Voodoo #6

Have Voodoo's breasts become more pendulous?

Voodoo has just discovered that she's a clone. That's the kind of revelation (or as Scott Lobdell calls it, "holy grail") that can induce serious Narration Boxing. I'm not really looking forward to a comic filled with angst-ridden "Who am I really?" and "Who created me and for what reason?" questions. Hopefully Voodoo will just suck it up and continue to think of herself in the same terms she thought of herself before she found out she was a clone.

What do you call it when you laugh out loud and mutter, "Fuck," at the same time? Because that's what I did after reading the FIRST panel of Voodoo #6!

WHO AM I? Can I conceal myself forevermore? Pretend I'm not the stripper I was before? And must my stripper name before I die be no more than an alibi?

So what are you? A trick of the light? A figment of someone's imagination (well, okay, technically that's what you really are! But I mean if you were really real than how could you be unreal by learning you're a clone as opposed to your being unreal because you're a comic book character and whether or not you're a clone doesn't really matter)?

See? You are your own person! You were a kerchief! I mean a do-rag!

This is what happens when you equate your job with sense of self. Lose the job and you lose everything. But Voodoo should be elated at this discovery. It means she's free! No more orders from alien mob bosses. No more secret missions. No more hunting and killing and espionage. She can go do whatever she wants! I mean, she was always free to do that stuff anyway. But now she's been given a free pass to do these things without feeling bad about letting her superiors down. There's another Voodoo out there! And she's the original! She can fucking do the job herself!

That button Voodoo pressed cancelled the transmission of the Super Hero files to Voodoo's Daemonite leaders. She's decided to figure out the truth about who she is and why she was created before she'll help out the Daemonites. I'm not even sure why she wants to know that much. You've got a fresh start and a corvette, bitch! Hit the road! Go check out the Badlands and Devil's Tower and Little Big Horn and the Redwood Forest!

Why are so many people so concerned with finding their identity outside of themselves? How does that even work? What does finding out why the Voodoo clone was created and by whom have anything to say about the Voodoo clone's idea of self? It might answer some questions that are nagging her about how she came to be. Like a small child wondering how it was created. But that isn't going to change anything in her own mind and how she feels about herself. Stop looking to the outside world to define you, people. You are not your possessions. You are not your parents. You are not your job. You are a culmination of your own thoughts and experiences. You create you with a little help from the chaotic randomness of the universe and the things it throws at you. But you aren't the tornado or the lightning strike or the bear attack; you are how you deal with those things.

After Voodoo escapes through some kind of hyperspace portal as the Daemonite battleship explodes, the scene returns to the Black Razor base where the original Voodoo is being held. Once again, a caption reminds the reader that the Black Razors are "a super secret organization that hunts rogue alien technology threatening mankind." What makes it SUPER secret versus just secret? Is it super secret because everyone else in the DC Universe doesn't know about it as opposed to secret like the Blackhawks and Suicide Squad that everyone seems to know about but they all just pretend it doesn't exist?

Black Jack and Fallon have arrived to break the original Voodoo out of Black Razor custody before they kill her. They think with her help they can catch the Voodoo clone. Really? This sounds like a case of importing foxes to Australia to deal with the rabbit problem. Why is the original Voodoo going to care or comply? After you break her out, you'll just have two problems to deal with! And once they meet up, they'll probably act like long lost siblings.

Oh, don't worry about hiding behind the moon. Earth can't spot anything in orbit.

Meanwhile, behind the moon, the Daemonites watch and wait! Or something. I guess about a billion also watch and wait on Earth while pretending to be human. I think what they're waiting for is the Intel on Earth's Superheroes that Voodoo is supposed to deliver. I'm a bit unclear on why the Daemonites are so concerned with Earth and have been for thousands of years. Do they want to conquer it? Or are they just hanging around to destroy Camelot every time it pops back up. Were the Daemonites the men on the grassy knoll? Did they kill John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X? Was Nixon a Daemonite?

Voodoo has transported herself to this ship so that she can confront the War Council and figure out why she exists. She confronts Skinny the redneck Daemonite and his lackettes while on board. She kills skinny more easily than she's killed any other Daemonite in the book but lets the girls go since she "still believes in the cause."

Back on Earth, Agent Fallon and Black Jack break Priscilla (the original Voodoo) out of the Black Razors facility and make a break for it. Black Jack mentions that their "real boss" will be pissed when he finds out what happened. And their real boss is Lincoln of the Blackhawks. But he's not really that pissed.

So that's what the 'super' in super secret means! It's the secret group of a secret group!

I guess someone realized that the Blackhawks and the Black Razors were redundant. I bet a bunch of editors were in a meeting discussing it when some sharp wit noticed that they both had 'black' in the title and why couldn't they be PART OF THE SAME GROUP!!!!! Those was the fantasy person's extra excitement and his extra exclamation points and not my own. And it made good sense to merge them at this point because it keeps the Blackhawks in the DCnU even after their title was cancelled. Just like Mister Terrific is heading to Earth 2. And OMAC is in Justice League International. And Static Shock will probably become a Teen Titan. And Men of War was simply renumbered and retitled to G.I. Combat. And Hawk and Dove, um, well, Liefeld will probably stick them in Deathstroke or one of his other titles.

And back on board the spaceship for a check-in with Voodoo. She makes her way to the War Council and kills dozens of Daemonite guards. I guess Hybrids are more powerful than the pure Daemonites. Or else they infused Voodoo with some kind of Daemonite super power when they experimented on and then cloned her.

The Fallen One was that thing in Grifter where he battled Midnighter.

This is the war council discussing matters just before Voodoo breaks in demanding answers and ends the comic. I don't understand why they've been hiding in the shadows. If the something that is coming is the conquering of Earth, then perhaps they shouldn't have waited so long. It's as if they waited until they had problems. They couldn't attack until they learned how to defeat the super heroes but why didn't they attack before the super heroes were around? Did they try and was it Stormwatch that has always held them at bay? Or maybe for the last thousand years, it was simply an advance team on Earth trying to keep the Earthlings from getting to a point where they couldn't be defeated which is why they destroyed Camelot every time it sprang up? Why were they only able to attempt the summoning of the Black Curate once they had Grifter as a sacrifice? I hope the answers that are supposedly going to be given next issue answer some of these questions!

Voodoo Issue #6 Rating: No change. Nothing special going on here! At least not for me.