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Doom Patrol by Rachel Pollack: They Liked My Powers But Couldn’t Handle Me

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“The ones who return are the ones who suffer. Live as if you’ve never lived before.” – Niles Caulder receiving a message from his subconscious. Doom Patrol #73. “The Dream Patrol: Return of the Windowmen,” written by Rachel Pollack.

In his introduction to The Vertigo Tarot, Sandman creator Neil Gaiman mentions the surreal experience of accompanying author Rachel Pollack on a visit to an esoteric shop in Camden to pick up a Tarot deck. This resulted in Gaiman, “feeling like I’d just gone into a record show with someone who, to my surprise, turned out to be one of the Beatles, as Rachel modestly admitted her identity to the lady behind the counter, and signed autographs.”

Last month, Gaiman wrote again about Pollack, but this time under heavier circumstances. “I am writing this at the request of her wife Zoe,” he wrote on his Mastodon account, “to let her friends know that the end is soon, and to let the obituarists know too.” [Read more…] about Doom Patrol by Rachel Pollack: They Liked My Powers But Couldn’t Handle Me

Steve Orlando’s Marauders—Annotated, Part 3!

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Steve Orlando’s Marauders #10-12—Annotated!

Marauders #9-12

Credits: Steve Orlando writes; Eleonora Carlini draws; Matt Milla colors; Travis Lanham letters; covers by Peach Momoko (#9-10) and Kim Jacinto (#11-12).

This is the final of three annotated entries on the recently ended Marauders volume 2, a whirlwind of cosmic and timey-wimey adventure that perhaps tried to do too much in too little time and space (ironically enough!)—but should provide plenty of worthwhile fodder for further mutant adventures.

The first entry annotates issues #1-5; the second covers issues #6-9.

Here, we look at the wrap-up to the title’s main story, about the human/mutant Threshold society—which also, oddly enough, contains the seed of the origin of Krakoa itself! Unfortunately, without the rest of this gonzo deep-time history, it’s very unclear what the storytellers were trying to achieve with Threshold. Seriously, given the ease with which Mars was terraformed… why not just give them a whole new planet, which they can verify isn’t already home to indigenous life and won’t be open to damaging time paradoxes. Perhaps there was a plan here, but for the foreseeable future, we just won’t know.

That said, whatever your feelings about this title, no one can deny our storytellers here took big swings and wild risks to do something different. In an industry where nothing is ever guaranteed, they took bold moves to see how far they could get before the corporate guillotine fell. If the series wasn’t for you, hopefully, you didn’t sink much, if any, cost into it—and if you still like X comics years down the line, who knows, maybe someone will take some of the most interesting material laid out here and give it another go in a story that can run its course. Sometimes, it never happens, but if it feels relevant to the right creator, the raw story stuff from prior runs does get told, even if it’s piecemeal, by different creators over time. That is just the biz.

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Steve Orlando’s Marauders—Annotated, Part 2!

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Marauders #6-8

Credits: Steve Orlando writes; Eleonora Carlini (#7-8) and Andrea Broccardo (#6) draw; Matt Milla colors; Ariana Maher letters; covers by Kael Ngu (#6-7) and Peach Momoko (#8).

This is the second of three annotated entries on the recently ended Marauders volume 2, a whirlwind of cosmic and timey-wimey adventure that perhaps tried to do too much in too little time and space (ironically enough!)—but should provide plenty of worthwhile fodder for further mutant adventures.

The first entry annotates issues #1-5; the third covers issues #9-12.

While the last entry speculates on where the title’s deepest revelations, regarding the origins of Krakoa itself, might be headed beyond Marauders #12, this one 1) provides some backstory reference for each Marauder, per their character-revealing therapy sessions; 2) covers the obscure pulls Orlando utilizes for the B plot (which unfortunately likely won’t get picked on again for quite a while); and 3) lays out the basics of the title’s main story, about the human/mutant Threshold society 2 billion years ago.

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Who Watched the Watchmen? Alan Moore’s “What We Can Know About Thunderman”

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Alan Moore’s relationship with superheroes in the wake of Watchmen has been… contentious, to say the least. This is due in no small part to Alan’s relationship with DC Comics. To be perfectly blunt, DC Comics’ attitude to Alan Moore can be best compared to an abusive ex-boyfriend who has never gotten over being dumped. So he (DC) routinely calls his former girlfriend (Alan) at the dead of night, engineering schemes to get her back, all the while badmouthing the poor woman to anyone he can pull into listening to him ramble like an incoherent drunk at a third rate bar that doesn’t even have any decent rats. All the while the woman is just trying to move on with her life, but everyone from old friends to complete strangers to new co-workers simply won’t stop asking her about the ex.

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At one point, she’s working in the same office as her ex (because the son of a bitch bought out the whole building without her knowledge), and she makes it perfectly clear that she wants nothing to do with her ex. And, for a short while, the guy acquiesces. But when she begins to work on something personal and difficult, something that could get the ex into trouble with the sort of people you should make life more miserable for (and one thing that was so arbitrary, you have to assume he knew it’d piss her off but did it anyways), the ex decides to butt in and make it impossible for her to do the gig. So, naturally, she quits.

Then, one day, the son of a bitch sends one of her old friends—a term used loosely given what’s about to happen—to ask her to help with something they did together a few years back. She says that she wants absolutely nothing to do with it, but won’t say anything negative about it. Offhandedly, the friend notes, “that’s good, he said you would be quietly compliant.” At this, she explodes at the world, cuts off most of her friends who stood by the abusive ex while he did unconscionable things to her, and badmouths the sons of bitches who weren’t there but think nothing truly unconscionable happened (or, rather, profit off the unconscionable). In response, the ex decides to hurt her best friend, whose brother is in hospital at the time with something that looks fatal.

So yeah, Alan Moore and DC have a rocky relationship, to say the least.

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