InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "bro"

kingrockwell (kingrockwell) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-07-29 19:38:00

Current music:	Sparks ~ "This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us"
Entry tags:	char: animal man/buddy baker, char: ellen baker, char: maxine baker, char: starfire/koriand'r, creator: chris batista, creator: gerry conway, publisher: dc comics, title: animal man

Hey guys, guess what book I'm dropping!

Which one bothers me more, that Ellen's calling Buddy on shit she'd have learned to deal with years ago, or that the shit she's calling on him has never been one of Buddy's things since, well, fucking ever?

It gets worse!

(sorry this scan is bigger and still looks shitty. this is why i don't like using my own scans)

I'm-- I'm really beside myself with anger right now. I found it jarring to find Buddy fighting supervillains to begin with when this mini started, but to completely change his role as a superhero only to set up fucking this is infuriating! Family always came first for Buddy! And Maxine, dammit, Maxine was supposed to grow up to be Animal Girl. :( :( :(

There's more bullshit with Cliff who's grown up to be a workaholic lawyer to be like his dad, but Conway essentially bulldozes all of Buddy' relationships with his family (which is what made him worth reading to begin with!) so he can give us this:

Fuck this book. You can see what I'm guessing might be Prismatik coming in on the last panel to beat them up, well let her have him! I don't give a shit anymore, I'd rather save the money for food.

And here I was gonna come on here to fanwank about the League of Titans (Dick's Nightwing again, and hardly looks the mid-to-late forties he should be, discuss) and the really poor color consistency (Clark' eyes can decide if they're blue or green (i almost wanted to think it was Kon, since it would've been fun if he got Lex's eyes, but no dice), Kory's eyes being yellow, and Cliff going blond sometime in the skipped fifteen years), but the book had to come and along and distract me, by sucking.

I'll give it one thing, Chris Batista brings it pretty fierce, but even he can't save this sinking ship.

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	kamino_neko 2009-07-30 07:00 am UTC (link)
	Dick, currently, should be mid/late 20s. Dick started at 16, in current canon, yes? So, if he started ~3 years after Batman, that puts him at 23-28. (Batman and Superman have been around for somewhere between 10 and 15 years.) Add 15 to that, and he's in his late 30s to early 40s, here. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	sistermagpie 2009-07-30 02:52 pm UTC (link)
	16??? I can't imagine any continuity where he would have been 16 when he started. But he is, I think, pretty consistently mid-20s now. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

kingrockwell
2009-07-30 03:43 pm UTC (link)

Only mid-20s? I've always seen him as starting younger and being older than that. I like to think of him as being 29, since that was the age TPTB had Bruce as for basically ever (Frank Miller pitched DKR because he was turning 30 and couldn't deal with the fact that he was going to be older than Bruce), though I suppose he started earlier than that, so mid-20s might fit Dick better.

As long as they don't forget Babs was a few years older.

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sistermagpie
2009-07-30 04:34 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, I always tend to go by more of a vague idea about how old they all are based less on a number and more on "stage of life." And let's face it, once they get past 20 they pretty much all have a window of ages they can be. I think most people just go by the age the character seems based on whatever factors they pick up on, and keeping them relative to each other. Like I know somebody at one point said Bruce started at 19, which I just can't see. Batman has never been a teengager to me. It just wouldn't have worked, even with Bruce. Babs is older than Dick, who's older than Jason, who's older than Tim...but the Robins have gotten closer to each other in age to each other over the years. Kind of a sliding scale to give everybody a spot.

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kingrockwell
2009-07-30 06:04 pm UTC (link)

Anyone who tries to tell me Bruce was younger than 24 when he started will get nothing but laughter.
We know from Nightwing 153 that Babs is old enough to wish she was 22 again, so the late-20s to early-30s might be fairer to her, and guess that she's maybe 5 years older than Dick (it would be old enough to make Babsgirl/Robin as weird as it was, but not as bad when it was Oracle/Nightwing)?

Confusing the issue further, according to a conversation Tim and Babs have in Cry For Blood (which is nine year old now, but who knows how long in comic book time), Helena's family was killed when she was eight, which was stated to be "roughly fifteen years ago". The "roughly" bit is probably to be intentionally vague, so I'm tempted to add a few years to it, because I find it hard to believe Helena could be my age at the time, considering she'd not only need to have finished college and gotten a teaching job in Gotham (simultaneously training the whole time) and establish ten years worth of comics afterward. She debutted around the time Babs stopped being Batgirl, so she should be around the same age if not older, but never really comes off that way. Putting her older than Dick is certainly no problem, as he doesn't mind older women (hi Babs!), but that still doesn't settle things. Whether anything in Huntress: Year One settles or further confuses this I couldn't say.

The only tangentially related character whose age I can confirm is Renee Montoya, who turned 29 in Tec 747 (cover dated August 2000) and a show of her passport in 52 give her a birthdate of Sep 7, 1970. I have a problem though, believing that she's been The Question for three (or even one!) years, so we'll just keep it to 36-7, but, not knowing her age in relation to anyone else, that doesn't really help matters for the Batfamily as a whole.

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