Johnsification

If you watch all those cleaning, reorganizing, and remodeling shows on TV (and I do, because it's much easier than cleaning, reorganizing, or remodeling), then you learn that "everything in your house should have a place, and if it doesn't, it shouldn't be in your house."

That's some of the spirit that's been behind the "Character Donation" series the Absorbascon has been doing jointly with Seven Hells. That, and, of course, anti-Marvel snark; we're only human, ya know.

A similar impetus drives the "Rungs of Villainy" and "Dynastic Centerpiece" series. By analysizing the mytho-structural context of function-driven identities in comics' Manichean etho-sphere, we deepen and enrich our understanding of the artform, its conventions, and, perhaps, how it reflects ourselves and our society. Or maybe it's just funny. Take your pick.

Anyway, we are just following DC's lead, I guess. They've got their writers taking all the "old" characters lying around, rearranging them and using them in new and interesting ways. If you sent yourself a tachyon-email to about 10 years ago and told your past self that the Calculator and Cat-Man would be breakout characters of 2005, your past self would just laugh and delete it.

So many who read comics -- or, at least, those who write about reading them -- seem to think that creativity is about creating new characters. They fall over for every trendy little "Girl 13" or "Fallen Angel" or "Breach" some frustrated novelist pulls together (no offense meant, really, to those particular characters; replace them with others in your mind, if you want!). They make fun of icons like Superman and Batman, as old, empty, tapped out. Some people always want what's new and different, not because it's necessarily better, but because they are people intrinsically dissatisfied whatever is or went before, and who think the grass is always greener on the other side of the origin. They keep "small press" small; all those new characters they revere one minute are abandoned when the new flavor-of-the-month comes along ("Dude, aren't you reading 'Pistachio Girl and the Sprinkles'? I've never read anything like it!").

They're the same people who can read Ayn Rand without laughing or puking (ain't that right, JP?). They worship individualism and independence, failing to see that greatness can be achieved only in a larger context than us, the context of society as a whole. People disconnected from their society don't really amount to much, I think. If a man living alone on the moon makes a masterpiece, who gives a flying? He is a tree, falling in a forest.

So it is with comic book characters disconnected from the larger context of their "comic book universe". DC toyed with this idea in the original JSA and early "cross-pollination" between titles, but Marvel first carried it to its logical conclusion: anyone in Marvel might interact with anyone else in Marvel, tune in to see it! Of course, putting them all in Manhattan was overkill, but that's a different discussion.

And what are DC's best writers doing lately? Ellis, Simone, Morrison, Johns, et al.; they're revitalizing existing characters from DC's stable -- it's enormous, nearly ENDLESS stable of characters. So many that DC actually could give away the 365 characters that Devon and I will nominate as "donations", without it causing more than a slight bump in their overall storytelling. Making up new characters for the DCU, at this point, isn't a sign of creativity; it's a sign that you lack the creativity to do something new with any of the existing characters.

.I'll label this process of creative re-use "Johnsification" after its greatest practitioner, who takes broken pieces of DC's past and turns them into some fine-looking mosaics! His use of Ian Karkul to explain Obsidian's powers; of the shared Egyptian basis for the Hawkman, Dr. Fate, and Captain Marvel myths; of a common explanation for Hector Hammond and the Shark, which ties them to Hal through his USAF and sci-fi connections; these are merely a few recent examples. And what fun it all is, delighting longtime readers while enticing and amazing newer ones!

That's a "trend" Seven Hells and the Absorbascon are happy to join in on! We'll suggest "Johnsifications" ourselves from now on, and label them as such, proposing groupings and connections of existing DC characters we think would enrich the mytho-structural context of the DCU's etho-sphere.

Or that would simply be fun.