Once we had a weekly comic book review thread. And a new comics reviews open thread.
Now, apparently no one seems to feel they’re worth commenting on at all anymore.
Well, I wasn’t the most faithful of reviewers back in the day, but I just got myself caught up on two months worth of comics, including the finale of FlashPoint.
Personally, I felt that the end of FlashPoint was a genuine tear-jerker. The universal reboot was clearly tacked on to what was meant to be a more personal story, and unfortunately seems to have overshadowed it.
I flipped through JLA # 1, but didn’t buy it, I really have quite little interest in it at the moment.
I suspect DC made a big mistake forcing ongoing stories to an end before the big reboot. I was following Green Lantern - that’s 3 books a month - since the onset of Blackest Night because the ongoing story held my interest. With the story effectively concluded (and I think that the last chapter of “War of the Green Lanterns,” which I also bought yesterday, had some pretty brilliant stuff), I have no plans to continue buying the book. After spending somewhere upward of $20 a month for comics (all DC) for quite a while, I’m trimming down to just the two Legion books.
One of the other books I picked up yesterday was the JSA 80-Page special, which opens with a creepy Spectre story from the old mold, which was very nice.
Thawne changed time by murdering Barry’s mom and framing his dad? And that change caused…um…the post-crisis universe? The pre-crisis universe?
Barry went back in time, saved his mom from Thawne and we got the crapsack-Flashpoint universe? So–the “default” state of the universe, if no-one tampers with time is the Flashpointverse?
And then, when Barry stopped himself from saving his mom from Flash, we get the post-Flashpoint universe*?
I dunno–I had no problem with the pre-crisis multiverse. I had no problem understanding the post-Zero Hour verse or Hypertime or the 52 universes. But this has me lost.
*With a Batman who’s not an asshole? Major plus for me–not enough for me to buy the books any more, but…still nice.
It seems to me that Geoff Johns established Reverse Flash as having the unique ability to alter the past with precision. So the “default” universe is whatever existed after Reverse-Flash’s changes.
When Barry tried to alter the past, he does not have this ability, so FlashPoint universe resulted.
When he stopped himself from altering the past, he would have been restoring the familiar DCU, but for the actions of this mystery female character, who merged WildStorm and Vertigo with the DCU for some reason which I guess will be revealed in the near future. She’s supposed to be making more appearances, at least.
In any case, to me the “real” ending is the moments of bonding between the two orphans - one man who had to let his mother die to save the world, and one whose father sacrificed his life in order to restore his son to life.
That part was wonderful–fully agree on that part. And again, I love that they seem to have finally gotten the idea that Batman can be tough, driven, the pinnacle of human perfection…and not a Roarschach-like dick. That bonding moment worked.
I used to do weekly comic book threads - I just fell out of the habit because they seldom generated discussion in depth and I was becoming more and more disenchanted with the SD Board. I was still reading nearly everything DC put out, though.
With the reboot, my pull-list (on the DC side) has been cut in half. I did pick up Justice League #1. It was okay - it felt like a rehashed Greatest Hits version of the DCU, though.
Batman as an Urban Legend? Check. Batman punking Green Lantern (a la All-Star Batman and Robin)? Check. Set-up for a yawn fight between Batman and Superman? Check. And the main villain for the formation of the Justice League?
Darkseid? Really? Weren’t we just saying how overused he was? Wasn’t the point of this reboot to make the characters seem less invincible, and the first foe you’re going to have them beat is Darkseid?
Is that a joke? You mean Geoff Johns actually plugged in blatant editorial directives into his story without even trying to camouflage them? You know, that’s why, ever since the first Crisis I cant take DC seriously. It’s like the characters are smashing on the 4th wall all the fucking time, begging to get out.
I’ve been buying digitally so I haven’t seen FP 4 or 5 yet, and the only new book that’s available is Justice League. It was fine. Mostly set up. I’ll reserve judgement until I see more from this universe.
Depends what you mean by “camouflage”. He didn’t go all Morrison on us if that’s what you mean (unused characters living in story limbo, omniscient aliens opening up Buddy Baker’s eyes to the greater reality, etc). It was more like what they did during the Crisis on Infinite Earths, where the Anti-Monitor’s actions at the dawn of time merged Fawcett, Quality and Charlton comics worlds with the main DCU. Flash, having stopped the FlashPoint reality from coming into existence, is seeking to run back to what we know as the normal DCU, and a mysterious female character says that some enemy has “split the history of heroes into three” and that they must be merged together again to stand strong against this enemy, or something like that. Pretty much like the Anti-Monitor in Crisis. And apparently this mystery character will be hidden in crowd scenes and the like throughout all of the 52 DCnU # 1 issues, which implies to me that they will be revealing this enemy and the (on-panel) nature of this character at some point in the near future.
But yes, I’d say it was about as blatant as editorial directives get. Just a notch below the way Poochie was removed from Itchy and Scratchy in that Simpsons episode.
I have nothing against the universal reboot, but I suspect it will backfire. The OP makes a very good point that while a reboot is a great stepping on point for new readers, its also a great stepping off point for existing readers. I wonder if DC considered that?
It took me a long time to break out of my comic book addiction, for the same reason that people get hooked on soap operas. There was always some important plot around the corner. If every plot terminated simultaneously, it would have been a no-brainer.
Is the new universe going to be more ‘real world’, ie are they going for a marvel ultimate type vibe? Or is it just a way of ditching continuity?
Frankly I would much prefer a Morisson approach to this. I dont like him much but he at least understands the forces (I mean the storytelling rules) he’s playing with. Second row writers like Johns dont. And since the first Crisis, there’s been a tendency at DC to thinly disguise very brutal editorial moves (Hawkman is one pretty good example).
Marvel did have some of that too (Iron Man: the Crossing or that whole Heroes Reborn stuff) but they dont base their universe on this. DC seems to think showing the ropes to the audience is some kind of achievement.
Thing is, Johns can be a A-List writer. He’s still (IMO) the best Flash writer ever and his Green Lanterns, through say, the end of the really surprising Sinestro Corps War were great.
However, after that, his writing is less and less good as he gets less and less focused.
PS–Since Geoff Johns is one of the movers and shakers, the “mysterious foe” that Access-ette is talking about has gotta be the Anti-Monitor. His corpse has been floating around since like 2005 (Infinite Crisis) and his corpse went missing since Blackest Night (or thereabouts). They’re clearly building to something.
Johns is totally A-List. I think he’s over-extended himself, is what’s happened recently.
In addition to his work on Flash (though I would personally put him second and Mark Waid first) and Green Lantern (which I have enjoyed since the Sinestro Corps war as well as until it), his JSA was fantastic. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of DCU History and he prefers to reconcile it in a consistent manner rather than contradict stuff outright.
I’m positive they did and saw that it wouldn’t be any problem for them.
Most of their books are having problems breaking the 100,000 circulation mark and really sell much, much less. No comic has sold 200,000 in two years. Worst case therefore is that half of that number are old-line fans and half of them see the reboot as a stepping off point. That’s 25,000 leaving max.
JSL #1 has already sold over 200,000. That won’t hold up, of course, but say that half stay. That’s brings them back to 100,000 – 100,000 who are eager to move forward and explore the new world, not people complaining about every convoluted idiot crossover they ruin.
That seems to me to be the conservative worst-case scenario. Much more likely is that they won’t lose a quarter of old readers and will keep more of the new ones. The real point is that they’re trading a small and finite number of disgruntled readers with the ability to attract a pool of a comparatively infinite number of new blood. Everyone in every thread about DC has complained about how impossible it’s been for anyone not reading every single issue of every single comic to understand anything that was going on and so new readers weren’t entering the system.
I think this move is brilliant, so brilliant that they’ll have to work very hard to goof it up. Just mediocrity will be enough to make it work and anything more than that is gold.
I’m about halfway through all the Flashpoint books and I honestly think that alternative world is more interesting than the past several years of DC continuity. Except for Secret Six, which was downright friggin’ awesome.
I thought that Flashpoint #5 was utter crap. It was all exposition, with the much-vaunted Flashpoint U characters basically standing around on the sidelines while Reverse Flash monologues technobabble. And then into a splashpage preview of the Really Final Crisis This Time We Mean It For Sure And How.
The codecil at the end with Batman, although well-written, didn’t redeem the whole mess. It ends up, not with the hero of the piece doing something heroic, but the reverse – Barry ends up screwing over the entire DCU. Ironic that Johns worked so hard to redeem Hal from what Parallax had done to his character, and now is going the opposite direction with Barry: degeneration from his meaningful death in Crisis. tsk.
This reboot is ditching continuity when DC editorial doesn’t like that continuity, but keeping it when they do. It’s a bit of a muddle what stays and what goes – Green Lantern and Batman (mostly) seem in. Superman may get a bit of a continuity trimmed off (maybe, his marriage). The Teen Titans got dumped from continuity and are rebooting from start. And the JSA is MIA right now.
What, they didn’t mash the Justice Society and the Justice League into one gigantic super-duper group of every super-hero who ever existed? That was the direction they were headed in anyway.