A Month Late and a Dollar Short: The Last Flashpoint Friday

Flashpoint 5
Writer: Geoff Johns
Artists: Andy Kubert, Jesse Delperdang, & Sandra Hope
Rating: 2 out of 5 Pixels

In this finale that was meant to tie-up about twenty loose plot threads, introduce the biggest reboot in decades, and wow us all to pieces, Geoff Johns fails to deliver. Instead what we get is a story that takes us from Point A to Point B in a rather anticlimactic fashion, playing fast and loose with logic as it does so. Somehow, Barry saving his mother thirty years ago was "like a bullet shattering a windshield," altering time in every direction, in ways that no one bothers to explain. When the Flash runs, it's not so much about traveling from one place (or time) to another, but rather just the act of going really fast makes him magically appear wherever the story needs him to be, whether it's on his mother's couch or at his cosmic treadmill (which apparently exists in empty space, outside of reality) at the precise moment when he needs to be there in order to stop himself from saving his mother's life and thereby destroying the world. I can deal with these leaps of logic, though. Comic book laws of physics are typically... creative, especially when it comes to time travel and alternate realities. The thing that really bugged me about this issue, that made me just now drop the rating from 2.5 to 2 Pixels (even lower than I rated Red Hood and the Outlaws 1), is this scene:

See, Geoff Johns realized that if Barry decided to sacrifice his mom, even in order to save the entire world, he wouldn't come across as a hero. Rather, he'd come across as a douche who decided his mom's life wasn't worth everyone else's. So Johns writes in this scene where Barry's mom herself makes the decision to die in order to save the world, so instead of being the victim of Barry's douchery she's a hero, right? Except that this scene more or less comes out of nowhere, as far as characterization is concerned. We've seen Barry's mom for what, a few pages in the first issue or two of the series? If she was going to be the hero of this series, then she needed to be a bigger part of it all along. We needed to get to know her so that we'd understand that she's the type of person who sacrifices herself to save the world. We needed to care about her so that we recognize what this sacrifice means to her. Not what it means to Barry. Because this woman has been in the background for most of this series (as most women have), this scene comes across instead as her recognizing that she's not as important as the big (male) heroes, Flash and Batman and Cyborg, so she might as well just get out of the way so they can have their happy world back.

Sorry, Mr. Johns, I generally like your writing, but this just doesn't work for me. You created a (female) supporting character simply as motivation for the (male) main character, then tried to convince me that she's the hero of the story when in fact you just didn't want to make the main character look like a complete asshole. Bzzt. Try again.

Also, is it just me, or does Batman have a total double standard when it comes to fellow heroes who have tried to rewrite reality and in the process have killed innocents? Remember how he didn't forgive Green Lantern for years? This time, Flash tells him, "You know what? I just tried to go back in time and save my mom, but instead I created this new reality where millions of people suffered and died needlessly." And Batman is all like, "No worries, bro, it's cool."

Admit it, Batman, you just don't like Hal. It has nothing to do with him having been Parallax.

A Month Late and a Dollar Short: Flashpoint Friday

This week's flash reviews:

Flashpoint: Project Superman 3
Does it make it better or worse for the woman in the refrigerator to be self-aware enough to recognize that she's a woman in a refrigerator?

Personally, I'm kind of bothered that Lois sees herself as "the girl" and not "the hero." (Or, y'know, both.)

Flashpoint: Lois Lane and the Resistance 3
This book should have come out two weeks earlier. One scene leads directly into Wonder Woman and the Furies 3, which came out last week (speaking as if I'd bought all these books on their initial release date), and another scene leads directly into Project Superman 3, which came out the same week as this, but with no indication that I should read one before the other. Yes, I can put the pieces together even when read out of chronological order, but one of the appeals of a collection of miniseries like this is the connections between them and how they all come together to tell a larger story than each one tells individually. A little more planning in the scheduling department could have made that aspect work just a little better.

Flashpoint: Kid Flash Lost 3
I did not expect to see Max Mercury in this comic, nor many of the other references to Bart Allen's history. Sterling Gates clearly knows his Mark Waid. I would love to see a Gates-written Kid Flash ongoing. Also, Bart being the speedster to sacrifice himself in this universe-altering crisis? I didn't expect that. (Because, you know, he's alive in Teen Titans 1 next week.) Still, a nice touch.

Flashpoint: Hal Jordan 3
The end of this issue would make a great origin story for Carol Ferris, Green Lantern, who now has Hal Jordan as her very own woman in a refrigerator.

Wonder Woman's Invisible Pants

One of the most talked-about changes of DC's New 52 is something that on the surface seems pretty inconsequential: Wonder Woman's pants (or lack thereof). After DC radically altered the character's costume last year for J. Michael Straczynski's "The Odyssey" storyline, giving the character full-length pants to replace the traditional bathing suit bottom, it appeared that the more permanent New 52 redesign was also going to feature long pants:

But then a couple of months after the first preview images were released and everyone was talking about Wonder Woman's pants, DC quietly replaced the original preview images with updated ones:

You'll have noticed the missing pants. My theory is that Wonder Woman's pants are made from the same material as her jet, and she's able to turn them invisible at will. Who wouldn't want that superpower?

Actually, I find the whole debate about Wonder Woman's pants fascinating. I can see either side from a feminist perspective: On the one hand, you can argue that the bathing suit look is a product of male creators objectifying the female form, making Wonder Woman into nothing more than a sex icon. On the other hand, you can argue that the pants are a product of male creators trying to desexualize the character because they feel threatened by a woman who embraces her sexuality. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Personally, I prefer the pants for aesthetic reasons--I think the costume looks good with pants--and for practical reasons--I know I wouldn't be comfortable fighting crime in a swimsuit.

But setting my own preferences aside, I really think that the only solution is to have Wonder Woman written and illustrated by female creators. Typically I'm not a believer that one must be a woman in order to write women, or that one must be Latino to write Latinos, or that one must be bisexual to write bisexuals. One must be an observer of human beings in order to write human beings convincingly, regardless of sex, gender, orientation, race, or nationality. But Wonder Woman is not just meant to be a woman; she is meant to be the woman. She's an Amazon ambassador to Man's World, the ultimate living ideal of womanhood. William Moulton Marston (yes, I know, a man) created her to be the ultimate hero for young girls to look up to. I just don't think the character works when she's interpreted as a man's idea of what the ideal woman should be. Gail Simone's run on Wonder Woman is by far the best run in recent years, mostly because Simone is a damn good writer, but also because Simone is one of the few female writers to tackle the character. By the same token, Amanda Conner's Power Girl is by far my favorite interpretation of the character, not only because Conner is a damn good artist, but also because when Conner draws P.G. looking ridiculously sexy, I know it's a woman embracing female sexuality, not a man drawing his fantasy girlfriend. Have Amanda Conner or any of the other great female comic artists out there redesign Wonder Woman's costume, and then her pants or lack thereof can honestly be claimed as a woman's expression of sexuality or practicality or whatever, and not as the object of the male gaze that it will inevitably be otherwise.

The other part of the solution would be to embrace the sexual objectification of male characters in comics. As Sonia Harris points out in this blog post, sexual objectification swings both ways when it comes to superheroes with perfect bodies dressed in very tight clothing. I think to truly make the argument that male characters are as much sex objects as female characters, though, we need to see more male characters with costumes like Namor's traditional nothing-but-a-Speedo look, and we need to see more male characters twisting their bodies into uncomfortable positions in order to thrust their crotches at the viewer, the way female characters do with their chests and rears. Heck, it would be nice if some (presumably straight male) artists would just stop drawing men who appear to be castratos, judging by the lack of bulge. When Power Boy showed up in Supergirl a few years back, I was thrilled to see the chest window in his costume, mirroring Power Girl's:

Wouldn't it be all the more awesome if his bulge had (and deserved) the same reputation Power Girl's bust does?

So I guess what I'm saying is that you straight men and lesbians can have your pantless Wonder Woman if that's what you want. Just give us gay men and straight women some equally sexy men to ogle in return.