Secondhand Badassery

I was rereading JLA (My reaction to this past issue was mixed), particularly that splash page at the end.

For my sanity, I choose to believe "Stargirl" is just Maxine Hunkel cosplaying.

Anyway, I was thinking of the Sand and Geo-Force exchange. (Jon's got a scan of it in his blog entry here.

I'm actually pretty intrigued by this exchange. Geo-Force is also in the preview for the JSA issue, which is interesting. I've always wanted Sand to interact more with non-JSA heroes and this is a good opportunity.

I'm a bit skeptical of Geo-Force's current, well, what I call the "secondhand badass phenomenon".

Basically, that's what I call any situation in which a character categorically proven to be good at something compliments another character on that same trait, despite that character not really having proven to deserve it (at the time).

In this case, a man who held together the Earth by sheer force of will (not to mention being legitimately badass in most of the JSA's standard battles, swatted away a handful of powerful E-1/E-2 heroes while preoccupied with stopping an earthquake, and even lasted a hell of a long time in a fight against Power Girl while basically an animated magma-corpse) is praising the earth-powers of...

well...

GEO-FORCE.

I mean, it's cool that Geo-Force has Terra's power and all, and the gravity thing is pretty neat. He's got a pretty decent grab-bag of powers. But has he really done anything quite the level of, I dunno, manhandling the freakin' ROCK OF ETERNITY and slamming it into a villain's cranium?

To be fair, Sand was not actually comparing Geo-Force to himself.

He was comparing Geo-Force to SWAMP THING.

That's like double whammy of Secondhand Badassery right there.

Now, there's not necessarily anything wrong with Secondhand Badassery if it plays out well. As long as the character is shown to earn it later, or it's relatively unimportant to the plot and is conceivable off-panel. (For example, when Batman mentions something about Sand's detective skills. We don't see him use them, except the intro of one issue, but that works, as JSA isn't a mystery comic and we did see enough of an intro of him, Mid-Nite and Terrific working together to believe he's capable off-panel. Also, in the Golden Age stories, Sandy was as often as not the brains of that duo. As Wes is a moron.)

Something like having a resonance with the Earth possibly on level with Swamp Thing is a bit much to be written off as off panel. Which means, Geo-Force is going to have to do something seriously fucking badass to make this worthwhile.

Or it'll be like those romance novels where all the minor characters say the heroine is an absolute intellectual wizard when she acts dumber than a box of hair.

Oh well, if this all gets my favorite character more panel time then they can fall down and worship Brion Markov as a god for all I care. I just think the whole thing is tremendously amusing. I mean, dude. It's GEO-FORCE.

Sand must be flirting with him. That's the only explanation.