Eye Of The Camera-Wha…? I thought this was supposed to be a sequel to MARVELS. It’s not. It’s set before and during issue 2 (of MARVELS). That said, damn, Busiek is good when he’s on his game. Not thrilled with the artist (but what an incredibly thankless job-following the book that made Alex Ross a super-star)–he’s competent, but just…what’s the opposite of dynamic? Boring?
Justice League-Never having read any of the Milestone books, McDuffie doesn’t make things easy for me–I have absolutely no idea who any of these guys are or what’s going on. Also, I thought they were from a parallel Earth–so what’s with the comment that Speedy knows them (I remember the Superman crossover from the '90s) and the comment that Black Lighting keeps getting asked if he’s Static’s dad? I also don’t buy Canary being able to get into that meeting room (Batman doesn’t have a security system on in? C’mon). Anyone know?
Trinity-Eh–it’s…competent. But that’s all. Readable but just…there.
Detective-I hate Denny O’Neil’s writing (almost as much as his editing–he did more damage to the Batbooks than any other 3 editors–including the guy who nearly got the books cancelled in the late '50s), so it’s no surprise that I’m not thrilled with this one. It’s a standard Two-Face story. And no-one seems to be mourning Bruce. It feels like a file-story they dug out and changed a couple of references on to ‘update’ it.
Final Crisis–I still don’t know what’s going on. Didn’t Barry come back from the dead about 4 issues back? Shouldn’t there have been some reaction to that? This issue is vaguely more coherent than the last couple, but it still feels like there’s huge chunks of story missing.
Green Lantern Corps–Too much going on…but the writer is able to keep all the balls in the air. Barely. But that said, it’s still a good read.
Bunches more when I get to them–it was a big week for me. Anyone else?
C’mon–Gamera and I can’t be the only ones reading comics here? Where was everyone last week?
Dark Reign–Gah–the art is terrible. Namor shouldn’t look like a 60-year-old wino. Yeah, Bendis has a hard-on for the Hood but really, he’s not that tough or interesting. I dunno. I can’t seem to bring myself to care–we need some breathing space BETWEEN events Marvel–at least DC gave us a couple of years between Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis (I don’t count “One Year Later” as a event.)
Final Crisis: I think that this whole series illustrates Grant Morrison’s greatest problem: His tendency to write grand, ambitious storylines that are cosmic in their scope, but that lack any sense of wonder and engagement.
He’s been accused of writing weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and while his large fanbase may take umbrage at that, I do think it’s an accurate assessment.
I’d agree–and it’s infecting the rest of the DC Universe. In the two Batman RIP tie-ins this week, Batman’s missing (or dead?) but there’s no reaction or emotion to that fact. Flash has been back since (our time) like June. And there’s been no reaction beyond a one panel “Wally hugs Barry” panel. In JLA, the Milestone characters appear and we don’t get any real reaction. I’m a huge silver-age DC geek. Love the weirdness and the energy–but I like the “people centered” stuff from Marvel too–and it takes the combination to engage me any more.
My understanding on Batman and Final Crisis, based on Didio’s “20 Answers” bit at Newsarama, is that Batman’s “death” story is resolved in Final Crisis #6. It remains to be seen whether his battle with Dr. Hurt and the Black Glove was all in his head, a product of Darkseid’s minions trying to break his will, or if he simply survived the bit with the helicopter, and then got called in to JLA HQ to deal with the stuff we see in Final Crisis #1.
So Batman is ‘missing.’
I like Final Crisis, and they explain some of the wonky problems by revealing Darkseid’s rebirth has caused space-time to begin collapsing around Earth, but… that makes it damn hard to reconcile when it happens relative to other books.
My understanding on the Milestone characters in JLA is that there’s been a pocket retcon - Dakota and Icon and the rest have now always been a part of the DCU.
I hate the pocket recon. It makes no sense and I’m someone who LIKED Superboy’s reality punches, so I’m not hard to please from that standpoint. (But I appreciate the info).
Hey, now, I posted last week. I missed the week before that. It’s just that there were two threads last week.
Trinity, eh. They still haven’t learned the lesson that 52 and Countdown should have taught them – don’t get caught in the exposition; move the story forward and have things happen. They just keep showing the same things, and talking their explanations, over and over while the story inches forward. We get it already. Move on!
Final Crisis is definitely High Morrison Weirdness, but it’s a fun ride. Revelation, too. Morrison has a habit of letting plotlines dangle before tying them back in much later – as with Mister Miracle and that ex-Monitor, finally, this issue. The Flashes will be showing up again, eventually… but their timing is even wonkier, since we know they ran through time and so aren’t in the same timeframe as the main story may be.
Damn sight better than that Death of the New Gods crap at the end of Countdown, though.
GL Corps was good, as expected, but once again I want someone to take a clue-stick and beat the @#$% out of those freaky blue idiots. I know they have a history of making stupid decisions to move plots forward, but this is getting ridiculous.
Action Comics is turning out to be the weak link for art and writing on the New Krypton storyline. Although the story moved forward, the action seemed… disconnected, I guess. And did we ever get an explanation of why Nightwing and Flamebird are running around? Did I miss an issue or tie-in, somewhere?
And Flamebird is allegedly that “Third Kryptonian” woman
Based on that last panel, he looks kinda like Conner.[/spoiler]
My big problem with Trinity is that the pacing is off (to me). 52 had exactly enough story for a 52 issue series. Nothing seemed rushed or slow. It also seemed to have a pre-planned timeline/storyline–Giffen/Rucka/et al seem to have sat down and said “By issue 10, here’s what we need to do and here’s where the characters need to be. By issue 20…etc” For me, the pacing was perfect.
Countdown (beyond being a gawdawful mess) had too much–they were trying to do too much too fast (and they were sloppy as hell–they never did make up their mind if that world that was destroyed twice was Earth-1, Earth-52, Earth-51 or what)
Trinity seems slow…glacial even. Plus there’s just chunks of bad dialogue (which I attribute to that Fabian N. guy).
As an aside, I’m rereading Batman pre the Brubaker/Rucka era–Contagion/Legacy/Cataclysm/Aftermath/No-Man’s Land (where Rucka came on). Gads–those stories don’t hold up. The dialogue is unbelievable. In Contagion, someone had obviously read “The Hot Zone” and was giving us huge, multi-paragraph infodumps of near-plagerized info. Rucka is so very underrated for how well he redefined the Bat.
Fenris, if you hate the Dakota retcon, wait until the Archie heroes show up. The rumor about Nightwing at least has a basis in fact, since he used Tactile Telekinesis. Wonder how they will pull it off if it is him.
There is another rumor going around that the writer after Johns in JSA will be Gail Simone. I don’t know of anything that would indicate this is true, but it certainly sounds good to me.
Thing is, the Archie heroes (assuming that the !mpact stuff isn’t cannon–and since they broke a bunch of the characters in a Watchmen-esque crossover mini-series–I’m assuming not) are new. They’ll be blank slates with no background who can appear over time. In theory they won’t have an established history and can appear “for the first time” like they did with the Charleton heroes after the Crisis (only hopefully–y’know–done well and with a nod towards their original personalities, origins, etc*.)
The Milestone characters, from what I can tell, have a solid 8-10 year history–and it makes no sense that the other DC characters haven’t run across them before. And if they have, this is a HAWKWORLD level continuity fuck-up.
If they want the Milestone characters to be part of the DC universe, it’s not that hard–one of the Monitors twiddles his fingers and Dakota moves from Earth 37 to New Earth “and will remain there forevermore for the stability of the Multiverse”–end of problem.
Otherwise, where have Icon and all the heavy hitting Milestone characters been during all the various Crisises? Why hasn’t Static been offered membership in the Titans before this? Why hasn’t Superman come in to help clean up Dakota? (Isn’t the backstory something about a drug experiment gone wrong that gave a bunch of people powers?)
Frankly, as much as I love Johns’ stuff, he seems to be…I dunno…not as fresh on JSA as he once was. I think leaving will be good for him and for the book. And Simone rocks.
On a side note, I’d love to see someone on Justice League who wants to write Justice League stories. We had Meltzer who gave us a Red Tornado story, guest starring the JLA, then McDuffie who’s given us a Vixen story (and Vixen just isn’t all that interesting to me) guest starring the JLA and now a Milestone story guest starring the JLA.
*Except for The Vegetable. Mighty Comicss #33-ish. “The Vegetable” was an arch-fiend who looked like a parsnip with arms and legs who had “all the powers of a vegetable”. We can do without The Vegetable. **
**Although…a 6 issue, prestige format mini-series featuring The Vegetable vs Detective Chimp Battling for the FATE OF THE UNIVERSE Across Time and Space? I’d buy that.
In the interests of accuracy, I dug up the issue–it was Mighty Comics #40 and he looks like a cucumber with arms and legs, not a parsnip.
A few more comments on this week’s books:
I loved the Haunted Tank. I’m normally not a fan of Vertigo’s “redefinition” of characters who they strip-mine from the main DC Universe* but in this case? Perfect.
PS238 needs to knock off the super-hero/save the world stuff and get back to “Kids in super-hero school” themes that made the first 20-some issues fantastic.
Not like Sandman* or Fables or Y-The Last Man which are original Vertigo creations, but atrocities like “Kid Eternity” or what they did with Animal Man and Swamp Thing (who’s broken as a good character for who-knows how long) or Shade The Changing Man etc.
**Actually I think the first few issues of Sandman were DC, not Vertigo, but you know what I mean
I believe the Milestone characters are basically reboots. I don’t think the old adventures happened anymore, the characters just had their origins (whatever they were, I didn’t read them.) recently. But I could be wrong, I won’t read the issue for another month.
What I found interesting about Vertigo taking characters, they did a Deadman, but Boston Brand is still in the DC Universe, and Kid Eternity is back in the DC universe. But Swamp Thing? Nope, not there, can’t use him. I am looking forward to the Haunted Tank book. It looked pretty good.
Nope. McDuffie has said that what happened in the Milestone books happened (except for the mini where they crossed over with the DCU), and under the current status quo, it happened in the DCU, not in a separate Dakotaverse.
The combining of the two universes is also a retcon WITHIN the story - Anansi talks about it in the last arc, implying Dharma has something to do with it.
He’s also said that, aside from Icon and the Shadow Cabinet, pretty much all of them stuck to Dakota - they’re known (and apparently Static’s got a bit of a following), but they’re not much interested in spreading out, which explains why they’d be talked about rarely enough that our never hearing of them from DC characters before isn’t too big a deal.
As to Vertigo ‘taking’ characters - it’s hard to take that claim seriously while Madam Xanadu is running, given that it’s used the Phantom Stranger (extensively) and Etrigan (a brief cameo), and referenced Green Lantern, all while they’re all still being used in main line books. They should just go ahead and say Swampy and John Constantine are off limits, and the Endless need to be used carefully (or else, everyone but Destiny is off-limits, depending how they want to give Neil his due), but go nuts with everyone else.
Actually, I’ll go you one better: if it were up to me, any character that started in DC can/must be returned to DC once the character’s run finishes in Vertigo-so Vertigo wants to publish a dark, modern, edgy deconstruction of “Swing With Scooter” comic? Swell…and as long as it’s running, Scooter, Cookie, Malibu and the others are off-limits in DC. But when the book folds, the characters get returned to DC the way the Doom Patrol did (after years of inter-company bickering), the way Animal Man did (after Grant Morrison demanded it) and apparently the way they made a pre-arranged agreement for Deadman. And who knows–that may be how they’re handling it now—you make a good point about the Madame Xanadu series.
It just pisses me off to see Vertigo flailing away at trying to find a vehicle for Swamp Thing (heh–remember the one series with Tefe where Swampy was an occasional guest star in his own title?) when he could return to the DCU which to me is where he works best. (I read a recent interview with DiDido where he said that Swampy is pretty much off-limits forever.) Hell, for me, Constantine works better on the fringes of the DCU as well (think of Moore’s and Veitch’s runs).
Gail Simone would be just about perfect for JSA, I think. Her Birds of Prey was good writing for an ensemble group (although, smaller), and she has done well with some of the JSA characters in the past. Plus, All-New Atom was fantastic, of course. Just wonder if she’d be able to handle both JSA and Wonder Woman, since she apparently had problems doing both BoP and Atom.
At that point, she was writing 4 ongoing books - BoP, Atom, Gen[sup]13[/sup], and Welcome to Tranquility. Atom and Gen[sup]13[/sup] suffered for the split attention.
Right now, she’s only writing 2 - Wonder Woman, and Secret Six.
I am looking forward to the Haunted Tank book. It looked pretty good.
There is nothing that approaches Hawkworld in terms of fuck-up.