this person here (we shall give him a funky superhero name, and men shall call him The Hypotheticon, or perhaps Straw-Man), who is actually spaceman enough to even know, to even give a damn, whether it’s Wal or Baz in the red running suit this week, might be well-socialised enough to have successfully internalised modern taboos against racial prejudice? He doesn’t care if people in his neighbourhood are being discriminated against on account of their race. He cares about Hal Jordan.

What I’m going to do, here before your eyes at the everloving Mindless Ones Dot Com, is perform the utterly IMPOSSIBLE. I am going to drink of the waters of the Lethe, erase from my memory all of my own preconceptions about which superhero is best, and based on nothing more than information available through Wikipedia and Google Images, I’m going to objectively, fairly, but above all authoritatively compare ye olde with the new and see which iteration of which superhero is best and deserves to be the One True Holder of the mighty mantle of… whoever’s turn it is this time.

It’s Blue Beetle’s turn. Let’s look at the men, the Inheritors of the Scarab of Khaji Da, who have been blessed and brave enough to make the mantle of the bold beryl bug their own. (I think I will probably have to use the word ‘mantle’ rather a lot over the course of these posts, for which I apologise in advance. ‘Mantle’ is, along with ‘annihilate’, ‘telepathic’ and ‘alter-ego’, one of the core words of the lost Superhero Dictionary, the definitive compendium of terms that are never used in real life but are inescapably ubiquitous in superhero comics. Comics readers are supposed to have vocabularies 20% larger than the average. Unfortunately, 99% of those extra words are totally useless. I’m sure someone else did a blog post on that very topic a while back.)

Let’s go:

The Golden Age Blue Beetle (Dan Garrett)

Dan Garrett! The Blue Beetle! Hhmm… ‘Dan Garrett’ is a pretty rubbish name for a secret identity, isn’t it? Weakly alliterative, and a poor finish on the final syllable (come to think of it, isn’t Blue Beetle a pretty rubbish name for a superhero? Oh wow, it’s a blue one, is it? Like ‘blue’ is such an impressive quality that it needs to be right there in the headline. And beetle? Oh right, not Wasp or Mantis or any of the cool insects, just the really generic and normal one? Only Blue? Great. Like, he’s got a magic scarab, why wouldn’t you call yourself The Magic Scarab, that’s much cooler. It’s a ‘Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone’ kinda deal there I suspect, mustn’t scare THE MOUTH BREATHERS. What’s a Scarab?)

Sorry, sidetrack. Not a great start for DAN, is it? He’s very much a man of his times. The Golden Age lines on his outfit are a crisp, classic cut, nice, but not remarkable enough to stand out. A dodgy colour separation and he’s just The Phantom isn’t he? His powers too, solid strongman stuff, a bit of eyebeams and ‘energy blasts’, a touch of the jump-flights, are OK in a pleasingly vague rise-to-the-occasion kind of way, but again not impressive enough to successfully mark out his pitch. No memorable villains to speak of, and, and I say this with no real knowledge but of course it’s going to be true, some nasty ethnic stereotypes in his villain register.

DG, the GA BB is too much of an everyman to really make his mark as the One True bearer of the MANTLE.

The Other Age Blue Beetle (Ted Kord)

Spoiler Alert: There is no way in HELL that Ted Kord is going to win.

But he’s got a cool aeroplane spaceship thing! (Well, no he hasn’t, he’s got one which looks like my daughter drew it, which did nothing except get destroyed a lot, and besides) So has Batman.

He’s got some other cool gadgets! So has Batman.

But he’s rich and a genius! So is Batman.

But he’s got no superpowers, he just fights using WIT and SPUNK! So does Batman.

But he’s got a sort of bluey-grey costume! So has Batman.

But he was in the Justice League! Batman was running the Justice League when this CLOWN was in it.

Ah! I have you now! There’s one thing Batman hasn’t got which Tedward Kord has got in spades: a sense OF humour!

Well sorry son, sorry if the costumes gave you the wrong impression but THIS IS CRIMEFIGHTING, not the GODDAM CIRCUS. There’re lives at stake here and this fool just wants to spend all day looking at the girls in their fightsuits and mucking about with his mate! When’s he gonna grow the hell up, stupid, rubbish, over-privileged idiot.

Let me tell you, when I BINNED all my issues of Infinite Crisis the other week (try it friends – the resultant feeling of liberation is EXQUISITE) the only one I couldn’t bear to part with was the Prologue issue where this fool get a bullet in his STUPID GOGGLY head. It’s a great issue – everyone spends all of it telling this macrodouche what a LOSER he is, and then he gets CAPPED at the end in his STUPID GOGGLY head.

(That’s a LIE of course – I threw this issue out along with all the others, because it had this PATHETIC IDIOT in it. I will not have this turd in my comic collection, stinking the whole place up, and to give you an idea of what that means to me chum, I own comics with CABLE in them.)

(That’s a LIE of course – like everyone else I love the initial Giffen JLA run and have the trades.)

The Laser Age Blue Beetle (Jamie Reyes)

UGH. Talk about political correctness gone mad – this idiot’s comics were so lame some of the dialogue in them was in Spanish sometimes. Pathetic. I emailed the DC website about this – how am I, a repulsive Hutt of a man with nothing to do but sit on the internet all day, supposed to find a helpful translation of all that Latino jabber? I live in the United States of American, where a mere thirty five million Spanish speakers live – there is no way it would be possible for me to find anyone to help me with this intractable intelligibility problem in your stupid, unintelligible comic of stupidity. Talk about political correctness gone mad. UGH.

Jamie Reyes has got his own cartoon you know. (I mean, basically he has.) It’s the wisdom of crowds – sometimes the numbers just speak for themselves. Sometimes (ALL THE TIME) John and Jane idiot sheep consumer are smarter than a few hundred weeping Korduroys (I don’t mean ‘weeping’ in the ‘crying tears’ sense, I mean in the ‘blistered sofa-sores’ sense). Jamie Reyes is the first bearer of the Blue beetle mantle who has got any of the things you expect from a decent superhero. A cool costume, a sidekick (his now-sentient costume, but honestly, sometimes Batman is his sidekick FOR FUCKSAKE) a believable friends & family setup in the background, cool powers, a toy made in his honour (a real toy, I mean. Not a collector man toy like my awesome 12 inch Admiral Ackbar – that’s not a euphemism – but a toy, a real kid’s toy for a kid to play with that Zom’s kid has got and loves and everything.)

So there we have it, in black and white for everyone to see. The One True Blue Beetle is Jamie Reyes, a nice kid trying to do his best, and the others, Dan Garrett who no-one gives a damn about anyway, and Ted Kord, the one who the people who are KILLING COMICS care about, and their fans, can die drowning in a river of their own poo, pickled.

Next up, them FLASH BASTARDS.