Supurbia #2

[superboyprime]

First, two pages from the previous issue for background:





Okay, with that out of the way, onto the latest issue...





Meanwhile, over on NotThemyscira...

Comments

[shadowpsykie]

huh... i think i like lone son of bright moon,,,

[captainbellman]

I liked the not!Themyscira from "Planetary" better, even if that world's not!Diana had to die.

[auggie18]

Yeah, figured that's where they were going with this. Though the breeding thing caught me off guard. (Makes sense, though.)


Not!Diana is awful. I want to know how she was planning on explaining this to her husband and daughter.

"Run, Lone Son of Bright Moon! Run and escape, so that I can honorably murder the hell out of you later!"

That kid is totally my favorite character in this series. He's so awesome. Hope he makes it out of this alive.

[icon_uk]

Don't worry, her husband has apparently been expecting something like this and is making plans of his own.

[blueinkedfrost]

The line about 'seeding' makes me think that the alternative to honourable murder is honourable gang rape.

But, like you, I'm interested in the way this subplot in the story is going! Poor kid.

[lucky_gamble]

Okay it's official, I'm buying this issue.

[blunderbuss]

I really liked the Bright Moon scans. The idea of a woman offering up her child to be honorably killed but balking at the idea at him living the dishonorable life as a 'seeder' is a brilliant bit of values dissonance. And that would lead to a brilliantly complicated relationship between mother and son later on.

As for the top scans, did that Superman-expy guy basically do the 'falling for Catwoman' thing but actually decided to choose her in the end?

This actually looks really interesting; I might have to start checking these out.

[silicondream]

And that would lead to a brilliantly complicated relationship between mother and son later on.

Dunno, seems to me like it would lead to a very simple one. If she wants him dead, the fact that she also doesn't want him to spend his life sexing Amazons isn't really going to make a preteen boy less conflicted about hating her.

[captainbellman]

Given the alliterative name, I thought Helen Heart might be a slightly more murderous version of Lana Lang.

[icon_uk]

Well if I wasn't already primed to dislike Not!Diana before, that would do it.

She willingly brought her young son to be ritually murdered (I'd use the term "Honour killing" if such a term didn't bring bile to my throat) and only intervened because she felt that using said son as sperm bank wasn't honourable?

The fact that the son loved his mother and IIRC showed some talent in training, whilst she basically ignored him in favour of her daughter (who didn't want to train) adds to the drama I grant you.

It's an interesting decision to make character- and plot-wise, but it's so toxic to the character of the mother that I'm not sure where they can go after this, certainly as a mother and wife, because her husband KNOWS that something like this was up.

[sinisterlink]

You know, people always go on about how you have to stick with family and family is important and you love them no matter what and blah, blah, blah, but if my mother had been willing to let me get murdered just because I wasn't the right gender, I'm pretty sure I'd want absolutely nothing to do with her ever again. Seriously, in that last panel I'm like, "Run, boy! Run and keep running and never look back!"

[sinisterlink]

That poor kid is going to have soooooo many issues. You gotta love how horrible and messed up the mother is, as well. Murdering your kid just because he is male? Totally acceptable. Letting your kid be a "seeder"? So not cool. Also, how old is that kid? Cause if he hasn't even hit puberty yet, he wouldn't be able to immediately start "seeding" anything.

The first scans were good, though. I find that couple very interesting.I like super dude's speech on how giving something a name doesn't really mean you own or control it. I love the woman at the table who is all like, "You supervillians always keep lists of all your victims, right?" Idiot. The scan at the end of the two of them flying off with her crying and him kissing her on the cheek made me, "awww", as well. I have a soft spot for the good guy/bad guy relationships, though.

[espanolbot]

I think the woman was meant to be Hilary Clinton or something...

[espanolbot]

I vaguely remember in Journey into the West there was a valley entirely inhabited by women who used the magic water from their river to get pregnant (leading to an unfortunate situation when some of the male mani characters rank it)... Not sure if it was meant to be Mongolian or whether these guys are meant to be a reference to them or not.

The valley could be interesting to use as the place of origin for an Asian version of Wonder Woman, in any case. Particularly since they weren't particularly malevolent or anything from my memory, unlike a lot of the people and creatures encountered along the way in the story.

EDIT: Turns out that the place is called Western Liang. :)
http://alfred.isea.ru/MyLib/Journey%20to%20the%20West/The%20Womanland%20of%20Western%20Liang.htm

[icon_uk]

Don't see how these characters would match those ones, since they don't use magic water to procreate, they use men (There's probably a metaphor in there if one went looking for it, but I'm not going to be the one to do it)

[kamino_neko]

Hmm. I think they may be pushing the Superman/Lois Lane thing a bit too close to the original (aside from both of them being arrogant jerks, of course).

[alan_smithee]

It's too close for me for me to be interested - knock-off superheroes are surely done to death at this stage.

Am I imagining this?

[blue_bolt]

Obviously Hayler Harper = Lois Lane,

But is Hellen Heart a female Lex Luthor?

Cause if so, [insert throbbing heart emoticon here]xoxoxoxoxo.

Please tell me there are a couple of Superman + femaleLexLuthor "What Ifs" or the like somewhere. I wanna buy them all up. *om nom nom*

[beoweasel]

If he was like four, five years older, you know he wouldn't be running. :P

[icon_uk]

Though I believe you meant that in a humourous tone, it has a number of disturbing undertones.

A) There's a difference between wanting sex and being made to have it with women (Who think you're scum because you're male) whether you want to or not. That's basically human slavery, and no amount of teenage hormones will make up for it.

B) Suppose he's just not INTO women. Something tells me that these women wouldn't care about HIS interests or wishes at all.

[md84]

Life as a stud horse, and nothing but a stud horse, honestly doesn't seem that much better than death. Then again, as long as he's alive he would have a chance of escaping.

If he somehow grows up to be his mom's super villain archnemesis, I'm rooting for him.

[jaybee3]

Except for Lone Son of Bright Moon, ALL these people just seem horrible. I can get deconstructing the super-hero mythos but after Millar and Ellis it just seems like old hat. It would be interesting to see Lone Son of Bright Moon become a sympathetic super-villian (or at least his mother's arch-enemy) since how could you root against him after THIS? And also it makes me love Lois Lane all the more because the Hayley Harper version shows what would happen if she really was as cold/gold-digging as the likes of Chuck Austen tried to say she was.

[dahlia_moon]

Honestly? the first two pages turned me off.

[darkknightjrk]

I'm not sure how I'm feeling about those pages. As straight analogues, it's kind-of cold and crappy, but I don't know what these characters are like outside of these pages, so maybe there's something different about all of them that I'm missing?

[wake_the_dragon]

I just realized why I especially hate the depiction of the not!Wonder Woman and the not!Amazons, well besides all the other reasons like honor killings, because I'm already sick of the way DC keeps making them villians: Amazons Attack, Flashpoint, New 52, I'm just so sick of it.

Besides that, pretty much all the characters are terrible. I get that this is a deconstruction of super heroes, but do they always have to make every character so unlikeable? I'm just getting sick of it.

[theflames]

Eh, for Actual!Diana - her people have swerved back and forth between good and bad that they get the 'grey' award.

Honestly, since their original creation in DC Comics, they've had a lot of time to be presented as always good and perfect. The last 12 years, I think, have shown people finally presenting them as otherwise - which I don't think is a bad thing.

Then, there's this - which is also fine, but still, these not!Amazons are just plain wrong.

[cypherfdp]

Uh, did they not notice the whole "man-child" part? A 10 year old isn't going to be doing much seeding.

[darkblade]

Their tendency to kill their male children has left them with large holes in their knowledge about the other gender and how their sexual organs work.