Tony and Mat are both out of town but managed to record a briefer podcast taking about this week's comics, Batman kicking motorcycles in half, and changing your personal branding.
Nice podcast Tony and Mat, it's fine that it's short since it takes me a while to fully sit down and listen to it all on one of your longer sessions anyway lol. Some very interesting topics were discussed here. In regards to the Helena Bertinelli race change not being negatively received, I think its reasons go beyond the greater fanbase for Wally than there is for Helena. Helena's race change has not had an obvious effect on her personality. Seeley and King have stated that they plan to go into her character and backstory in the series and it appears that she's not drastically different than she was Pre Flashpoint. With Wally's race change, that altered everything about the character in the most negative way possible. He's now a walking black stereotype wearing the name of a beloved fan favourite character who people have grown attached to in the Pre Flashpoint years only to see hum butchered beyond recognition in The New 52.
On the ridiculousness of the Batman vs Nightwing fight, those kinds of showings are what we see in comics all the time, even among street levellers. Batman has cracked bazooka proof glass with his fists and kicked down trees in prior feats so I don't see the problem with how Batman and Nightwing performed. Humans and peak humans perform low level superhuman feats in comics a lot of the time now as they often perform feats that are beyond ordinary human performance to accomplish.
@nightfang: I was using that as a metaphor to say that the reason people are overreacting about Wally is because he is very well known for having red hair and freckles. I was using Deviantart in the metaphor, because when you type in Wally West on Deviantart's search bar, generally the results are usually images of Wally that put great emphasis on his red hair and freckles, likely drawn by a legion of fangirls.
@nightfang: I was using that as a metaphor to say that the reason people are over reacting about Wally is because he is very well known for having red hair and freckles. I was using Deviantart in the metaphor, because when you type in Wally West on Deviantart's search bar, generally the results are usually images of Wally that put great emphasis on his red hair and freckles, likely drawn by a legion of fangirls.
As someone who found the Wally changes dumb and about as lazy as you can get I didn't mind the Huntress/Helena B. changes. Mostly because she is in the same age group as she was in before and she is interacting with a peer who was a friend before the reboot to her while she was Huntress. They didn't deage her into a preteen and throw in some awful "troubled black youth" stereotype or things like that. Her hair is a little more curly and she has a darker skin tone, but she is still a badass and the changes feel like they came from the creative team rather than DC telling them to change her a certain way like they did with Wally.
Sure it is sad that she can't be Huntress in the reboot because Helena Wayne is running around, and the fact that Helena Wayne has been such a bore and just plain awful in the reboot (Power Girl and World's Finest has just been such a massive disappointment given the potential they had with that title), so it is a little annoying that a disappointing reason like that is the reason for the changes, but it was handled so much better than Wally.
I think DC changed Huntress race because they already have the white Batman/Catwoman daughter Huntress in Worlds Finest and they probably didn't want to confuse people.
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