Earth Too: Society #9

Guess what?! Everybody on Earth-Too fears heroes as well!

Rating: -1 Ranking.

I get that the part where Lois Lane begins writing the new Earth-Too constitution with "In God We Trust" and then crosses it out is symbolic but it also makes Lois Lane look like a fucking dope. Why would that thought--beginning the new constitution with that phrase--even cross her mind?! Unless she's leaving that bit in! So she writes "In God We Trust" and then continues after a double-spaced gap with "Ha ha! That's how people saw the old world, right? Trusting the gods. Putting their faith in something other than themselves. But now we're on a different world. A new world. One created not by any god but by an interdimensional Machiavellian robotic monster! Which ultimately means the destiny of this planet must be shaped by those now living on it. It is up to us to trust ourselves, and to trust each other, to make this world a place where we can live in peace, prosperity, and the pursuit of sappiness."

And boy howdy do the people of Earth-Too need that speech! They're all fucking still living with the expectations of the Old World (you know, Earth-2!). They've just arrived on a new planet with only the technology and materials of the spaceships that brought them here and they're already trying to power the planet with oil and natural gas and shit dug up out of the earth! Hello! Your planet has two suns! TWO! Start upcycling your stupid spaceships into solar panels, you morons! Better yet, have Green Lantern make some for you with his magic, scary godlike powers! Oh, and isn't Mister Terrific down there? I hear he's the third smartest man in the world! He can build some shit to use the suns as a power source, right? Get those fucking Mister Terrific Balls in production already!

Earth-Too has about three million people on it and they're fighting over land rights. Are you kidding me?! If Green Lantern were a real hero, he'd just move the first city that becomes aggressive with another thousands of miles away to a new stretch of useless land (because apparently all the land is fucking useless). Who cares if somebody calls him a god or a fascist or a faggot? Okay, that last one was out of line. But still, who cares?! He can save lives and teach lessons!

I was hoping this was going to become a Justice Society book where the heroes all sit around a table and listen to Hawkman scream his fool head off about some non-traditional something bugging his bigoted ass. But instead it's about a bunch of heroes trying to build a new world in the face of a populace that are scared assholes without any fucking common sense. I hope the whole place blows up by issue thirteen.

I should also mention that whatever weird breeding program Fury has begun that's creating Amazons is also giving them some kind of weird hip dysplasia.

Harley's Little Black Book #2

It's okay for Harley to pinch Hal's ass without consent because she's pinching up.

Rating: -1 Ranking.

You Harley Quinn fans know you're being fleeced for every dollar DC Comics can wring out of you, right? I mean, I am too because I keep buying all of DC's comic books! But if I weren't buying them all, I certainly wouldn't be buying all of these Harley Quinn books. No matter how likeable the character may be, these books are all the same fluffy bullshit. It's like cotton candy! There's no substance to it! I mean, it does what it's supposed to do which is give you a moment's respite from the inevitability of your eventual death! And I suppose if you enjoy Harley reacting in the exact same way but with a slight variation on the words she uses, all of these Harley Quinn stories must make your underwear sticky. See? That's the kind of thing she would say! Over and over and over again! I don't like to think of myself as mature but I'm suddenly thinking I'm too mature for Amanda and Jimmy's Harley Quinn. If I have to have a cartoonish Harley, I'll take the original from the Batman animated series. I want my comic book Harley to be dark and dangerous and insane. Instead of playing with her beaver and Mike Cock, I'd rather she were fucking corpses and throwing babies off of skyscrapers.

The New Titans #54 (March 1989)

Blah blah blah! By all the holy fucks, the antagonist never shuts up! I didn’t process half of what she was moaning about while battling Wonder Girl and Raven because I was thinking about some awesome sex I once had. True story! I totally had sex once.

By the end of it, the Titans of myth have their youth restored and promise to hand out gifts to the victors. It’s all fairly anti-climactic for the big Issue #50 Who is Wonder Girl? Spectacular.

The best part is that Danny Chase and Terry Long go on a date. I knew that guy was creepy but this is a new low for Terry! Or Danny? One of them had the worst time and I can't decide who it would have been.

The New Titans #53 (February 1989)

I suppose by now we sort of know the new origin of Wonder Girl. But I still don’t know the answer to “Who is Wonder Girl?” It’s such a complex question! I suppose she’s the type of person who would marry her teacher and then support him when he relies on her to do all of his research as a professor and loses his job because she refuses to do his job as well as her own (super heroing). But then she’s always known that! So I guess she’s like Dorothy Gale who always knew who she was but didn’t truly understand what that meant until she fell in love with a scarecrow, murdered a witch with a bucket of water, learned how to orgasm from a cowardly lion, and talked about that uptight tin man behind his back the entire journey down the Yellow Brick Road.

The New Titans #52 (January 1989)

The Titans go on some sort of space scavenger hunt for seeds that will whatever. I don’t know. I think it’s clearing up Wonder Girl’s origin? By making it into a monstrously huge space opera slash sibling rivalry? Once again, I read this months ago and have forgotten the details. I just know the Titans have split up and they’re battling some of Wonder Girl’s space siblings. I’ll remember what’s going on soon because this is where I left off and Issue #53 will be fresh in my mind when I discuss it!

Still not heroic because they’re in space on personal business while Danny Chase sits around headquarters acting like an ass.

The New Titans #51 (January 1989)

Who is Wonder Girl? It turns out she was a little girl destined to die in a fire. But she was saved by aliens pretending to be gods or vice versa or maybe nobody was pretending anything. She was then returned to Earth without any memories because how could she remember this history that had just been written by Marv Wolfman and George Perez? Duh!

She has some brother and sister gods who are her other Titan family and one of them has gone rogue or something. Maybe some evil is hunting them down. Something dramatic is happening but I kind of forget what and I don’t want to read this again.

The Titans are too busy finding out who Wonder Girl is to do anything heroic. They continue to be the worst superhero team of the '80s. Weird how their comic book basically saved DC singlehandedly! Maybe Swamp Thing and the subsequent British Invasion helped too!

The New Titans #50 (December 1988)

The long awaited story that everybody was waiting for during a long period of waiting: the newest origin of Donna Troy! See, Wonder Girl used to just be stories about young Wonder Woman. But then somebody whose name some nerd knows but I don’t give a shit about decided to make Wonder Girl exist side-by-side with Wonder Woman so the Teen Titans could have a female “sidekick” join their team. At that point she got a new origin which wasn’t “Wonder Woman as a young woman but taken out of time to exist beside her adult self” but something else that was probably campy and stupid. But then the Crisis on Infinite Earths happened and a lot of Golden Age characters ceased to exist and Wonder Woman got a brand new history and Wonder Girl apparenty had never met this new Wonder Woman or had parents or an origin or any fucking history at all that wasn’t completely fucked up. So fans had been asking since Crisis for Marv Wolfman to make some sense out of Donna Troy. This is the beginning of the sense he made out of her.

Also it’s part one of five! I guess the story needed extra clarification after this cover was already printed. Also the “teen” was dropped from their name because comic book fans’ heads were exploding over the fact that most of them were young adults now.

This is the "50th Anniversary" issue. The Teen Titans were first created in 1964. This issue came out in 1988. That's only 24 years. Which means the editors at DC Comics don't know the definition of the word "anniversary." What they meant was "mensiversary" which probably sounds too much like "menstruation" (for very good etymological reasons, of course!) to use it.