Oops! Slipped my mind, folks, since I got my comics a day late. Standouts for me this week were Brave and the Bold, Checkmate, and Incredible Herc.
I got Cory Doctorow comics! YAAAAY!
Checkmate was ok, but the guest appearance smacked of desperation to me.
I also bought Robin, which was eh. I much preferred Beechen and Williams to Dixon. Perhaps this is heresy.
JLA vs. Suicide Squad was pretty good. I disagree with the nature of the conflict they’re setting up why shouldn’t supervillains be imprisoned on a remote planet? Not like Arkham is foolproof. And there wasn’t very much “Versus” in the issue, honestly. but a big fight is always good.
Oh! I also bought Welcome to Tranquility, which I liked. Gail Simone, clone yourself!
Because the transportation of criminals is morally dubious even under the circumstances under which it was undertaken in America and Australia.
But Salvation/Hell World isn’t America or Australia. It’s not being prepared for colonization. There are no authorities keeping order. It’s more than just ‘home of some massively deadly creatures’ - it is a specifically designed death trap. Everyone from a cat burglar to psychopathic mass murderers, to would be world conquerers is being sent there with no hope of return. And there is no public knowledge or oversight to prevent abuse - which is, of course, deliberate, because they’re abusing the HELL out of it.
Would you still object if it was, say, just an uninhabited copy of Earth, an Earth-2, if you will, where the only danger to the convicts is each other? Granted, not everyone on the list is Joker-bad, but I’d rather have 99% of them there than the tissue-paper prisons that seem to exist in DC now. I feel that if you’re a sufficiently dangerous metahuman, send them somewhere normal people won’t be in the crossfire. Sometimes decisive action must be taken, and if the idea for the prison planet went through regular channels, it would take years and probably wouldn’t work at all. I’m not gonna cry for most of those fellas.
And don’t get me started on Batman of all people making moral pronouncements. That’s whole 'nother rant…
Yes, I would.
You’re still sticking them in lawless territory with no checks on each other except each other, no support infrastructure, and no chance of ever getting home.
And you’d still be doing it with no oversight. (Of course, in order to do all that you’d HAVE to do it with no oversight.)
It would hardly lessen my objections.
If it were handled like transportation to Australia - publicly; support structures, laws, and law enforcement present on scene; and a chance to go home (or live on the world they’ve helped build as a free citizen) after completing their sentence - or if it were like Takron Galtos - a planet sized, but otherwise standard issue prison, including the chance of going home after finishing their sentence - then there’d be room for debate.
But the way it’s being done, there’s not a single defensible - or even debatable - aspect to it. Salvation is just a slow, brutal death sentence. If you’re going to secretly execute every criminal that wears a mask, or every metahuman who steps on the wrong side of the law, at least be efficient and put a bullet in their heads when you catch them. Don’t throw the Catwomen in with the Jokers and just turn your back.
I would. Firstly because the Weather Wizard doesn’t deserve to be repeatedly raped by Gorilla Grodd until Grodd gets bored and eats him. And that’s what’ll happen if you throw them together in one place without guards or neutralizing their powers.
Secondly, by the same narrative inevitability that makes simple incarceration and even execution useless, putting the criminals off world simply won’t work. They’ll just come back angrier and likely accompanied by an incredibly powerful alien armada (just ask the folks over at Marvel). I mean, half of those guys are mad scientists, and they have no supervision. It’d take Lex Luthor about a month to build a boom tube generator from scratch, even if he wasn’t on a planet with abundant supertech to scavenge from.
As for the comics:
Death of the New Gods #6: “This is how a God would die” Yep. And not off-panel without any struggle like the others all did. But not that particular God. We all knew how he was supposed to go down, and it wasn’t like that. The killer just keeps get lamer and lamer with every revelation doesn’t he?
Ah well, Morrison has an absolutely kick-ass concept for the New Gods that’s at the core of Final Crisis, from what I understand.
Checkmate #23: Very cool setup. I like that Sasha is nice enough to actually ask politely instead of just flexing her legal muscles, unlike some iron men I could mention. I’d think she’d be even more reluctant to go to that particular hero, given their shared past. The Titans preview is very odd. A throwaway characterization page, a cheesecake shot and a group shot? Not making me apt to buy the book.
The Flash #237: Would it have killed them to at least mention Chris Kent? And the moral lesson was just asinine. And the art was terrible. Well, let’s see what Peyer can do with my one-time favorite character.
Justice League of America #18: I liked it. I’m still pretty disturbed by how the league is aware of the transportation, and only oppose it because they don’t know exactly what’s happening. Even if you don’t know that the criminals are being shipped to a hellworld, it’s still abhorrent. But the characterizations are strong, the action is solid, and I liked the Red Tornado backup a lot.
Countdown to Final Crisis #10: Not bad. Would like to see Piper a bit stronger, and Harley and Holly’s new duds look like ass. But hey! Bonus Bruce Timm art.
The Brave and the Bold #10: I loved the Superman/Silent Knight story. I never knew Silent Knight’s deal, and wrote him off because, hey, he’s a silly pun, but he’s actually pretty cool and I’d gladly read a book about him. I loved the revelation at the end. The Teen Titans/Aquaman story didn’t do much for me. I’m not much for the self-concious retroness of classic Titans stories.
Robin #171: Nothing to complain about. Nothing to crow about either, but that’s Chuck Dixon for you. I did like the Condiment King appearance and Bruce’s faith in Tim’s abilities.
Birds of Prey #115: Ok. Here’s a somewhat philosophical question. If a man brainwashes a woman into being his paramour and accomplice, the implications of rape are blatantly obvious. McKeever here nods at the rape, but keeps it subtextual, which is fine by me. But he didn’t make up the Queen Killer Shark concept. Was the original as rapey or were the stories of the time so utterly sexless that you could imagine that Killer Shark never used his hold over Lady Blackhawk for carnal relations?
As for this story, I liked the Zinda and Huntress bits (it really struck me how completely Huntress has been rehabilitated; I recall when Huntress was pretty much “Batman if Batman wasn’t as well-adjusted”), but I have mixed feelings on the Babs/Misfit/Black Alice bits. Charlie has a decent reason to be pissed (though Babs’ reasoning is sound too) but she comes off as too whiny here.
Countdown - so close to the boredom being over. Harley and Holly do, indeed, look stupid. And doesn’t Mary’s re-powering-up sort of invalidate the whole premise of Trials of Shazam?
Death of the New Gods - ugh.
Batman/Superman - Picked it up on a whim, and really enjoyed it. Lil’ Red Tornado looked like one of my old micronauts toys, so doubleplusgood. 
Birds of Prey - Charlie and Babs seem really out of character, here, but Helena and Zinda are great fun.
Especially with at least one teleporter and assloads of human-built super-tech to cannibalize. At least when meta crooks are thrown in the Slab, Alcatraz or Arkham, they take their gear away. (Of course, on Salvation, even if it hadn’t been a deathtrap hell-world, they’d have needed their crap for survival.)
But, seriously, with the numbers of super-brains and super-tech stuck on Salvation, the only reason they’re not already back on Earth planning how best to make Waller’s intestines into a cute scarf is the egos at play.
Other commentary…
JLA - Not bad, but I’m left pissed off. The end of the last arc left two major points that need to be dealt with - Batman’s unilateral press-ganging of Firestorm, and his insubordination. There’s no sign he’s been taken to task for it - in fact, no sign he’s not running the show! - and no indication of if 'Storm was inducted (against their will or otherwise).
Hack/Slash - Kind of an anti-climactic ending, which is weird considering how damn much happened. We’re getting into Buffy-like territory here, with the not-really-evil-but-entirely-amoral-and-stupid anti-Slasher organization coming into conflict with Cassie. It’s looking interesting, though.
Catwoman - So, basically, it’s an Apokolipitkan-tech version of Black Mercy. Funky. I’m not impressed with Selina’s deductive skills given the conclusion she drew in the face of what she saw at the end of the issue, but…she’s not Batman after all. It’s too bad she was wrong, though, it would have been more interesting, I think.
Robin - OK, this has been bugging me for a while… Did I just MISS mention of Tim and Zoanne getting back together or has the whole break up just been ignored? Other than that… Dixon can write Batman and Robin well. Too bad he can’t write Catwoman, Metamorpho, Thunder, Katana, J’onn, Geo-Force, Black Lightning, or Hawkgirl to save his life.
Sorry, some Outsiders bitterness seeped through. I really wish Bedard had been allowed to do it.
Anyhow, back to Robin…I really like the art. Tim looks like an 18 year old kid, not a 15 year old or 30 year old.
Transformers Spotlight - Arcee - Arcee has a personality! It’s a scary personality, but it’s more than just The Girlfriend which she was in Dreamwave’s series. (I’ve not been able to stand more than brief flashes of G1 since I was a kid…) Not how I would have chosen to explain the concept of gendered Cybertronians, but it’s an interesting twist.
But how do you weed out who goes and who stays?One murder? Two? Three? I know the Rogues, for example, aren’t really killers. I don’t agree with dumping them on an uninhabited planet, just because it seems like the most practical and easiest way to get rid of the really bad guys. Joker or Grodd I could drop there and leave to die (I NEVER liked the Joker and would love to see him die) with no problems. (and actually Menocchio, that brings up a good point: why can’t Mirror Master get off the planet?)
The really bad ones are unredeemable. Let them kill each other. Lock the door and throw away the key. Yes, I know it won’t work. I know they’ll eventually come back. But I approve of the concept and the willingness to do it. Do not trust them. Do not give the really evil bastards any chances or structure or the hope of parole, because you will regret it. When Superman or Batman comes down and starts criticizing you, tell them to stick it, because the prisons do not work. (It may or not amaze you I was on Iron Man’s side in Civil War.)
And no, I’m not this adamant about real life criminals (mostly) But they don’t have the capacity for destruction. Register the mutants, too, dammit.
Hey, I’m with uou. Aas the man himself said, “You can’t put an atomic bomb on probation.”
And, y’know, when you think about it; if you accept the premise that Arkham or prison will be ineffective at holding supercriminals, meaning they’ll escape and cause suffering (danger to or destruction of lives and property), AND that deporting supercriminals to a depopulated Earth-2 will cause weaker or “undeserving” supercriminals to suffer at the hands of eviler or more powerful ones…you’d still have a net reduction in suffering caused by supercriminals.
Or, if you really wanted to be cold about it: say the Joker kills 50 people a year. You can teleport him to Earth-2 (or Arrakis, or whatever), but you have to send 20 (or 25. or 50) people along with him, who he’ll probably murder. However, once the one-time sacrifice of lives is made, he can’t continue to kill people on Earth. As long as you don’t sacrifice more people in the teleportation than you could conceivably be saving, you still come out ahead. And that’s without narrowing down the people you send along with the Joker to superpowered weirdos arrested while wearing a scary costume.
(Although, personally, if I were running the program, I’d just say I was exiling supercriminals to another planet…if anyone got there to check, they’d find a big pile of dismembered corpses stacked next to the stargate, soaked with holy water. The heads would be in a pile twenty feet away, nailed to the ground, with the eyeballs poked out.)
There’s a big problem with saying “Well, they DCU authorities ought to try something, obviously just putting the in lockup isn’t working”, in that the only reason jail doesn’t work is for metafictional reasons, that is, because we want to read about those villains some more. And nothing harsher than that would work either!
Take Flash’s Rogues Gallery. In the Underworld Unleashed event, they were killed while doing a job for Neron (the Devil, for all purposes). Killed in huge explosions. No bodies left behind.
But in time, the writer who killed them off regretted slaying a bunch of classic baddies, and the fans were clamoring for their return. So the Devil brought them back. Resurrected their bodies as soulless, indestructible killing machines and set them loose on Keystone city. Even once the Flash was able to return their souls and their mortality, they still were said to be harder and more dangerous than they were before (which they demonstrated most recently by beating a Flash to death).
If these guys escaped from complete disintegration and spiritual captivity in Hell, and were *more *of a threat than they were before, what hope is an extraterrestrial prison?
“They always escape!” is simply a trope of the genre, a product of the serial and indefinitely continuing nature of these stories. And, like a domino mask or a pair of glasses hiding one’s identity, one best not examined too closely. It cannot be used justify harsher punishment of supervillains, since any such treatment will itself inevitably fail.
Well, hell, when you look at comics that way, most of them are also a Kafkaesque nightmare world where no victory or defeat is permanent, and the only monuments to the endless fighting are the mounds of innocent, anonymous dead.
At last a new issue of Runaways! yay!
Which is one thing I HATE HATE HATE about superhero comics in general. If they were planned, plotted and scripted intelligently, they’d have a long arc featuring one supervillain (perhaps lasting a year or two) at the end of which that villain would be killed. Permanently. Forever.
You could intersperse other events during the arc, such as minor villains, regular crooks, team-ups, etc…but only one major baddie per arc.
Then you introduce another. That would be interesting to read, more logically realistic (well, as realistic as you can get in a superhero book) and wouldn’t fuck with the readers as much.
To be fair, the authorities did not know it was a death trap. The last page of the first issues says specifically that the traps were all dormant when the scouts checked it.
And if you want a comic that deals with bad guys with finality, check out The Boys by Ennis and Robertson. They won’t be having any returning villains in that one. 
I continue to enjoy Joker and Lex Luthor stories way too much to endorse true finality in stories.
Just locking them up works fine. Just don’t peek behind the curtain. Don’t ask why Batman still refuses to kill the Joker. Don’t use comic book recidivism to justify extreme penal measures. Ultimately, it’s no different than allowing people to not recognize Clark Kent without his glasses.
There’s a difference between peeking behind the curtain, and pretending not to notice that it’s tattered and flapping in the breeze.
(If that analogy doesn’t work for ya, I can torture it some more. Where’d I put my thumbscrews?)
I didn’t even know there was a Warhammer 40K comic!
Hey, I thought I was the only one still reading. Glad to see I’m not alone.
I still love Runaways. I know a lot of people have jumped off their bandwagon due to the delays (can’t say that I blame them), but I love this story. I’d buy a book about the characters that have been introduced in this arc.