Friday, November 17, 2023
I know a lot of these we come in midstream, but this time...
Plus, everything you know, changes forever! Really! From 2005, Plastic Man #18, "The Edwina Crisis, prologue, part four" Story and art by Kyle Baker.
Previously, emo teen supervillain Ray El Rey had shattered the frozen Plastic Man into pieces, and accidentally disentegrated Plas's love interest Nancy and his adopted daughter Edwina! Ray mourns them, but is then accidentally killed by Woozy Winks spilling a drink on him and shorting his electrical powers, blowing his head off. And that's like three pages in! Woozy then accidentally--you know, just assume anything Woozy has ever done has been an accident--thaws some of the Plastic-pieces, which form tiny Plastic Men! Who themselves mourn Nancy and Edwina, as they try to pull themselves together, which doesn't work the way you would usually figure it would.
Elsewhere, a thug attacks a little girl in a dark alley, but is then himself accosted, by the new Spectre, and Teen Spectre! Yeah, it's Nancy and Edwina. They subject the thug to a variety of punishments, arguing about whether they should be ironic, or cool. Plastic Man bags up Nancy and Edwina's ashes, so he can take them to the monk that previously brought Woozy back to life. (Plas dishes, it was the same monastary Green Arrow went to after he killed a guy!) But the monk is dead, killed by a member of the League of Assassins! Well, throw the monk's ashes in the bag...They crash the LoA headquarters: literally crash, as Plas got frozen and shattered and made into tiny-Plastic Men again. The tiny Plastic Men are getting hacked up right and left, before the arrival of...Ra's Al Ghul! A dramatic reveal, since he had supposedly been dead...like he was about every time he appeared, sure, but still.
There were only two more issues of this series to go, and man, if you thought Baker was taking the piss out of DC before...
While I’m too crazy about how his art style evolved later on, I do think it more than suits the tone of this series, particularly Plastic Man.
ReplyDeleteI’ll always give credit to a creator rightfully shitting on the company employing if it’s righteous