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THINK First!By Michael Hutchison
Maybe this was just the naive misconceptions of a younger reader, but I grew up thinking that DC had incredibly competent people who could keep decades of continuity straight in their head. People like Bob Rozakis, who hosted the monthly "answer Man" column and never once told a reader, "Who cares! It's just a comic book! Why are you so picky?" Or like E. Nelson Bridwell, who could supposedly rattle off any fact about Kryptonian history. Or Julius Schwarz, the manufacturer of such concepts as the multiverse.
So why is it that today's editors let even the grossest errors slip by without comment or apology? I've already recounted some of the biggest ones in past issues of Fanzing, such as the name errors in Starman or Java the caveman's appearance at Metamorpho's funeral despite the blowing out of his brains in Metamorpho. That last one was also by writer Grant Morrison, our perpetrator for today's piece. Twice in one year, he has not checked his facts…for in Flash #134, the Thinker is alive and well. Or alive, anyway.
You can count me as one of those who remembers the Doom Patrol-Suicide Squad Special where the Thinker was killed. Even though some people like to forget about the pre-Morrison DP, this story is well-entrenched in continuity; after all, the Thinker's helmet came into play in Suicide Squad when Cliff Carmichael was transformed into the new Thinker (a great character, BTW).
Doesn't anyone at DC Comics run a Who's Who database? Is there not some Bob Rozakis-type who could just read the month's periodicals and jot down any changes to established characters in a filing system? I'm not talking "Mindboggler is allergic to mushrooms"-type detail, just whether that person is, oh, I don't know…"alive" or "not-currently-alive."
I mean, if I was writing a story and wanted to use a somewhat-obscure villain, I'd ask *somebody*, "Hey, what was ___________ up to when last we saw him?"
Come to think of it, I've actually done this! I was writing the Batman story in this issue of FANZING and wanted to use Kadaver as a villain. I remembered him from the "Death of the Penguin" storyline from several years ago, but I wasn't sure if he'd since reappeared in one of the 18 monthly Bat-books that I can't afford to read. But, in re-reading the Detective Comics story where Kadaver appeared, I also saw that, surprise!…he gets shot by the Penguin. So, he's dead and I'm using him; I had to come up with an explanation for it (Not hard, for a master of death.). But at least I checked my facts…and I'm not even a professional drawing down big bucks to create work potentially read by hundreds of thousands of people.
But, hey, I have a solution. It's not a perfect one, in that it's a *shudder* ret-con. But my thinking is that Clifford Devoe (Hey, the new Thinker is named Cliff, too! Heckuva coincidence), the Thinker in Flash #134, is REALLY old…and apparently, a foe from the Golden Age. Also, his helmet is an old-style, and it doesn't look like the molded plastic one in the DP/SS Special.
Let's face it, a guy that old cannot have been active as the Thinker within the last ten years of the new Heroic Age. The Thinker with the newer helmet who battled the Atom and seen in the DP/SS Special looked to be about 50-ish. As a member of the Suicide Squad, his talk of getting older was obviously in terms of "early retirement" as opposed to "Oh, it's possible I could croak at any moment. Have youu seen my respirator?" So my opinion is that there was a different Thinker for the modern Heroic Age who took over the role from Cliff and was then killed by the Weasel.
Of course, the Thinker was one of the three villains holding Keystone City hostage until they were thwarted by the two Flashes (a decade ago by the Zero Hour timeline). Was this the old Clifford Devoe Thinker or this hypothetical "second" Thinker? It would make sense that it would be Cliff, given that the other two villains (Fiddler and Shade) were also old JSA foes. But if it was Cliff, how did he have his Thinking Cap if that was in the possession of Johnny Thunder since the 1940s?
That's it for this month's Retconvention. I know that this article was a bit different, in that I had to actually INVENT a ret-con. But until we get editors willing to haul out their Who's Who (or God forbid, actually read the old comics), this will occasionally be necessary.
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