By Joe Palmer
I don’t know how what you think about Kate and Maggie no longer getting married, but I was kind of looking forward to the nuptials. Not going to happen now, thanks to Dan Didio’s pronouncement that heroes won’t be allowed to get married as one way to help keep them fresh and exciting. Except something kept nagging in the back of my head. Something to do with marriage, but not Clark and Lois, or Barry and Iris, or Aquaman and Mera because none of them are married this time around yet. No, this had to do with someone more obscure….and then it came to me! Dale Gunn, special agent for ARGUS and rookie superhero Vibe’s handler for the same organization with Amanda Waller heading it up and Steve Trevor having had some involvement with the top secret government organization. Continuity geeks will remember that Gunn was a part of the Justice League Detroit cast, along with Vibe, Gypsy, and Zatanna (she and Gunn had something going on back in the day). And then Crisis came along and wiped all those stories out of continuity.
So yes, Dale Gunn is married. To a blond man named Casey this time around though he may have first been married to an unnamed woman. And apparently Dan Didio isn’t aware of the marriage or maybe it doesn’t count because Gunn is supporting cast and technicly not a superhero. Geoff Johns, along with Andrew Kreisberg, wrote the first two issues of Vibe and presumably laid down some groundwork for the character and cast. Sterling Gates started as solo writer with issue #3 and is the writer responsible for the Gunn’s marriage revelation in issue #4. Everything there is to know about Dale and Casey’s marriage so far is shown in the image below, which opens the story. With Vibe’s setting in Detroit, Michigan leads me to think that marriage equality is a matter of fact in all 50 US states in the DCnU.
Questions, questions, questions! Did Geoff Johns have anything to do with or know about this marriage? If so, did Johns mention it to Didio and Didio forgot? Did the marriage ban come into effect only just recently or did Sterling Gates sneak it, intentionally or not, under the radar? And what about editors Katie Stewart and Brian Cunningham? Will Didio allow Dale and Casey to be the sole exception to the no married couples rule or will he banhammer the couple by making them split up or, worse, killing off Casey?
