“In a perverse way it’s kind of flattering. Because, had we not put these characters in a position where enough people cared about them, their deaths would have been meaningless. To a certain extent, and again in a really perverse way, we helped put the gun to their heads.” Via Neilalien, JLI-era writer Keith Giffen talks about Countdown to Infinite Crisis and the death of the Blue Beetle.
Tag: Blue Beetle
Squashed like a bug.
What the? I haven’t been keeping up with comics very well for the past decade or so, but I do have a fanboy’s protective fondness for my own Golden Age, which dates to the mid-to-late ’80’s…right around John Romita Jr. on X-Men, John Byrne’s FF and Alpha Flight, Squadron Supreme, and Secret Wars on the Marvel side and to the heyday of the Teen Titans, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Alan Moore on Swamp Thing on the DC end. So it is with some dismay that I received the news from my brother yesterday that, in a fit of Chris Claremont-like revisionism, the new, best-selling, and apparently very dark Countdown to Infinite Crisis (another one?), DC’s follow-up to last year’s gritty Identity Crisis, not only turned relatively congenial corporate shark and JLI head Maxwell Lord (of the classic Giffen-DeMatteis-Maguire run) into an long-simmering evil genius, they had him off the Blue Beetle!
What’s that about? For one, they’re screwing with my childhood here, and that’s not cool. For another, they took out a character with a 60-year history (although admittedly we’re talking about two different Beetles, Dan Garret and Ted Kord.) I mean, they could’ve waxed Booster Gold (who apparently doesn’t fare very well in this issue either) and nobody would’ve batted an eye. Or, if they really wanted to up the body count, DC could have set pretty much all of Justice League Detroit and Batman’s Outsiders on fire, and it’d have been no harm, no foul. But the Blue Beetle? That’s just not kosher. Grr…when the “culture-of-life” protestors come-a-knockin’ in force, DC, you’ll know who sent ’em.