SMALLVILLE'S Allison Mack On Chloe's Greatest Accomplishment

Allison Mack's contribution to Smallville's success cannot be understated, and as the show that chronicles the evolution of a super boy to a Superman enters into the final stretch of its ninth season, Mack's Chloe Sullivan has become its most interesting and enigmatic character.  Chloe, you see, is Smallville's only main character that isn't part of the established Superman mythos. As written, she's Lois Lane's cousin - and at this point in Smallville's weekly drama, she's become an integrated part of the show's superhero community, whereas  Lois herself is still a good leg from getting the scoop on Clark Kent.  By virtue of her existence outside of Superman's comic book continuity, Chloe's also Smallville's' go-to girl,' the one character that everything can happen to that can't happen to everybody else. Though this fact has made Mack's character something of a guinea pig for past plot lines, has also allowed Chloe to develop a character arc -- to change -- more visibly, and perhaps more dramatically, than the rest of the Smallville gang.

What's most intriguing about Chloe is the character's potential to become anything - or anybody. Smallville's fans have been intrigued for years as to who Chloe may yet become, as a name or identity change may one day surprisingly reveal her to be an already-established character from DC Comics' Superman lore.  The mystic hero Doctor Fate even alluded as much in Smallville's Absolute Justice episode earlier this month - and he hasn't been the first to do so.

We take today's quote from an Allison Mack's February 12th interview with Newsarama.com -- because, frankly, it just made us smile. It's also a testament to the interplay of legend building in the comic book universe,  and to Mack's creation of a very pivotal role in the world of The Man of Steel.  DC Comics purchased the rights to Chloe Sullivan, intending to bring her into Superman's comic book canon, beginning with issue #674 of that series. Ultimately, however, those plans fell through -- and DC has no future plans to integrate Chloe into the DC Universe.

Still, while mainstream superheroing may evade her, Allison Mack's Chloe did get the DC treatment.  In 2002, DC Comics published Smallville: The Comic -  a 64-Page Special! - a story set outside of DC's other Superman titles but that did jive with Smallville's own continuity.  Featuring the show's entire cast at the time, the Smallville Special was a one-time event, but its popularity brought Smallville back for a second eleven-issue run  (and TV series tie-in) the following year.  Considering how things are really super-heating up for the series, it's likely that Smallville - and Chloe - will find itself cast in four-colors for a third time.  For both, as we've said, anything is possible.  Need more Smallville or Chloe Sullivan? The place to be is Kryptonsite.com - HERE.

 Left: Smallville (Volume 2) Issue #7 (DC Comics, 2004) 

Right: Chloe Sullivan as her comic book alter-ego

Pop Psychology...and Sunday's MISSED CONNECTIONS

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What People Are Saying About ABBRACADABBLING

Man Of Steel: Dreams

SUNDAY FUNNIES: Special Afternoon Edition... Ka-POW! WWAS??

Abbracadabbling embarks on an even bolder social experiment with The Sunday Funnies: AFTERNOON EDITION!  When the mood strikes us (and when it does, it stings like a bitch!) or when DABBLERS DEMAND IT, we'll supplement our supple Sunday Funnies with -- you guessed it --  even more Sunday Funnies!  As we're so fond of saying, It's a Good Thing When There's Even More of It! (Raley embarrassed her last boyfriend with those exact words and got kicked out of the nursing home.)  So what can you expect in our FIRST (and quite possibly our LAST) Afternoon Edition? Our way-way-way-too-popular Comic Comics is back for an encore featuring some great dialogue from Wednesday's New Avengers. (Good to see Spidey's okay after Superman's pocket rocket surprise!)  Graphically Speaking sneaks back to the blog, too.  Plus, two features you'll ONLY find in the Afternoon Edition -- SUNPMNSFW (we'll let you figure it out) and the Afternoon Academic -- hereafter to be called affectionately, AA.  AA is interactive and it's fun, and the first Dabbler to get us their Back Issues with the correct answers will WIN a Brand-New Comic Book!  But we'll get things going with HOBNOBBING -- The Home Office News Of the Blog Bulletin-Board - an uncensored inside look  at abbracadabbling behind-the-scenes. An afternoon with lots of larfs and sex and free comics...begins NOW!

HOBNOBBING

Comic Comics with the 

  

   

 Source: New Avengers, Issue #61 (Jan 2010 - Marvel Comics)

Graphically Speaking

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SUNPMNSFW

  

WWAS?? What Would Archer Say?

Sex Explained By BIC Pens

(Every position & pairing imaginable - here)

Ka-POW! Batman! T-shirt - $36 @ UrbanRetro

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 Afternoon Academic

It goes without saying that there's AT LEAST 100 Quotes that Every Comic Geek Should Know. Like, duh! A fave fellow blogger of ours compiled his Top 100 List (we'll link-source them next week) and we've borrowed just four of 'em for today's meeting of AA! Be the FIRST dabbler to leave us a BACK ISSUE containing who said each quote - and which TV show, book, comic, or movie the quote's from - and we'll reach into our Prize Pile and put a brand new comic book in your hands ASAP. How's that for a Sunday?

Good luck to everyone in AA -- we'll be back in just 7 with more. (Is that a threat?) 

NEXT Sunday Funnies: February 7, 2010 

Dick Giordano Apologizes for The Dark Knight Returns and I'll Have None Of It

The Comics Journal's blog Journalista for November 10th featured a short quote from Dick Giordano, a comics creator and DC Comics' Executive Editor from 1983-1993. Giordano was on hand when the company published both Alan Moore's Watchmen as well as Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns in 1986, and he commented on the latter:

"The Dark Knight Returns additionally helped start the grim and gritty trends in comic storytelling that still exist today. That was an unintended result, and I'm truly sorry it happened. Comics are much too dark today. Er -- in my opinion."

Criticism and apology? You're probably wise to clarify yourself there at the end, Mr. Giordano. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Miller's work not only inspire Tim Burton's first Batman movie but also last summer's Dark Knight, the $1billion+ box-office record breaker and cinematic phenomenon? Aren't the proceeds from that movie paying for your retirement?

And while the movies are great, let's not forget about the comics themselves. The Dark Knight Returns comes about as close as any comics work can get to being a force of nature, arguably even closer than Watchmen. As a former DC Executive, you know better than I, Mr. Giordano, that those two series heralded the sudden and drastic departure from the boring if not broken conventional compass that guided and defined the comics industry for decades.

What shape would the industry be in today if not for Frank Miller's revolutionary Batman tale? Consider the depth and a richness of comics storytelling today, just one hallmark of the sophistication that might otherwise never have been possible if not for Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen.

Both comics stories, for example, are skillfully set against the backdrop of nuclear Armageddon, a powerful symbol of the helplessness and self-destructive bent of their respective characters. Furthermore, the relevance of Miller and Moore's bombs as metaphors for precious endings and important changes extends even beyond the context of the comics! As an artist yourself, Mr. Giordano, surely you must recognize that their metaphor ingeniously also comments upon the very impact of both books on the comics medium itself.

Yes, sir, Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns rocked the comics world like A-bombs under your watch. And you know what? They're still shaking things up with the unforgettable impressions they've left on an entire new generation of creators. That extreme acts of creation are equally extreme acts of destruction that leave an even more extreme world in their wake is a legacy of literary talent today's creators can only hope to achieve within their own works.

I hope I've helped clear things up for you, Dick. For the record, I hope I've set you straight. I did, didn't I?

Shout!: Creatively Speaking with Summer Pierre, Blogger

"But for now, it was easy to lay out and pour over the colorful pictures

and dream up my own stories -- of something that was still yet to come."

- from Comic Books

Summer Pierre's not specifically a comics writer or artist; she's not a comic book industry name but I don't think she intends to be, either. She's an artist, a writer, a musician, a Bay Area native, and a fellow blogger. It's quite by accident that I found her blog, An Accident of Hope, but it's a great name (like abbracadabbling) and I'm happy I did.

Industrial Vigilante:Shout!''s last (and first) blog featuring the quote by Grant Morrison captured his beliefs about the essence of superhero comics with words. But quotes just as meaningful can be found in photographs and drawings, too. In comics, they often are, whether from text and image or image alone. A story, or at least a single, meaningful moment of one, can be captured within the size of a small panel. And though it's not much, any of us who might look at it would certainly get the picture.

My first discovery on Summer's blog was her entry Comic Books. Her single image captures an anecdote of significant time, like a well-written short story, as well as conveys to her reader not just the joy of that moment but her feelings about comics and their role in the story. While she might have just written the story with text sans any illustration, making it a drawing frames and defines this moment in ways a paragraph alone could never do.

Words and image combined make a very powerful quote - Pierre calls it a 'one page story' - that tells of her passion with comics as much as it makes a statement about the power of comics storytelling. Take a look:

Pierre's blog is peppered with one page stories. Her Artist in the Office 'Zine is just one more example of so many that have resonated with me. Exploring An Accident of Hope was a fun and inspiring, and it's more than earned my bookmark.

I recommend a visit to An Accident of Hope for every abbracadabbler. Summer Pierre doesn't know the word for what it is you and I are doing, but she's doing it along with us -- and very well. We're all accidental abbracadabblers, by definition. See for yourself here. Also, Pierre's comics, 'zines, and illustration can be viewed at her Flickr page.

More germane to social networking than comics, I wanted to include a few examples of Summer Pierre's creativity with the blogging medium below. Being a new blogger myself, and someone who's in love with ideas and images period, I really enjoyed her Creative Blogging entries -- photographed attempts to blog using other forms of communication - other mediums - than just keyboard and computer screen.

Another excellent example of inspired blogging communication is the series I've excerpted below. It's A Message Pierre posted for her readers in 2007 for her blog's second anniversary. You can see the entire message at the link.

Thanks for the borrow, Summer. Like the X-Files' Fox Mulder would say, "The Truth is Out There."

Photographs by Summer Pierre

Grant Morrison:The Essence of Super Heroes

Quotes are like perfect diamonds, formed and cut from the coal of another's experience, freely discovered yet infinitely priceless. Each of us, of course, determines the value or benefit of a quote by how it speaks to us specifically. It's no surprise that many of the best words ever said came from individuals whose voice spoke to the most people.

I'd left comics behind through high school and college, and may never have returned to them if not for 1996's JLA #1, written by Grant Morrison. Grant returned the Justice League to the stature its members deserved, while closer to home, he rekindled a passion and challenged my dreams. Ten years later, a 2006 Comic Book Resources survey of its readers 100 all-time favorite comic book writers placed Grant in the Number-Two spot, out-voted only by Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta). Clearly, Grant's voice has been heard by many. In the three years since, he hasn't slipped an inch.

Industrial Vigilante begins its blog run with a quotation from my favorite comic book writer, Grant Morrison.

Born in Scotland, Grant Morrison is one of the foremost writers in comics today. His body of work is known for its non-linear narratives, counter-cultural leanings, deconstructed superheroes, metaphysical motifs, metafictive interpretations, and widespread fan appeal.

To narrow his list of notable works in next to impossible. Except for 1996's JLA, Morrison's 90's decade characterized the mainstream fringe. He established new boundaries for comics storytelling and new understandings of the super-heroic in titles like Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Flex Mentallo, and his unparalleled opus, The Invisibles. His original Batman: Arkham Asylum coincided with the release of Tim Burton's film, and has since become one of the best-selling graphic novels ever written as well as the inspiration for the award-winning 2009 video game of the same name.

The major franchises at both DC and Marvel Comics became Grant's creative playground post-Y2K. His three-year stint on Marvel's New X-Men ended in a brouhaha of scandal and bewilderment that's now remembered as a one of the titles few highly regarded classic runs. At DC, Morrison's influence has carried beyond any one group of characters and instead has affected the DC Universe as a whole. Recognized as the individual with perhaps the greatest imaginative reach at DC, Grant was given the deity's challenge of restructuring DC's fictional geography, as evidenced by Final Crisis, Seven Soldiers, 52, and his rewiring of the company's biggest property, Batman. Along the way, he's resequenced the essences of Superman, Batman, and Robin the Boy Wonder for a legion of new readers with his All-Star Superman and DC's current top-selling title, Batman and Robin.

Grant Morrison's complete biography can be found here, and a DC Comics interview with Grant can be found on YouTube here. For more on Grant's interview with Wizard Magazine try here.

Our Amazon.com store offers abbracadabblers an extensive collection of Grant Morrison's many collected creations. Scroll down the blog and take a look.

We'll be seeing a lot of Grant Morrison on abbracadabbling -- so stay with us, dabblers!