Listen now to the ballad of Glitterboy

Ah Glitterboy.

One of my irrational favorites. I mean they never did all that much with him. He really did make a better side character than a hero but all the same he's just kind of bad ass.

I mean how do you go wrong with a psychic vampire wearing steam powered armor?

OH I know!

You option him for a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the character. It's particularly funny because Gyllenhaal did all these interviews leading up to the movies release about how much he liked the character and how he read it as a kid and blah blah blah but in the end apparently it was all lies because the character they gave us was more Booster Gold than Glitterboy.

Yes, the armor they gave him is "magic" rather than "super-tech". Yes her can pull off pretty much all the stuff that the original Glitterboy did in terms of brain draining and all that but no-one ever dies as a result.

He's a smarmy magic Ironman. So pretty much just a Magic Ironman really...

Where is the Mythos stuff? He's a Fire Vamipre for shits sake! The whole point is that he's a monster who's sort of doing the right thing. The conflict between nature and demeanor is what makes the character interesting.

If he's just a pretty boy hero with armor... well... who cares.

Anyway the movie... INEXPLICABLY turns out to be a huge success. How big? Oh. You know, optioning the next two less than a month after the release of the first. Top box office draw for like four weeks.

And it's good.

DAMMIT!

But it isn't Glitterboy.

Naturally this led to WC thinking "Hey! If this movie is doing well surely a comic featuring he character will do just as well.

Hah!

Now every other moderately intelligent person on the planet would have told them that movies do not impact the sales of comics but they tried anyway. They had a HUGE ad campaign and set up all sorts of stuff with the character but...

THEY DIDN'T USE THE MOVIE VERSION!

I don't like the movie version as well but if you want to capitalize on the movie then you at least need to have the comic be enough like the movie that the people who liked the movie might have some chance of liking the comic.

So they start up an ongoing Glitterboy series. It bombs out after oh... maybe four issues. They start up a new series the very next month featuring the new version. The part that really bugs the crap out of me is that they didn't just make a new character and call him Glitterboy. They came up with this RIDICULOUS story where a freaking fire vampire is somehow transformed into Jake Gyllenhaal.

Yeah! I know! WTF!

Only he didn't work because it didn't make any fucking sense and they rushed it out so fast that there wasn't even a story worth reading or art worth looking at.

So that story bombs just as fast as the first one and by that time the serious buzz about the character was dead and they mercifully let it die.

But for how long? Not very thank you very much.

Just today i hear the Glitterboy will be featured in the new Arc of Dreams story and all the pictures I'm seeing are the old armor but the explanations I'm seeing sound more like the new version.

We'll just have to see how it plays out.

The only upside I can find is that at least they brought back the original creative team.

Arc of Dreams 2

Okay...

Sure. Why not right? I mean sequels never ever ruin the original. Right?

Anyway lets look back at how this happened so that we can fully appreciate just what a BAD IDEA it is.

So Wonder Comics is pretty old at this point. They've been up and they've been down and sometimes I love them and sometimes I want to tear out my hair and feed it to a cat just so that it hacks up a vile greasy hairball that i could then hurl at the people that insist on SHITTING on everything I grew up reading as a kid.

Case in point several years ago they decided to have this colossal crossover, using every hero with a vaguely magical back ground.

You know. Like Conundrum. The only version of Superman that ever caught my attention for more than say, oh, twelve seconds.

So they get them all together. They have this HUGE BAD ASS story and then at the very end they yank the rug out from under your feet, roll you up in it and rather than throw you off a bridge they slather you in honey and turn a bunch of horny bears loose on you.

Okay. Your experience in that regard may very.

The upshot is they got rid of magic. All of it. Even the parts that didn't suck donkey balls.

Now i normally wouldn't complain about getting rid of magic. I mean one of the classic tropes of comics is that Magic > Superpowers which means it ends up being sort of the "fix-it" button for the universe.

"Oh! We fucked up. Gosh. There isn't any reasonable way to fix this without actually trying to write a good, well thought out story so lets just bring in The Sterling Sorcerer and have him fix it."

Yay. I'm so glad you have a character you can turn to when you do something stupid.

Too bad it ends up invalidating everything that all the less insano characters do in the process.

But that is true of non-magic characters too so... whatever.

The point is that they decided they didn't want to deal with the magic crap anymore so they got rid of it.

A few years later, far more than I would have given them credit for actually, they had the Arc of Dreams.

Now Arc of Dreams sort of rubbed me the wrong way when it started. I mean it was like they were trying to make people forget about all the stupid shit that had happened after they got rid of magic (I presume everyone remembers the 'glory' that was the Superhuman Registration Act... News Flash Wonder. It didn't work for Marvel and it's not going to work for you.) by having stuff happen that could not possibly be ignored. Destroying a fair chunk of Chicago. Killing most of Eastern Europe. And let us not forget the "Jesi" or how ever the hell you spell that.

Now the funny thing is that in the grand scheme of things it turned out pretty well. Maybe a little cerebral and Meta for my taste but all in all pretty cool. Now they're have a second part and I don't get where they are are going to go with it.

I mean the only thing I can come up to top it would be the end of the world like six times in a row. Whew.