I recently got my hands on the 1983 Zatanna special and the 1993 Come Together mini-series. Reading them both close together brought something back that I’d noticed and meant to ask about before, but never got around to it.
Sometimes Zee’s spells, the words are reversed, but the word order stays the same (as in the special) sometimes the word order is also reversed (as in the mini)…sometimes it flips back and forth within the same story (JLA: Obsidian Age).
Is there an in-character reason for this or is it just a matter of the writer making a booboo, noone noticing/bringing it to his attention, and then everyone deciding to pretend it didn’t happen rather than try to explain it away?
If the latter, that makes the Obsidian Age stuff even more annoying, since the writer (can’t remember who wrote that…) got it right half the time. >_<
No known in-character reason, as far as I’m aware. I’d chalked it up to a writer being told “She speaks her spells backwards” and interpreting that statement differently.
In Books of Magic, she says that speaking backwards is just a concentration technique. So I guess it wouldn’t matter if she said each word backwards or the whole sentence.
