Onetime DC employee who wrote a terrible Adam Strange tale turns up again

The Comics Journal interviewed Richard Bruning, one of DC's former managers (and husband of the onetime editor Karen Berger), who, while it goes curiously unmentioned, had a handful stories to his credits, including a repellent miniseries from 1990 starring Adam Strange, which saw humanoid co-star Alanna killed for the sake of it, though that story was reversed several years later. Though I couldn't seem to find any mention of Adam Strange here, the discussion does bring up the following, along with early efforts in digital artistry, and how Paul Levitz actually thought this guy was worth keeping for employment:

There had been a couple of novelty efforts at computer art in comics by that point. There was Shatter for First Comics, and then an Iron Man graphic novel [1988’s Crash] at Marvel…

Pepé Moreno approached us after Shatter came out, and we did Batman: Digital Justice. I got to work with him very closely on it, and I started learning a lot about how those tools could work. He and Mike Saenz [artist of Shatter and Crash] were pushing the boundaries of what these machines could handle. I don't even know how they pulled off what they did, and it was certainly crude in some ways, but it was a necessary step to get to a technological level that would give you art worth looking at. All those things convinced me that this was a real turning point in my industry publication and communication. I was getting very impatient with DC dragging its heels. I had become friends with another graphic designer, Dean Motter from Canada, and we had been talking about forming a business and opening up studios in Manhattan. He was moving down from Toronto and wanted to live in New York.

That was around 1990?

Yeah. I decided to go out on a limb and resign, and then set up a studio with Dean. Fortunately for me, Paul liked what I did, and he signed me up to an exclusive contract for the comic book business [at DC]. I couldn't work for any other publisher, but I got paid every month whether I worked or not, which was kind of cool, and it certainly helped financially in getting a business started.

You must have made a compelling pitch to him.

I didn't pitch it, he pitched it to me. I had a very successful run for those five years at DC, and I had become fairly high profile within the company, which was a very small company at that point. I think Paul saw something in me, and he didn't want Marvel to have it. Basically, he thought it was to his advantage as a businessman to keep me off the market for the competition. That was an incredible honor, and I left on good terms with him. He was happy just to have me still doing freelance work for DC, and not working for Marvel or anybody else.

What's curious about the mention of "freelance" work is that it sounds like Mr. Bruning's obscuring the time when he wrote the aforementioned Adam Strange miniseries, Man of Two Worlds, which was pretty shoddy, and while Alanna's fate was reversed later on, as noted, that doesn't change the fact that it was artistically an embarrassment. But that's exactly why it's a shame if Comics Journal's writer and Bruning himself deliberately obscured his writing portfolio and all but limited the discussion to the business side of things. That only suggests they don't have the courage to discuss what mistakes were made in writing, and possibly art, and how to improve upon said mistakes in the future.

As for computerized artwork, there may have been some achievements, including the aforementioned Iron Man special, but some of the more recent efforts from the past 20 years or so are utterly worthless, recalling an artist named Adi Granov who specialized in stuff like that for Marvel. Other artists like Greg Horn only seemed to do cover art, and while that alone might be okay, it hardly helps in the long run. Digital art may have some potential, but Marvel decidedly didn't make good use of it by the turn of the century. Now, here's where he first brings up how he had a role in getting rid of DC's symbol that was retained from 1977-2005, though recently was restored, certainly on the DC Finest archives. It was the Vertigo line where this first occurred:

Tell me about the process of developing the Vertigo design. Was the idea that you wanted to set this off as visually something distinct from the main DC branding?

Yes, that was one of the things we decided early on. We did not want the DC bullet on the Vertigo books.

You said that you always had problems with that bullet.

Paul thought that some identification to DC [was necessary]. I didn't integrate it into the Vertigo logo per se, on the covers and such, but there'd be a little “DC” in a different typeface just right above or right below the Vertigo logo on the covers. There was that presence or indicator that DC was part of it. We worked that out with Paul, and it worked out fine. It was just a matter of figuring out how to do a line of books that people know are from DC, that will appeal to people who don't read DC comics. How do we get them to want to try it out? Creating a specific identity was really important.

One of the ways was we did this was to use only painted covers. There were very few painted covers on regular comic books, partially because they are not economically feasible, and also because people wanted their line art to maintain [consistency] for the superhero titles. We were able to start commissioning painters to do covers, and that immediately gave the book a different feel and look. The editorial stuff was all Karen.

Oh, I remember some painted covers on books like Avengers and New Teen Titans, and I'll say that those examples were among the better of their kind, if only because they weren't forced, unlike the disgraced Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, which featured stunningly dull cover illustrations, whether painted or not. Why Bruning and company seemed to think it was such a big deal for an imprint that was allegedly aimed at adults I have no idea, because if they did it almost routinely and by editorial mandate, that risks insulting intellects. And speaking of Sandman, that's mentioned here:

It seems like that was pretty intrinsic to the Vertigo line from the beginning. There was this system, especially for some of the bigger titles like Sandman, where you would get collections coming out almost as soon as the story arcs concluded in the monthlies.

There was a lot of back and forth on that, because it wasn't the normal way that DC did things. They usually let time pass. It wasn't very important when you collected a certain volume of The Flash, but we could tell that we were picking up new readers all the time. We didn't want them to feel out of touch with what was going on in the books as book sales rose. We pushed very hard to get the books collected early. We would go to all the different comic dealer meetings and expos and talk to the retailers about this. The retailers were very explicit about the fact that if we give them volume one, and then three months later we give them volume two, and then volume three, they can push those books out the door all day long. That was the general consensus from the retailers. So we had a really strong ally in that, and it helped us firm that up as a publishing platform.

And a comic as overrated as Sandman truly was is exactly what they just had to collect instantly. All they did was hint they considered the superhero fare less valuable, compared to a comic that was more like a political lecture a number of times. But of course, they won't admit that, will they?

Most annoying of all is how the same publishers wouldn't consider the time may have come for making a shift to paperback/hardcover only, or even Graphic Novel format, if that sums it up better. Why waste so much money on two formats, rather than consider what could become more viable sales and business-wise?

Would you say that Paul was more reluctant to push for collected editions, while Jenette was more gung-ho in favor of it?

Yes. Jenette was by nature, a very gung-ho person. You could get around Paul by going to Jeanette, and then Jenette would convince Paul that it was a good idea, and he'd throw his hands up and go, “All right, whatever you want.” She was a wonderful agent of change. Without Jenette coming into the company when she did, I doubt DC would still be around. I mean, it almost folded in the late ‘70s. It was her enthusiasm and ability to take a risk – and Paul's ability to take a risk, too. He was not risk-averse. What you were trying to do just had better be nailed down. Don’t just wing it.

But, really, it was a good time. And the people there - Dick Giordano and everybody - were very supportive. Superhero editors were never very happy with Vertigo. Somehow they saw it as competition, or I think they saw it as thumbing our noses at the superhero books. That wasn't true. We were just doing our thing.

Oh, were they ever, if we take the Sandman as an example. It's one thing to write an adult comic, but another entirely to act like horror and dark, jarring violence are the only ways to do it. Even the heavier use of profanity in the Vertigo line is enough to raise questions. Now, here's more on what Bruning said about DC's most significant symbol:

You finally got to live out your dream of abandoning the bullet after all that time. And of course, it immediately ran into criticism from just about everywhere.

Yep. There is no pleasing people. I stand by my position that if you are stripping away the nostalgia that all of us, including myself, grew up with, the Bullet, structurally, doesn't work very well. There is too much negative space to it. Everything gets tiny if you start to reduce it. The little hair lines start to break up. It just becomes a little clump of things. And that's why on the design, I wanted a big clear “DC.” Whereas on the Bullet, the “DC” seems unimportant compared to the band with four white stars on it. I've worked with it physically more than most people have. I saw that early on that there were a lot of internal structural problems with the design itself, and I stand by that.

Well that's still nothing compared to the artistic mess DC became by that time, which Bruning and interviewer conveniently left out. But if the "DC Bullet" symbol matters, they were making peanuts out of an otherwise okay symbol for putting on the top corner of the comics, and considering Mr. Bruning otherwise didn't offer much positive by the mid-2000s, it's awfully hypocritical of him to make petty fusses about symbols when the company under DiDio plunged into repellent disasters. Years ago, I didn't even know they called it a "bullet"; I just thought it was a "diagonal" coin-like symbol. Since then, it's made a quiet comeback, now put to use on archives like the DC Finest series. So what's Bruning celebrating anyway?

It's striking to me that here we are in 2026, and yet after all this time, it feels like publishers have thrown up their hands at the idea of finding a new format that specifically works with digital readers and phones, and everything else. At the end of the day, comics still look like comics did 30 years ago.

Right? It's a unique format, and it is hard to get it to accommodate other means of presentation. People who buy comics are aware of a certain amount of a collectible nature in them. I think people wanted to be able to buy and hold the comics, and digital comics never gave them that. They didn't feel like they had anything. Comic book people have a physical collector sort of mentality. And I do, too. I love seeing the books lined up on my shelf. So yeah, that one hasn't been cracked yet.

Interesting they brought this up, because it's an important clue how digital comics on the web haven't caught on successfully, and certainly not the Big Two's. At the same time, they also hint at the misfortune of the speculator market, which largely ruined comicdom beginning in the early to mid-90s. And lest we forget, if they think anybody's going to care about digital when their stories are otherwise bad, they have to think again. When artwork becomes bad, and company wide crossovers keep getting churned out entirely unquestioned, that's why digital sales won't work. Next, wouldn't you know it, Mr. Bruning even lauds a man who turned out to be a bad omen, who ruined the storytelling, and whom Mr. Bruning apparently had a hand in approving for employment:

Around the same time that Zuda launched, Dan DiDio became executive editor at DC. I'm wondering how that played out in terms of your role.

I was one of the few people who interviewed Dan before he was hired. Paul wanted my take on him. Dan is another super smart guy, knows comics inside and out; he had even been doing a little writing, as well. He was pals with Jimmy Palmiotti, so he'd been given a few assignments here and there. Dan had big ambitions. I was very enthusiastic when he came on board, partially because the whole Mike/Denny/Archie thing hadn't worked. And then Archie tragically died from cancer. Denny was just – God love him, but he was kind of checked out. The burden was falling on Mike, but Mike had been carrying the ball for years by himself, and it's a hard job. Marvel couldn't keep anybody in place for a long time as editor-in-chief. There was turnover every year or two.

When you say that Denny was checked out, what do you mean?

I'm not trying to insult Denny. He was very nice man, but he just didn't seem like he was engaged in his work, shall we say. When I had a Batman project that I was working on, he felt a little too hands-off for me. At least, that’s how I view what an editor does, and he had his assistant doing most things. Again, I'm not trying to slag him, but just I think he was tired. He was tired of doing superhero comics.

As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Bruning is belittling O'Neil, though there's valid arguments to make that even O'Neil made serious mistakes. Also note how Bruning, by contrast, is more favorable to DiDio, and that's as telling as it's disgusting. If he's talking about Mike Carlin, it can be validly argued he was a failure, based on how he threw the late Len Strazewski under the bus, and I don't think Archie Goodwin, whom I assume he's alluding to, did a good job with them either, based on his being an editor of the pretentious James Robinson's Starman series. But to say DiDio was galaxies better than them, and knew comics inside-out, when he lacked a moral compass and relied heavily upon crossovers, that's insulting to the intellect.

The other big thing that was going on at that point was the merger of WildStorm into DC, which also brought Jim Lee into the company. How was that playing out?

That was funny. I hadn't been back long when Paul called me and said, “This is quiet. Don't tell anybody, but we're buying WildStorm, and I want you to help be the liaison to their offices to try to integrate them into ours.” We had never tried to do that before. Milestone was the closest thing where they had their own little editorial setup, but Jim had a very well-established shop that did everything. It was Jim that DC seemed to be buying. They were buying more Jim than they were buying WildStorm properties.

I went out to La Jolla every couple of months and just hung around there for three or four days, met with people, asked them if I could help them with anything, and if there was anything New York should be doing for them. We'd go over cover sketches, we'd go over marketing materials, just trying to point them in a direction, not tell them what they had to do.

A lot of good that did in the end. The Wildstorm universe didn't see much success when they bought it, or even tried to merge it into the DCU proper, and for something like 15 years now, it's largely vanished into the land of the forgotten. So what "success" is Mr. Bruning talking about even here?

If you look at the way DC looked when you came in ‘96 and the way it was when you left in 2010, do you think your time there was a success or a failure?

I'd like to think there were few failures. Something can be a success and be a commercial failure. If you achieve your creative goals, then it's a success. If people don't buy it, they're stupid. I was very fortunate there. I just felt like they gave me a lot of rope to hang myself, and I never hung myself, and they backed me. Even if I did something really stupid, they would say, don't do that again, and then let me move on. I'm eternally grateful to people like Jenette, and Paul, and Dick, but Paul probably the most of all. He was the one who brought me back for the 15-year tenure.

I think for me, the end really came when Warner Brothers decided these movies are really fucking big deals. The Batman trilogy was just setting the world on fire. That was the clarion call for corporate to come in from the West Coast and start telling us how the new place was going to be run.

He can say whatever he likes, but I think Mr. Bruning knows the failures were plenty when it comes to the comics themselves, and the company wide crossovers were also a standout example of that. And while the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy may have been a success, there were other adaptations that were failures, like the Jonah Hex and Green Lantern movies, to name early examples in modern times.

And it's very insulting how Mr. Bruning acts like they achieved artistic success in the past 3 decades, when early examples of destruction like the mishandling of Green Lantern can clarify otherwise. For the Flash, the plummeting down came when Geoff Johns became writer. And lest we forget the most repulsive example of the 2000s, Identity Crisis. Mr. Bruning's declaration the audience is "stupid" for not buying is also poor conduct, because you don't use insulting words to describe consumers who aren't interested in your output when it effectively becomes repellent. No doubt, he also has some responsibility for bringing in even more "woke" writers of the times, and artists. Based on that, he's another former employee of the majors who won't be missed, based on what pretentions he foisted upon the DCU, which includes his aforementioned Adam Strange miniseries, which he didn't even have the courage to discuss. That's very telling as to how much he merely whistles in the dark.

I think This Man, This Collection's take on Man of Two Worlds sums up pretty well why the story aged poorly:

In Bruning’s introduction to the collected edition of this story, he defends himself by stating his childhood love of the character, and that he was trying to apply the same approach to storytelling that that Alan Moore applied in Watchmen and Swamp Thing or that Frank Miller did with The Dark Knight Returns. But in his zeal to tell a more “mature” Adam Strange story, Bruning loses track of what made the character appealing in the first place. That opinion was clearly the one that prevailed, given what happened next. After this mini-series, Adam Strange dropped out of the DC Universe completely; his next appearance was a few years later in a supporting role in Green Lantern #75, when Kyle Rayner moved the floating city of Ranagar back to the planet. In 1998, in Mark Waid hit the reset button by bringing Alanna back to life in two-issue story in JLA. Aside from Adam’s daughter, everything of consequence from Adam Strange had been undone.

So he basically "cliched" the audience by applying more darkness than need be, and surely worse yet, making Adam far less heroic, if at all, and making Ranagar's council look repellent too. The part about the Zeta-beam being designed to teleport a guy to Rann for the purpose of serving as a breeding stud also conflicts with the original takes from the Silver Age. This posting misses, however, that there was a Hal Jordan-starring GL story written by the disgraced Gerard Jones printed in 1993, prior to the Rayner run, where Adam made an appearance, and that story stunk of fishy stuff too. And Bruning didn't even have the courage to discuss any of that in his Comics Journal interview. It's fortunate that dreadful story was jettisoned, but unfortunate the DCU had to collapse afterwards due to the machinations of an editor Bruning himself had a hand in appointing a quarter century ago. As a result, Adam Strange and company still suffered a terrible injustice, as did many other DCU cast members.

Why the late artist Darwyn Cooke took the job drawing Catwoman's 3rd volume

Since the subject of pretentious writer Ed Brubaker recently came up, I found this fluff-coated Popverse article from last May, telling why the late artist Darwyn Cooke accepted the assignment of drawing the Catwoman volume Brubaker wrote in the early 2000s:

Catwoman has nine lives, and one of her most notable lives was her 2001 revamp by Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke. The character’s previous run had mostly portrayed her as a cunning thief in skimpy clothing, but Brubaker and Cooke gave her a new look, a new supporting cast, and a new mission as the protector of Gotham’s East End. According to Darwyn Cooke, who passed away in 2016, this was a dealbreaker for him.

“Going back to Catwoman, when I was asked if I wanted to get involved in that, I said, ‘On one condition. She has to be completely redesigned. And I have to know that the writer believes, as well as I know, that this is a book that should be aimed at women, not at teenage boys,’” Darwyn Cooke says during a panel at Toronto Fan Expo 2009.

“And I said if that’s the approach we’re going to take, then I’m happy to get involved, because this is a great character, and it gives us an opportunity to build her back up and redeem her as a person and get girls reading comics again and excited about a character that they can relate to. I’ve always felt that this is an important thing that any sort of creator should be trying to consider.”

It’s good to have nine lives, and it’s even better if one of them is penciled by Darwyn Cooke.

I think a challenging query to be raised here is - what's so wrong with writing a story appealing to teen boys? Or, who says the same approach won't appeal to teen girls as well? In hindsight, I'm really not impressed with Cooke as an artist, and IIRC, at the time this took place, DC made efforts to do away with the blue shadings from previous designs for Batman's costume, and make entirely black. Catwoman's costume underwent a similar change, of course. But was her previous outfit really skimpy? I think during the 80s, Selina Kyle had one with cleavage, but I don't recall if what she wore in the 90s drawn by Jim Balent had, so this is another unshockingly sloppy take on history.

That said, did women really flock en masse to Brubaker and Cooke's take on the Feline Fatale? Perhaps the following I found on CBR's forums from 2016 can give a clue:

I did some research on Catwoman's sales from 1994 to 2016 on comichron.com and diamondcomics.com. I've been wondering why Catwoman sales have been so low, especially why they plummeted a few issues ago since they've been the best issues I've read in many years. Now it is assumed the comic is cancelled because it was not mentioned as being included during the Rebirth event.

Catwoman vol 2 (1993-2001) maintained much, much better sales than vol 3 or vol 4. In fact, the final issue of vol 2 in 2001 (the worst selling of the series) sold almost as many copies as vol 3 issue 25 (by Brubaker) in 2003, about 26,000 copies. The 90's Catwoman never ranked below 100 in the monthly Top 100 Comics chart. It only dropped below a rank of 75 around the Fall of 2000. It almost always sold as many issues as Robin, Supergirl, Birds of Pray, often outselling them and usually outsold Wonder Woman consistently.

Volume 3, which ran from 2001-2008, did not sell near as well. Its sales dropped from 49,000 copies of issue #1 to 26,500 copies of issue #12 in only a year. It consistently ranked well under 75 on the Top 100 chart, oftentimes dropping below 100. Its final issue only sold 15,000 copies.

Volume 4, the New 52, sold a little better than vol 3. Issue #1 sold 53,670 copies, but issue #20 was down to 26,900 copies, ranking 85th on the chart and was then one of the 3 worst selling DC titles. Sales from that point on were consistent until issue 42 only sold 22,000 copies. Then issue 47, Frank Tieri's first issue, plummeted to only 15,000 copies, ranking 166 on The Top 200 chart for December 2015.

These sales figures make it pretty obvious that the stories told and the artwork used used in Vol 2 in the 90's was significantly* more desirable than that of Vol 3 & 4.

I believe there were a few problems with Vol 3 from the beginning of it. First, I believe the new costume was simply unattractive. Darwyn Cooke said he wanted to tone down Catwoman's sexiness and make her look more practical and utilitarian. And he gave her bug-eye goggles. Catwoman became the opposite of sexy and I think that was a bad idea.

Next I think focusing on Catwoman in the role of a vigilante sworn to protect Gotham's seedy East End, where she has a controversial history of working as dominatrix, probably wasn't ideal for most comic readers. I think it was too dark and controversial for general audiences to get into. This was not the Catwoman that the public was used to seeing, and not what they wanted for her comic. She has always been glamorous and sensuous. She was fun because she was naughty, but still helped people often. This new Catwoman was a complete opposite, so people didn't buy it.

Vol 4, the New 52, had prettier artwork but the same bug-eye goggles, Emma Peele outfit, and bulky boots. She was a theif again but she was younger and dumber. And she was having sex with Batman while the two of them kept their masks on in the first issue. Yeah because when you wear a mask over the top half of your face, the person you are frequently screwing will never find out your true identity. This is just bad writing, which simply got worse over the next few years and the sales kept dropping.*

It's tragic that the past few issues have such low sales, and that Catwoman won't be included in DC's Rebirth. Frank Tieri's issues have been recieving great reviews, especially issue #50.

But I hope that DC has big plans for Catwoman to make her more attractive, more exciting, and more successful.

Thoughts??

Unfortunately, as the wokeness of the past decade made clear, there was no reason for optimism, and besides, Identity Crisis also led to ruination. IIRC, there was a story with Catwoman shortly afterwards where a retcon took place claiming she'd been influenced by Zatanna, quite possibly at Batman's request, to reform Selina. In other words, according to that tale, Selina did not reform of her own accord and thinking, which makes a mockery and insult to the older works of better writers.

Cooke's claims also ring hollow when you consider that at least a few women actually worked on the Feline Fatale years earlier. For example, Mindy Newell, and then Jo Duffy, who wrote the first 14 issues of the 90s series. So Cooke and Brubaker were insulting a woman who had no issue with depicting Selina Kyle as sexy. A most disgraceful distortion Cooke pulled there, and if memory serves, Brubaker not only implausibly revived Holly Robinson, a character originally seen in Frank Miller's Year One tale from 1987, Brubaker even turned her into a lesbian for the sake of it.

Now I'll give Cooke this: he did the right thing to say he didn't want to see the kind of one-sided sexual violence seen in Identity Crisis become normalized as offensive, sensationalistic plot devices. But if he once said he didn't want to see once heterosexual characters be turned LGBT overnight, he contradicted that, in a manner of speaking, by working with a writer as overrated and exploitive as Brubaker, who did something like that, certainly in Gotham Central with Greg Rucka, where they changed the Renee Montoya character to lesbian. Cooke also continued to work with DC even after Identity Crisis came out, and it can be validly argued that in doing so, Cooke wasn't following through on his arguments convincingly. Besides, he also once led a chummy connection with the disgraced Gerard Jones, and that too doesn't reflect well on Cooke in hindsight.

Cooke may have made a few valid statements, but he was apparently an early example of a wokester, and one can only wonder what he thought of his take on Catwoman selling considerably lower than the volume drawn by Balent, and first written by Duffy. Cooke not only insulted the aforementioned two, he also insulted plenty of other, more talented artists who came before Balent, like those who drew Catwoman in the 1970s. Having artists like Cooke on the job is sadly not better at all.

And as for the mention of Frank Tieri, wasn't he the writer who derailed Wolverine in the last 2 years of the 1988-2003 series? One more reason why I'd rather not buy his take on Catwoman either.

Brand new Green Lantern stories are considered the "best"

Comic Basics listed several runs of Green Lantern from the past decades, only one of which is worth considering (Denny O'Neil's early 70s run), while some of the others are predictably fluff-coated takes on modern runs. For example, there's Geoff Johns' run:

Writer Geoff Johns revitalized the franchise by returning Hal Jordan to the spotlight in the miniseries ‘Green Lantern: Rebirth’. The overarching narrative expanded the lore by introducing the Emotional Spectrum and creating diverse new Lantern corps across the cosmos. Major comic crossover events such as ‘Sinestro Corps War’ and ‘Blackest Night’ elevated the title into a cornerstone of the DC Universe. Johns collaborated with prominent artists like Ethan Van Sciver and Ivan Reis to deliver high-stakes cosmic action and deep character development. This nine-year run transformed the mythology and established the modern foundation of the Green Lantern mythos.

Some "revitalization" alright. There were several jarringly violent moments in the run, and most particularly telling was when Johns exploited the title for forcing Islamic propaganda into it, in the decade following September 11, 2001. The story introducing Simon Baz even resorted to the cliche of a white supremacist being the actual culprit. This is what Johns cares about, not actual victims? What he did was definitely telling.

Also note how conservative-leaning artist van Sciver was part of the GL project at the time, and a case can be made that some would-be right-wingers have blame to shoulder for bringing comicdom down to such an awful level. Plus, when there's the totally uncritical take on company wide crossovers, you know something's wrong. Another reason this run can be considered worthless is that it hinged on Identity Crisis, and thus came at a time that was simply too late for bringing back Hal. Another example listed here is the 1994-2004 run:

Ron Marz drastically altered the franchise by penning the controversial ‘Emerald Twilight’ arc, which saw Hal Jordan fall from grace and become the villain Parallax. Following the destruction of the Green Lantern Corps, Marz introduced artist Kyle Rayner as the torchbearer of the final functional power ring. The decade-long run focused on Kyle learning to become a superhero while maintaining a relatable civilian life in New York City. Notable storylines introduced supporting characters such as Jade and examined the legacy of previous ring-wielders. This era redefined the mantle for a new generation of readers and established Kyle Rayner as an essential DC hero.

Gee, a run starring a character who came off little different in the end from how Hal's characterization was perceived - as a cipher lacking in genuine personality. Also note how the writer doesn't acknowledge the heavy editorial mandates that defined this run, coming as they did before Spider-Man was subjected to much of the same the following decade. These mandates included that Rayner could not have a "civilian" girlfriend at the time, only an established superheroine like Donna Troy for starters, and Jade afterwards.

Interesting how no objective view is provided for whether it was in good taste to turn Hal into a murderous villain, nor any mention of the notorious fridging scene for Alexandra deWitt, the girlfriend who was introduced only to be murdered by Major Force about 6 issues in. These kind of steps are exactly what ensured sales would otherwise plummet in the long run, and I'd seen legitimate arguments made over the years that the Rayner stories weren't the big deal some wanted all to think they were. If the fridging of deWitt was retconned away of recent, that in itself is miraculous.

Oddly enough, the paragraph is accompanied by a coverscan of the 3rd volume's premiere issue from 1990, which was written by the disgraced Gerard Jones. Do they realize that could haunt the Rayner run for a long time, and only compounds why the 3rd volume is so otherwise obsolete?

Next, there's one of the spinoff series, GL Corps:

Running alongside the central flagship series, Peter J. Tomasi penned a critically acclaimed ensemble title focused on the wider Green Lantern Corps. The narrative centered on veteran Lanterns Guy Gardner and John Stewart as they led the cosmic police force through galaxy-wide conflicts. The series provided essential perspectives during major events like ‘Blackest Night’ while highlighting the camaraderie and sacrifices of alien ring-bearers. Artist Patrick Gleason provided distinctive, kinetic visuals that brought life to massive space battles and alien civilizations. Tomasi’s work added emotional depth to secondary characters and proved that the franchise thrived beyond Hal Jordan.

Oh, do tell us about it. I've long learned not to be fooled by such balderdash, and look where things have arrived today, with a TV show that practically throws Hal under the bus for the sake of DEI ideology. And why are we being lectured that a series with connections to company wide crossovers was "essential"? Yawn.

When stuff like this is all they can think of highlighting, and not the Golden/Silver/Bronze Age stories other than O'Neil's, something is definitely wrong. But I guess that's what to expect when the whole franchise plummeted into the abyss beginning with the Action Comics Weekly run, and nobody in the press is willing admit severe mistakes were made. That's how both DC and Marvel have been able to get away with their worst acts for decades now.

Animation can be a great spot for superheroes, but only if they aren't subject to PC

Indiewire says there's animated series based on superhero fare that's more interesting than the live action film adaptations, but unshockingly, they sugarcoat the presentations, beginning with what the Supergirl movie was adapted from:

“Supergirl,” the second film in James Gunn’s developing DCU and one of the biggest box office bombs of an otherwise strong year for movie theaters, isn’t the worse movie I watched in 2026. But it’s probably the most disappointing. An adaptation of an acclaimed standalone series called “Woman of Tomorrow,” “Supergirl” has a great lead in Milly Alcock and nothing else worth remembering. Whereas the comic it is based on is stunningly bright and beautiful to look at, “Supergirl” is a murky, brown-tinted eyesore. Its generic plot strands the character in a sci-fi universe that feels microscopically small, populated by third-rate archetypes the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies would barely have time for. There are interesting threads to unravel regarding Kara’s grief and anger, but the story she’s stranded in doesn’t have time to do that in any meaningful way.

I just don't understand why we keep getting lectured about why the overrated Tom King's tale is a modern "classic". The artwork I've seen is certainly overrated. And King's stories about "trauma" are forced and contrived. And we're not told anything in regards to that.

Even more galling: as “Supergirl” was tarnishing the character’s reputation in movie theaters, a great adaptation of the character was airing on Adult Swim. “My Adventures With Superman,” an animated series reimagining the early career of the most famous superhero on the planet. Ostensibly, Clark Kent is the main character, but Season 2 introduced Kara (voiced in the show by Kiana Madeira), and the currently airing Season 3 — which airs its season finale this Sunday — sees her take center stage. And she rules: reimagined as a former brainwashed intergalactic conquerer attempting to atone for her misdeeds, the show’s Kara is charming, funny, badass, with a meaty arc about atoning for her misdeeds and a super cute romance with Jimmy Olsen (Ishmel Sahid) that slots right in with the show’s bright, optimistic tone and focus on these character’s day-to-day struggles contrasted with the sci-fi operatics. If “Supergirl” the movie only scratched the surface of the character’s potential, “My Adventures With Superman” takes the time to really examine what makes her tick.

“My Adventures With Superman” is one of three animated shows adapting popular comic book superheroes that ran over the course of this summer, along with “X-Men ’97” on Disney+, which concluded its second season earlier this week, and “Batman: Caped Crusader” on Amazon Prime, which premiered its second season in late July. Pitched to a slightly older audience than usual for an animated comic book series, teenage up as opposed to for children, these shows aren’t flawless. But as comic book film studios continues to struggle to adjust to a world where they are no longer the center of the entertainment landscape (give or take “Spider-Man”), these shows demonstrate that these characters are better suited for serialized storytelling in the first place.

Would this be the cartoon where Jimmy was changed from white to black? And where Lois Lane's turned into a short-cropped tomboy? In that case, I regret to say, but this puff piece amounts to little more than misleading the audience by obscuring how the production is allegedly optimistic with strings attached. It's also worth considering that, if Kara Zor-El was changed from an innocent girl to a former conqueror, brainwashed or not, that too, unfortunately, is tasteless. It's also symbolic of the modern era's inability to appreciate a simpler concept of a character who could be written with flaws and mistakes, but doesn't have to be written as that guilty of wrongdoing as Kara sounds characterized here.

One of the major criticisms of superhero cinema for the past decade has been its resolute sameness: while certain MCU movies may have loose genre window-dressing, they’re fundamentally tonally similar in their quippy characters and excess spectacle. But all three of these series have strong art direction and visions for these characters that feels spiritually true to the source material but also provides something fresh and new that fans haven’t seen before, and are all radically different from one another.

Heavily inspired by early 2000s anime, “My Adventures With Superman” is the bright, zippy, lighthearted offering. The show takes the characters and their battles seriously, but it provides a wonderfully comforting take on Superman that also heavily foregrounds the love story between Clark and Lois; it’s a rom-com as much as it is a series about fighting invading aliens. It works because of how well-drawn these versions of the characters are, and because his relationship with Lois was always what made the seemingly invulnerable Clark feel most human. If the 2025 James Gunn “Superman” film sometimes strained to reinvent the character’s optimism for modern audiences, “My Adventures With Superman” makes that challenge look effortless.

But again, we're not being told about the character design, and that's being dishonest with the readership, for the sake of virtue-signaling. They may not have done to Kara's hair what they did Lois', but that's still no excuse, and that Lois' ethnicity may have also been changed only further (she looks darker complected in the cartoon) confirms the disrespect the producers actually have for Siegel and Shuster's creations. The writer also made sure to take a biased look at the aforementioned Marvel cartoon:

“X-Men ’97” is another successor of a ’90s kids’ cartoon, albeit a direct sequel. The 1992 “X-Men” animated series that aired on Fox during the decade was a foundational series for fans of the Marvel superhero team, providing definitive versions of the mutant protectors in all their messy, soapy excess. “’97” picks up where the series left off, but again ages up the content for adults who grew up with the series for a much darker tone. The animation emphasizes fidelity to the original show and the time period’s garish aesthetic in general, for a show that, more than almost any film, truly feels like picking up and reading five random issues of a comic run from 30 years ago.

Not all of these series are of equal quality. “My Adventures with Superman” has been the most consistent of the three, a nice good time throughout all three seasons without ever being exceptional. “Caped Crusader” Season 1 was a promising start, but Season 2 ramped up the stakes and serialized storytelling for a much improved follow-up. “X-Men ’97,” meanwhile, had a near flawless debut season, but a divisive Season 2 that struggled with unfocused storytelling and weaker stakes, albeit with a standout fourth episode that ranks among the best of the series (the show’s production was likely marred by the firing of head writer Beau DeMayo during work on Season 2 for allegations of sexual harrasment).

No surprise they'd sugarcoat X-Men 97 as well. They made Rogue otherwise sexless, drew Storm with a mohawk forcibly, and even the treatment of Morph was reprehensible. The part about the darkness predictably goes by without objectivity, and seriously, what "fidelity" is there truly here? And why does the writer talk about being "unexceptional" when Jimmy's ethnicity was changed, while Lois was made to look unattractive, and Supergirl gets a questionable premise shoehorned onto her? Such dishonesty indeed.

I'd spoken before about why brightness and optimism can't come with strings attached, yet that's exactly what the producers of My Adventures With Superman did, and it's disgraceful how Indiewire's writer doesn't have the courage to admit it's ludicrous, divisive, and conflicts with entertainment value. Animation can certainly be a great venue for superheroics, but not if woke changes are forced onto established creations. There was once a saying that change must be consistent with what came before, and the Hollywood phonies who turned out these items certainly aren't proving much different from the live action moviemakers who race-swapped and sex-swapped any of the characters in specific adaptations.

Marvel failed the X-Men long ago, yet Collider thinks it's only recently this happened

Collider argues that Marvel is now failing the X-Men, as if it hadn't already happened, though it's interesting they take issue with one of the most overrated, pretentious leftist writers of modern times, Gail Simone, in their look at what she wrote in recent X-Men stories. The article doesn't begin well:

Comic books have come a long way since their advent in 1933, but they have evolved significantly over the last ten years as the industry has grappled with writing stories in a post-Comicsgate era. Still, some of the most celebrated titles have found themselves falling into familiar and oftentimes uncomfortable patterns.

When the writer starts subtly blaming Comicsgate, something's obviously gone wrong. That's just a distraction reducing the seriousness of the subject.

Few writers embody this evolution more uniquely than Gail Simone, whose early commentary helped redefine how gender and agency are understood in mainstream superhero media. In 1999, prior to her professional writing debut, Simone launched the website "Women in Refrigerators," coining a phrase that forever altered comic book criticism. Sparked by the infamous death of Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt (who was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator in Green Lantern #54) the term described a pervasive industry trope where female characters were routinely killed, maimed, or otherwise de-powered purely to advance the emotional arcs of male heroes.

Simone’s sharp critique propelled her into the industry itself, where she swiftly became a powerhouse writer for both DC and Marvel, crafting acclaimed runs on titles like Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and even Deadpool while proving that female characters could anchor the same complex narratives as their male peers.

That legacy makes the last two years of her run on Uncanny X-Men all the more jarring. As the first woman to be the mainline’s sole writer, Simone benefited from a degree of “plot armor,” so to say, which allowed her early missteps to be given a pass. However, this run has slowly become a depressing descent into the very creative pitfalls she spent decades dismantling.

Rather than propelling the mutant flagship forward, Simone's work succumbs to clunky prose, dated characterizations, and a frustrating reliance on regressive tropes that feel out of character for not only the franchise, but Simone as a writer. Perhaps most glaring is how the narrative falters under the weight of subtle microaggressions and tone-deaf interpersonal dynamics, which begets the question of how an icon of feminist comic commentary could deliver a story so strangely out of step with her own established standard.

Unfortunately, she continued to work with DC even as they performed many of the same offensive acts she was supposedly against, and even her work on Birds of Prey may have contained allusions to Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, which dampens the impact of whatever she was supposedly trying to reverse. It's also worth considering her real life politics are another contradiction that make a joke out of her alleged mission. Even the artwork in some of her later projects became noticeably bad. So why do they suddenly say she's stumbled into "creative pitfalls"? She was sadly always a left-wing phony, and her attacks on J.K. Rowling only made things worse. And the writer appears to have forgotten one more chilling trope: when a girl is turned into a villainess for the sake of it. Another something I don't think Simone ever made a convincing effort to dismantle in her scriptwriting, and she never made a convincing effort to give ladies a complex narrative to rival the male cast members.

The most immediate, and perhaps least egregious, casualty of this run is the regression of Rogue and Gambit, whose iconic relationship is flattened into a hollow caricature. Rather than leading the team as a formidable leader in her own right, Rogue is reduced to little more than a domestic "tradwife" existing solely in relation to her husband. It quickly becomes evident that the narrative prioritizes making Gambit look effortless and cool instead of allowing Rogue to command respect as an actual leader.

Let me get this straight. The writer believes Simone turned Rogue into a "conservative" stereotype? Something tells me the columnist's not being altruistic. Besides, Rogue's potential as a character was damaged 3 decades ago, and Scott Lobdell could be considered the culprit. It's one thing to pair up 2 superhero figures, but another to do it in such sloppy fashion as Lobdell did it, which undermined characterization. It's interesting though, that the woman who wrote this Collider item actually feels Simone's doing stuff that's allegedly anathema to a leftist agenda, when she claims there's "microaggressions" in the script, and the talk of a "tradwife" also gives strong clues where this is really going.

Rogue's dialogue (and Remy's, admittedly) is weighed down by heavy-handed, exaggerated Southern phonetics that read more like mocking stereotypes than authentic regional voices. Compounding this domestic imbalance is the awkward insertion of Calico; forcing an infantilized teenage mutant into their immediate living situation pushes Rogue further into a suburban foster-parent trope, taking her even further away from the frontlines of mutant leadership. The narrative comes across as off-putting as Calico is written in a deeply juvenile way which includes seeing the teenage mutant crawling into bed with Rogue and Remy — a couple she has only known for a few months.

This superficial obsession with making Gambit look cool constantly sacrifices basic narrative logic for cheap, unearned hype. A glaring example occurs during a major battle sequence in Uncanny X-Men #32, where Remy abruptly transforms into the "Wyvern" — a monstrous form that has been teased relentlessly for nearly ten issues and hyped up on promotional art. Instead of delivering a dramatic, satisfying payoff to all of that teasing, the transformation arrives suddenly at a moment that makes little sense within the flow of the story.

The panel they presented doesn't show Gambit in bed while Calico's there, and Rogue's role in that segment is clearly meant to play something like a big sister figure who cheers up a protege who'd been suffering from a nightmare. I don't find Simone's writing appealing today, but it sounds like the columnist's looking for cheap excuses to tear down on motherhood/sisterhood. Nor does it show Gambit looking cool, which I assume means he's battling baddies. But that's not what happens in the material I've seen so far. In any case, if the writer's delegitimizing Gambit as a character by acting as though he's a real person, she's just perpetuating the rock bottom lapse in logic that's been going on for decades.

Most striking is the treatment of Monet St. Croix, a Black Muslim woman whose established characterization has always centered on bodily autonomy and a fierce opposition to incarceration. Reducing her to the temporary warden of Graymalkin — a fascist concentration camp where mutants are detained until human authorities arrive — completely guts the core of her identity, reframing a hero of liberation as an enforcer of state-sanctioned violence.

Monet, from what I know, was not created as a Muslim adherent in 1994. I think it was Peter David who was allowed to force that retcon onto the former Generation X cast member, 15 years ago. What occurred is similar to how heterosexual characters like Obsidian in Infinity Inc. were retconned into homosexual characters. What happened to Monet is atrocious in the extreme, and that the columnist appears to be fine with that also speaks volumes. In the Islamic world, women are treated as 2nd class citizens, and we're being lectured about "bodily autonomy" and opposition to incarceration? I'm sorry, but what's written sounds so deliberate, and again, like a lecture. If the writer's going to take such an accepting view of the Religion of Peace, then this article is politically motivated, though it does have some eyebrow raising details to tell:

Another recurring pattern in Simone’s Uncanny X-Men run is the abundance of cultural insensitivity and subtle microaggressions woven into the dialogue. Asian characters are routinely subjected to lazy, exoticized tropes. Of note, Logan casually refers to the young Japanese mutant Deathdream as a "manga kid,” which Simone glibly responded to criticism by framing it as Wolverine “incorrectly” calling him that. This casual bias rears its head again with Calico’s most recent interactions with Pietro Maximoff. Calico treats Pietro — a character of Romani heritage and a man of color — with a smug, condescending superiority (despite being in a moment of crisis), dismissively refusing to even view him as a true mutant.

Rather than celebrating the rich diversity that has long defined the franchise, these characterizations alienate readers, reducing an ambitious flagship era to a series of uncomfortable missteps. While there is some narrative explanation for Calico’s behavior, it is nevertheless jarring to see a blue-eyed, blonde-haired white woman othering a character who is, historically, the son of a Holocaust survivor. Coupled with the optics of tethering her to the franchise’s most cookie-cutter Southern couple, it feels as though Simone is doubling down on an inherent and accepted bias about Southern ideals.

Watching an industry titan like Gail Simone, whose entire legacy was built on dismantling harmful tropes, fall into these exact creative traps is a deeply disheartening turn for modern comic criticism — especially as she argues with fans of her writing on social media. Yet this failure does not rest solely on her shoulders; Marvel shares equal responsibility for allowing one of its most iconic flagships to languish without editorial discipline or vision.

Honestly, it's hardly a surprise if Simone doesn't respect any of the better qualities of X-Men from the past. Let's recall said quality definitely collapsed since the early 2000s, along with cohesion of continuity, and characterization. But truly, Simone never "dismantled" any harmful tropes, and she added insult to injury for the Atom by fully accepting the assignment of writing a DEI-pandering character of Asian background shoehorned into Ray Palmer's costume in 2006. It was cancelled about 2 years later, and 2 decades later still, nobody cares about a social justice pandering production. But if Simone really is resorting to harmful tropes, should this be a surprise? What it can suggest is that, if she was part and parcel of DC and Marvel's earlier embarrassments, and never took issue with what DC did to any female character not written by her, then she never had faith in her alleged positions to begin with. No wonder she's so overrated.

Since the X-Men is a subject, here's also an article on IGN telling why the X-Men don't have a role in a Wolverine video game:

While there are many mutants famous for being members of the X-Men in Marvel’s Wolverine, in the video game’s story the X-Men do not exist. Rather, Logan is a former member of Team X, the mutant black ops unit that includes the likes of Sabretooth and Mystique. Yes, Jean Grey is in the game, but she is not part of any group called the X-Men because it hasn't been formed yet. Put simply, don’t expect Cyclops to turn up in his comic accurate suit, dropping from the Blackbird under orders from Professor X back at the X Mansion.

But why? Why not have the X-Men exist in Marvel’s Wolverine? In an interview with IGN, narrative director Walt Williams said Insomniac was keen for the mutants in the game to not have a safe place to go to, to not benefit from being superheroes, but rather remind players that mutants exist on the outside — and Wolverine himself, who this game is all about, is perhaps the biggest outsider of them all.

“So Team X is canonical,” Williams began. “It is Logan's first team in his history. It was a black ops team from the '70s made up of wetworks mutant workers. So in telling Wolverine's story, we wanted to bring it back to the beginning of where his story really began in that long string of teams. Because as we know, he's been a member of many teams by this point in his 50-plus year history.

Well that's part of the problem with the comics since the early to mid-2000s, if we take the terrible Brian Michael Bendis' work on Avengers as an example. Several mainstay characters were dropped in favor of hilariously obvious choices like Wolvie and Spider-Man, with Scarlet Witch the biggest victim of jettisoning, yet the same people doing these interviews don't take an objective view of that, and it's no excuse for forcibly omitting his own team from reference. If they want to make this game a solo adventure, so be it, but I don't see why the X-Men have to be downplayed, or written out that forcibly.

“But really what we were looking to do is, because superheroes have become so mainstream at this point in just pop culture and everything through TV shows, comics, movies and everything, that even especially with our own Spider-Man games, these are characters with superpowers that a lot of the world has accepted, that they are celebrated. They have parades, they are honored and stuff. But mutants at the core are outsiders, even within the Marvel universe.

He acts like this has to be the norm at all times, and cannot be changed. Another decided problem. It's exactly what led to the Spider-marriage being thrown out with bath water 2 decades ago, and Mary Jane Watson paying a heavy price in the process.

It’s a detailed answer to a question that fans have been wondering about ever since Marvel’s Wolverine was revealed. And so, while you’ll get co-op gameplay with Jean Grey, she’s not in the story as Marvel Girl or wearing a suit we’ve seen from the X-Men comics. And without the X-Men knocking about, Logan and Jean are free to explore their own romantic relationship — assuming the game itself goes that far — free from Cyclops’ death stare.

Indeed, Williams confirmed to IGN that there is no Logan, Jean, and Scott Summers love triangle at play in Marvel’s Wolverine.

“I don't want to get too much into spoilers because obviously there's a whole story that we want everyone to experience as they play through it,” Williams said. “But I think it's safe to say that we are focusing on just Logan and Jean's relationship in Marvel's Wolverine.”

Gee, so that's what is considered a big deal? Up to the turn of the century, I can't recall if Wolverine was ever seriously seen pursuing a relationship with Jean, and Chris Claremont wrote Logan noticing she and Scott were an item in the late 70s, to the point where Logan quietly discarded some flowers he'd brought her in a trash bin at a hospital when Cyclops was around. It was only when Mark Millar being helming Ultimate X-Men that all of a sudden, exploring a love triangle became a big deal, because in this alternate universe, practically depicting Logan as morally bankrupt was somehow a great idea. But that alternate universe line was little more than one of the most overblown tales of its sort, and came at a time when mainstream was declining.

And it's a shame we once again have examples of MSM sources not admitting the X-Men went downhill long ago.

Adapting directly from overrated modern source materials is what's bringing down comics films

Inverse recently argued that direct reliance on certain source material for making a comics adaptation has only hindered such films, with Supergirl being the latest casualty:

In the early days, these movies were far more willing to bend comic book lore to the will of the screenwriter and director – the original Blade screenplay from David S. Goyer, rewrote the character’s origins — created by Marv Wolfman — to be set in America instead of London, a change that quickly made its way to the page, and many other superhero films took their own liberties with the source material as well. But now that the genre has become one of the most prevalent in Hollywood, these franchises have started plumbing the depths of canon with more intentionality, directly adapting iconic storylines and using that sense of “accuracy” as a key part of the marketing…a strategy that has earned mixed results. In the case of this year’s Supergirl, a movie currently being met with middling reviews and a disappointing start to its box office run, part of the criticism has been a lack of fidelity to the Woman of Tomorrow storyline that it’s predominantly based on. But here’s the thing: This criticism could’ve been avoided wholesale if the DCU hadn’t made that adaptational choice such a major factor in the writing and promotion of the movie.

I would just like to note that Goyer's a very overrated writer himself, and I'm not forgetting the time he made repellent remarks about She-Hulk over a decade ago, and the story where he depicted Superman throwing out his USA citizenship. Goyer may have proven a worse comics writer than a movie writer. With that noted, there's certainly an interesting point made here that decades ago, filmmakers had the creative license to build a story that stood on its own, wasn't based directly on any particular story or back issue, but drew certain ideas seen in the stories for developing a screenplay. Now, in an era where creative freedom's been all but taken away, they're almost literally obligated to adapt overrated modern miniseries that most film critics aren't willing to admit was hardly worth the effort compared to the films, and that is problematic.

And if there's a flaw in this article so far that needs to be addressed, it's that Blade first debuted in 1972-79's Tomb of Dracula series, becoming an ally to the main vampire hunting protagonists (Quincy Harker, Rachel van Helsing, et al). That series was set in the UK, and Blade did not have any kind of series at that time; he just made guest appearances in various series up to the early 90s, and if he got a series by that time, it may have been published under a brief imprint called Midnight Sons. So you know that Inverse's writers are again proving to make insufficient effort to do the math and connect the dots. Mainly because they perpetuate the sugarcoating of Tom King's miniseries, along with another error:

While there are quite a few other problems the film faces, it’s hard to ignore that its narrative issues stem from the decision to straightforwardly adapt Woman of Tomorrow in the first place. And at first glance, that seems like a strange takeaway – it’s a critically acclaimed storyline, and for years comic book fans have wanted to see films adapt iconic story arcs more directly. However, there’s a reason Woman of Tomorrow works on the page in a way the filmed version never could: it’s a story that operates as a deconstruction of Kara Zor-El and the unwavering optimism she has represented throughout her existence as a character. Exploring her buried grief regarding the destruction of her homeworld and her refusal to end a life takes on a new significance because she’s spent over 60 years of real-time storytelling suppressing her pain and upholding her golden rule – directly adapting WoT as Kara’s first DCU outing misses the metatextual nature of why the book works within the decades-long lineage of Supergirl as a comic book character.

That’s not to mention the ways in which the film outright changes certain elements of the story. In the book Krem is a despicable mass-murderer, but the fact that Ruthye and Supergirl banish him to the Phantom Zone instead of ending him forces him to reckon with his own failings as a human being and grow to feel genuine remorse for his crimes – making him a slaver and a trafficker almost demands he meet his end because a moviegoing audience truthfully just has a different tolerance for that kind of debauchery. Kara slaying him by the end fits a character who’s evil in a nastier way, but it also compromises the original intent of a story that’s ultimately about Kara and Ruthye preserving their own innocence and refusing to beat Krem in a way that validates his violent worldview.

So they're saying "deconstruction" is entirely acceptable? Sigh. Another serious mistake, right down to how they claim fandom wants to see more direct adaptations of anything. It all depends, and besides, whenever DC and Marvel produced miniseries past the early 2000s, they were some of the worst tales ever to litter the landscape. Also, I seem to recall that, when Batman caused the Joker to fall to his death from a helicopter in the 1989 film, that was done without any moralizing coming before or after. Even Superman 2 from 1980 didn't seem to do anything like that. Even the 1st Spider-Man movie from 2002 depicted the burglar who murdered Ben Parker falling to his death after Peter injured his hand to disarm him of the handgun. So if the new Supergirl film does wallow in heavy handed moralizing over whether to kill a repulsive villain, and ends with the Maid of Might jettisoning her earlier stance, isn't that another mistake in-screenplay?

Also, where do they get the idea a movie audience is more open to the idea of superheroes obliterating the worst of criminals, or that a comics audience isn't? All that does is suggest, on the one hand, that either/both are absurdly hypocritical, and it only makes for a more divisive situation.

Anyway, John Nolte at Breitbart's spoken about how the Supergirl film's sunk big time in 2 weeks:

Between production and promotion, Warner Bros. sunk around $250 million into Supergirl, which puts the break-even number at around $450 million, which means we’re looking at losses in the hundred million range, not to mention the damage done to the overall DC brand.

James Gunn’s Superman was not a very good movie, but it was good enough, good enough that people were willing to see what came next from his rebooted DC Universe. Supergirl is a drain on the one thing a successful franchise requires, and that’s goodwill. Next up, later this year from DC, is something called Clayface, which no one asked for.

We’ll see.

No, we won't. The spotlight on villains got out of hand in its own way, and it's a poor example of what to emphasize. Interesting there's no news so far that they may want to adapt characters like the Silver Age Atom to the silver screen, because that in itself could have clever potential, as could possibly a shape-shifter like Metamorpho. But under overrated filmmakers like Gunn, it's always possible such possibilities for adaptations could be as totally botched as the Supergirl film. Also, I don't think in the original comics, Superman and Supergirl had to be within the range of a yellow sun solar system proper in order for their powers to work. It's just that when within the confines of a red sun system, their powers were nullified, and I think there were times when red solar radiation was used as a plot point in at least a few pre-Crisis Superman stories as a way to portray a weakness in sci-fi terms without his being in a red sun system proper. One more reason this new live action movie is clearly theater of the absurd.

And in the end, once again, it's a terrible shame Supergirl's been subjected to such injustices and indignities as a comics creation, along with a movie adaptation. The sad result of only so much corporate neglect and mismanagement. But who knows if the box office receipts will convince the studios to allow screenwriters and directors more creative license to build a story they think is worthwhile? Even then, it'd require creatives who aren't heavy handed ideologues, and they're sadly in short supply in modern Hollywood.

More signs it's looking bad for the live action Supergirl film

The reviews are in, and according to Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart, even leftist trade journals like Variety are appalled with the new live action take on Supergirl, describing it as follows:

Even the left-wing Hollywood press is turning against Warner Bros’ new summer superhero tent pole, Supergirl, calling the film “super-horrendous” with the “worst script” ever.

The review by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman was quite negative ahead of the film’s worldwide debut coming up on Friday. The Hollywood newser ripped the film as “pretentious” for it’s “punk rock attitude” that is “cringe.”

Gleiberman dismissed the film, writing, “here’s the key thing to know about Supergirl, the second outing from James Gunn’s DC Studios: The entire movie thinks it’s ‘punk rock.'” And that, Gleiberman says, is “cringe.”

“The film introduces us to Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock), who rather than being the spunky Supergirl of legend, saving earthly lives in a primary-colored spandex suit, is an interplanetary drunk in a Blondie T-shirt (how punk rock!), bopping from one arid dystopia to the next,” Gleiberman explained.

What's additionally troubling is how the Girl of Steel's depicted as a drunkard, which Culture Mix talks about some more:

Supergirl spends most of her screen time in the movie being drunk, nearly drunk, or hung over. There are multiple scenes that are meant to make Supergirl into some sort of sad superhero emo girl, who uses alcohol because she’s got inner demons about being an orphan. It’s supposed to make her look sympathetic, but her repetitive drunkenness gets tiresome to watch after a while.

When it's that heavy-handed, something is definitely wrong, right down to how they're forcing Supergirl into the darkness, instead of offering an optimistic vision of a woman who could overcome any trauma she suffered and find happiness again. If this film lacks a sense of humor to boot, that's another major error. And the filmmakers may have screwed up with the following plotlines as well:

A trio of Sklarian raiders (played by blue-costumed Clara Rosager, purple-costumed Heather Agyepong and red-costumed Alice Hewkin) suddenly invade the bus because they want to steal Ruthye’s sword. A massive fight ensues, Supergirl suddenly exerts her superpowers (because she’s on a yellow light planet), and somehow she’s able to get these Sklarian raiders to tell her where Krem is. He’s on a planet where kidnapped girls are being held captive to be forced into marriage to men. For a superhero movie aimed at families, this pedophilia/child trafficking storyline is quite disturbing and might be inappropriate for viewing by children of a certain age.

Similarly, the movie has some murder scenes that are unsettling and sends hypocritical messages about revenge killings. Several times in the movie, Supergirl gets preachy with Ruthye, by lecturing her to not be consumed by vengeful anger because it will rot her soul. Supergirl literally tells Ruthye that killing Krem won’t be the answer to help Ruthie’s emotional pain.

And that’s why it’s a letdown to see what happens to Krem, because it’s the complete antithesis of Supergirl’s moralistic lectures. Why go to the trouble of having Supergirl hold herself up as taking the “high ground,” when she stoops to the level that she does by the end of this movie? The end fate of Krem is just lazy and formulaic. This movie is really trying to be a superhero version of “Mad Max” meets “Game of Thrones,” but the nihilistic themes in “Mad Max” and “Game of Thrones” just don’t work in a “Supergirl” movie.

There's 2 things that can be said about the above: one, the chances the plotline with slave girls is a metaphor for Islam's support for child-trafficking are very slim. Two, if murder scenes are what the screeplay is built upon, that too is pretty alienating. Let's also recall James Gunn, who's one of the producers of this film, turned out to have made some very offensive jokes among other horrific deeds in the past decade, and also injected a repellent metaphor for Israel into last year's Superman film, which is why he's unqualified to explore the aforementioned themes in the movie. At the end of this review, it also notes that:

Don’t expect any mid-credits or any end-credits scenes to hint how this story might continue, because there are no mid-credits or end-credits scenes in “Supergirl,” probably because the filmmakers ran out of ideas for this underwhelming superhero movie. And there’s no better example of how far off the mark “Supergirl” is than the fact that it isn’t until about 80 minutes into this 108-minute movie before Supergirl is seen in her full iconic superhero costume. “Supergirl” spends so much time trying to prove that Supergirl has an identity crisis, the entire story loses its way in its own identity crisis that falls short of what a great “Supergirl” movie should be.

Ah, that's got to be another huge mistake the scriptwriters made: they take forever to show Kara donning her costume - which looks pretty dull in terms of color here - and only so much time depicting her as a drunkard, while her powers oscillate between stronger and weaker in ways that don't avail. The filmmakers also made the unpardonable error of adapting the script of the overrated Tom King's miniseries, and if that's how it's going to be, you can't be shocked when things go into freefall. A leading error in the film's making has to be that the screenwriters didn't have the creative autonomy to develop their own story free of editorial mandates. And it looks like we'll be seeing the sad results soon at the box office.

Once again, as in 1984, the Maid of Might and her creators (Otto Binder and Al Plastino) have been done a terrible injustice. With the worst part being that the filmmakers - and even modern comics writers - are unlikely to apologize for what they've led to, no matter the box office results.

A new book about the art of Michael Turner features some for a most inappropriate miniseries he worked on, and 3 unsuitable contributors

In this IGN article on Yahoo, it's announced that Aspen, the company originally founded by the late artist Michael Turner, worked on a crowdfunded art book featuring art he did for DC, and wouldn't you know it, one that includes some embarrassments based on what they were used for:

The late Michael Turner was undoubtedly one of the most popular comic book artists of the 2000s, with a proven track record of driving up sales on a series every time his art adorned the cover. Clover Press previously celebrated Turner's Marvel resume with The Marvel Art of Michael Turner, and now they're back with The DC Art of Michael Turner.

[...] The DC Art of Michael Turner is a 200-page 9" x 12" hardcover that reprints the artist's work on titles like Superman/Batman, The Flash, Justice League, Identity Crisis. The book includes an introduction by Ghost Machine editor-in-chief and former DC Comics Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns, as well as commentary from Jeph Loeb, Brad Meltzer, and Dan DiDio.

Turner may have been a talented artist, and some of his contributions to Image's Top Cow affiliate years ago were impressive, but what he drew for DC was all-style-no-substance, and that he would actually draw covers for Identity Crisis was disgusting and an embarrassing stain on his portfolio. I remember when Alex Ross told how he'd been asked to draw artwork for the vile miniseries that was offensive to victims of sexual assault, and in contrast to Turner, Ross wisely refused the offer. How is it Ross understood a story with a belittling structure could tarnish his resume if he'd participated, but Turner couldn't? And how come a site like Get Your Comic On is also obscuring the topics involved by putting one of the illustrations Turner did for Identity Crisis at the top of their article? Also, lest we forget, that Meltzer, Johns and DiDio gave introduction commentary for this project is also bad news. As for Loeb, his writing from the times was hardly a big deal.

What makes this additionally troubling is when a "feminist" site like Girl Talk HQ glosses over some art connected with one of the most repulsive miniseries of 2004:

In celebration of the Kickstarter campaign launch today, we are sharing some exclusive images from ‘THE DC ART OF MICHAEL TURNER’ – the artist’s iconic interpretations of Wonder Woman, which you won’t find on any other media publication!

One of those panels they highlight is a cover Turner drew for Identity Crisis, an issue where WW was made to look absurdly mechanical in-story, showing her using her lasso on an interrogated crook without actually showing her face, IIRC. That doesn't trouble them? I guess that says all you need to know about how some feminists aren't the responsible folks they'd like everybody to think they are. Oddly enough, another feminist/SJW writing for Book Riot actually woke up and recognized what was wrong with Identity Crisis 15 years afterwards, though she dampened the impact of her essay by continuing to embrace other forms of wokeness, IIRC. When will the writers for this other feminist site begin to wake up?

Comic Book Club Live also glossed over the news, and they say:

Like other volumes in The DC Art Of… line, the high-end edition will come in a 9″ x 12″ deluxe hardcover, featuring over 200 pages of art and commentary. The campaign will also feature an ashcan, a “sketchbook” edition featuring black and white art, “a Kickstarter-exclusive slipcase and dust jacket, and multiple DC Portfolio sets spotlighting Turner’s unforgettable takes on Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman, and The Flash.” In addition, Geoff Johns has provided an introduction alongside “thoughts” from Jeph Loeb, Brad Meltzer and Dan Didio. Hopefully those thoughts will come in thought bubbles, but probably not.

And that says all you need to know where they stand regarding those charlatans too. Almost a decade after the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and they're continuing to sugarcoat some of the worst stories to bring down DC/Marvel over the past quarter century. That doesn't speak well for alleged "fandom".

Turner may have some decent artwork to build an art book with, but Identity Crisis taints the covers he foolishly drew for that. I would not advise backing the crowdfunding campaign for this financially, and when it comes to his DC artwork, I don't think it amounted to much in the end. Though if it matters, it was reprehensible when DC reprinted the Superman/Batman story reintroducing Supergirl in an anthology with censored panels for the girls' rear ends, yet violence against Lois Lane went by without any opposition. This was when DiDio was still in charge, and that too says quite a bit about his MO. So why is Aspen welcoming him to provide commentary for their new art book project? He's just one more reason why not to give the book any financial backing, because what if some of the profits go into his pockets? So I'm sorry, but I would strongly advise anybody who's a realist not to give this book about Turner's DC art any money.

Turner may have been a talented artist, I won't deny that. But again, he made some very sad mistakes that make it necessary to separate art from artist and/or take it with a grain of salt when it comes to his own portfolio.

Since when was Supergirl always stuck in Superman's shadow?

The Conversation wrote a sugarcoated item about Supergirl and the upcoming movie, that rather predictably takes no objective view of the Maid of Might's history:

Since her official debut in 1959, Supergirl has struggled to emerge from the shadow of her cousin, Superman. So it’s a bold move that the second cinematic release in the newly rebooted DC Universe will be Supergirl.

Milly Alcock first appeared as Supergirl in the epilogue to Superman (2025). Her Supergirl is a brash “party girl” – an immediate contrast to David Corenswet’s squeaky clean rendition of Superman. Based on the comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2021) by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, she is a traumatised character, dealing with the destruction of her home planet of Krypton. “I have no people,” Supergirl laments in the trailer.

Well that's the problem: it's based more on the overrated King's story than a screenplay that could stand on its own. Might I also add I don't find the posters showing Supergirl wearing a trenchcoat appealing? The sunglasses may be cool, but the coat ruins everything. And I don't think Supergirl was always in Superman's shadow as they say, if only because there were times in the past where she did have solo adventures printed. The problem is the publishers didn't always see her as the storytelling vehicle she could be if they wanted to invest in serious merit-based writing. And the article has a pretty big goof in the following:

However, Supergirl was not always so introspective. The character and her alter ego, Kara Zor-El, first appeared in 1938, to cash in on the popularity of Superman. She was a preppy teenager who played a supporting helpmate role, allowing Superman to display his paternal side.

Publishers DC Comics also flirted with the concept of Superwoman. A 1943 story had Superman’s girlfriend, reporter Lois Lane, dream that she was Superman’s female counterpart. In her book Supergirl: Contemporary Feminist Reboot of a Hapless DC Comic Helpmate (2022), Batya Weinbaum suggests this moment reflected the “changing position of women in wartime”. In a 1947 story, Lois Lane, Superwoman! from Superman issue #45, Lane is convinced she has superpowers, only to discover she is the victim of a ruse where Superman is using his influence to simulate the experience. This prompts her frustrated exclamation: “You men who try to keep women weak and defenceless – I hate you!”

Lane may well have been addressing the DC editors who published her adventures. In his cultural history of comic book heroines, comic book historian Mike Madrid outlines an excerpt from 1950s-era DC Comics’ editorial policy which reluctantly accepts stories featuring women, but only if the female characters are “secondary in importance”.

Somehow, it's hard to believe a company that readily published Wonder Woman all these years would have a problem publishing anything with a lady in the lead. Either way, they did have some impressive lady co-stars created at the time, and who went on to see better writing as time went by. Also notice the hilarious goof in the year of debut, which is actually Superman's, not Supergirl's, which was originally early 1959.

As for what Lois Lane was written telling in 1947, well, that could easily describe the situation decades later, when men and women alike who had lenient views on discrimination led to the publication of Identity Crisis. Yet that sees no mention in this puff piece, and that's the considerable weakness here. As is the following "explanation" why Kara Zor-El was originally terminated in Crisis on Infinite Earths:

Whereas Superman (played by Christopher Reeve) was introduced in 1978 by the same producers with a daring rescue of a plummeting helicopter, Helen Slater’s Supergirl performs an aerial ballet and frolics with woodland creatures. In comics, Supergirl fared even worse. The character was killed off in 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline, partly because of her threat to Superman’s unique status as “the last son of Krypton”, and partly because of the film’s disappointing box office takings.

Excuse me? What kind of monumentally stupid explanation is that? The staff may have wanted to establish Kal-El as the last Kryptonian at the time. But that doesn't make Kara a "threat" to said status. What the writer says is disgusting, and undermines any valid lamentation he's making, though he's right the editors used the film's failure as a justification, which is also sick. And then he adds insult to injury when he says:

In comic books, however, death is never permanent. Kara Zor-El and Supergirl were resurrected in 2004 in The Supergirl from Krypton. There was an attempt to add nuance to the character, with a greater emphasis on the trauma she suffered from witnessing the loss of her home planet. But this was rather undermined by various revealing costumes clearly designed to satisfy the male gaze.

And this inherently wrong because? Even years before, there were times when Kara Zor-El was drawn as quite a fashion plate, and the bare midriff costume was actually introduced around the turn of the century, at the middle of Peter David's run on the new take on Supergirl (I think Leonard Kirk was the artist), which was developed out of a character who first appeared in 1988. The real reasons to complain are that no concrete story accompanied the reintroduction in the Superman/Batman title published at the time, or even the solo title that followed, and that a very bad man accused of sexual misconduct was in charge of editing, that being Eddie Berganza, who was only fired from DC in 2017. If there's a valid complaint to make about fetishizing in what he oversaw, it can be blamed on Berganza, and also writer Jeph Loeb. Oddly, when Kara was reintroduced at the time, the figure as drawn by Michael Turner wasn't so busty, if at all. As for the costume, if there's anything wrong with it, and possibly has been for a long time, it's how it was long-sleeved, which makes it look silly. The article, interestingly enough, notes that the TV show starring Melissa Benoist appears to have followed up on the PC view of Supergirl's outfits:

In the pilot episode she finally strikes out on her own with the dramatic rescue of an airliner, assuming the mantle of Supergirl. In a show that employed several female writers and became known for its positive representation of LGBTQ+ issues, problematic topics such as Supergirl’s infantilising name and costume were directly addressed.

Kara refuses to wear revealing versions of the costume from the character’s comic book past. In discussions with her employer, CatCo Worldwide Media CEO Cat Grant, she is told: “I’m a girl. And your boss. And powerful. And rich, and hot, and smart. So, if you perceive Supergirl as anything less than excellent, isn’t the real problem you?” Significantly, Grant is portrayed by actor Calista Flockhart, known for the Ally McBeal series – a show that sparked debates about feminism and women in the workplace in the late 1990s.

Well if all they care about is putting down even creators with more common sense, along with pushing an agenda that did more harm than good, those are just some of the reasons why it's regrettable the Maid of Might's potential has suffered ruin for years. The TV show became increasingly political, and that's why it's more an embarrassment than a classic today. At the end:

The 2021 comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow follows the young alien Ruthye Marye Knoll, who recruits Supergirl to seek revenge after her father is murdered. The story is told from Ruthye’s point of view, the fractured narrative lending the story a fatalistic quality. The narration also emphasises the mythic quality of Supergirl, “who lost everything and kept walking”.

It remains to be seen how closely the film will follow the philosophical source material. Meanwhile, in the pages of the latest DC comic book, writer and artist Sophie Campbell has returned to the brighter tone of the 1960s version of the character, merged with the sensibilities of the 2015 television series. The many interpretations of Supergirl continue to reveal the character’s durability and versatility.

If memory serves, the writer of the latest series is really a man with the name Ross, and it sure is ironic somebody who claimed earlier the outfits in post-2004 Supergirl were a problem suddenly makes no such arguments when somebody of "Sophie Campbell"'s standing is helming the new series. Predictably, no objective view is taken of King's overrated story either, and that takes away any impact this puff piece might've had.

Since the new movie's also a subject, Polygon says the director, as much as the screenwriter, did draw "inspiration" from both King's story and what the assigned screenwriter turned out:

"I very deliberately started with the script that Ana wrote," Gillespie says, "and I put together a lot of visuals around that coming from the script, trying to make something that I would be excited about and that had this grit and flavor of the Supergirl character, Kara." [...]

"After that, I went back and visited Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow and took some images from that," he says, "but I didn't want to start there because I didn't want to just do the comic book."

Unfortunately, that's just what he did nevertheless, and borrowing even remotely from something that pretentious doesn't help a bit. Nor did injecting feminism into the narratives of the TV show or even the comics themselves avail, but that's certainly a moot point by now. It remains to be seen what the box office results will be for this new Supergirl movie, and based on how it's crafted, I'd rather stay home and read the comics I own instead. These articles are just more examples of stuff that ultimately doesn't help the Maid of Might's reputation at all.

Without merit, USA comics won't have "everlasting" appeal

The North State Journal (Raleigh, NC) wrote about why American comics are so great:

Pick one up. Be seduced by its glossy cover. Gaze upon the impossibly muscular body clad in a skin-tight suit. Our hero or heroine will surely be soaring, shouting, blasting a villain into next week.

They are ridiculous. They are addictively great. Comic books, of the superhero variety, are 100% American.

Compare the thin comic book to Europe’s graphic novels, and they come off looking flimsy, infantile. Compare the American comic to Japanese Manga and they appear innocent in their fixation with heroism; they hark back to a departed American age.

Once a nickel, a dime, a quarter, now the price of a latte, they are objects of American consumer capitalism. The comic is literature in junk-food version.

Well it used to be, but that doesn't mean it was always perfect even back in the Golden Age. And if you consider how, by the turn of the century, they were on their way to putting far more forced emphasis on leftist ideologies, that's why it doesn't make much sense now to say they're objects of capitalism. The American age in question has sadly departed, and they're not fixed on heroism like they were before.

Yet what truly makes them American objects is what plays out in their 32 pages month after month, decade upon decade.

When the Fantastic Four took their fateful space journey in 1961 and “cosmic rays” transformed the quartet into unwilling superheroes, comics entered a weird realm where the all-powerful were also the unwilling, decidedly modern victims of science and circumstance.

Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine (the list goes on) were given supernatural abilities that made them outcasts, obliging them to be flawed messiahs.

They were, by some quirk of the American character, bound to Peter Parker’s moral imperative: “With great power comes great responsibility.” They are versions of an American Sisyphus, bound to saving us over and over again.

What could be more American — that might, when lashed to a sense of justice, eventually, makes right? So honorable, so naïve.

Well now even the phrase from Spidey's 1962 premiere has been throughly trashed for the sake of pointless directions, not the least being the erasure of the Spider-marriage. When the paper, possibly a college-type one, won't get into any of those issues, something is decidedly and terribly wrong. There's no justice to be found in modern comics when they force in so much leftist ideologies at the expense of coherency.

To this day, though the tone is darker, Marvel and DC, the two mammoths of comics, continue to reimagine the American character.

Once side attractions in a world of leading white men, Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey and Susan Storm have in recent years emerged as leaders to reinvigorate the Spider-Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four sagas. Absolute Wonder Woman has broken ground with beautiful art. Miles Morales is Spidey for a new generation.

And when they make such ambiguous statements about these leading ladies, something is wrong here too. Note the absurdity of bringing up what I assume is Spider-Gwen, some kind of otherworldly take on the 616 universe Gwen, without even making anything clear, or asking if it really does favors for the Spidey franchise. Also, not all art is good today, what with the woke damage of the past decade still being felt, and the Titans' title in the DCU is one that's suffered as a result. And they don't have a problem with the darker tone? That's practically what brought down comicdom in the long run. Also, do they have a problem with white men? One can only wonder if the writer's saying he considers Peter Parker expendable.

Yet the central fissures remain.

Bruce Wayne can’t connect with anyone other than his butler; he is the lonely individual in an atomized America. Steve Rogers bears the burden of representing the “Greatest Generation” from World War II. He is a Captain America forever out of place, even in his own land.

And could there be a more iconic tech magnate toying with humanity’s fate than Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor and his delusions of grandeur? If only our world had a bespectacled Clark Kent keeping an eye on things. Just in case.

Umm, even this is flawed if they'd consider there were stories where Bruce had affairs with ladies like Vicky Vale, Silver St. Cloud and even Catwoman. Where do they get off using that kind of laughable lecture anyway? The writer's also oblivious to how there were several stories over the years where Marvel tried to replace and harm the reputation of Capt. America for the sake of publicity stunts, and it goes without saying that today's dialogue for a lot of the regular cast doesn't feel like that of the older comics anymore.

So what's the point of this article? Practically nothing, since like a lot of other such modern articles, it won't explore what went wrong over past decades, nor will it take an objective view of Marvel/DC in their modern form. Once again, comicdom's getting nowhere fast as a result of all these phonies writing about what's hardly coverage of history.