Yeah, so I finally got around to reading 52 Week 21 last night and I finally got to see what all the controversy was all about. Trajectory, a throw-away character from a throw-away team from a throw-away storyline in a book that I am sometimes wanting to throw away all together, was killed. She was a girl.

Now, I do understand that women have gotten the short end of the stick for fall too long in comics. Actually, they’ve mostly gotten the business end of laser guns, axes, refrigerators and Dr. Light. Comics have an awful history of brutalizing female characters where the male characters almost always come out clean and heroic. In comics, when a man dies, he is a martyr. When a woman dies, she is a plot device.

But I don’t think this really is the case for Trajectory, the speedster of Lex Luthor’s Infinity Inc. who had her neck twisted (off?) by some random villain being called the “new Blockbuster.” She was clearly always meant to be killed off (murdered by Luthor, in fact) which is a bad sign, but she also, with the exception of Natasha Irons, was the most fleshed out character in the new Infinity Inc.

Of course, it is very sketchy that her career highlights were being hooked on drugs and being murdered, but we also knew her motivations and personality, which is more than we can say about the other members of Infinity Inc.. I can’t even list the other members of Luthor’s little troupe.

Now, I think it’s pretty obvious that all of the members of Infinity Inc. is going to loose their powers by the end of 52. That would mean that even if Trajectory wasn’t killed (let’s say whichever one came from Gary, IN got his head ripped off), she till would have fallen victim to depowering and then obscurity. My point is, all of the characters of Infinity Inc. are made to be forgotten, so why should people be upset that the one who is given the spotlight but is also killed happens to be female? Would it have been better if she had remained in the background only to be depowered and tossed aside?

But then again, other than the well-established Natasha Irons, Trajectory was the only female character on the team (I think?). What were the odds she would be the one to be brutally killed?

When I heard that Marv Wolfman would be writing Nightwing, I got excited. Mostly because Wolfman and Dick go way back and I was sure he would drop that Jason Todd crap that Bruce Jones was using during his “One Year Later” arc.

I swear, I will boycott anything that features Jason Todd from no one. That dude must really be a zombie because whenever he shows up he stinks up the comic to high heaven.

Back on topic, I was looking forward to Wolfman writing and when I picked it up at the comic shop and saw that Dan Jergens would be drawing it, I got a wave of instant nostalgia. But it didn’t take me two pages to realize that I really wasn’t going to like this issue.

I will admit that it is better than Jones’ crappy scripts, but that’s not saying much. The issue is incredibly dated with Wolfman’s sometimes chunky dialogue (and that narration, good God!) and Jergen’s art looks exactly like it did fourteen years ago when I though he was the shit. This issue is way too retro for me.

There are a handful of really bad parts, like Raptor, who is some spaz in armor that somehow is able to take down Nightwing without even trying. Raptor’s dialogue is especially bad. At one point Nightwing says something about how Rappy claims to have not killed someone. Raptor replies “I didn’t. But you’re not him!” I then expected him to say “I know you are, but what am I?” soon after.

And now we have new babes to fawn over Dick. There’s Ryan who is a masseuse and then there is her roommate Zen, who is a bit of a ultra-liberal poststructalist Asian background character. She doesn’t approve of the system of family names but she’ll name herself after an Asian philosophy? Want to make a pool as to how long these two stick around. I predict they will leave as soon as Wolfman leaves the book.

And the script is a little spotty. I wish I had scans on hand to illustrate this point, but you’ll just have to trust me that I’m totally right. Transitions between scenes are really, really jarring. On one page the scene shifts three times without any visual cues of transition. One panel has Dick, the next one is of Raptor across town, then back to Dick a few panel’s later. It’s just very sloppy and I haven’t seen that level of poor transitions since the mid-eighties. Oh, yeah, it’s Wolfman. And the only book of his I have is Crisis on Infinite Earths, which I never finished due to lack of interest and readability. Nostalgia has clouded my judgement again!

But it’s not all bad.

The stuff with Dick trying to get back to himself is interesting. Of course, I don’t understand why he can’t find a job. He’s one of the best heroes in the world, but he has no employable skills? He can’t do some networking with those Wayne family connections? Whatever, it’s still cool.

And then there is the shower scene, which I do like because it shows a male character clearly being eroticized, just like female characters always are. If it were a woman in the same panel no one would have batted an eye, but since it was Dick it really stands out. Good. I hope there are a thousand homophobic fanboys burning down forums in flamewars over it. And the slash fans are probably going rabid.

And the best part is just meta this comic is. One of the new Monitors shows up at the end, telling Dick that he was supposed to die in the Crisis and evidently it is a problem that he didn’t. What is so cool about this is that Dan Didio, the editor-in-chief of DC Comics, wanted Nightwing to bite it during Infinite Crisis. Luckily, someone with half a brain saved Dick from this fate.

I really think we were very close to losing Dick there if you look at Infinite Crisis #7. On the page where Alex Luthor shoots Nightwing with some kind of energy gun, it looks like he is just knocked out, but Batman goes apeshit and holds a pistol to Luthor’s head. My theory is that this page was drawn before it was decided that Nightwing would live but before it was sent to printing a word balloon indicating that Dick was dead was omitted. He was then added to the scene where Bruce and Tim sail off into the sunset.

Anyway, I think it is awesome that Wolfman is making a plot out of Didio’s editorial stupidity. The art, clumsy transitions and awful dialogue really turn me off of this run, but the meta nature of the plot has me too intrigued to stay way.