#I wonder how the League's Pit was formed? Was it a Dead Ancient or a large number of Ended Ghosts?

[bet-on-me-13]

Ghost Cores are Dionesium

So! I while ago, I saw a Post about Danny and the Court of Owls, and one suggestion in the comments basically said, "What if Dionesium, the stuff they use to bring back the dead, is just Ghost Cores?"

And that got me thinking. Lazarus Pits are just Dionesium Infused Water, so how would they be created if Dionesium is a Ghosts Core? Well they way I see it, Lazarus Pits can only be formed in 2 Ways.

The first way is for a large number of Ghosts to be Ended at the same time, with their shattered Cores piling up and dissolving into Water.

The other way, if for an Ancient to Die. The Ancients are practically God's, and as such their Cores are immense in Power. When an Ancient dies, and their Core is left to dissolve in the Human Realm, it forms a Lazarus Pit in the exact same way it would take hundreds of normal Cores to do so.

Where am I going with this?

Well, isn't there a Giant Lazarus Pit under Gotham? The Batcave even has one, doesn't it?

The reason Gotham is so cursed isn't because Lady Gotham likes to collect Curses, or because her Ectoplasm is corrupted, it's because she isn't there to stop them anymore.

Lady Gotham is Dead.

Her Core sank deep into the Earth, forming a Lazarus Pit under the entire City, but thankfully far away from her People. She died, and only the fact that she is a Conceptual spirit saved a piece of her Consciousness. She represents a City, she can only fully be killed if the entire City is leveled. That doesn't mean she is still alive however, just that the barest sliver of her mind is hanging on by a Thread.

This is how Gotham possessed Batman that one time, it was her base instincts saving one of her precious children.

If you want her to be a little more cognizant, maybe she is just severely Injured? Her Core is cracked to the edge of shattering and she desperately needs help.

She she calls out to whoever could save her, and a certain Ghost Boy hears her cry for help?

[franchisewars-blog]

Young Justice: Outsiders - The Light vs “The Dark” Reaction

This week’s paired set of epsiodes for discussion deals with the origins of the Big Bad of Young Justice, Vandal Savage, and his extremely effective secret society of super-villains, The Light, while contrasting that organization with the heroes efforts to match the Machiavellian machinations of The Light with their own secret society of superheroes, who go nameless, but are accurately pointed out by Wonder Woman to not really have any good alternatives if they want to flip “The Light” for their own name.

First, Savage’s limelight episode (dedicated to his deceased first foice actor, Miguel Ferrer), “Evolution”:

VANDAL SAVAGE: THE PRIMORDIAL “HERO”

Greg Weisman once went out f his way to describe some members of the light as being “heroes” at some point in their lives, in particular to two aged and ancient immortals, the Lazarus Pit-dependent Ra’s Al Ghul and the functionally unkillable and immune to age 50,000 year old Vanda Savage. 

At first I thought he meant it in the modern sense of the word, and to some extent he did. It would be hard to not classify anicent “Marduk” Savage as a hero alongside his children (including Nabu!) for fighting off an invasion of Starro the Conqueror. 

But what Weisman actually seems to have meant was that Vandal, and Ra’s long after him, are heroic in the mythic fashion, where morality means a whole lot less than willpower, victory, and conquest. Vandal is still an inherently selfish, megalomaniacal would-be (and former) despot. But he’s not that different from such ancient heroes as Achilles (a collosal prick throughut the Illiad), Thor (a very murder-happy god in the original Norse myths), or even historical figures whose reputations have become highly ambiguous as time goes on, like how Julius Caesar was a praiseworthy figure for monarchs of the Middle Ages while also an inspriartion for Palpatine in Star Wars.

The “heroism” of Vandal Savage is the heroism of the “champion” for a people. And “champions” tend to build their reputation on the graveyards of their opponents, even in petty, totally amoral conflicts. And that’s what Savage is: a “champion” of Earth pursuing what he believes to be the elevation of humanity. And like ay old school “champion” he believes that sacrifices must be made to pursue that goal - even if those sacrifices ae dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, or even millions, of dead.

It’s what makes him and the Light more than your average villain group, and so much scarier than the word “supervillain”

Now, the second episode, Peter David’s “Triptych”:

HOW THIS *IS* GOING TO GO BAD:

The idea of the heroes covertly forming their own counterpart to The Light, even down to being composed of 7 members each controlling their own powerbases and keeping them compartmentalized? 

Fun! Exciting! 

And Doomed!

While this “The Dark” alliance allows the League, Team, Batman Inc., and Outsiders to obfuscate and conceal their true power and intelligence from The Light, there is one signifiant difference that will inevitably end up backfiring in some way this season:

The Light embraces the occasional internal conflict and purge, and the heroes... can’t.

Even beyond the blatant moral issues that will almost certainly arise from different hero groups inevitably clashng in some fashion, superheroes can’t shrug off potential losses of personel and infrastructure like supervillains can. For every hero, there are 3 or 4 villains, at minimum (or else the hero couldn’t have multiple adventures), and many vllains run huge NGO superpowers, if not actual countries.

And besides, this general scenario has already blown up in their faces once before: keeping Kal’dur’s infiltration of the Light a secret wound up with his brain fired by his own friend Miss Martian, and very nearly go them both killed in Black Manta’s retaliation.

All I’m saying is that someone’s getting “Season Two Miss Martian-ed” this seasn, and the stakes and likely collateral damage have all benn increased.

[mondofunnybooks]

The thing is, come 2006, funnybooks just weren't very Funny.

Not intentionally, anyway.

Of those of us who once read Dave Sim's opinion piece in Hero Illustrated that suggested all ongoing superhero comics are best read as some kind of Rodney Dangerfield routine, then comics were doing their outright best to be utterly hilarious.

Infinite Crisis attempted to fix the Continuity as if the history of Fights N Tights were some kind of sacred text that required updating in case serious questions were asked on how Batman could possibly be fighting crime if his book debuted during World War 2 because that would put him in his 70s! Superboy-Prime also debuted in that series, apparently meant as an Evil Mary Sue by DC Editors rather miffed at this invention called 'The Internet', which would allow readers to voice their thoughts on comics they'd paid for. We regard Superboy-Prime as our spirit animal.

Civil War was a Very Serious Effort to marry the themes of military abusing power in an attempt to detain terrorist suspects by having Iron Man throw people who wouldn't reveal their secret identity to the world into another dimension. This would be followed a couple of years later with an analogy for Guantanamo Bay and the new distrust for Muslims brought about by the events of the 9-11 strikes. (mainly featuring green aliens from space pretending to be Jarvis The Butler. And possibly Ant-Man. We forget. )

Oh, Elektra turned out to be a Skrull as well, so that was good, but sadly Marvel wouldn't go as far as to say that literally every appearance of Elektra that wasn't written by Frank Miller was actually Skullektra.

Meanwhile, Marvel punished retailers the world over for a plot point being revealed on a comic news website by not sending their main purchaser preview copies anymore. Because what every comic retailer dreads is being denied the opportunity to order more Marvel stock.

So, yes, an absolute plethora of material worth parodying and humbugging to go mad over, panic trumping a desire to be sick and crazy over the whole madhouse.

It's just that weren't many voices left to actually do the lampooning. MAD Magazine had long been defanged by it's sale to Warner Brothers decades previously, all the good writers on our beloved Twisted Toyfare Theatre had been snapped up to work on Robot Chicken, Amazing Heroes had been cancelled, Gary Groth had been less of a editorial voice on The Comics Journal for a while by that point and Harvey Kurtzman had passed away a long time ago.

I mean, there was Wizard, but they'd been shown to back off whenever advertisers had issues with their soft touch so weren't really worth mentioning in the first place unless you considered mocking comics from the 70's for not conforming to the norms of a 90's audience the very cutting edge of comedy commentary.

So imagine this writer's surprise to see a magazine advertised in possibly Comic Book Artist (Now Comic Book Creator, a magazine published by Two Morrows Press and readers are advised to get as many back issues of it as possibly. Learn how the late, lamented, iconic and possibly best comic shop in London, otherwise known as Comic Showcase, was probably responsible for League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen being published!) called 'Comic Book Nerd'.

Comic Book Nerd appeared not to be mucking around. Preview art offered educated attacks on modern comics anatomy, the hilarity of the notion of the superstar comics artist, the soulless pandering of publishers to flippers desperate to try and find an investment in recently published titles, the pomposity and pretension of the highbrow small press comics scene...

We'd not seen such an articulate and educated assault on the hand that feeds it since the last time Evan Dorkin published an issue of Dork! and obviously we were instantly in love. As with anything worth reading, we ordered extra copies in assuming that the readership were more than capable of the self awareness needed to laugh at itself and would take the book in the humour intended.

Suffice to say, we may have overestimated our audience. It's worth noting we have enemies who have never forgiven us for finding the issue of Legion Of Super-Heroes where small aliens in beanie hats kill Sun Boy by barbecuing him on a spit and then eating him to death one of the funniest comics ever published. We live in fear of having our flight ring revoked by Arm Fall-Off Boy* at any minute.

Having been blown away by Pete's ability to change style based on the assignment rather than forcing every brief to fit into one over practised, over swiped and under referenced aesthetic like 95% of comic artists, we looked on further into his works and discovered the gorgeous 'Morbid', published by Dark Horse but good luck finding the damn things, a love-letter to both horror movies and EC Comics in a knowing but funny writing style married with fumetti plus lots of very silly special effects. Very much recommended to fans of things like 'The Goon', 'MST3K' or anyone who thinks Vampira was way cooler than Wonder Woman could ever be.

Here at MONDO FunnyBooks we don't really do hero worship and fear at the sight of celebrities anymore. Especially in comics because we've seen most of them throwing up in a pub toilet but even we were slightly frightened when sending a friend request to the Powerful Pete Von Sholly. We stuttered the timid words 'Hello Sir your comic was dead good can we be friends please?' and somehow we ended up learning about his most recent project: LOVECRAFT ILLUSTRATED which is currently on Kickstarter with only a few days to go. We'll turn over the description to him. (Text taken from his Kickstarter page.)

'In 2014 Ramsey Campbell introduced me to Pete Crowther of PS Publishing and I proposed a DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH book with my illustrations sprinkled throughout- He liked it, we did it and then he suggested we do ALL Lovecraft that way in a series of books under his PulpS imprint. I have collected all the art form those along with many sketches and single pieces that are Lovecraft-centric into Pete Von Sholly’s Lovecraft Illustrated. Here is some background about me and HPL.  

Context is everything, so in order to say something about me and Lovecraft I need to lay some out: One fateful late 60's afternoon I was sitting in study hall (tenth grade, age 16 or so and supremely bored) looking through the Modern Library omnibus volume entitled "Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural". The final two stories in the book (as if they saved the best for last) were by somebody called H.P. Lovecraft; they were “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Dunwich Horror”.

The name Lovecraft was vaguely familiar.There were glancing mentions in Famous Monsters and paperbacks with his name on them in those pages but there were no Lovecraft movies yet so I had no idea what to expect. I read “The Rats in the Walls” first. it was a fairly short story but I experienced a delightful jolt unlike anything that I could get from all that I was familiar with.

There were horrors aplenty; hordes of ravenous rats, hideous nightmares, ancient underground grottoes leading off into infinite subterranean darkness and pocked with giant pits full of sawed and chewed bones of humans and things not altogther human and finally a man who went mad and tumbled down the evolutionary scale to embrace his ancestral cannibalistic form of nourishment... but, and maybe best of all, many hints of things just beyond the reach of the light- including something called "Nyarlathotep"... Hints which were even more exciting and pleasing than the overt horrors.

“The Dunwich Horror” was next and it was all over when I finished that one. I had been introduced to the Necronomicon, Arkham with its Miskatonic Library, Yog-Sothoth and so many key Lovecraftian entities and conceptions which were new to me. And it excited my imagination- and made me want to draw what I was imagining.'

For those interested, The Kickstarter is the link. See Ya in the Funnypages, Mondo Maniacs!:

*We have lied about many things in our lives but we could not make up Arm Fall-Off Boy on our best day ever.  Look him up if you don't believe us!

https://www.kickstarter.com/…/pete-von-shollys-…/description