Gail Simone's Wonder Woman and Devin Grayson's Inheritance

[3goodtimes]

I apologize in advance for the wonky scans. I got them from Ends of the Earth and The Circle which you should buy if you have the means. They're really wonderful.

Tom Tresser is laid up in the hospital and Diana comes to visit him.

He kind of looks like an aging boy band member with that hair.






How lovely is that panel of Diana stroking Tom's cheek?

Ugh, scan fail ahead!

Has Diana ever been written with a woman? If not, she should be at some point.

Later, Diana takes Tom on her magical seashell (lolcomics) to Themyscira to meet Hippolyta. She instructs him to be completely honest and he manages to make a good impression. Love Diana's expression in the third panel here.



Tom is almost killed by a Griffin. Then Hippolyta asks if he's been intimate with Diana yet.


Some moms bake muffins, other moms craft deadly weaponry! My mom's muffins could probably qualify as deadly weapons.


And now I'm imagining a much more harrowing version of The Drew Carey Show.


Now, I know there are emotional implications in that line about feeling (as well as some foreshadowing), but is Diana speaking literally too? Is her skin extra tough so she can't feel touch as much as other people? I was slightly confused by that line. Wonder Woman experts, maybe you can help me there.

suck my diiiick!! im a shark!


Three reasons I love those scenes: One, I find them incredibly fucking cute and feel no shame in enjoying cute in my comics. Two, Amazonian ritual fascinates me. When Diana is well-written in the JLA, I often feel she steals the show. But in her own title, I'm sometimes far more intrigued by her sisters, their history, and their traditions. And three, I would love to court a guy. Wouldn't that be great? I've never understood the appeal of being wooed, but when I thought about it from the other direction, I totally get it. More guys should concede to being courted with gifts and sweetness and pulling out chairs. And friendship bracelets.

I'm sad the short-lived romance of Tom and Diana didn't work out. :(

On a totally separate note, I recently finished Inheritance by Devin Grayson and it was just... just horrible, you guys. Maybe this is old news. Maybe you liked it and I'm once again the odd man out. If that's the case, you probably shouldn't read on. I don't think I could cringe more if I watched my grandmother in a porno. /steals joke



It's not the gay subtext (though it was barely subtext here) that bothered me. Heck, I love gay subtext! The more the merrier! However, I was so creeped out by the manner in which she wrote it. It was all pedo-y (not in a fun Golden Age way) and menacing and the characterization was off. I mean, I seriously missed Cry for Justice Ollie whilst reading this book's version of Ollie. It was that bad. The internal monologue-ing was drawn out and bizarre. She spent two paragraphs explaining in detail why Nightwing noticed Aquaman's lack of beard. From Arthur's perspective (although it's hard to tell since the perspectives change abruptly and at random). Which makes no damn sense for the character. That's just the first example of OOC weirdness out of many. I love her work on most comics but yeesh. This book, guys. THIS BOOK. IT BURNS LIKE TWILIGHT.

I cannot wait until Rucka's No Man's Land comes in the mail so I can erase Inheritance from my mind.

Putting that aside... have you all read any DC novels? Any recommendations or just general thoughts on what you've dipped into?

(PS: To the person awaiting Ragdoll scans, I promise I'm almost done gathering them!)

Comments

[q99]

-Logically, invulnerability SHOULD lead to a lack of sensation in the skin, but that's not how it works in most cases in comics, where you can be invulnerable and still have completely normal dermal sensitivity.
-

Not necessarily. Touch doesn't require damage after all, a light brush with a feather is far below your damage threshhold but you can feel it just fine.

Depending on how the invulnerability works, touch is doable.

-I can only think of two exceptions offhand, Diamond Lil from Beta/Omega/Alpha Flight, and a similarly powered character, also from Byrne, in his "Next Men" series, both of whom had no sense of touch worth mentioning.
-

JMS's Rising Stars had a no-touch character too.

[icon_uk]

When Superman says that he can't feel (or barely notices) a bullet when it bounces off of him, it implies that he can't feel anything less.

[cygna_hime]

The one problem I have with this is that it *can't* be true, or it becomes impossible for him to have a secret identity, or do much at all: if he can't feel where, say, the floor is, what stops him from putting his feet through it? He'd have to be looking at everywhere his body might contact all the time, and that...would make him extremely crazy extremely quickly. Touch is one of those senses we use a *lot* more than we pay attention to. I genuinely don't see how he could lead a remotely normal life without it.

[icon_uk]

It's comic books, anything can be true! :)

In the real world I believe there is a medical condition where the skins nerve endings don't reach far enough and the sufferer has no sense of touch, and worse, no sense of pain, so they can cut themselves, for example, and not realise it.

[hatman]

Leprosy can actually have that effect, I'm told.

As for Supes... He has super senses. Pretty sure it's canon that all of his senses are super. Which should include touch.

Heck, if a bullet can't make an impact on his skin, how's he supposed to have super hearing? Nothing would move his eardrum!

I think it's far more sensible to say that he can feel the bullets bouncing off his chest. It's just that they don't hurt him, so there's no associated pain.

[icon_uk]

Oh Superman's senses are super-sensitive, I don't think anyone's disputing that, it's whether they should be or not that we're having fun with there! :)

[iesika]

Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis, or CIPA.

Kids have been known to do things like accidentally tear off their own fingers when they get them caught in something.

[q99]

Barely notices makes sense; it's only touching him for a short time.

It's probably like a raindrop to him. His touch is just as sensitive as ours, but since there's no damage and the impact doesn't travel far, it's just a small object very briefly touching him.

He can feel a punch, but it doesn't hurt him. A hug to him is going to be pretty much the exact same as it is to us though.

Mostly invulnerables just lack the pain component of the sensation, nor will they feel an impact as spread out, but a nerve saying 'hey, something's touching' should work just the same.

[icon_uk]

Unless the nerve is under an epidermis which is, by definition, impervious.

[q99]

If it can still flex and bend, then the nerve can still be triggered.

[icon_uk]

Again, you're bringing reality into it. :)

You just have to remember that Superman's nerve endings are invulnerable too, it would take a super impact to make any impression on them at all.

Of course, all this is another reason I liked Man of Steel. It was established that Superman's invulnerability and strength derived from a subconsciously generated, skintight telekinetic shell triggered by anything beyond a slight impact, providing the imperviousness without interfering with the skin receptors. I have no idea what's still in place with that.

[q99]

-
You just have to remember that Superman's nerve endings are invulnerable too, it would take a super impact to make any impression on them at all.-

Nerves don't have to be hurt to be triggered, though. It would take a super impact to hurt them at all, but all they need is light non-harmful contact to send a signal.

So yes, it is perfectly logical for an invulnerable nerve to work. If it wasn't, then your normal nerves couldn't register a features touch, obviously not the case.

You don't need a fancy explanation, nerves work just fine the way they are no matter how invulnerable they are for simple touch.

[icon_uk]

Nerves don't have to be hurt to be triggered, though.

No, but they have to be sensitive to be triggered, you can't be sensitive AND invulnerable, since invulnerable means you are unaffected by external influences, whilst sensitive means you are susceptible to them. The more invulnerable you are, the less sensation you could pick up because it's implicit in the concept of invulnerable.

[q99]

That's being overly literal I think.

There's no more problem with invulnerable touch senses than there is with invulnerable eyes, which likewise are able to perceive stuff just fine.

Invulnerable as it's used in practice tends to mean undamagable/unaffectable in negative ways, not unaffected by anything.

Nerve function as it exists in humans can be arbitrarily damage resistant without impairing that function.

[bluefall]

Not at all. "Invulnerable" is not "insensible." It's "invulnerable." If you put a sensitive enough v-pod on one side of a steel wall and scrape your fingernail across the other side, the v-pod will pick it up. The fact that your fingernail isn't about to inflict lasting harm on either the wall or the device doesn't make a difference.

Plus, as mentioned upthread, we know her eardrums work, better than a normal human's, in fact, so we've got proof by demonstration that she can feel anything we can before theorycraft even becomes necessary.

[icon_uk]

Only because steel is, buy it's nature, conductive to vibration, try it with a durable non-conductive material like, say, leather, or something along the lines of a slab of meat and I think you'd have trouble picking up vibrations beyond it.

And as I've said, I know that they DO work, I'm just not sure that they SHOULD work.

[bluefall]

Yeah, but that's not how nerves work either. It was just a comment on "invulnerable" - you seemed in your last reply to be talking about the idea from a thematic perspective, rather than a scientific one (which is the only way you can, really, since "invulnerable" is a scientifically bankrupt concept to begin with). You said "since invulnerable means you are unaffected by external influences", which I don't agree with; the definition of "invulnerable" is that you aren't harmed by external influences, not that you're not affected by them. Which I was trying to demonstrate by example - steel is something we consider invulnerable (hence, "man of steel"), but not something we consider impossible to affect at all - as everyone knows you can successfully add heat, or electricity, or sound to steel. It just doesn't hurt it.

And anyway, f we're talking about "shoulds," I think Diana's DR 10000/piercing is a little higher on the list, heh.

[icon_uk]

Hmmm, still not convinced by the comparisons, but I'll give it more thought.

And anyway, f we're talking about "shoulds," I think Diana's DR 10000/piercing is a little higher on the list, heh.

Sorry, I have no clue what that means.

[bluefall]

Oh, sorry, D&D reference. There are three "types" of weapon damage in 3rd edition D&D - "bludgeoning," "piercing" and "slashing," and different weapons do different damage types (axes slash, arrows pierce, etc). Some creature types have Damage Reduction (DR) that can only be overcome by certain types of damage - like, a skeleton might have DR 10/bludgeoning, which means it takes 10 less damage from any attack that isn't a bludgeoning attack. (Slashing at bones with a sword is not as helpful as smacking them with a mace.)

Diana's whole "I can't be hurt by exploding nukes or punches from Superman, but bullets go right through me" can be represented as DR X/piercing, where X is some arbitrarily high number.

This is, of course, very silly, because there's no such thing as "bludgeoning" or "piercing" damage, there's only force distributed over an area, and Clark's punches carry a lot more PSI than a measly bullet. It's always the first thing I trip up on with Diana's powers.

[gailsimone]

This is a very cool post, Bluefall, very interesting.

I'm kind of sad we never tackled this topic.

[comicoz]

Butterball of Marvel has that issue. When one of the other superhero women, I forget which I think some fire-powered one or whatever, decides to strike up a relationship with him since he can't be hurt by her, it fails because he can't feel ANYTHING, which includes happy thumpy thumpy time.

[q99]

I thought he just freaked out ^^

Hm... one of the characters from Rising Stars had the same issue, and possibly even more-so. Touch was totally out. He was fat because taste was pretty much the only pleasure he had.