Martin and Ronnie simply have to agree that if either is asked if they experience that from the other, they say, "No. Weird how that's an exception." (And Caitlin and Clarissa should agree to believe them.)

It's a convention of the superhero genre that when it comes to superpowers, freelancers responsible only to themselves (or to the occasional superior alien or god) can be trusted with them, while any attempt by the government to harness them will invariably turn out to be sinister.

That sort of raises the question of how any of them are getting paid working at a defunct particle accelerator project. Assuming the plural in STAR Labs means it's an overarching scientific organization, what does it think it's paying Wells, Caitlin and Cisco to do?

It's not just because of that. (Though following up on a lead assigned her by a reporter is reasonable enough given her ambitions to work in the field.) She's realized that her friends appear to be hiding something about the particle accelerator that blew up in the middle of the city and the mysterious Burning Man,…

It's possible. Especially since, as those close to Barry Allen become known associates to the Flash, the secret ID isn't really protecting anyone.

Having Superman's ID known to the Planet staff would completely change the dynamic. Arguably to the point of making the Daily Planet superfluous to the story. (If he's not there to be Clark Kent, why is he there?)

Well, she's received ARGUS instructions via a computer screen, so she's been known to take orders from the monitor.

I'm surprised at all the negativity about the Firestorm concept. I thought it was a clever change rung on transforming heroes like the original Captain Marvel plus the young hero/mentor dynamic.

I was inspired by a lot of things: Daedalus and Icarus, Leonardo da Vinci, angels… but definitely not the Flash Gordon supporting character Prince Vultan or his, um, Hawkmen, who are of course the property of King Features Syndicate!

Preindustrial maternal mortality was terrible, but if it were 50% then the species would have gone extinct.

Oh, just make a product placement deal with Nabisco and make them proper Oreos like they're supposed to be.

I'd run into the theory before. But I hadn't realized that it had originally been proposed by Dwayne McDuffie (with the assistance of fans on the Milestone Comics Yahoo group) as a satire on insistence on tight crossover continuity in superhero comics.

Is there an actor whose name sounds more as if he's an emigrant from the Superman canon?

I think Username Too Long is right that it's populism more than age. When the US was a younger country than it is now, elites valued the canon of classics more than they do now: places like Harvard emphasized Latin and Greek, high culture assumed people would get allusions to Aeschylus or Milton, etc. But it wasn't…

I tend to underestimate the extent to which people gravitate to protagonists of their own gender, though it's clearly an issue. When I was a kid, I was voracious and didn't really discriminate on that basis: I read Harriet the Spy and the Beezus and Ramona books and A Wrinkle in Time and Island of the Blue Dolphins…

I'm absolutely in favor of parents and schools being there to talk about what the kids are reading. But I think being involved (especially for parents) will make it clear if the kids are buying into ideas they should be examining more critically.

I think context is gained from reading widely and developing a sense of how people thought differently at different times. If anything, the more distant the milieu of the original story from what they're familiar with, the less worried I'd be about kids absorbing the attitudes from it.

Armor is all very well in its place when facing overmuscled alien brawlers. But Luthor knows how to present when dealing with someone who understands what power is.

Though "A Dream of Rorschach" made me wonder just how Watchmen would come across in the DCU.

While the "world of cardboard" speech is awesome, two aspects I don't really like: