Comments on: There Will Always Be an Ambush Bug

By: The Mutt

The Mutt — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:42:27 +0000

Marvel could really use another Assistant Editors Month right about now. I’d love a AEM blogathon.

By: Nobody

Nobody — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:36:31 +0000

Great idea! But alas, my back-issue collection is in the US, inaccessible to me till my Christmas visit. I’ll bring my faves back to the UK for a belated P.S. in mid-January though!

By: Professor Fury

Professor Fury — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:13:04 +0000

Hey, you know, gorjus and Nobody, if no one has done this yet, we should get together and do an Assistant Editors Month blog-a-thon—we’ll each pick a favorite issue and analyze it. Metafiction ahoy! Maybe we can get Jim Roeg and plok, etc, involved. Maybe do it in early December? I can post a “call for posts” sometime soon!

LET’S!

By: gorjus

gorjus — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:56:44 +0000

Hm. That’s kind of interesting, Nobody . . . and I do remember those types of stories growing up, and I found them deeply disturbing—not funny at all, just worrisome. I didn’t WANT superheroes to hang out with weird, ugly guys in New York. I wanted them to hang out with me in Alabama!

Perhaps that’s why I loved Ambush Bug so much—he went where you weren’t “supposed” to go and made it . . . stupid! The Rolling Head of Julius Schwartz long predated Scipio’s Rolling Head of Pantha! And was, for my taste, roughly just as disgusting!

By: Nobody

Nobody — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:11:15 +0000

I fondly remember the Fred Hembeck-drawn issue of Spectacular Spider-Man (#86) during Ass’t Eds Month where he and the Black Cat team up against The Fly, then two pages before the end of the story Al Milgrim storms into the office furious that his pencilled pages had been rejected in favor of the cartoonist’s (Fred was drawn Hembeck style in the otherwise realistic interlude). So to appease him and the fans (?) the final two pages of the story were published with Milgrim’s art. Looking at the cover date I can’t believe I was three years old when my dad first bought it for me, though I re-read it dozens of times growing up.

That class on superhero metafiction sounds like a fantastic time. I’ve been looking for a topic outside my field of 17th-Century Lit to give a paper on next term so I’m contemplating something on Editorial Intervention in the DCU, for which I think Infinite Crisis was a metaphor if not outright allegory: Superboy as all Earth-Prime readers and Alex as DC editors and (re)creators.

By: Professor Fury

Professor Fury — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:52:02 +0000

I looooove this idea (and I had just read your post discussing these very issues). I plan to track down some of those metafictional silver and bronze-age Flash stories. It’s interesting: both Marvel and DC have played with the idea of metafiction, but in Marvel, even though we frequently meet the comics creators (usually of the FF comics), it’s always clear that the stories they’re writing aren’t the ones we’re reading (except when this is exploited for comic effect, as in the Asst Editor’s month issue of Thing, where he goes up against Goody Two-Shoes.) But the DCU past and present seems to be working a different dynamic…

If the stars align just right, I’ll be teaching a class on metafiction, history, and superheroes next fall—we’ll read novels about comics and comics about comics; someone just donated a huge collection of silver and bronze age comics to our special collections library, so I’m going to enjoy having an excellent excuse to while away next summer digging through them for just these sorts of issues.

By: Nobody

Nobody — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 23:09:47 +0000

Considering Morrison’s involvement in 52, I think the possibility of a “new Earth-2” alluded to in Infinite Crisis is actually going to turn out to be a New Earth-Prime, where the E2 Superman, Lois, and Wonder Woman were whisked off to (and reinforced by the revisions to dialogue in the IC hardcover).

It would keep them “dead” but also give “the original Superman” an afterlife similar to that realized by the characters killed in the first Crisis, as in Animal Man: “We can never die. We outlive our creators. We outlive our gods! ... Every time someone reads our stories, we live again!”

After all, if Earth-Prime is where Julie Schwatz lived, how can it have been “destroyed” at all in 1985?

By: Professor Fury

Professor Fury — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 15:16:15 +0000

I loved it! I just wanted there to be more of him. It remains to be seen, I guess, if this is just a one-off, salutary gesture to the metafictional or if we’re going to see notions of metafictionality woven into the fabric of the new DCU more thoroughly. It’s a good start, in any case.

By: Nobody

Nobody — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 04:35:13 +0000

So what did you make of Ambush Bug’s appearance in 52 last week (#24)? As Jim Roeg observed, it was the most explicitly metafictional issue yet…

By: TheChisa

TheChisa — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 08:48:05 +0000

The thing about the Bug is: he’s ALWAYS been considered institutionalizably insane, so if you view his comics from his own POV, no continuity explainations are required. He’s simply seeing the world in his own patently batshit way.

That having been said, this article is quite a nice reminder that, as Alan Moore once noted, “madness is the emergency exit.”