New Years Resolutions

Welcome back to another edition of Comic Relief! Where I talk about all sorts of things in the realm of Geekdom!

Welcome to 2017 everyone! It’s a New Year and with the New Year comes resolutions. So, with that in mind I have a resolution for all my readers: I will be posting at least twice a week. Mondays and Fridays will become Comic Relief days. However, obviously if there is something urgent like a new trailer, or just a pressing matter that I just need to get out there ASAP I will make a post, but for the most part I will be sticking to a set schedule.

This article in a way is also about New Year’s resolutions, well really a challenge for a certain comic book company. I mentioned in my last post of 2016 that DC has been on a tremendous upswing with its Rebirth property. However, one of the most exciting aspects of this Rebirth relaunch is the emergence of a subsidiary line within the main universe called Young Animals. This brand is being headed by former My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way , and is supposed to be a darker, stranger DC brand.

Frontman of the Young Animals brand has promised it to be a brand that tries to emulate early days of the famous DC subsidiary company: Vertigo. This promise is something that peeked my interest, so I picked up the first issues of the Young Animals brand that had been released: Doom Patrol, and Mother Panic. Both of these books are EXCELLENT reads and show a lot of promise as stories, but while they certainly emulate the tone of early Vertigo books, they still feel oddly lacking in something.

Vertigo’s two biggest books from its early years are, arguably, V for Vendetta and The Watchmen. What made these two titles in particular such a success was not just their darker tone, but the fact that they had a political message along with them. V for Vendetta was a love note to George Orwell and his classic novel 1984 and Watchmen was a book about essentially what would happen if super heroes were a government entity. The political implications of these books grounded them in reality and made the stories more relatable and concrete. The question now is, where exactly am I going with this?

Well it has always been an opinion of mine that DC’s biggest failing, especially since the New 52, is their tendency to ignore the issues of the real world. While I understand the appeal of DC is the fantastical element as a new pantheon, comics were intended to serve as a moral compass in a way. In a world of today where platitudes of gray are becoming increasingly the majority over those of stark black and white, it would be nice to see DC comics use some of its characters to handle these big issues.

When I was writing for moviepilot, I wrote a piece called The Gambit Not Taken. In it I discuss the complete disregard for a small character with SO much potential called Nightrunner. Nightrunner, real name Bilal Alsselah, was introduced back in 2010 in an issue of Detective comics, and was made the Batman of Paris. A child of a single mother from an Algerian immigrant family, Balil is a Parisian Muslim that grew up in the Parisian HLM (ghetto) and faced a lot of discrimination. His origin begins on his 16th birthday with being brutalized along with his best friend by police at a rally for fairer treatment to Muslim citizens of Paris. When discharged from the hospital, Balil's friend goes out that night with another protest group, this time a more violent one, and they try to Molotov the Police station. During the incident, the friend is gunned down. Conflicted over the loss of his friends to the police and the extreme tactics used by his people, Balil decided to train in the free running art, parkour, to become a symbol of justice on the streets of Paris akin to the Batman of Gotham. Eventually he is discovered by Batman and is made a part of Batman incorporated and is provided with an arsenal and training facility as a base of operations as the Nightrunner of Paris.

Paris' Nightrunner

This is just one example of a smaller level hero that DC has that is incredible, but that DC has neglected to use since the DC universe relaunch. There are many more characters that have been tragically neglected by their parent company, but could bring about incredible series. With the promise of something like Young Animals, trying to make stories akin to early Vertigo, this is an excellent opportunity to bring back these neglected characters to handle those more down to earth issues. Could you imagine a series where Nightrunner is trying to hunt down an underground extremist group of radical Islam, while simultaneously dealing with the immense Antisemitism of Paris? It would give DC the chance to tackle a real world issue with a Bat character that isn’t directly tied to Gotham. This is my challenge for DC comics, in the new year of 2017 to dig deep into their reserves, and bring to light the characters that have since been ignored since the start of the New 52 and use them for tackling more real world stories. I realize that this has always been more of Marvel’s thing, but it’s important for comic book heroes to handle real issues from time to time. Right now, after 2016, we could all use heroes that take on the issues that we have such difficulty doing ourselves, perhaps even show us a better path.

Hope everyone enjoyed! I know my last two articles have been DC topics, but no worries Marvel fans, the next two are for you! Stay tuned next week for a MARVELous edition of Comic Relief!