Ok, Metzger screwed up on a couple of minor details but…wow.
When someone asks “So gimme an example of a good retcon.” and you’re sick of pointing to Moore’s “The Anatomy Lesson”, you can point them here. I love the explaination of why Dr. Light changed from being a seriously scary, first tier villian to one who could be beaten up by Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.
I was all set to bitch about Barry’s participation until he said “It was right after Iris died”. Perfect
Did Ralph just die? He better f*%*$#ing not have.
Isn’t Deathstroke dead?
Quibble 1: Hawkman doesn’t have the powers of a bird. And even if he did, a hummingbird wouldn’t have been fast enough to see Wally. :: shrug :: oh well.
How come Batman allows this. I don’t buy the “Batman can beat everyone if he’s prepared” stuff, but noticing that a couple of villians became lobotomized right after fighting the JLA? He’d notice. I’d notice, and I’m not the world’s greatest detective.
Quibble 2: I don’t think this particular iteration of the JLA ever existed. Atom was gone by the time of Iris’s death. Zatanna didn’t join until later and anyway she should have been wearing that horrible Power-Girl-esque costume with the pony-tail.
Overall I really liked it though (assuming Ralph’s not dead).
Yup. I’m surprised too, as I was all prepared to loathe this. But :: shrug :: good is good.
(and on second look, Ralph is probably NOT dead)
BTW, Fenris – I thought we settled this “Batman wins if he’s prepared” argument a long time ago! You up for a rematch? (grins)
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Not so much. But I still object to Batman having the “…if he’s prepared” super-power (it makes him into Nemesis Kid with a slower reaction time). He’s the world’s greatest detective, a hell of a fighter, sneaky as hell and driven. But he’s still only human (and that’s what makes him kewl.)
Not a Quibble: The threat was enough. There was no reason Light had to succeed raping Sue in the flashback. Not only is it disgusting, it doesn’t match her (or Ralph’s) persona. She isn’t a rape victim. He was never the husband of a rape victim. They are bon vivants.
Oookay, we’ve agreed that Dr. Light wasn’t always the idiot he was when he lost all those fights to the Atom and the Teen Titans.
…but you’re not gonna tell me he was powerful and crazy enough to withstand the combined enraged pummeling of half the JLA. Hell, he’s holding up pretty well until Ralph lets him have it with Hawkman’s mace. And even then, he’s together enough to gibber and threaten and generate holographic flashbacks of Sue’s rape, just for giggles.
Dr. Light was never a demented rapist kind of guy. Here, he’s presented as doing a pretty good Joker imitation.
Ralph’s okay. One of the comments from #1 was that he could stretch through a hail of machine gun fire… I think the purpose of that line was to establish for those folks unfamiliar with his abilities that he could survive this sort of thing feasably.
While Hawkman doesn’t have bird powers, he does have some mildly superhuman characteristics - Captain America-level strength and endurance, for instance. I don’t specifically recall that he had enhanced vision, but it seems like something they’d give him. And remember, he doesn’t need to see Wally directly… vibrating into invisibility would likely kick up a little dust circulation in the air.
We don’t know that Batman doesn’t know, yet. Wait until Issue #7, and we’ll see… the World’s Greatest Detective might just be playing along out of respect for Ralph.
Crisis on Infinite Earths and Zero Hour jumbled the League’s membership order. In fact, Identity Crisis contradicts established continuity in issue #1, when Green Arrow lists the first six people to join the JLA. According to the issues of (current series) JLA in which the League battles Julian September, Ray Palmer was the seventh person to join the League - which can’t be resolved with the order GA presents the members in. Minor mistake, though.
Yeah, I was gonna comment about that-Yeah, I get the “The Sword Of The Atom” reference, but still–wouldn’t one of, saaaay, Adam Strange’s ray-guns (for instance) be a better weapon? Or he could zap her with Amos Fortune’s “Stimuluck” device so she can’t be killed…or any of a dozen other things that make more sense than a freaking crossbow!
Say, I don’t suppose someone could give me a quick rundown on the premise/storyline of this “Identity Crisis,” as it is so far? I’m kind of in the dark, except that it’s supposedly going to be the “biggest event in comics since the Crisis,” or some such.
Basically? Sue Dibny, wife of the Elongated Man, was murdered - prompted a manhunt for the likely suspects and a good dash of fear for the other heroes with significant others. The ‘classic’ satellite-era JLA has banded together to take on Dr. Light in this regard, because they know the good Doctor once assaulted Sue.
Re-use of the Injustice Gang’s satellite HQ. Lovely. Provides nice symmetry with the old JLA satellite HQ.
The casual Firestorm fly-by, just to check - classic. I can just picture poor Ron Raymond, 4AM on a weeknight, awakened by his JLA signal device to do a fly-by on that satellite because he’s one of the few space-capable heroes that isn’t doing anything important.
Getting Wally and Kyle involved as stand-ins for their predecessors - Very nice. I was a bit unhappy with the diminished role they got in JLA v. Avengers, and it’s good to see them used here, especially if Kyle’s going away soon.
Deathstroke the Terminator - Yeah, if you want to pick a single villain who’d actually work for hire that could take on the JLA, Deathstroke’s your man. And no, Deathstroke’s not dead, Fenris - he recently did an arc in Teen Titans.
Satellite-Era JLA - Just nice to see them again, that’s all.
Bootleg Miraclo - One would expect Miraclo and counterfeit Miraclo in the supervillain black market scene, and I like its inclusion here.
That just leaves me wondering, though…Am I the only one who thinks that lobotomizing supervillains is actually a really good idea?
I mean, these guys bust out of prisons and asylums with no apparent trouble, and it’s generally considered “immoral” to kill them, despite all the innocent people they hurt and kill. So why not just screw around with their brains until they’re unwilling to be supervillains anymore? You’re not actually killing them…heck, argueably, you’re improving their mental condition and overall quality of life.
Remember the animated Justice League episode…“Justice for All”? Psychosurgery seemed to have worked out pretty well in the “Justice Lords’” universe, and that was just with AU-Superman burning holes into people’s skulls with his heat vision.
Can you imagine using Zatanna’s magic, or even modern psychosurgery on the Joker? Hell, you might even be able to make him normal again!
Of course, if the Joker, Lex Luthor, et al were to be killed off, the comic book universes would get boring really fast. The JLA/Avengers/whoever would just be a bunch of guys in tights with nothing useful to do. I mean, yeah, the guys writing the stories are a creative lot, but sooner or later they would run out ideas for cool villians…
Well, that goes without saying. It’s the same principle behind Bond villains never plugging 007 in the head instead of explaining their evil plot to him then chaining him to the execution machine that doesn’t work.
But reasonable off-screen explainations do not a fanboy debate make. (Damnit.)
What? No, nonononono. Definitely ‘Fanboy’ is the vanilla version of the term. Popularized as “Bite me, Fanboy.” in numerous places.
I’ve seen the variant ‘fanboi’, and had gotten the impression, perhaps mistaken, that it was usedby male homosexual ‘fanboys’ to refer to themselves distinctively.
Anybody want to weigh in on that?
Incidentally, as a completely unrelated point, it appears that the JLA/Avengers crossover is being rendered in-continuity at DC. The description of the plot for the JLA issue in October, now available at dccomics.com, indicates a storyline springing from the events of the crossover.
Well, I just raided the change jar and went out and bought the two extant issues of Identity Crisis and… wow.
I really dug The Atom checking the carpet fibers.
One thing, though, I’m a little in the dark as to whether Ralph saw the other little present Sue put in the box with the magnifying glass. There was no mention of it outside the panel it appeared in. I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that Batman found it on his investigation of the scene, and being as how Batman would not be so foolish as to disturb a crime scene, the others would surely have found it as well.
I was a little disturbed that the five conspirators would have kept their suspicions about Dr. Light from the rest of the JLA. I imagine that they will find out sooner or later. Barbara is bound to tell Bruce they went after him, and Bruce is bound to find out why. Batman and the Green Arrow seem to be pretty tight just of late, and I’m sure that Ollie will 'fess up sooner or later.
Of course you can’t lobotomize your major villains- but how about the minor ones? Superheros face a never ending stream of punks and menaces, so there are any number of one-shot or minor villains who would be completely expendable.
In fact, I seem to recall an issue where we saw that at Arkham asylum several grade-D villains (TweedleDum and TweedleDee for example) had been permanently disabled by their “treatment”. Of course Gotham attracts all the truly certifiable cases, so most villains aren’t eligible to be delcared in need of “help”.
Unless someone decides that being a costumed super-villain is itself a personality disorder? I think Arkham had a 2/3 cracked administrator who thought that.
No, here’s a more likely scenerio: The government passes a law that sufficiently infamous super-villains (like anyone who’s killed more than 100 people or has escaped from incarceration more than 10 times) can be declared outlaws, with no civil rights or protections, and can be summarily killed by anyone who cares to. The SCOTUS upholds the constitutionality of the law, and the super-heroes wrestle with the moral dilemma of being given tacit permission to kill these troublemakers.
I mean, in the 1930’s, law enforcement agents gunned down several infamous gangsters and no one cared about legal niceities. I suspect a similar attitude would develope towards people who threaten hundreds, thousands or millions of people.
