HOME | DD
Heckfire — YJ2: Little Barda
Published: 2011-01-16 15:58:04 +0000 UTC; Views: 2815; Favourites: 49; Downloads: 54
Redirect to original
Description
...OK, before I go on, I have to say that this poor girl has got to have the WORST superhero name ever. Seriously. Even if it was used for an absolutely hilarious joke.Anyway, while I was rummaging around the DCUs fridge looking for G'nort, I found this spitfire-and-a-half, Little Barda. Introduced during the awesome mini-series "52," she is one of the "One-Year Gap" Teen Titans, a group of gratuitous and often obviously parody-based teen counterparts to existing DCU heroes (seriously, one was named "Young Frankenstein"...and he STILL kicked ass, too) that joined and quit the Teen Titans during the year after "Infinite Crisis." Little Barda and her best bro Powerboy (yes, a teenage Rule 63'd version of Power Girl, complete with hole in the chest of his costume to show of his hairy pecs) were a pair of refugees from Apokalips who came to Earth for different reasons, LB to follow in her namesake Big Barda's footsteps ("I am Little Barda, but someday I will be BIG"...this said by a girl who's 6'3', 400 lbs of solid muscle, armor, and DD boobs AS A TEENAGER) and Powerboy to creepily stalk Supergirl and get a Kryptonian nut-shot for his troubles. Disenchanted with how Beast Boy was running the team at the time, they left, not to be seen again until the "Titans East" one-shot as members of Cyborg's new team, along with fellow TT dropouts Anima, Hawk and Dove, Son of Vulcan, and Lagoon Boy.
They didn't even last the issue...Hell, Powerboy ended up burnt to death and impaled to a tree by mystery attackers (revealed MONTH LATER IN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FUCKING COMIC BOOK) during their first training session. The rest of the team were promptly pummeled into comas shortly thereafter, save Vic who was sent scurrying back to the all-Caucasian west coast team (OK, so Starfire is technically orange), and placed into the ICU until they would miraculously recover in time to be brutally murdered for shock value (so far Hawk got her heart ripped out by her Black Lantern predecessor, who was then brought back to life and shoehorned with his former partner into "Birds of Prey"; DOve was brought back as a pointless plot device in the same story and is now falling in love with the guy who killed her sister and once killed her too; and Anima was brought out of her coma just in time to be ripped in half between two dimensions in a tie-in to the horrible "Cry For Justice" mini).
So, why care about an obvious one-joke parody character destined to die already when there's a former "Young Justice" member and a character so awesome he already has his own rogues' gallery in the next beds over? Well, see, in the time between the "Titans East" one-shot and the present day, a little mini-series penned by cosmic god-writer Jim Starlin and called "The Death of the New Gods" came out, wherein an insane Infinity Man BRUTALLY MURDERED EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER IN JACK KIRBY'S FOURTH WORLD, from Darkseid through the Forever People and all points in-between.
Except her.
Yep, as of right now, Little Barda, one-joke parody character and current coma ward inhabitant, is the Last of the New Gods. SO, you can imagine how the idea of a young war-goddess from a cosmic pantheon far beyond any of Earth, not even sure enough of herself to forge an identity of her own, waking up from a four-year coma to find that every one and every thing she ever knew, loved, hated, or even remotely cared about was now DEAD, would appeal to me...I mean, seriously, why give us this story when we can read about Superman walking around America, Wonder Woman being ret-conned as a homeless street fighter, or Batman's latest foreign outsourcing projects?
Fuck you, Didio. In the urethra.
...anyways...since I've been toying with a revamp of "Young Justice" initially centering around the new Impulse, Iris West (daughter of Wally West, the Flash since "Crisis on Infinite Earths"), I thought I'd give LB here a little TLC since Primus only knows when DC ever will. I toyed with her overall look since her original "Big Barda Lite" look somehow managed to be needlessly complicated AND yawningly generic AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME, but I think I may have made her look too young in the process...not to mention I was at a complete loss as to what the Hell that cudgel thing (I call it a "Collapsible Apokalyptian Beat Stick") is actually good for other than smacking Powerboy around.
It's my hope that drawing her might prompt some love for the poor kid-god, but, knowing my luck, all I've done is put her back in the DC editorial staff's gunsights.
Related content
Comments: 20
Thanks. It's an unappreciated style.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
I think I'm more concerned about why you were Googling hawk penis.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Like Highlander 2, Death Of the New Gods never happened. (Seriously, Grant Morrison's reaction came down to "What the hell was that? That was stupid. And thanks for fucking up the premise of my huge new crossover mega-event guys remember that thing I'm writing for you?", and he completely ignored it for Final Crisis. FC may have been a clusterfuck, but DotNG managed to make no sense in continuity and be deadly boring.)
Ahem.
Anyway, I'm gonna be super anal here and point out that technically, IIRC, Little Barda was introduced in Teen Titans before she appeared in 52, as part of a (ridiculously massive) list of Titans members who had joined and left in the interim OYL. Her tenure, along with Powerboy, was so pathetically short (I don't think they lasted a full day with the group) that it's kind of strange that they even made the list.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
...of course, since that was a cameo flashback (aka a photograph on Red Star's wall amidst dozens of others) that was referring to their single mission against Luthor's Infinity Inc. team in 52, it kinda comes down to the chicken or the egg.
And I thought it was only "Countdown" that Morrison disowned, since most of the New Gods WERE dead in "Final Crisis"...I admit you probably are more knowledgeable there tho', since I haven't even read FC yet. I usually love Morrison's stuff, but reviews on FC are pretty damn mixed...was it really that bad in your opinion?
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I'm pretty sure he said that DotNG explicitly contradicted the beginning of Final Crisis (which requires some of the New Gods to still be alive, or at least killed by other means than in Starlin's mini).
As far as Final Crisis goes...
Morrison's greatest strength is that he's absolutely overflowing with nifty ideas. His greatest weakness is that he can't restrain himself from packing all of them in wherever he can get them to fit, which can overwhelm the pacing of the story. Final Crisis is a good example of that happening. It just wasn't long enough for its contents, even with all of the tie-in minis. So many subplots had been set in motion that the climactic final issue could barely touch on all of the big ones and the narrative collapsed under its own weight.
For example, Wonder Woman's appearance in the issue consists of two panels. In the first she's possessed by one of Darkseid's Female Furies (Lashina, I think? I can't remember), wearing one of those mind control masks and riding a huge devil dog, and is bearing down on Frankenstein. The next panel flashes forward to after the final battle and has her, now her normal self, saying to some of the non-meta human survivors "Later, I'll tell you the story of how I was saved by Frankenstein". That's it. The whole thing is resolved off-panel. And that's concerning a character who's supposed to be one of the linchpins of the DCU, part of the "trinity"*! With the exception of the notorious scene of Batman busting a cap in Darkseid's ass, that sort of thing happens for nearly every story thread. Then once Darkseid is dead, the "real villain" appears, a character who had previously only appeared in the Superman tie-in mini, but is quickly dispatched because the comic is running out of pages.
There's neat stuff in Final Crisis. Lots of it, in fact. Too much. And it ends up a total mess. Compared to it, the unwieldy and written-by-the-seat-of-the-pants original Crisis On Infinite Earths is a masterpiece of narrative cohesion.
*Don't get me started on what a crock the idea of the "DC trinity" is.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Morrison has gone on record as saying he has NO idea what to do with Wonder Woman, which makes little sense considering he practically re-defined her for the current crop of fans and writers in JLA...which, come to think of it, probably explains WHY she's so badly handled these days. It's depressing Greg Rucka isn't working with DC anymore, his WW was one of the only readable runs of her book since Perez left.
Semi-related, you should read/hear some of the things Morrison has said about his intentions for the DCU...you know he's a practicing chaos mage like Alan Moore, right? His plan...is to break down the barrier between fiction and reality, to let the comic characters interact with our world and humanity interact with the fictional one, and for the DCU, the actual comic book universe itself, to achieve SENTIENCE.
Kinda ridiculous and insane and far-fetched, right? Then along comes DCU Online, and the revelation that events in-game will be affecting the comics, starting with having the players take part in the restoration of Nightwing's old stomping grounds, Bludhaven...
...and you gotta tell me how you're able to change the font size in these comment boxes.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I was really disappointed with Simone's run. She should have been a great match for the character, but unfortunately she was stuck having to clean up the mess left by previous writers. (And, frankly, "Genocide" wasn't all that inspired...and was kind of a rehash of "Devastation" from the late '90s).
I take most of that "chaos mage" stuff with a huge grain of salt. Most of the stuff they say is not meant to be taken literally (or at least, not with the conventional meanings of the words).
Font size is easy. It's just the HTML small and big tags.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Spider-Man's deal with the deal may killed the character, but at least his supporting cast got more love then most of the minor characters in the DC-Universe, who got killed off panel and so on...
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Yeah, I rail and rant about OMD and OMIT all the time, but, all in all, the Spider-books HAVE gotten pretty good since that whole clusterfuck happened, and at least Mary jane is still allowed to, y'know, LIVE still, which is more than you can say about most of the DCU.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Now that is an awesome character background. I'm impressed that you even FIND these characters.
And I love how solid and purposeful your characters look. Mine always just seem to be standing there, posed awkwardly. Yours looks like she's actually gonna beat you up.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Practice. All it is. Once you know how all the body parts fit together, you can make educated guesses about where they go, and, even more importantly, once you know how the character thinks, you can start imagining things like how they move, how they stand, how they'd react to certain stimulus...very useful when doing Rule 34 stuff, too, I might add. It's why some fan-smut hits the right buttons and others make me want to smack the artist and yell "POWER GIRL WOULD NOT DO THAT, YOU MORON!"
Yeah, I'm the Angry Porno Geek. Sue me.
👍: 0 ⏩: 2
Practice... *sigh* I know that's what it takes, but...
And I TOTALLY understand about the Angry Porno Geek thing. Even a really well written smut can leave me cold if the characters are, well, out of character.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
...um, that was supposed to be a *THHBBBT!" emoticon, not a "trying to lick my own boogers" one.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Y'know, I think I look forward to reading your descriptions almost as much as seeing the artwork. Helps get me caught up on what's going on in comics. Didn't know all the New Gods got killed off, or that Dove was hooking up with Hawk. Could've sworn I just saw her sleeping with Boston Brand in Brightest Day. Didn't know about all those Titans getting killed off, either, but Titans getting killed off is almost a given at this point, isn't it?
Anyway, as for L'il Barda, she looks good, but what what happened to the DD boobs you mentioned? 
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Like I said, she turned out looking WAY younger than intended...maybe that's how gods deal with being in 4-year comas, though, by regressing their bodies to a physical state that reflects their brain damage and letting it re-grow naturally? I'm totally talking (typing?) out my ass now...
And the Band-Aids were a reflection on the one-joke I mentioned: as if to PROVE she's only "LITTLE" Barda when she said her line, she was blowing a big pink bubblegum bubble in his face, so the Band-Aids were to reflect that she's basically the Apokalyptian war-goddess version of a rebellious tomboy...and you KNOW how I feel about rebellious tomboys by now, I hope.
...one with a love of Hubba Bubba to boot, what's not to adore, huh? LOL
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Heh, that explanation works as well as any, I suppose. I wonder if Little Barda might end up Loli Barda if she stays in that coma much longer.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
...can't...respond...would lose...what little credibility...I have left...
Maisy: In that case, you're perfectly safe to respond.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
