Saturday Splash Page #222

"Opaque," in The Ray Annual #1, by Christopher Priest (writer), Oscar Jimenez (penciler), Chip Wallace (inker), Pat Garrahy (colorist), Starkings and Comicraft (letterers)

The Ray got one Annual, in 1995. The theme for DC's Annuals that year was "Year One," which for a lot of characters I assume meant a flashback to some tale in their earlier career. In Ray's case, Priest said it had been one year since he learned the truth about himself, and maybe the reality of the life he was living was setting in.

The crux of the story is Ray trying to stop an airliner from crashing. He didn't stop the crash, but he managed to control it enough to save most of the passengers. 112 people, alive because of him. But as Ray sees it, 18 died, also because of him.

Because the one who attacked the airliner was Death Masque, the computer program Ray built and forms with his powers, that's gained independence. Death Masque wanted to teach Ray a lesson, specifically about being concerned with anyone other than Masque itself. Ray's old friend Jenny was coming into town on that airliner, and Ray, worried about the rift he was sensing between them, planned to propose.

The issue is a little confusing, as it hops between the aftermath of the crash and the events leading up and including the crash. Ray's considering getting drunk for the first time, his father shows up and unsuccessfully tries to give him a pep talk. Death Masque pretends to be Happy Terrill once he hears Superman is lingering around the crash (because every passenger is certain they saw Superman saving the day, which Ray is almost relieved about), and asks if he would speak to Ray, because Ray looks up to him. Superman initially declines, then appears to reconsider. Except wait, it was actually Happy using his powers to disguise himself and Ray kicks his ass, revealing him to be Death Masque. Except Ray thinks that's just another trick by his dad. Then Jenny, who Ray notes wasn't among the survivors, shows up, because she missed the flight entirely.

At that point, I wasn't sure Ray's grief wasn't causing him to hallucinate. Or, since she responds to his proposal with "Good-bye," if he wasn't replaying some earlier conversation in his head that actually lead to her being on the plane. Like, that's why she died, moving away from him, and he made one last-ditch play, Death Masque objected, and she died. And then Superman actually does show up, except Ray thinks it's his dad again and well, *gestures to the top of the post* When Ray wakes up, the two of them talk about how hard it is to live up to people idolizing you, but it's something you have to consider, blah blah, Ray doesn't get drunk.

I'm still not sure if we're meant to read the fight as Ray really beat Death Masque, so all his later fears and whinging that he can't do it was wrong, or that Death Masque threw the fight to sell his trick that this was really another manipulation by Happy. Considering Ray loses every other single time they fight directly, I assume the latter.

The point seems to be that Ray still hasn't moved on from his childhood. He's still trying to date the girl that was his best (only?) friend. When the grief over everything gets too much, Ray tries to return to his childhood home, which someone else owns and inhabits now. He's idolizing Superman instead of trying to be the best Ray he can. I don't think that was a necessary story, considering the point of the mini-series was for Ray to embrace his new reality and move forward, but Priest seemed to think it was relevant. Seems undercut by all Death Masque's manipulations.

Maybe Priest just wanted to write Jenny out, since she never appears again. I don't think he really replaced her in the supporting cast. Ray's main girlfriend ends up being a future cop who gives him instructions how to return to his time, and it turns out Ray saved her when she was a little kid and gave her those instructions to give to him, which implies a fairly large age gap, and we mostly see them interact in a future where Vandal Savage did shape Ray into a ruthless corporate type.

But if the point was removing useful voices around Ray so, "ask Vandal Savage for help," seems like a good plan, then mission accomplished?

Saturday Splash Page #221

"Dark Light," in The Ray (vol. 2) #3, by Christopher Priest (writer), Howard Porter (penciler), Robert Jones (inker), Pat Garrahy (colorist), Ken Bruzenak (letterer)

About 2 years after his mini-series ended, and after he'd gotten some play in that era's Justice League titles, The Ray got an ongoing series. It lasted 28 issues, counting the Zero Hour tie-in #0, Christopher Priest the writer, Howard Porter the penciler for most of the first half of the series, Jason Armstrong illustrating most of the second half.

Jack C. Harris' mini-series was about moving beyond adolescence, growing and coming into your own, with Ray accepting his powers and symbolically shutting the door on the home where he'd spent his entire life up to that point. Priest carries that forward, but with more emphasis on the reality of being a "grown-up" versus the illusion.

Ray's an adult now! He gets to live in his own place! Earn his own money! Date the girl that was his childhood best friend! Hang out with his birth father! Be a superhero!

Except it's not such a great time. The only apartment he can get has no fridge, and comes with an ugly industrial sculpture bolted to the floor. He works at a fast food chicken restaurant. He has almost no furniture, because he spent his money on a souped-up laptop and a cardboard standee of Superman. Jenny, who was not only accepting, but encouraging of Ray embracing his powers, no longer seems to have time for him. Eventually there's a young woman he meets first in the future, then the present, then her future self travels back to his present to avert a bad future. There may have been at least one other brief romantic interest, but if so, the character made zero impact.

Happy Terrill turns out to be not just a congenital liar, as he's still deceiving Ray and Ray's mother - Ray thinks she died in childbirth, she thinks Ray was stillborn - but a domineering, frankly, abusive prick. When he thinks Ray isn't taking his powers seriously, Happy somehow makes Ray think he stole his powers, then dumps him in Chernobyl. Later, when Ray seems to have adjusted to not having powers, Happy disguises himself as a robber and jams a shotgun in Ray's face to terrorize him. It's like Happy took all his parenting techniques from Silver Age Superman.

I was entirely OK when it appeared Happy was killed by Death Masque, the game program Ray designed as a training tool, which subsequently slipped his control and eventually conquered a country. Unfortunately, Priest revealed Happy wasn't dead near the end of the series, which might have been with some notion of reconciliation, as part of a larger thing Priest was doing about family, but I wasn't really having it. If there was some chance Happy could fix all his mistakes, maybe, but he hadn't demonstrated that level of competence in anything, so everyone's really just better off if he's dead.

Ray's superheroing doesn't go so great either. Obviously the issues with Death Masque, which hang over the book throughout. Especially when one of the Justice League squads - I don't know which, that Triumph character was leading it, straight to the dollar bin I assume -  refuses to help, so Ray turns to Vandal Savage for some reason I'm sure was addressed in another book. Priest tried to acknowledge developments in Justice League comics that might impact Ray, but as I didn't buy those comics or care about them, it just ends up being confusing. Ray was gone for months because of what? Long-distance space travel time dilation? Huh?

His team-up with Superboy almost results in Ray killing Superboy, then almost dying against Brimstone because Ray exhausted all his power. Black Canary takes advantage of his school boy crush to get him to help her chase a crook through a dimensional doorway to another world, which later results in Ray having to fight Lobo, then time-traveling and messing up certain details of his father's life. The better half of Dr. Polaris contacts Ray to warn him about the return of the Light Entity, but when Ray can't make heads or trails of the warning, and neither can anyone else, he busts out Emerson. Which backfires when Polaris retakes control. Neron approaches Ray, initially as a woman, and after revealing his true form, Ray's more freaked out he kissed a guy than that the devil is bargaining for his soul.

Porter's work in less exaggerated than Quesada's. He tones down Ray's frankly ridiculous hair and Jenny stops looking like her skirts and suits are going to tear apart if she breaths too deeply. But he and Garrahy don't have the same knack (interest?) in playing with contrast in how they depict Ray's powers or appearance. He still looks similar when powered up, but there's less flair to it, less exaggeration for effect. Ray's not suddenly turning into a little bowl-cut version of himself while interacting with the Light Entity.

Though Priest doesn't entirely forgo embarrassing Ray for comedy's sake. Ray has to kick Lobo out of a space station bar to get Canary medical treatment, and on his initial approach, Lobo simply tears the top off Ray's helmet, taps his cigar ashes on Ray's head, then slams the helmet closed again. Ray gets attacked by Happy while still a little power-drunk from contact with the Entity, and after getting knocked into a clothing shop, emerges wearing a sun hat and a body-length green dress with polka dots. Porter's art has the pacing and body language to sell those moments, despite the times where you can feel his work veering into that '90 Image style of too much cross-hatching or characters gritting an impossible number of teeth.

It's strange, a big part of the series revolves around family. Ray's strained relationship with Happy, especially when he thinks Happy's dead. Ray trying to covertly kindle a relationship (not romantic!) with his mother, by pretending he wants to earn money mowing her lawn. (His mother assumes he's the result of some affair Happy had.) Death Masque is like a jealous child, especially once Vandal Savage starts sniffing around. It turns out Ray has a brother who is both older and younger than him, who comes into play in the last-third of the series. Ray's cousin Dean pops up occasionally, dealing out sage "wisdom."

I'm not sure what the goal is, given Priest also seems to be making the point, as an adult, Ray has to solve his own problems. Ray ultimately stops Death Masque, and settles down the Light Entity. He has to protect his mother and his younger/older sibling. He has to find their dad. He has to recognize Vandal Savage is a scumbag who was never going to help Ray, but instead groom Ray into something Savage could use. That fits with the notion of adulthood that, at a certain point, you have to take ownership of your life, but as far as the "family" aspect, I'm less sure. It's caring about his family that makes Ray stop whining about not being able to beat Death Masque, and just knuckle down and do it to save their lives?

Random Back Issues #89 - Xero #9

We'll check back in on how that works out for "The Doctor".

One of the two issues of Xero drawn by Eduardo Barreto rather than ChrisCross, issue 9 is a waiting game. Level 0 "Closer" Xero (aka, super-awesome basketball player Trane Walker) is cooped up in an American Embassy in Bulgaria. A CIA section chief named Tony somehow became aware of Xero's existence and tried to use him to kill a weapons dealer named Draga. This is did not work, and now Xero's trying to kill Tony. But a) Tony's on American soil at the moment, and b) since Tony works for the government, there's a question of if Xero can kill him. That's being argued over by Xero's boss, Decker, the Attorney General, the Department of Justice, and the Central Intelligence Director.

The caption boxes use a series of abbreviations for those, but then there's a handy key at the bottom of the page. Since I think all this is a book Trane's brother is writing years after the fact, odd that he would take that approach.

So Xero waits, and Tony waits and they play golf, and Tony generally acts like a smug prick because he knows who the blonde white guy is, and why he's there. While Xero dreams about killing him and deals with a persistent headache. 

Back in the States, Xero's brother Tre is in the midst of a huge bender. He was sleeping with the local sheriff's daughter and she broke up with him, because she was tired of being unfaithful to her reverend boyfriend. Who is also one of Tre and Trane's teammates. And guess who has come to visit Tre and use the power of the Lord to free him from the evils of the demon liquor?

Rev notices one of Sabrina's jackets hanging in what Tre calls his 'shrine' to her. He's also been spritzing her perfume on his sheets, which Rev smells. Rather than resort to violence, Rev does something worse: He prays. Tre's not even worth throwing away his vows to God for. That can't be good for the ego.

Meanwhile, their other teammates, The Doctor and Twig ("The WhIte Guy") are involved in a charity street game of sorts. Twig is more than a little unnerved that the refs are wearing Kevlar and packing heat, and that there are an awful lot of boxes full of cash being toted around by other people with guns. The Doctor assures him that these are just friendly wagers and that their victory will get a bunch of local children some new sneakers. If they survive.

Through all the waiting, Xero has left a gap in the sensor net he established to make sure Tony didn't slip away, and it's centered on the foosball table. Once Tony finds it, Xero is sure Tony will ask him to play and try to kill him there. At which point Xero can kill him on grounds of self-defense. The moment comes, and Xero walks away instead, to continue reading Confederacy of Dunces and wait for confirmation to act. When he next speaks to Decker, Decker tells him it's his call.

Which Xero knows would never happen. The reason Draga got away from Xero is he's a 'techno-merc' who can hack the system that sends Xero information. This whole time Xero's been seeing Tony, he's really been sitting across from Draga, manipulating the information (the source of the headaches) and pretending to be Decker. Now Draga's gone, leaving Xero a taunting message that he'll see him in St. Louis.

Then the Embassy blows up. As for the charity basketball game? 

Well, The Doctor doesn't appear to have been lucky in love, but Twig gradually gets in the spirit of the game, flattening a guy grabbing his jersey. Doctor scores a winning bucket, then has a bullet go through his Afro and hit some other guy in the head. Time to, as the song says, take the money and run.

{12th longbox, 160th comic. Xero #9, by Christopher Priest (writer), Eduardo Barreto (artist), Jason Scott Jones (colorist), Willie Schubert (letterer)}

Saturday Splash Page #19

"Passenger 57 is in Deep Trouble," in Xero #4, by Christopher Priest (writer), ChrisCross (penciller), Tom Simmons (inker), Jason Scott Jones (colorist), Willie Schubert (letterer)

Ah, a one-week break from mutant-related stuff. Xero ran for 12 issues in 1997 and 1998, focused on a high-level government assassin with the codename Xero. Xero suffered horrible injuries on a mission, and his brother devised some bio-implants that save his life and grant him additional abilities, like moving through solid objects. In his day job, Xero is Coltrane "Trane" Walker, an All-Star-caliber basketball player, and his brother Trent is his teammate and in a sense, p.r. guy. When Trane misses a game, Trent's the one who makes excuses.

Which doesn't make Trent a good man. Over the course of 12 issues, Trane gradually starts to regain his humanity, to start to care about people beyond whether they're immediately useful to completing whatever mission he's on. It's a slow process, alternately hindered and helped by a rival agent named One and their mutual boss, Decker. One wants the top slot in the organization, and Decker doesn't want Xero distracted by things like being a role model in his everyday life. 

Trent, by contrast, spends most of the series being a selfish prick. He keeps his brother alive, but there's no sense they really communicate. Trane doesn't confide what he's thinking to his brother, and Trent is busy carrying on an affair with the local sheriff's daughter (who is dating one of their teammates). Trent also narrates much of the series, so it's fair to wonder how accurate his description of Trane's thought process is.

A lot of the book is about perception. As Xero, Trane has an uplink to a satellite that feeds him information. Except that information can be altered, or his prosthetic eye hacked. So he keeps finding himself in situations where he thinks he's facing one person, but it's really someone else, or there's no one there at all. He can't trust what he sees, and steadily can't trust what he knows about the people he works for. What games they're really playing, and where he stands.

When Trane is Xero, he's a blond-haired, blue-eyed guy. Captain America's cousin. Trane himself is African-American, and the first time we see his true face, on a jumbo screen halfway through the first issue, it shows him sweating heavily and staring right at the camera with an intense look, a marked contrast to the placid or indifferent look Xero is wearing at that moment as he works on completing his mission.

Which plays into the theme as well. Sheriff Lake is constantly trying to get Trane to care about other people, because Trane does a very good job of appearing not to care. Trent seems like the more affable one, but he's generally the bigger asshole. He talks to his teammates, but only to insult them. He flat out tells the guys on their bench he doesn't talk to bench people.

ChrisCross draws most of the series, minus issues 9 and 10 (done by Eduardo Barreto), and issue 12 (by Eric Battle). He knows how to switch between small, tight panels for close-ups on Xero or someone else, but also when to go widescreen and splash page for the action sequences (what Xero refers to as 'cowboy crap.') Lots of using TV monitors as complete panels, or shadows to cut panels sharply in half along a diagonal to guide the eye. The prosthetic eye has a red glow or laser effect and that gets used for emphasis or to guide the reader as well.

Does The Reference Fit?

I keep seeing this scene from Christopher Priest's Deathstroke series online. A group of grieving mothers, their children killed by gun violence, have hired Deathstroke to kill the people responsible, which he is doing. The cop is frustrated by the fact nothing seems to get done to curb gun violence, and the reporter questions the wisdom of hiring a killer to kill killers. Both of which are fair points, but being me, the thing that grabbed my attention was neither of those things.

The reporter, and that's Jack Ryder, aka the Creeper, is getting his movie reference wrong. A Fistful of Dollars isn't about a town hiring a gunfighter. It's about a gunfighter entering a town of his own accord, and trying to play the gangs vying for control against each other for his financial benefit. The townspeople, such as they are, don't hire Joe. Silvanito, the innkeeper, tries to get him the hell out of town, figuring nothing good will come of his presence for anyone.

But ultimately Joe's actions weaken the Baxters and provoke the Rojos into destroying them. And then Joe kills the Rojos (for revenge for the ass-whupping they gave him or to protect Silvanito, take your pick). Granting a decent portion of the town burns down or is blown up, the few townsfolk we'd seen up to then are alive and free. Marisol is reunited with her family. I confess I don't know what those people will do for a living, but the Rojos' gun-running and the Baxters' liquor didn't seem to be creating many jobs, despite what I'm sure were very friendly tax rates (as in non-existent). Maybe more people needed to get in on the lucrative coffin-building industry. Still, I wouldn't say things worked out badly for the townspeople (excluding the crooks selling guns and booze), especially since they didn't waste any of their non-existent money hiring Joe to do this. Unless Ryder is counting the Rojos and Baxters as the townsfolk. I guess technically they would count, but the analogy definitely wouldn't fit in that scenario.

My best guess is Ryder is thinking of High Plains Drifter, where the cowardly, backstabbing townspeople hire the guy who killed three people and raped a woman his first half-hour in town to protect them. And he proceeds to take all their shit, let them humiliate and degrade themselves bending over backwards for him, and gets them to essentially help destroy their town. Although equating a bunch of moms who are angry and griefstricken over the loss of their children with a bunch of people who hired gunmen to kill a marshal to hide one crime, then framed the gunmen for theft to have them locked away, then hired more gunmen to protect them for when the first group of gunmen were released from prison, then hired the guy who killed the second group of gunmen for the same job, is a bit of a stretch.

The thing is, Christopher Priest seems like a pretty thoughtful guy, so I'm wondering if he got the reference wrong deliberately as some kind of point about Ryder, or he's just approaching it from a different perspective. Obviously the idea that hiring someone to kill people who killed others isn't going to solve the underlying problem of why those people took a life in the first place, or how they were able to have guns to do so. That there could be retaliation, escalation if the friends of the people Deathstroke kills figure out who pointed him in their direction and decide for some payback. Relying on killing to solve the problem of people killing people is not a sound strategy.

But going off either of those two films, what were the options? In High Plains Drifter, the townspeople could have opted not to mine on land they weren't supposed to, or accepted the punishment for doing so, or not framed Stacey Bridges for robbery. But having done those things, what were the options left if not to hire gunfighters? They did, at the drifter's urging, trying fighting for themselves, and failed miserably. They could have abandoned the town, scattered to the winds. Or they could have stayed and accepted whatever vengeance Bridges brought upon them. Fight, flee, suffer through it. None of those seem like viable options for the grieving mothers in the comic.

With A Fistful of Dollars, again, what's the option? None of the townsfolk have a prayer of confronting either of the gangs directly. The militaries of both the U.S. and Mexico use the town as a convenient meeting point for clandestine sales of weapons and booze. Neither of them is likely to step in and help. The sheriff is the head of the Baxter clan (and an incompetent boob to boot), so law enforcement is useless. I have no idea what political body they could appeal to, if any. It almost seems as though their best hope was to keep their heads down and hope that once one side won the struggle, things would get easier. But assuming that happens, and assuming it doesn't get them killed or their homes destroyed in the process, they're still living in fear of the remaining gang, which can now act with impunity because there's no risk of being attacked on an exposed flank if they overreach.

Maybe it shows that Ryder is well-aware of the limitations of the approach of using violence to eliminate violence, but has no viable solutions. Like me, he's good at picking out the flaws, but struggles to correct them. And hey, it's easy to criticize (fun, too). Or that he ignores the emotional element in this, the pain and frustration that would drive these mothers to this decision.All he sees is some vague way it could go wrong, not recognizing that from their perspective, it's already gone as wrong as it can.

Any Excuse To Talk About The Ray

So CW is going to do a series of animated shorts, or animated somethings, with The Ray, similar to what they did with Vixen previously, probably with an eye to incorporating him into the various live-action DC shows they have down the line. Assuming that's how it goes, I don't expect he'll look as cool as powered-up Ray did in the comics, but that's not new. I don't think live-action can match artists for making superhero stuff look cool. There's just a limit to what actors and costumes can achieve versus art, where you can do anything you can draw, regardless of whether it'd be at all feasible in the real world. Not a big issue, though.

And it turns out he's going to be gay, possibly a nod to an issue of Grant Morrison's Multiversity, where he did an updated version of the Freedom Fighters. Or they just recognized there's nothing about Raymond's character that requires him to be heterosexual, so why not broaden the range of people represented. I hadn't ever seen that comic, so I didn't know that had happened. My thought when I read the announcement was someone had been reading some of Ray's ongoing from the '90s.

There was an issue, #19 I think, that was part of Underworld Unleashed, where Ray is making out with this woman, who then reveals herself to be Neron, basically DC's Devil. And Neron makes Ray the old, "I'll give you X in exchange for your soul." Except Ray is more focused on having kissed a guy than about the fact the "guy" was the Devil*.

It's generally played as a joke; Neron even grows frustrated that Ray won't focus. I've always read it as Ray still being naive, not recognizing that as a superhero, these are the kind of things that will happen to him. Having seen the announcement about his character coming to TV, I thought, "Well, you could read that as his having been confused about his feelings after finding out it was a guy**." Then I started thinking about his other romantic relationships. The aborted one with Jenny Jurden, the only friend he had as a kid living inside in the dark all the time. There was Galeon, a young woman he meets when he and Black Canary are lost in time, who he finds out future him is having a relationship with. She also gives him a note with instructions on how many times to circle the sun to get home, which he gives to her as a kid when he meets her basically the moment he and Dinah reach home, and Child Galeon instantly develops a crush on him, which apparently persists to adulthood. Or there's whole puppy-dog thing with Dinah.

Jenny was the one person his age he had any connection with growing up, so he cares deeply for her. If his childhood friend had been John Jurden, would that have changed things for him? Dinah's the experienced older woman that mostly doesn't even seem to want him around, except when she can use him for something. She also seems like what popular culture tells young guys they should find attractive (especially as drawn in the '90s) Long blonde hair, big chest, fishnets, impractical heels for all that jumping and flipping, but what the hell. Maybe Ray's going with what everything around him says he should (or he's bisexual). As for the relationship with Galeon, I don't know. She saves him in the future, then he saves her as a kid, and she develops a crush on him, which apparently develops into something more, to the extent her future, cop, self travels back in time to try and straighten him out by stabbing Vandal Savage. I'm not sure what to make of all that. Future Ray doesn't seem to treat her that great, but Future Ray is a dick to everyone, a pitiless corporate ass, Justin Hammer with superpowers, so who knows.

It doesn't have to be read that he was a closeted (unknowing?) gay/bisexual who's trying heterosexual relationships because he thinks he's supposed to, but I could see that interpretation. Or he could be a young heterosexual guy with limited life experience making poor relationship decisions without a good support network. Relationships are tough, and Ray didn't have a lot of experience with people in general growing up. But it could also be that he was a young guy with limited life experience and no good support network, who is also gay.

We don't know much about his childhood, except that he was raised by his uncle (pretending to be his father), in a house kept perpetually dark***, and taught by nuns, I think. I have no idea what he learned about love, or sexuality, at all, but I can't imagine they spent much time explaining to him that sometimes boys are attracted to boys. They probably didn't mention the possibility at all. Now he's out in the world, but the man who raised him is dead. His birth father is a dick who has done nothing but lie to Raymond. His mother doesn't even know he's alive, because his father told her he died while being born (Happy Terrill may be the worst comic book dad ever). His boss is Vandal freaking Savage. His only other surviving relative is Hank, who looks and acts like the Fonz. I get the impression most of his Justice League teammates treated him like a dumb kid (J'onn seems like someone who'd be a good sounding board, but I don't think they were close). He's got effectively nobody to work through this stuff with.

I doubt much of that is playing into the character as he'll appear on TV, though I could be surprised.

*I think he actually makes the deal because he doesn't take it seriously, and that gets undone somehow. That's around the point in the series things started to get confused for me, because I think Priest was addressing things that were happening to Ray in Justice League Task Force, or Extreme Justice or something, and I don't really understand what those things were.

** Assuming a devil really has a gender. I guess they do if they want to.

*** Because his birth father's first son had the same powers, but stopped aging at 10, with the mind of a 4-year old, and was extremely dangerous. So Happy Terrill locked him in a missile silo for decades, alone.