This post is DC Universe specific.

[serinde]

dariodevil's slowpoke mail-order company finally sent his last month's stuff right before we left for London, and sweet thing that he is (and knowing what a huge Blue Beetle fan I am), he lent me Countdown #1 to read on the plane. Inside the below link you will find my exhausted, emotional, stream of consciousness and run-on sentenceful reaction to same which took up six scribbled pages in my notebook. But hey, it passed the time.


4/27, 9:45pm. Somewhere over the Atlantic

I'm in a plane just taking off for London, and I'm supposed to be settling down for sleep since it's a red-eye flight and we're going to land in six hours and plunge into a full day of unabashed tourism, but I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat and a solid kinfe of pain/pleasure in my heart, because someone else understands.

Someone else knows the Ted Kord that I know, not the goofy whipping boy with the weight problem that everyone else seems familiar with, but the smart, capable, gutsy, stop-at-nothing hero who handled himself just fine, thank you, for a double dozen issues of his own comic. Someone who took his original backstory and melded it perfectly into current time--of course, a junior hacker and a dot.com millionaire!--while yet acknowledging the unglory days between then and now. Not excusing them or covering them over, because they definitely happened, but giving them context and a reason to have been. And resultant consequences, too.

A lot has been said about Ted being left to fend for himself as his life is being swiftly & systematically blown to bits. On a literary level, you could say it's a device to pare him down to his most elemental self to meet his adversary (and if I wanted to be incredibly pretentious, I could draw a parallel to Ishtar's descent into the underworld in Babylonian myth, but I'll refrain), but that would be a pathetic and unsatisfactory thing if that's all it was. Instead, it all follows with perfect logic, perfect inevitability.

Of course Batman doesn't want to talk about what's going on. OMAC is his out-of-control Frankenstein, and he doesn't want anyone (especially not the "class clown") getting involved. And J'onn--let's be honest, the guy had to bear the leader badge through some fairly deeply retarded shit that Beetle was involved in. I can't entirely blame him for not immediately jumping to attention. Still, looking at the dialogue, you can see he's at least open to listening (compare Batman's reaction) if with a skeptical mind, at least until a major galactic war opens up in front of him. If Ted understands that this takes priority, can we do less?

And, Diana. Who is not only the one person besides Booster to believe, but who trusts, who respects Ted enough to let him own the problem. Who has been a witness to the doubts and lack of self-esteem that's plagued him since he first started playing with the big kids (heck, even before that--it's a running theme in the BB series), and who, with a few simple words, lets him know that she not only believes him, she believes IN him. Sometimes, that's all it takes to get us to start believeing in ourselves. And if you look at his face in the last panel of that scene, that's what I'm seeing.

Please note I'm not dancing with delight, here. I'm full of regrets. I wish that the people who so clearly understand Ted this well could have written a new series for him--a solo title, a buddy book with Booster, an ongoing team, whatever. I'm grieved beyond measure that now this can never happen. It's almost too cruel to get the taste of it and then have it yanked away. But life isn't fair, and sometimes the wrong people die; and if it's Ted's turn to take the Long Walk, I could not ask for a better send-off.

Let me just savor those last few pages again. A normal (if highly intelligent & trained) guy, with Everyman foibles and fears--whose flash of thought when first facing the architect of his woes was how he'd sound if only the girl he wants to impress could hear him now, my God, it's perfect, you know the crazy shit that goes through your head at the worst times--he doesn't have armor or deflective bracers or super-tough skin, no sorcerers or super-tech to bail him out, because he's not one of the "gods that walk the earth", just a guy doing the best he can, and he's staring down a gun barrel and with no one to ever see or know he HAS his moment as the greatest hero in the DC Universe.

I was going to post this to rac.*, but since it's like SIX WEEKS after everyone else has read & talked about Countdown, it seems sort of like digging up a dead horse. So I'm not sure and I welcome input on that score (dvandom, akawil, I'm looking at you).

Comments

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Go ahead and post it, discussions continue overall. :)

[msg1138.livejournal.com]

Wonderful post - I am not so much a DC zombie but still follow it enough to keep up. Although some of the pure illogic of the story (pointed out on the message boards) still spoils it for me somewhat.

It still seems a bit off to me that Ted would so obviously be in trouble and still be brushed off like that - wouldn't the JL have assigned someone to look into the situation, even if nothing had turned up at first (i.e., fruitless search of the warehouse)??

No doubt I am just re-hashing newsgroup discussions, which I follow intermittently...

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

Not so much. He didn't go to "The Justice League", he went to Bats and then J'onn, with results as seen above. And happened to run into Wonder Woman when he was getting bandaged up. Plus, he tried calling the JL when he discovered where the transmissions were coming from...and, unfortunately, got Bats again. TEH END

Also, bear in mind that the time frame is pretty compressed. It's entirely possible that Diana or even J'onn intended to bring it up at the next meeting, but the next meeting didn't happen within the couple of days that things started seriously going pear-shaped for Ted.