I was really shocked to hear (courtesy of Wizard Magazine) that one of the following four heroines
- Wonder Woman
- Catwoman
- Power Girl
- Oracle
will give birth in 2006.
Wonder Woman? Um ... how? Seriously, most people are expecting her to get reclayified in aught-six, later to be regalateanized after readers confirm that not even wearing Wonder Woman's costume will make Donna Troy interesting.
Catwoman? Okay, if Selina Kyle has a baby, then I want a new Catwoman. I want a selfish, amoral, fickle Catwoman, not a nurturing, maternal guardian of the East End.
Power Girl? Been there. Anyone who remembers the last time Power Girl had a baby, raise your hand. Now; who can explain it? What -- where did all the hands go?
Oracle? Now, that would be quite a story! As long as someone other than Dick Grayson is the father. Where is Jason Bard when we need him?
DC is not Marvel. Marvel characters have kids; it's part of their humanity (even when they're mutants ... oh, you know what I mean). But in DC, babies dent your iconic status (even worse than getting married, Clark). Babies make it very very very difficult to ignore issues of the passage of time (Remember when Franklin Richards was born? 1968). Babies are the kiss of death.
Grown up kids can show up, but they have to have done their growing up off-panel. Aquaman's son (Koryak, not Artie); Green Arrow's son (Connor); the real Starman's son (Jack); the original Atom's son (Damage). It's like the five-month Sequence of Maturation in soap operas: Swaddled Baby; First Christmas Season, Object of Custody Battle, Away at School, Hot Young Teen with Troublesome First-Time Romantic or Sexual Relationship.
Have a baby in the DCU and you might as well hang a "Shoot me now!" sign around your neck. Either you or the baby -- or both -- are headed for the afterlife or limbo. I could list all the examples, but it's easier to reverse it; does anyone know of any counterexamples? Hey, where'd all the hands go?
Anyway, I'm assuming it must be Oracle.
29 comments:
And father would be? Ted Kord? Booster Gold? Scipio?
What about Speedy? He has a kid in the 80's and she has popped up in Outsiders.
Keep in the mind the theme of Infinite Crisis appears to be reversing the last Crisis. Power Girl has her origin back, an adult Robin is running around in yellow tights, Earth-2 Superman and armor Luthor are back, etc. Who else was wiped out in CoIE?
Helena Wayne.
Selina and Bruce have been shacking up lately, after all, and none of the other women are currently in a relationship. Heck, Power Girl and Wonder Woman have never even been allowed to scratch that fifty-year itch. Throw in Johns' lust for character revival, and Helena Wayne seems the most likely choice.
The thought of one of DC's ladies having a kid is about as appealing as having syringes of pain-amplifying toxin shoved in my eyes.
I've been going through Wizard's questions and giving my predictions over at my blog and Oracle is my choice as well. Of the four choices I figured she was the one character who would least be ruined by it.
My vote is Diana. I mean, there's no saying she has to raise the baby on panel... She is the Earth-Mother's Goddess after all. Why not give birth, return to clay, have the baby magically raised by the gods to becone either a) her new sidekick Wonder Boy or b) her new worst nemesis--the Man's world equvalent of WW now, sent by Ares or something.
That way when Donna as WW's book gets cancelled (after only 3 issues--and I love her, but c'mon) they can bring back Diana with a teenage son.
Just a thought.
One of the rumors running around is that the DC Universe will switch to "real time" after the Crisis: that is, the characters will be getting older and the passage of time will affect them.
My money's on Diana. After all, "I have too many damn ribs" Supergirl has been hanging out with her and all the rest of the Amazon women and now can't stop babbling about how women can't be evil because they can make babies. Or some such stupid nonsense.
I can totally see WW having a kid just so this new version of Supergirl can dance around her with pompons going YAAAAAAAAAAAY! WOMEN ARE WALKING UTERUSES! WHOOOOO!
Or maybe not.
As eye-gougingly painful as it would be, I can totally see the Oracle-Braniac thing going down, too. Bleh.
And for the record: the last time PeeGee was pregnant was during Zero Hour, if memory serves. Beyond that, I don't remember how the kid got there, or what happened to it afterward.
I've heard that one, too, Vincent, and I've no idea where it comes from other than a peculiar overanalysis of Morrison's oddball "sentient universe" remark, which could have meant anything. I like Morrison, but he speaks a rarefied form of gibberish.
DC is never going to let its properties age and die; it would kill them as a company, both by driving away new readers (who wants to read about a geriatric Superman?) and pissing off old ones.
Whoa, I think spiritglyph is on to something there. The Helena Bertenelli version of Huntress has never rung quite true, and hey, Helena Wayne was in the short lived TV series, which admittedly, no one watched.
Counter-example: Arsenal and Cheshire's daughter. Been around for years, none of the three are in Limbo.
I'm voting for Wonder Woman too, but I don't see the kid growing up. It'll be a child that gets raised in the background on Themiscyra, because Diana's a career woman.
I'd say the father could be anyone available, as she only decides to get laid in order to avoid Aphrodite's wrath.
I suggest Hal Jordan, because he's easy. Anyone else would at least want dinner first.
Diana, and she makes the baby out of clay.
I think PG's gonna get pregnant - with Kal-L's kid. He was getting uncomfortably close in IC#2.
Hey, I think this is the first pre-natal character exchange!
" Counter-example: Arsenal and Cheshire's daughter. Been around for years, none of the three are in Limbo."
You don't think that child (Lia, by the way) is in Limbo?
Let's see ... hasn't been mentioned by or seen with Roy since god was a corporal. Off panel plot device in Villains United. Mother just killed but the child doesn't come to live with Roy.
If that ain't Limbo, it's the suburbs thereof.
I am TOTALLY enamored of the idea of Wonder Woman having a son, Wonder Boy.
Her dynasty lacks a male counterpart and that would be perfect: a male raised on Themiscyra.
Or, at least, the smoking ruins of Themiscyra....
Liam is mentioned now and then on Outsiders and was a strong (as strong as secondary characters can be) on the Titans. She is living with Roy but since Winick doesn't like to write her she spend most time with nannies these days (but about he did make a issue that she was the main plot point, and considering the severe lack of talent of Winnick and utter lack of characterization on all Outsiders characters, this is more than you can ask). So I think she is indeed a exception. They showed lots of development stages of her since the New Titans (she actually aged about four years since her first appearence).
Maybe it's the upcoming holidays, but I picture Diana singing as she molds her son.
(To the tune of the Dreidel song)
Baby, baby, baby
I made him out of clay.
And when he's dry & ready
My baby & I will play.
We'll fight male oppression
In the patriarch's world.
Ares, Ares, Ares
He'll scream like a girl.
maybe its Blue Beetle's. he nailed oracle off camera and then she squatted out a kid.
it'd make sense for them to do even more to treat that chracter like poop. why not make him an absentee dad as well.
poop.
"he nailed oracle off camera and then she squatted out a kid."
Hm.
I appreciate it, as a general rule, if things like this were phrased differently in the future.
As Harry S Truman's attorney's once taught me, "decorum, gentlemen, decorum; without it, we are not gentlemen."
Actually, I'm coming around to the idea of her building a baby from clay, because then it doesn't have to be an infant. She can make him any age the writer wants. We can have Wonder Tot (1-5), Wonder Boy (6-12), or Wonder Perv (13-24) instantly!
But I hope they go with the naturla route, because after all, Aphrodite is one of her patrons. And Aphrodite has turned much looser girls than Diana into trees because of "lack of love."
And it could be a fun OYL mystery: "Who is the father of Wonder Woman's baby?" Can't you just see Wildcat starting a pool in the JSA mansion?
Hm. Some legion characters have managed to have kids without going into Limbo any earlier than their version of the team itself. Does that count?
Deadshot's got a kid now, but the mother's a civilian and I think the rules are different for villians. I mean, Punch and Jewelee have at least one rug-rat, and they haven't been any more in Limbo than any C-list villians are...
I'm going to guess Catwoman. Wonder Woman is right out; she's not going to be giving birth out of wedlock, ever, and marrying her would be it's own event worthy of a few years of hype. Power Girl is both 'been there, done that' and too biologically improbable (with any solution to that problem having Lois Lane implications as well), and Oracle can't very well breast-feed and fight crime as Batwoman at the same time.
Odds on the brat to get Baby May-ed before the end of 2007: 3:1 in favor.
"Wonder Woman is right out; she's not going to be giving birth out of wedlock, ever,"
Hm. Why not?
DC might not be okay with her doing a Murphy Brown; that I understand.
But internally to the DCU, why would "wedlock" mean anything to Diana, who grew up on an ideal without any men, let alone "wedlock"?
Well, yes, I was primarily speaking to the external problems with the idea.
Internally, there's still something there, I think. They have the example of the Gods, who have marriages and consider it improper behavior when they (as they often do) go outside of them.
(For that matter, is WW still, um, a virgin in continuity these days? Or was there some holo-foil platinum cover special in the late Platinum age that I missed somewhere...)
Monkey In Blender:
DC is never going to let its properties age and die; it would kill them as a company, both by driving away new readers (who wants to read about a geriatric Superman?) and pissing off old ones.
Who wants to read about a geriatric Superman? All those people who wet themselves with excitement at the last page of IC #1, presumably.
Helena Wayne fits, but too many people are discounting Power Girl on the basis that it's been done before, which is really odd considering the backwards-lookingness of IC.
It's not just that PG has been done before, it's that PG-in-mystery-virgin-birth-pregnancy has been done before, a much more specific storyline, and that there aren't any (non-utterly-creepy) candidates for a more natural father for a Power-Girl baby.
Maybe the pregnant one will actually be Batman. Well, it will be "one year later;" who knows what amazing medical advances will be made in that time?
Cool. Pregnant Batman.
jeff r -- Yes, WW is still "pure" in the DCU. It's one of the major complaints of her fanbase, after all, one of her patrons is Aphrodite. Yes, Aphrodite the Greek Goddess of Love, Beauty, Grace, Femininity, Fertility, and Just Plain Gettin' It On is Diana's patroness. In fact, as I understand it, she was the original main patroness of the Amazons in the Golden Age. I'm sorry, Diana should been turned into some sort of vegetation by now for ignoring Aphrodite's preferred form of worship (which is, you guessed it, the eternally sacred act of Just Pain Gettin' It On).
And if Hera were actually Diana's patroness, I could see the marriage thing entering into it, but unless there was a retcon I missed, Hera could've cared less when Diana or the Amazons were created. she only took note when Zeus noticed how pretty Diana was.
So, I sincerely hope DC fixes this problem during the one eyar gap. Remember, Mighty Aphrodite of the Low-Rent Temple requires no commitment, or actual emotion to be involved in her sacred worship, and cares little for birth control (Fertility goddess and all).
Come to think of it, of Diana's other patrons (Athena, Artemis, Demeter, Hermes, and Hestia) she has 3 more fertility deities, 1 who would probably take an interest in keeping the royal line of Themiscyra going, and 1 goddess of motherhood. She's actually the most likely of the 4 to have a kid.
Oh, and I heard Power Girl's first baby's daddy was originally going to be Hal Jordan, but he caught a bug. So there are non-creepy romance options around for Powergirl.
Y'know, with Carol Ferris married now, and Hal free to wander about, I can see a lot of little babies with a tendancy to get hit on the head OYL.
It'll be Wonder Woman - not the current one, but her "one year later" replacement (Jimmy Olsen.)
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