Black Lightning: Year One - Part 2

[espanolbot]

Previous part,
http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/3923557.html

Also, Thunder (Anissa Pierce) doesn't seem to have a tag...

After the death of a student, Jefferson Pierce starts to gain notoriety both as the new headteacher of possibly the worst highschool in Metropolis and in his secret persona as a superhero. But as his family notices, the artist's depiction of the vigilante isn't as accurate, and the head of the 100 and his puppet politician Tobias Whale aren't exactly that worried about him...















Should probably say that there IS an explanation as to why Superman isn't helping out as much as he could, and Clark isn't just making excuses here.

Later, Jefferson's family confront him about his superheroics, and surprisingly are completely on board with it. The one thing that they've set upon though, is that he wears a different outfit, one made of a special bulletproof material Mr Gambi got from his brother that shows his face more (so it doesn't seem that there's a white guy going around beating up the, mostly black, criminals in the area which can have... unfortunate implications). Mr Gambi even made a capacitor that enables Pierce to control his powers better.

Later, after beating up some criminals and dumping them outside a policestation, he officially debuts to the public thanks to strange red haired photographer from the Daily Planet...

Comments

[wizardru]

Like this a lot. Who are the 100? Are they part of InterGang?

[espanolbot]

No, they're independant. I'm not sure what they were prior to this series, but here they're kind of like Intergang only with a supernatural bent that only the guys at the very top of the food chain are aware of, if that makes sense?

Basically they're a gang that literally owns the majority of the South Side through their various legitimate fronts, and deliberately try to create a sense of fear and hopelessness in order to satisfy their own powerbase. Their power is such if they complain about the gang, if they aren't outright murdered they get their water and electricity cut.

They are the reason why Suicide Slum is called that, for example, as it was the name the cops used to give the area (as two thirds of all the on the street fatalities were in the area) before they just flat out decided to stop going there. And it's because of this that all the big businesses moved out, leading to the district becoming an economic sinkhole where the only jobs going are drug, prostitution or stripping related, with social services like schools, ambulances and fire brigades actively attacked to maintain the grip on the area.

An example of what the area is like is brought up by Jefferson's wife, who is a lawyer and began working for a law firm in the South Side the same time as her husband got his school job. It turns out that both the law firm and the judges are thoroughly corrupt (first case she was assigned was defending a guy who shot the grandfather of an underage stripper when he tried to get her out of the business, and she says it turns out that all she needed to do was turn up because the judge had already been paid to give a not guilty verdict), but she hopes that she can reform it from the inside by collecting information on just how deep the corruption goes.

This doesn't go well for her.

They later became more of a generic crime syndicate, with Whale reappearing in Gotham Underworld as part of his attempt to turn the city into a new stronghold following the disappearance of the Joker and the like during Salvation Run, but he was depicted more like a version of the Kingpin there. Probably because Frank Tieri was writing it (he introduced a character that was basically Jigsaw too).

[michael_ellis_day]

The 100 date back to Lois Lane comics written by Robert Kanigher in 1970, so they very slightly predate Intergang. Lois Lane and the "Rose and Thorn" backup strip in LL's book which first introduced the 100 were set in Metropolis, so when the original Black Lightning series was set there a few years later they were logical foes.

[eyz]

Didn't Booster defeat the leader of those guys, back in his original series?
I remember the 100! They were closer to (Marvel's) Hydra than Intergang weren't they?

[michael_ellis_day]

The 100 from DC Comics in the Seventies did drug trafficking, gambling, and other real world organized crime stuff. Their counterpart at Marvel would have been the Maggia, a name Stan Lee came up with to avoid saying "Mafia" while making sure everyone would know who they really were.

The following decade, Dan Jurgens introduced the 1000 as bad guys in Booster Gold. The 1000 were said to be an offshoot of the 100, but they had nothing in common with them in a real world sense -- they were much more like Bond villains, world conquering schemes instead of street level organized crime.

Intergang were recurring characters in the Jack Kirby New Gods, Jimmy Olsen, et cetera, around the same time as the 100 were introduced. They thought they were an organized crime outfit, and most of them didn't realize all their high tech gadgets were from Apokolips and that their crimes were secretly advancing the agenda of Darkseid.

Anything that's been introduced in subsequent years, either post-Crisis or New 52, I don't know -- but this is how these groups were originally conceived.

[filthysize]

Holy crap, this is nice. Positive treatment of sex workers too? I am floored. Where in the frank miller did this come from and why haven't I read it?

[theflames]

This is real good stuff. All the characterizations seem really on points.

How did Black Lightning get his powers...? Wasn't he originally part of the Outsiders? Does that remain the same here?

[espanolbot]

"How did Black Lightning get his powers...?"

He's a metahuman, which is basically the DC version of Marvel's mutants, 'cept the general public had no grudge against them until the reboot.

"Wasn't he originally part of the Outsiders? Does that remain the same here?"
Yes he was, and this series only covers his first year as a superhero, the Outsiders came afterwards. :)