A little more comic book geekery, I’m afraid.

The article I linked to last time also mentioned Secret Six, which was my favorite comic book until DC Comics decided to reboot their entire comic line a while back.

The Secret Six were a team of super villains (mostly pretty much second string). They hired themselves out for various nefarious activities, mostly trying to pretend that they weren’t becoming friends (and also occasionally trying to kill each other).

They had a tendency to be hired by people engaged in enterprises that even they found they couldn’t stomach (human trafficking and slavery, for example). That was one reason the book worked: the fact that they tried to live according to some sort of code, though they often had a lot of trouble agreeing on what that code should be — along with the fact that, while the stories were often wickedly funny, the characters never became a joke. To the extent that they weren’t first string, it was mostly because they weren’t quite rotten enough (much as they tried to convince everybody otherwise).

Since the reboot (the “New 52”), I’ve been wondering if the Secret Six would reappear in some form. There hasn’t been any buzz about it (unlike the return of the wonderful Stephanie Brown, for example, which was widely reported months before it actually happened), but then:

This month’s issue of Batgirl features Ragdoll, who was one of the members of the Secret Six. Typically, he’s been hired to do something apparently awful (terrorizing two environmental activists to death) which turns out to be very different and not anywhere near as evil, but in the middle he calls the person who apparently arranged the contract. He doesn’t mention a name, but he closes the call by saying, “Give my love to your wives.”

There’s only one person Ragdoll knows who has two wives — his Secret Six teammate Scandal Savage.

I have a definite “We’re getting the band back together” feeling about this. 🙂

By the way, if you don’t read comics and want some sort of analogy for the general vibe of the book, think of a nastier and kinkier version of Firefly and Serenity.

And, very specifically, I wonder if Jayne Cobb was somewhat based on Deadshot, since they have similar personalities and fulfill similar roles on their teams.

Anyway, as with Firefly, we hope endlessly for the Secret Six to reappear, someday, somehow, in some form.

The Movement has been canceled.

This is, on one hand, too bad, though I’m sure the company didn’t fight very hard to keep the book going. Gail Simone is, and with good reason, a very popular writer (when she was kicked off Batgirl there was so much protest from fans and in the press that she was quickly and quietly reinstated), and this looked like it was a passion project of hers.

But I think the book could have been better. Diversity is very important, as Kristan Hoffman talked about here, but characters have to be vital characters first, and these didn’t quite get there, especially at the beginning. And, in a serial medium, you have to grab the reader quickly (without — and this is the trick — giving away too much too soon).

The Movement didn’t quite do this for me. I kept reading, because it was Simone and because I was intrigued by the idea, but only at the end did things start to come together, and you can’t count on having that many issues to make your case.

Sometimes the best way to show diversity, oddly enough, is through focus, by not trying to have every individual category represented all at the same time.* One new comic book that’s off to a great start is Ms. Marvel, about a teenage Pakistani-American girl who gets superpowers. Kamala Khan is a very specific character, even compared to her friends who come from similar families, and that’s the strength of the book. She’s definitely not Generic Muslim Superhero Girl.

Not that The Movement couldn’t have worked, but it was very ambitious (and very anti-authoritarian), and now that comic books are officially the idea machine that’s driving some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, there’s probably a lot of pressure to keep from rocking the boat too much.

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* From the AV Club article:
“…Simone went all-out on the diversity, assembling a line-up of characters from a variety of different races, sexual orientations, and social classes: An African-American lesbian leader, a Laotian-American female brawler (loosely based on comedian Kulap Vilaysack), an asexual Indian-American woman, a recovering substance abuser whose muscular dystrophy keeps her in a wheelchair, a gay white man, and one straight white homeless man with a behavioral disorder.”