Bear in mind, this could be the headaches, stress and brain damage talking?
But this may be the funniest thing I’ve seen all week.
Why Batwoman #1 is great: a reason for every year it took to get to print
It’s here. Finally. The first issue of Batwoman arrived in stores and on digital devices today. After six long years of development, a run in Detective Comics and a “0” issue from almost a year ago, Batwoman has finally kicked off her series. How was it? Pretty damned great. Why? Here are six reasons, one for every year it took to get to this moment. (That’s the variant cover to the first issue by Amy Reeder which, unfortunately, was not used due to the reboot). Note: Spoilers.
On animals you do not want to mess with
I got the trade paperback of “Green Lantern Corps: Brightest Day” yesterday since I’m catching up on all my Green Lantern reading and read through the entire thing last evening. Hey, it was a slow day.
In a startling coincidence I was talking to a friend of mine about Green Lantern and somehow the subject of Dex-Starr came up.
To explain exactly who, or rather what, he is, a little bit of history is needed. In the DC universe the various energies of the universe are divided up into colors that are ruled by the emotional spectrum. For years we only had green which is willpower. In recent years we have made a myriad of other colors crop up which draw their powers from different emotions. Each of them now has their own corps and their own power rings.
The Red Lanterns, who are getting their own ongoing this fall, are the emotion of rage. Not just unchecked savage rage either as it turns out, but the rage caused by a horrific tragedy in one’s life. Atrocitus has become a more sympathetic character from his traditional role as a Green Lantern villain and we have found out much about his past, finding him to be fleshing out into a much more complex character which most GL fans applaud.
And then there’s the fact that the existence of the Red Lanterns has given us the coolest thing ever.
We’re dead.
We are so dead
i can haz mirdir nao?
Yes that is a cat in a Red Lantern costume. And yes he just killed those bad guys. He is actually, according to Geoff Jones, “one of the most sadistic and vicious” members of the RL corps.
Ruffles the Ragecat as he’s affectionately known by among fans started out as a joke. Shane Davis put him in as background filler and there really wasn’t going to be anything come of it until Johns, a few other creaters at DC, and GL fans took a look at the critter and proclaimed it to be THE MOST AWESOME THING EVER.
So Ruffles was given a name, that being Dex-Starr although most of his fans persist on calling him Ruffles. He was made the official Red Lantern of Sector 2814 and has made on-off appearances in Green Lantern over the past couple of years. He mostly served as a gimick for a time, a cute little bit of whimsy that fans chuckled at.
Then Geoff Johns decided to be a bastard (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) and wrote Dex-Starr’s origin story.
See the thing is most people thought Dex-Starr was an alien cat due to his name and the fact that he’s blue, but no he is an earth cat. His real name was Dexter, and I guess if you explain his new name like in his fuzzy mind he fudged up Dexter to sound like Dex-Starr it makes sense. Some have speculated that his blue coloring can be explained by what his breed is, most thinking that he might be a British Blue.
Anyway we find out his owner was killed and that he spent some time being homeless before the above panels where he was nearly drowned and drew the attention of the red ring. That was Aw-worthy enough, but what really clinched the “Johns is a bastard” thing for a lot of people was these panels below.
……..
If you don’t find yourself shedding a few tears reading those panels, you’re just not fucking human.
Anyway, it’s an interesting story fleshed out for something that started out as a joke character and I do know that come the reboot, if Rage Kitty isn’t in the new Red Lantern book prominently, I will be royally pissed.
This is pure awesome.
