Broken Frontier

Hello, everyone, and for our readers in the U.S., Happy Independence Day! Welcome to Guiding Lines, a look at tomorrow’s comics today! This is William Gatevackes. Let’s take a look at the comics arriving in stores tomorrow, July 6, 2006.

Devi #1 is scheduled for Thursday and is the first title to be released by the new comic company Virgin Comics. Virgin Comics was created in November of 2005 as a partnership between businessman Sir Richard Branson, self-help guru Deepak Chopra, filmmaker Shekhar Kapur and South Asia’s leading comic publisher, Gotham Entertainment Group.

The company was created to serve the burgeoning entertainment market in Asia; India in particular. Most of the books published will have a certain Southern Asian flavor. Devi, as a matter of fact, is drawn from an ancient Indian myth. It tells the story of a young girl chosen by the gods to become a warrior and save humanity from evil.

The concept is universal, but how will it play in the United States? Sure, the company seems like it’s focusing on a more international market. However, the U.S. is still a major force in the comics business. Several years ago, I would have said a book like this wouldn’t have much popularity outside of the South Asian population in our country. But with the enormous success Manga has become in the States, these books could become the next big thing.

And let’s not rule out the Indian market in this country either. In the 2000 Census, 1,023,000 people listed India as their country of origin. Sure, not all of them are comic book readers or would be, but they are a sizable demographic that has yet to be tapped by the major comic companies in the U.S. If Virgin could reach just 5% of this total, they’d have a success in their hands. 

And Virgin Comics has a lot going for it, namely Sir Richard Branson. Branson is a marketing genius and has created various companies with the Virgin name which made him a billionaire. His partners aren’t slouches either.  Kapur was nominated for a Golden Globe for his direction of the movie, Elizabeth, and has also directed the recent remake of Four Feathers. And Chopra is respected as a leader in marrying conventional medicine with more traditional healing methods. These are three diverse people at or near the top of their respective professions. They know how to be successful and this might transfer over to their comic venture. 

I will be watching the company with interest, especially how successful they will be in the U.S.A. They could just be a flash in the pan, a worldwide success everywhere else but here or a new company and creative style that will wrestle shelf space away from Manga. Only time will tell.

Speaking of diversity and trying to reach an Asian market, DC brings us The All-New Atom #1 this week. Springing out of last week’s Brave New World one-shot and based on concepts by Grant Morrison, writer Gail Simone and artist John Byrne tell the story of Ryan Choi, a man of Asian descent who not only fills in Ray Palmer’s role as a Professor at Ivy University, but also his role as the Atom.

The use of an Asian-American man as the new Atom is the next step in DC’s recent policy of showing diversification in their books. The Asian-American Atom joins an African-American Firestorm and a Mexican-American Blue Beetle on the shelves. He is soon to be joined by a lesbian Batwoman, who you better believe I will be talking about in a couple of weeks.

DC states this policy is a way of making their universe look more like the world outside our windows—I’m sure that they wouldn’t mind new readers coming in because of it as well—but I don’t know if they are going about it the right way.

Don’t get me wrong, I think diversifying is a good thing. It’s a little hard to take seriously an all-white Justice League when the world is composed of many different shades. Racial and ethnic diversity is a big part of America, from the big cities to the small towns. It seems only right that each member of the melting pot should have a hero to call their own.

But every culture that makes up the melting pot has its own history and traditions. What good would an Asian Atom be if his Asian background doesn’t come into play? In other words, if the character of the Atom would be no different if he were white, Latino, African-American or Asian, how does that go towards fostering diversity? If the hero’s ethnicity is interchangeable without affecting the story, in my opinion, that is not a great step in what DC is trying to accomplish.

I don’t know if The All-New Atom is going to be like that, but after reading the first few issues of the Blue Beetle series, I don’t think much would be changed if the character was an Irish-American teenager instead of a Mexican-American one. There might be some subtle nuances in the character that I am forgetting, but I think you could tell the same story about a Sean O’Leary Blue Beetle as you did with a Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle.

Part of this might have to do with the creators tapped to write the books; Keith Giffen and John Rogers don’t appear to be Latino names any more than Gail Simone or Grant Morrison appear to be Asian. Granted, they are all good writers, but there are plenty of Latino and Asian American creators that could do just as good of a job, but at the same time draw on their own upbringing to flesh out the character’s backgrounds and ethnicity more.

On the other hand, even if the new Atom is a homogeneous portrayal, it will still be better than how Asians are usually portrayed. Many times they are seen as evil Fu Manchu-type manipulators or some variation of the martial arts/Bruce Lee archetype. Of course, there are exceptions, and creators have gotten better over the years portraying all ethnic groups, but still what comes to mind are those two stereotypes.

Yes, DC should get kudos for their attempts to diversify their line-up. But we have to ask: are they going far enough? 

Uncanny X-Men # 475 is the debut of writer Ed Brubaker on the title. He is joined by Billy Tan, who had done several fill-in issues of the title from regular artist Chris Bachalo. The first storyline follows directly after Brubaker’s Deadly Genesis series as we follow Vulcan in his vendetta against the Shi’Ar Empire.

Marvel likes to juggle its X-title creative staffs around every so often. The books consistently rank high on the Diamond 100 lists, which lead me to believe that these regularly occurring shake-ups are unnecessary. But maybe that is why they remain at the top of the charts. When you are guaranteed a fresh start every year or two, perhaps X-fans stick around to see what happens next.

And each creator change usually means a change in the make-up of the team as well. This issue introduces a roster made up of Professor X, Nightcrawler, Havok, Polaris, Warpath and Marvel Girl. An eclectic bunch, I’ll admit, and a return to each X-title having its own team with no intermingling allowed. This usually doesn’t last long as each creator succumbs to the desire to bring Wolverine into the mix. But for the time being, as far as X-Titles go, Wolvie is the exclusive domain of Astonishing X-Men.

I am also tickled by the hierarchy of the various X-Men books. For the longest time, Uncanny X-Men was the only X-Men book and therefore ruled the roost. Then ‘Adjectiveless’ X-Men started, and propelled by being a vehicle for superstar creator Jim Lee, it became the big dog in the pound. Nowadays, both have taken a backseat to Whedon and Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men as the line’s Alpha book. And by Alpha book I mean the book that features the A-list characters, hottest creators and where if there is going to be any changes to the status quo, they would happen here.

I wasn’t a big fan of Deadly Genesis and I’m not really that thrilled about the Uncanny team make-up, but have liked Brubaker’s past work enough to give this a shot.

Also spinning out of last week’s Brave New World book is OMAC #1. Written by Bruce Jones and with art by Renato Guedes, this features a new OMAC hitting the scene. It should be interesting on how they explain this because as of the end of the Infinite Crisis, all OMACs and their controller, the Brother Eye satellite, were destroyed.

Perhaps this limited series will serve as a bridge between the Infinite Crisis and Jack Kirby versions of the character. The two concepts share a number of similarities, but the Kirby version always existed with a tenuous connection to mainstream DC continuity. Of course, they could, and most likely will, go in a different direction…
And finally, Marvel gives us Beyond #1. The limited-series is written by Dwayne McDuffie, comic veteran and story editor on the Static Shock and Justice League Unlimited cartoon series, with art by Scott Kolins.

The title will revisit the same territory as the legendary Secret Wars series of the 80s. In Beyond, a powerful being gathers a diverse group of heroes kidnapped from Earth and takes them to a planet called “Battleworld”.

This is essentially the same plot as the Secret Wars series, except that series featured all of Marvel’s big guns at the time instead of characters like Firebird and Gravity. The powerful being from that series was called “the Beyonder”, which is further evidence that Beyond returns to the Secret Wars well.

I find it interesting that, if this is a true sequel to Secret Wars, Marvel would be so willing to greenlight this series over 20 years after the original. There is a certain percentage of the comic reading audience that wasn’t even alive when the first series came out. I wonder how they are going to straddle the fence between the people who remembered the original series and those who don’t.   

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William Gatevackes is a writer living in Mamaroneck, NY with his wife Jennifer. He also writes the periodic comic review at PopMatters.