EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW

Instant trauma often forces us into recognizing the prolonged trauma we’ve been heir too, all this time. There’s almost no way to read Phantom Girl’s throwaway line of “You know me…nothing hurts a phantom…”, a throwaway line that comes on the heels of ten panels of gut-wrenching panic and dread, ten panels of fear for the well-being of her compatriots in the wake of their star-cruiser crash, and not feel in some way as if we’ve already been implicated in the deeper dread of that glibness.

This isn’t the gnawing paralysis of survivor’s guilt that Phantom Girl is experiencing. Because simply put, she hasn’t survived. She’s been in trauma her entire life, a trauma uniquely entwined with the very nature of her superpowers—she’s been intangible to the world around her.

If anything, issue #17 opens with a kind of “instant trauma” not just for Phantom Girl, but for readers as well. We’ve never seen the powerhouse storytellers of Keith Giffen and Paul Levitz together on the Legion of Super Heroes. At least, we’ve never seen that before now…

Previously on To Be Continued…, we explored the skullduggery, hijinks, monkeyshines and skylarking shenanigans of DC’s unstoppable surreal showman, The Heckler. Well. unstoppable until his “ongoing monthly” series was cancelled at issue #6. DC had longer lasting “Limited Mini-Series”.

This lack of success could be related to The Heckler’s accessibility. The Heckler inhabited a corner of the DC Universe where a specific brand of surreal insanity reigned. Neon signs point the way toward criminal hideouts when they’re not advertising places like “YOUR Lady of Perpetual Suffering Hospital”, “Ig-Pay Atin-Lay Otel-hay”, “REPENT or I’ll kill you!”, “Unca Andy’s Putty Palace”, “Home of the world’s largest CYST” or even reading “Just another *#@ Sign”. Yes, it took a special kind of mind to click with The Heckler.

So who was this title Heckler? The first issue speculates on this for us, calling him everything from “The Duke of Disdain” to the “Founder of the European Coal and Steel Union and First Chancellor of the German Republic.” On the same page, the writers make the observation “We’ve never seen YOU and The Heckler together at the same time, have we?”

EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW

You can debate the comparative strengths of Aaron Sorkin’s most recent offering, Newsroom. Has he pushed the model he began with Sport’s Night too far? Has something in that idea of dialogue-driven storytelling gotten broken by being revisited time and again, through Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and now through Newsroom? Is Newsroom itself fraught with too much ideological grandstanding to lure viewers into the inherent dramas of cable news?

You can debate the various merits and the comparative strengths of Sorkin’s miscellany of TV shows. And if you know Sorkin as a producer and as a writer, you know that he takes on a Woody Allen-like aura for his fans—each fan defending their own favorite Sorkin project.

Thinking about it now, it’s hard not to remember the bile rising, hard not to relive it. In at #2 on MAD’s “20 Dumbest” for 2008 was Herman Mejia’s “Keeping Bad Companies”. We’d just made it out of the Financial Crisis without hitting a second Great Depression, but in February of 2009, we were beginning to ask, “But at what price?” Was the Bailout too much to afford, too high a price for us as a nation?

And there in the pages of MAD, in the starkest of terms, was Mejia’s caricature. President Obama, Geithner, Bernanke raising a parody of the Star-Spangled Banner, in a parody of the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising. But this wasn’t the real American flag—just as the ground underfoot was not the soil of Iwo Jima but piles of cash, the flag had its field of Stars deleted, only to be replaced by corporate logos.

Even now, the bile rises at the memory of that image. It’s the idea that we’ve been had, been taken in not only by the financial wizards who caused this mess, but by the political wizards who engineered the Bailout. A powerful image, with a powerful message.

EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW

There’s hardly a lot to go on in “Connection Lost,” a new sci-fi webcomic drawn by UK comics writer and artist Hannah Berry. For a quick but intriguing three-pager built on a script by novelist James Smythe, Berry uses algae green tones and pale blues to establish an air of dread in the drafty corridors of a spacecraft. It lurches toward what appears to be a disintegrating Planet Earth when the story closes out abruptly. Berry is given far more room to shimmer in her 2012 graphic novel Adamtine, even if some questions go unanswered.