Tuesday, January 03, 2006

What Are those Things On The End of Your Shoelaces? Things I Think About #5

That's right, I found a decent computer, hurrah. They're aglets. Not relevant. My real question is, what happened to the citations in comic books. You know, you're reading Uncanny X-Men and Shadowcat says something like "We haven't seen Yukio since that battle with Sunfire and the Renagade Panda Squadron"*. And then at the bottom of the panel, there would be some little box and it would say "*in the now classic Uncanny X-Men #153" or something like that. I don't seem to see those as much any more.

I was thinking about this when I was reading one of my Batgirl's. She's asking Batman if he knows if Shiva is her mom. He says, he's not sure and that once upon a time, he thought Shiva might be Jason Todd's mom, but he ruled that out. In the comic, there are a couple of panels that are supposed to depict this, including Jason attacking Shiva while Batman follows, which seems kind of unlikely. And my first thought was, what comic was that in. Neither panel really explained how they determined she wasn't Jason's mom, so now I'm wondering what book it was in, so maybe I'd go buy it to find out. That's how a lot of my older issues got purchased. They got referenced in some more recent comic, and I was intrigued enough to want to spend more to read it.

So, any idea what that seems less prevalent? Or am I just reading the wrong books? Back on Friday.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have to say this before some one else does.

"Their real purpose in sinister."

Anonymous said...

It was determined that Shiva wasn't Jason's mom in the "Death in the Family" story arc.

Jason tracks her down since she's on his short list of matriarchal candidates, he and Batman beat the crap out of the people she's with, Batman beats the crap out of her, then ties her up and injects her with some truth serum.

None too exciting, if you ask me (unless you want to see Jason Todd get fake blowed up. Damn you Winick).

Diamondrock said...

You're not reading the wrong books. It seem exceedingly rare in this day and age. Though I honestly have no idea why that is.

thekelvingreen said...

I know that Marvel don't do the footnotes anymore because (a) they're unfriendly and confusing for new readers* and (b) they look weird in tpbs**.

People like Busiek held on to them for a while, putting the footnotes towards the end on the letters page, but even that disappeared.

In a strange coincidence, I read the Under the Hood tpb today, and there were footnotes in there, to my surprise.


* don't they help new readers too?
** okay, I sort of understand that one.