Vibe: the Series

Vibe: The Series.

By all rights, I should be exulting about the fact that Vibe, history's most unfairly maligned of all Justice League members, is not only part of the New 52, not only in the Justice League of America, but also being given his own title.

I'm not exulting not because I am not overjoyed about it; I am. But, quite frankly, I simply consider it appropriate; it is time; it is his due.

Newsarama is, wisely, opined little on the development, having already ruined their own credibility to with their puerile and ignorant comments on Vibe before.  Fortunately, writer Andrew Kreisberg is more voluble about it, and there is much that he immediately gets right in his approach to Vibe.


(1)  "I owe Vibe one." says Kreisberg.  As does all of DC and its fans, Andrew!  DC's first Latino superhero was, on the whole, a well conceived character but not one well handled.  

(2) Vibe is Hispanic.  This may seem like a no-brainer.  After all, making Vibe a non-Hispanic would be like, I dunno, making Aquaman into a sword'n'sorcery title or the Martian Manhunter into a sane person or Green Arrow into a television series.  You should never underestimate just how stupidly and off-model a character can be 're-imagined'.  

(3) "Paco" is not actually a name, it's a nickname.  I almost fell over when I read Andrew call him "Cisco Ramone", since, of course, his name would actually be 'Francisco', but almost nobody not familiar with Spanish names would know that.  Certainly not the boneheads at Newsarama, who could never even manage to remember that Paco's family was Puerto Rican, not Mexican.

(4)  Vibe lives in Detroit.  Look, I've got no big love for Detroit; in fact, I don't know anyone who does.  I don't think of it as some wonderful, under-appreciated urban gem or faded star of industrial past.  It's not special to me at all, it's not my hometown.  But it IS Vibe's hometown.  Paco was a normal kid in a real-world city drawn into the bizarre world of DCU superheroes by virtue of his powers, and nothing symbolized that better than grounding him America's arguably least glamorous city.

(5) There is a reason for Vibe's powers.  The fact that Vibe had powers in the old DCU was just... a fact.  No one addressed it.  The world 'meta-gene' was never uttered.  Was he bitten by a radioactive tuning fork?  Only later, after he was dead did we 'discover' that one of his brothers (Reverb) had the same power.  And no one ever seemed to notice or care?  I can't help but think that even in a world as power-full as the old DCU that teenaged brothers with the ability to cause earthquakes would go wholly unnoticed.

(6) Paco's got a love/hate with a ne'er-do-well brother.  It's one of the few identifiable and unique elements of his origin.  Paco's brother always symbolized the path that Paco rejected, making the tough choices to do the right thing and become a hero.  And for me at least, it's the thing about him I can most easily relate to.

Oh and of course...

(7) AGENT DALE GUNN.  Because that's just freakin' genius/hilarity, people!