Tuesday, June 22, 2010

THIS IMAGE WENT AROUND SOME TUMBLRS: (Not that I have any idea what Tumblr is--given my usual position on The Curve I will figure it out in March, 2014--) Notably (for me) Gail Simone's:



It's Dr Light! By Rodolfo Migliari. And then Gail says:

I love this character. LOVE her. Freaking adore her.  I also think she’s one of the most misused characters anywhere in the DCU. Her character changes from book to book, her badassery is constantly being neutered, and she’s been absolutely chumped so many times.  Asian female HEROES are very rare in the DCU, as well.

And I agree! With all this. 1. Love the character, who basically has a Von Doom-level intellect and powerset and personality but she's a good guy and a single mother. 2. Woefully inconsistent characterization, nobody's really gotten her "right" since her Crisis debut so everybody tries something different with her and it never quite sticks. James Robinson tried to do something by playing up her insecurities lately. Yeah, that's going to last as long as any of those random "here's the human side of Victor Von Doom" we've seen over the years. 3. She's the Asian female superhero Wedge Antilles in terms of managing to survive for years and years and still be in a prominent position most of the time. I mean who else is there? Grace? In comic book limbo. Katana? I have no idea. That new Judomaster? Cass Cain? Well, I just don't know. I do know that Kimiyo manages to keep on trucking without much of a scratch (that episode where evil Dr Light took her powers and left her in the ICU was forgotten almost as soon as it happened.)

She's obviously fared much better than the other Crisis characters--Lady Quark, Harbinger, Pariah, Alex Luthor. And I think her origin is what makes her so difficult to pin down--if you back to basics with her you go back to the granddaddy of all Crises, but it's also an event that has a strange status in DC continuity, where people seem to go back and forth about if they remembered it or what they remembered and so forth. But if you go "back to basics" with her (which is what happens when people try to rejuvenate a character) you get somebody who was given powers by a good god (the Monitor) to fight an evil god (the Anti-Monitor.) And that's pretty good as origins go! And if you were somebody who was already so damn sure of her own intellect and such, you'd feel pretty good about being picked for that task by a god-entity, right? So there's some fertile ground there. Of course, DC being DC they'll probably kill off her kids and have her go on a mission of VENGEANCE and be EVIL. Because that's always so very interesting...

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