Panel Vision - No Man's Land

As you probably know Puerto Rico recently suffered devastation at the hands of Hurricane Maria.  It’s a natural disaster of incalculable scale made infinitely worse by the federal government's point-blank refusal to help Puerto Rico in the manner that would befit our so-called leaders.  If you’re at all able to give please consider donating to organizations like United for Puerto Rico, Americares, Convoy of Hope, Direct Relief, Catholic Relief Services, International Medical Corps, or Unicef.  The people of Puerto Rico are in desperate need of help and it’s painfully clear that it’s going to have to come from us because those in power are too cruel or incompetent to take action. 

This idea of being abandoned by our own government has been a running theme in 2017, especially with the way the natural world seems to be coming apart at the seams.  More and more, the organizations we once trusted with our basic safety and day-to-day concerns have turned on us with, at worst, a predatory maliciousness and at best a blind idiocy.  

In that power vacuum citizens have had to rely on one another to fight the battles we can’t as individuals, be that in the form of mass demonstrations and call-in over healthcare or the civilian fleet that went to Houston after Hurricane Harvey.  This blend of federal abandonment with the greater need for joint community action seemed fairly familiar to me because it’s also the core of my favorite Batman comic of all time- No Man’s Land. 

Cover Story - Top 15 Harley Quinn Covers

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We’re currently a week out from Suicide Squad, DC’s latest attempt to salvage the flaming wreckage of their cinematic universe.  I could go on and on about how bizarre it is that the people with the biggest stable of superheroes imaginable keep consistatly getting one-upped by the likes of Ant-Man and Thor (seriously, 9 years ago who outside the comics fandom even knew those guys existed?) but that’s not the point of this particular column.  No, we gather together today because there’s nothing topical happening this week related to comics but I have a compulsive need to make this show link to something.  

As such, we’re getting a head start on Suicide Squad by looking at the career of its most prominent member in the advertisements: Harley Quinn.  Originating in the Batman animated series of 1992 before immigrating to the comics and taking up residence there for 20 years as her character evolved from tragedy to comedy to something close to DC’s Deadpool.  So, let us celebrate this glorious harlequin of comics and dive into the shallow end to get the cover story on the top 15 Harley Quinn comic covers.

Panel Vision - World Without Batman

Merry Christmas everyone, even to those of you like me who might not observe the holiday.  Christmas has always been a weird time for me as a result of that little wrinkle.  It’s become sort of a known joke at this point that most Jews like me spend Christmas at the movies and enjoying all the Chinese food we can put our hands to but that’s just a small part of a broader phenomena.  Because this time of year is so centralized around traditions a lot of us who don’t celebrate Christmas work to craft our own traditions, so as to still be included in the overall emphasis on traditional celebration while making it our own and preserving a certain sense of identity. 

Me, being a nerd with an aesthetic preference for the trappings of Christmas, I usually spend the holidays hunting down holiday superhero adventures and boy do I have one to share here.  It may not be specifically Christmas oriented but given it’s the same basic plot as It’s A Wonderful Life I think we’ll all count it, this is “World Without Batman.”