Maggie and Toby

[gargoylekitty.insanejournal.com]

Following the last issue of Detective Comics, I figured the comm could use a post about Maggie Sawyer, Toby Raynes, and their relationship.

(to start off, I don't have my box with these with me so these aren't my scans)
So, the foreshadowing of their meeting. Maggie meets Superman for the first time during a hostage situation and they take down some badguys together. It being Superman and Metropolis there are reporters waiting for them to get the story. This is when they meet(or at least that's what it seems like, always a chance they'd met before).


Next time we see them, they're living together(they're talking about Maggie's daughter, who'd gone missing from her father's house).

Awww.
Anywho, she follows Toby's advice and we get the story of what happened with the previously mentioned husband.



Hurm.
Though enough of that. Someone asked in the Detective post if Turpin knew about Maggie and Toby. Well, not only did he know but...

Listen to your daughter! Gah.


While it's the classic 'oh... you didn't know?' amusement, I hate moments like this in comics/books/any medium because they give me such bad second-hand embarrasment(which is annoying since I rarely get embarrassed by things happening with me but with characters in things I'm reading? All the time.). That aside, Turpin keeps moving blindly ahead with his plans.

So he proposes, rather out of the blue, and Maggie, presumably, sets him straight. So how does Turpin respond?

Though Maggie won't have any of that nonsense.

So now that we have our couple established, time for the drama to roll in. At this time there's a case going on with fires mysteriously starting up in a way even Superman can't stop them. As though that wasn't enough for Maggie and the rest of the force to deal with, they loose a member in one of the attacks and have a bad story written about them by Lois Lane. To make matters worse, in order to get the inside feel for the SCU, Lois goes through training and joins them, after much protesting from Maggie and Supes. So, Maggie's worklife = chaotic.

But wait, there's more!


Poor Toby(or Tobie, even... they never really seem to settle on one way of spelling her name).

Though, eventually, Maggie makes it up to her.

Well, tries to make it up to her.

:(

As though that's not enough, they kick the drama up even more with added problems with Maggie's ex.

And having Toby get jealous of Lois.


Which leads to...

;_;

So, they part ways for a bit. Take a breather. As they'd been talking about earlier, Maggie's daughter comes for a visit, surly ex in tow.

Yeah, he's not exactly made out to be the most charming of people.
While Maggie is out, Toby stops by.

Aw, you just know that little moment with Toby and Jamie was cute.

So Toby grabs some things and leaves before Maggie gets back.

Oy.

Double oy.
Though Maggie doesn't prove to be the best of dates.

So off she goes!

So what's the call about this time? Well, it seems they'd found out the source of the fires has to do with this biosphere. Oh and that the thing has these balloons atop it that will release poison and kill everyone if they don't stop it. XP

Snooping around Maggie finds one of the two people who'd been inside the sphere on the outside(chasing after her pet cat). They fight, if you could call it a fight, and Maggie ends up locked inside.

Back at Maggie's place, things are going well, no one knowing what's going on with her.

Things were going well, at least.

But they get back on track, while Maggie's meeting the other person inside the sphere. The bad guy, who takes the time to show her around and tell her of his plans.


Yeah, so Maggie's having none of that and after a brief fight with an alligator manages to break free.

Something about the break out is hilarious to me. So they get the bad guy, Maggie needs a bit of medial attention, and everyone at home gets the news.

But it's okay, she gets better.

And everyone gets a happy ending!

:D

But wait! There's more! Turpin takes over for Maggie in Metropolis and we get this scene over in Detective Comics #764 as Maggie moves in.





So that leaves us at Maggie in Gotham and Toby set to join her soon. What happened from there?
Honestly? I don't think it ever really mentions anything, I mean we even have this moment from 52 with Renee mock threatening Maggie via Toby.

Pretty sure that's implying they're still together and good so I honestly have no clue.
Anyone have something more conclusive?
(edit: well aside from the 'oh, we broke up a couple months back' thrown in)

Comments

[bluefall.insanejournal.com]

Pretty sure that's implying they're still together

More than that, it implies Toby's been around Gotham, and she and Renee have actually met enough times that she's in Renee's monkeysphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number). That's just not really something you'd say about someone you only knew as a name periodically mentioned.

[gargoylekitty.insanejournal.com]

Which makes her saying that it was a long distance problem all the more 'wtf'.

[thebigapricot.insanejournal.com]

Ha. It's so funny you mentioned Dunbar. The other night when I was out someone went Ape shit ranting (really) over Facebook and Dunbar. She was drunk but it was interesting.

[bluefall.insanejournal.com]

Also: sometimes I'm really fond of Byrne. Mostly when it involves stuff he did a decade or two ago, but nevertheless.

[thandrak.insanejournal.com]

I have a rule of thumb involving Byrne. Unless he has an editor riding herd over him, he should never, ever, ever, be allowed to touch any comic characters people already care about.

However, if he can be given his head to go invent things from scratch, he can come up with genius. In the case of Superman, nobody cared about Clark or Lois. (Except Elliot S! Maggin) And what Byrne did with them was magic. As well as with the Kents. He probably had an editor riding herd as well.

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

Indeed. I think that Byrne was starting to pick up a bit of a reputation as being a homophobe (possibly because of his early Gay Guy college strip and a stray remark in an interview that Chris Claremont had sort of ruined the character of Colleen Wing for him by deciding that she was bisexual), and this was his "Oh no I am not" sort of reply to that. Although I never quite figured out the short skirts on Sawyer--whether it was Byrne trying not to make her too much of a Dyketty McDykeperson visually, or he knew one lesbian and she dressed like that, or something.

[scottyquick.insanejournal.com]

Wait, Colleen's bi?

[bluefall.insanejournal.com]

My guess from that would be Byrne was just complaining that Claremont shipped Colleen/Misty with a fervor unusual even for him. But authors do like to play with it - there's a lot of Harley & Ivy style hinting through the second HEROES FOR HIRE and DAUGHTERS OF THE DRAGON - so maybe there's something more canon to it? If so, I demand scans, posthaste.

[merrickm.insanejournal.com]

Not canon, something from an interview, from The Comics Journal #57:

Byrne: Chris [Claremont] keeps souring me on characters. He soured me on Colleen Wing when he told me that she was a) bisexual and b) promiscuous. She sleeps with anything because she's looking for the big O. And I don't want to know that. I didn't need to know that to draw her, but I couldn't draw her properly from then on. It was like, "Who is this weird lady that I'm drawing here?" And every time I put her in any kind of costume or in danger or any kind of a tied-up situation, I knew that it had a totally different meaning for Chris from that point on.

Itkowitz: Well, didn't you know that before Chris told you? You had no inkling at all?

Byrne: No, I liked Colleen Wing right up until he laid that brilliant little bit of characterization on me. But my idea of sexuality and what's exciting and what's stimulating is a long way from Chris's. We merge at some points, but just because I think The Story of O is the best movie ever made has nothing to do with...

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

I have no idea if it's canon--this would have been Claremont talking to Byrne sometime in the mid-late 70s.

[thebigapricot.insanejournal.com]

Hey this was great, thanks! I've picked up bits and pieces of their relationship but never caught up with the whole arc.

I would certainly hope that they didn't break them up for the sole purpose of Kate's storyline in 'Tec. I have to say, though, that for all her drinking and smoking Maggie is looking pretty good for someone who's got to be in her early 50s.

And I have to say that panel of her on the horse wearing the evening gown and her leg holster just cracked me up.

[gargoylekitty.insanejournal.com]

Yeah, I only really included that page for that. ;p

Honestly, it looks a bit like she grew a little younger in moving to Gotham.

[greenmask.insanejournal.com]

A fair bit younger, yeah. Shame!

[darkknightjrk.insanejournal.com]

Yeah, she does look a lot younger in Det--it looks like her hair had completely greyed over in the scene with her and Dan on the roof. It also sounds like she hasn't really been out for that long at all, or, as the scene of her with the dress shows, the kind to wear a tuxedo.

[(Anonymous)]

it could very well be the long distance thing did kill it. just because Toby has been to Gotham doesnt mean she stays there. also, from almost all those pages you can see the stress and work it took for them to stay together when they lived together. I could imagine it would be a lot harder for them to stay together with maggie in gotham and toby in metropolis, i mean bat man has a jet, superman has superspeed and flight, and look at how hard it is for those two love birds... or was... *RIP Bruce*

[nezchan.insanejournal.com]

ARGH!! As cute as all this is, the page the the "I need to be alone" note hit me square in one of my artistic pet peeves, where most of the page is off-panel but you can still see all the text. NOBODY WRITES LIKE THAT!

Seriously, who takes a fresh sheet of paper and writes diagonally in a little corner of it?

[gargoylekitty.insanejournal.com]

Yeah, it was definitely done solely so the reader could read it rather than working out the panel better.

[kenn_el.insanejournal.com]

Anyone who's written oncocktail napkins a fair bit. I still ruin lots of paper that way.

[starwolf_oakley.insanejournal.com]

As a "Johnny Come Lately" who only became more familiar with the Superman universe right before DEATH OF SUPERMAN, I didn't fully "get" that Maggie Sawyer was gay until one issue. I don't remember the exact issue, but I'm pretty sure it was an ACTION COMICS by Roger Stern and Jackson Guise (IIRC). Maggie wants to make sure her sexual orientation isn't the reason she's not getting a promotion. I figured at the time if she wasn't gay, she wouldn't mention the term "sexual orientation" even if she didn't go into specifics.

These pages are a good example of how many SPIDER-MAN comics, where the people in Peter Parker's life got their own storylines, influenced other comics. Clark Kent's friends and other people in Metropolis became important enough Post-Crisis to get 3 or 4 pages to themselves in each Superman comic.

[kingrockwell]

Not being as big of a Superman reader as I was as a kid, I didn't pick up on it until Half A Life, when Maggie's talking to Renee about her being outed. I had to put down the book and double-check Wikipedia, because if Maggie hadn't been gay, then what she was saying would make her terribly insensitive.

Seeing the kind of fallout Maggie did have, Renee's response now sounds pretty petty and ignorant, but I guess she didn't know about Jamie.

[lieut_kettch.insanejournal.com]

Hmmm... so comic book shorthand for "gay bar" is "bartender in muscle shirt and pornstache."

[kingrockwell]

Hmm. Tec 764 gets more interesting when you consider that Rucka wrote it. The implication at the end there seems to be that Toby was delayed in the move, maybe indefinitely. They'd visit each other now and then, but they're jobs kept them separate?
It is a real loss, though. I'm sorry to see them get broken up! They should show Toby in the Metropolis books.

And Maggie/Kate is really weird to me, since Kate doesn't even come across as Renee's age in Tec, and Maggie's at least ten years older! Eeeee...

[meamcat.insanejournal.com]

This post was pretty fabulous!
There's another moment in Gotham Central where Sawyer is being unusually cheery and Crispus Allen mentions something about Toby visiting Metropolis for the weekend.

[meamcat.insanejournal.com]

She came up from Metropolis, of course.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

This is pretty cool. I've always liked what little I've seen of Maggie, and this is a nice handling of a potentially delicate subject. It's so easy to revert to stereotype, and so many people do it, that it's genuinely refreshing to read a story where a lesbian couple is treated as a couple of normal people. Maggie has a job that requires a lot of her, she has friends on the force that she pals around with, a grouchy ex-husband, a daughter who she loves but doesn't get to see much who nags her about her smoking - in short, she's a perfectly ordinary woman. And she's gay. The impressive thing is that all that other stuff comes first.