I was fortunate enough to get to spend some time with a nice big stack of old issues of The Brave And The Bold today and I have two things to say: 1) goddamn, that Bob Haney can write him some craaaaaazy shit and 2) goddamn, they got Jim Aparo and other folks to draw some craaaaaazy shit.
First up is an issue of the title just prior to it becoming the Batman team-up book most of us remember it as. In issue 63, Wonder Woman and Super Girl turn into Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, foresaking their heroic identities to slut around a bit in France in “The Revolt Of The Super-Chicks.” After rescuing a couple of movie stars from an on-set disaster, Supergirl thinks that she’s tired of being a paragon of virtue and wants to get pounded real hard by some frog-eating piece of Eurotrash. Superman, is, of course, a bit incestually motivated to keep this from happening and he ring-a-ding-dings Wonder Woman, asking her to pop by Kara’s pad in Paris and give her what for. If you click on that picture there, you can see their initial discussion of this subject and how it turned into Diana trying a dress on and, well…just click on this next picture.
All it takes to get Wonder Woman wet in the knickers is apparently knowing some sort of secret French tongue move and she’s opting for a life of lying about on chaise longue and nibbling on snails? Darkseid really should look into this methodology next time he’s really freaking out over finding “Anti-Life,” you know? I was hoping that this story, which shows the two “super-chicks” struggling with trying to be normal and dainty females because they want to keep bumping uglies with Jean-Luc and Pierre or whatever their names were, would end with their having been mind controlled by the cover villain, Multi-Face. No, they’re just vapid cunts in this one until the last page, where they magically change their apparently pea-sized minds and go back to knocking down the sort of people who need that sort of thing in order to save the world. This even lacks the fun, stupid charm of Haney’s attempts to write “relevant” teenage characters and makes you want to smack the pair of femme-heroes about until they sober up. Bad form, really.
Oh, since I spoke of the Darkseid in the previous paragraph, I’d though you’d all like to see this charming image of Granny Goodness from issue 128’s Batman / Mister Miracle pow-wow. Sadly, this story does not connect to #151’s epic concerning the disco of death, but managed to make me shriek in abject horror anyway. Dance Music hasn’t had that much luck with comics, really - Dazzler, the Hypno-Hustler and his Mercy Killers, and the unforgivably-stupidly-named Superboy And The Ravers all sprang to mind far too quickly when contemplating music with repetitive beats, but it’s not like rock hasn’t had its own embarrassing comic book moments - think Sonic Disruptors.
Finally, two random images. The first is from a Hostess ad that was in one of the issues I flipped through - I found a copy of it on SeanBaby.com and edited it down to just the relevant panel that caused me much dismay for the children of the DCU. The second, well, doesn’t need much explanation at all, really.
They see an alien ship with Superman in tight pursuit
and they can’t be bothered to use exclamation points?
How fucking jaded are they?
“You shot me. Ow.”
“Tommy, you’re on fire.”
“Oh, no. A bear is mauling the counselor.”
Take that, Identity Crisis!
