To Robson Rocha
Robson Rocha passed away from complications caused by the COVID-19 virus on July 11th. He was 41, and he was barely getting started. His ten-year career in comics was spent almost exclusively at DC Comics, where he went from a promising penciller stuck on books like the New 52 Lobo, Birds of Prey and Superboy, to a superstar-in-the-making. In 2016, he signed an exclusivity deal with DC, and he kept getting better and better. On Green Lanterns, he showed he could do big blockbuster action with a strong emotional core. On Aquaman, he leveraged that power to deliver some astoundingly evocative imagery with mythological gravitas. His last work to be released before his death, Future State: Justice League was a vote of confidence, a triumphant event comic proving once and for all that he was ready to strike it big.
Beyond the sadness, beyond this shared pain I feel, along with his family, his co-workers, and anyone that’s enjoyed any of his work, I’m actually pissed off. I’m angry at the virus, obviously, but I’m also angry with anyone that’s complicit in one way or another with its circulation, from the politicians who think keeping the economy running is worth any human life at all, to the agitators peddling debunked conspiracy theories to push their own scams. You are playing with lives that were never yours to play with, and I think you should stop. For everyone else: please, please, please, take care of yourselves. Please do whatever you can to get vaccinated as soon as possible. Please wear masks and respect social distancing whenever you are able. Not just for yourselves, but for the lives of the people around you. Thank you.
Now, the reviews:
I want to make two cases against The Flash Annual 2021, a comic that I find to be wholly cynical in the way it makes itself everything the loudest and most annoying parts of the Wally West fandom have been asking for. With the peerless dedication of a fanatic, it repeatedly affirms that the former Kid Flash is the fastest, coolest and most worthiest hero to carry the Flash mantle ever, almost like it was trying to persuade itself. Worse, of course, is the fact that, in order to do that, it has to negate everything that is interesting about Heroes in Crisis, in what is going to be remembered as the second worst retcon made to a character in 2021. (#1 being what America Chavez: Made in the USA did to the Utopian Parallel).
The first case I’m making against erasing Heroes in Crisis in the way this annual does is going to be the moral one, because it’s the one I care about the most, and you probably care about the least. Heroes in Crisis is very specifically about how trauma and mental illness aren’t just things you can discard or wish away. It’s about looking to one another for help with the burdens we carry, because we’re never alone. You can make mistakes along the way, which you have to be accountable for, but they shouldn’t make you underserving of compassion or help. (This is all in the text and if you don’t believe me, give it an actual re-read.) When you remove Wally’s responsibility from the events by having a semi-obscure villain be the cause instead, and when characters go out of their way to say “I forgive you, and you’re good and cool, let’s never speak of this again”, you’re taking a work of remarkable honesty and twisting it back into the kind of magical thinking behind some of the most violent injunctions thrown the way of people with psychological problems. To me, it is highly irresponsible to pretend that this is how things work.
That’s the moral case, it’s the one I’ve been making in one way or another any time I’ve defended Heroes in Crisis, it’s the one I wrote in the very first newsletter I sent out, and it’s the one that most people will object to if all they’ve experienced of that story is hot takes by the usual peanut gallery. I think I’ll have a better chance of convincing you if I make the second case, which is the practical case: The Flash Annual 2021 is just not a very good comic. In order to make the mechanics of its story make sense from a technical point of view, it has to launch into several paragraphs’ worth of absolute nonsense technobabble, all packed so densely the eye just glazes over it. That problem goes beyond this valiant attempt at trying to make any sense of what the Speed Force does, and it spills over into the way the characters spell out their motivations, at its worst in the page where Roy Harper explains why everything Wally has ever done up to this point is completely okay and everyone forgives him, which is just bloated with text.
Those failures add up into a comic that is already hard enough to read as it is, but worst of all to me is the fact that it can’t even commit to its bit. It’s half a retcon. It washes Wally’s hands clean, but it purposefully does not do anything about the people he has killed, who are still dead by the end of the annual. It does not change the timeline in any way, it just adds an absurd wrinkle that breaks everything to the pivotal moment of Heroes in Crisis. It’s pure substractive bullshit, rushing unearned absolution on a character instead of telling an interesting story, all to placate people who are too lazy to read. I hate it and you should too.
With its endgame ever approaching, it’s only natural for Rorschach #10 to return to the series’ central question, the one at the heart of its puzzle, the one that animates every single Rorschach test that has ever been. It goes like this: “Here is a picture. What do you see?”. Let’s take the sentences one at a time, and start at the start. The picture assembled over the course of this week’s issue is that of the last few unknown circumstances leading to the assassination attempt on Governor Turley, from how exactly the two would-be killers got in the convention hall to the fateful phone call that ended up stopping them. Remixing imagery from the nine issue previous and adding a bit of detective grit, answers are laid out, names are added to the web of conspiracy, and a question is asked. What did they see?
The answer will not surprise you if you’ve followed along with the themes of Rorschach. As stated over and over again in the course of this chapter of the investigation, they saw a story, and they wanted in, for one reason or another, thinking it would just be that, a story. As you’ve come to learn by now, stories are never just stories. Stories affect people, and people affect the world. We’ve explored the questions of “What happens when a story comes true, and why do people wish for that?” in previous issues, so really this is just underscoring the themes for effect. But the story of Laura and Wil is just that, one story within that of Rorschach, and with the picture fully in place, it’s time to step back and wonder just for whose benefit that story is being told. That’s the next big clue, and that’s where we’re going next.
Finally, it’s been a heavy week, so I feel like I need to close out the newsletter on a happy note. I had a big dumb grin reading the final story of this week’s Batman: Urban Legends. It’s been fairly big news, so either you’ve already seen it, and I don’t need to tell you why it made me so giddy all over, or you haven’t, and I’m not about to spoil it, because you deserve to see it for yourselves. Allow me to say this in lieu of a proper review: if comics are indeed the art of cool people dreaming up cool shit, then it doesn’t get any more comics than what Ryan Benjamin and Matthew Rosenberg pulled off. I’m ready for it! I want more of it! I need it! You know what you did!
Anyway, once more: see you next week and thank you.