Action Comics Annual #11: Wow, the long-delayed conclusion to the much-hyped Johns/Donner/Kubert “Last Son” story arc. This storyline is so late in ending it was launched out of the end of DC’s big event like three events ago. Adam Kubert gets an F for work ethic — his dad, comics legend Joe Kubert managed to get more pages done last year and he’s technically retired — but what he gets on the pages here does look great. It’s not precisely consistent with his work in the previous chapters of this story, oddly; at times the art here resembles Walt Simonson’s work more than the style Kubert used when this story began. Writers Geoff Johns and Richard Donner (making his last co-writing appearance?) get some good bits in here, but the story is so cold at this point it’s nigh impossible to get too worked up about it. Good stuff, really, but you guys who managed to avoid it until now and then just randomly stumble across the collected volume at Borders will probably enjoy it more than anyone.
Avengers/Invaders #1: Uncharacteristically awful covers by usually dependable artists David Finch and Alex Ross herald this Dynamite-produced, packaged-for-Marvel 12-issues series with art by former JSA hotshot Steve Sadowski. Unfortunately, it looks like they went with the same reproduced-from-pencils method here that’s made made Scott Kolins’ work look like crap ever since he left The Flash. A good inker (like Sadowski’s former JSA partner Mike [Hernandez] Bair) would have straightened out at least some of the rough spots here and there, anyway. Disappointing overall; absolutely nothing happens that anyone with a vague idea of the overall concept of the series (’40s Invaders come to the present and meet the present-day Avengers, starting this issue with Spider-Man) wouldn’t predict. Still, I’m hopeful for future issues, as I’m enjoying the other two current Golden Age-meets-the-present series, The Twelve and Project: Superpowers — but frankly this series doesn’t come out of the gate with the same charge as those books did, even with the advantage of much higher marquee name characters.
Secret Invasion #2: Mm, this felt a bit light for a chapter of a big event book. Nice art, and what’s here is well done, it’s just not really enough of it to be satisfying. A few too many big panels and obvious reaction shots, not enough real content, and no big revelations. A bit of a step down from the excellent #1.
Mighty Avengers #13: Conversely, this Secret Invasion tie-in was densely satisfying, providing some really meaty SI B-story that seems likely to lead into more interesting areas than what happened in the main book this month. Even the appearance of Bendis’ intensely annoying amazing automatic foreshadowing plot device character Layla Miller doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm here. Still, I don’t know, I guess I’d like to see more of this stuff that’s been separated off into the Avengers tie-ins at least referred to in the main book once in awhile to break up the big fight scenes with random dinosaurs.
Invincible Iron Man #1: I’m still not convinced that a second monthly Iron Man book is necessary, but eh, what the hell — let ‘em cash in while the cashing’s good. Not overwhelmingly great but a good first chapter setup, with overall decent if distractingly obviously photoreferenced art. I think I still prefer the other Iron Man book, though.
Amazing Spider-Man #558: Regardless of the merits of the individual Amazing Spider-Man ‘Brand New Day’ arcs since Marvel began this thrice-monthly publishing schedule, I have to say I think the format in itself is a success (time to ditch the Brand New Day branding though, guys). While not everything that’s comes down the pike has been great, it’s all been decent, and when it comes out three times a month it’s easy to hang in there, since the stories don’t drag on forever. Hell, that whole dumbass Mephisto-retcon thing already seems like a long time ago. Especially now that they’re not locked to the 3-part story arc structure, there’s an energy and unpredictability about the book, yet also a certain, sort of ossified classic-DC sense of there being an inviolable set of standard situational story rules as well as a refreshing sense of disconnectedness from the rest of the Marvel line due to the necessary mechanics of publishing the book. This issue wasn’t great by any means, in fact it was kinda dumb, but I found myself not really minding. The maxim of the thrice-monthly ASM seems to be “Look, we can’t promise greatness, but we can promise consistent entertainment. And a lot of it.” And sometimes that’s good enough — that’s the case here, and I’m on for at least the next dozen issues or so.
DC Universe #0: This was a very effective job of weaving what were basically teasers together and making them all tie in thematically to an overarching story that was in itself a teaser. Writers Johns and Morrison did a good job making connections between the main story and the other bits in the book, though some of them were admittedly subtle and were only evident upon rereading. (The Red and the Black, anyone?) Don’t worry if you’re a tad confused at times, as this is basically a trailer: you shouldn’t expect to understand everything in this book yet even with a comprehensive knowledge of the DCU and recent events, as most of the stories teased have either not yet begun or just started. Myself, the only bit that didn’t really get me excited for what’s upcoming was the Wonder Woman segment; I dropped that book already and haven’t seen any reason to pick it up again yet. But holy shit I can’t wait for Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds and Final Crisis itself. Other than simply getting people hyped, I think the point that was successfully accomplished with DCU#0 and its attendant publicity is that it’s not so much important whether or not Barry Allen is back so much as what they do with him. And frankly, for anyone but me and other freaks the return of Barry is not a big enough event it and of itself to be the climax to a story this big. The sense I get from this is more like “Yes, okay, Barry is coming back, we’ve hinted at it heavily enough that you all know it. But we’re not gonna make you wait until Final Crisis #8 to see it, he’s coming back soon — and that’s when shit starts to break loose.”
Joss Whedon’s Runaways is just not very good. In places the writing is absolutely cringe-inducing. If your comic is going to be horrendously late it could at least show signs of more than the absolute minimum of effort being spent on it.
I bet Adam Strange has a really bad credit rating on Earth and would have trouble getting a home loan or something.
On JLA Classified going away: editorial gave a lot of big-name creators runs on the book, and the only consistently good run was Giffen/DeMatteis’ last word on the JLI characters. The rest was uniformly boring, and average at best. Yes, even the reunion of the Stern/Byrne team; yes, that Simone/Garcia-Lopez nonsense; yes, the long-awaited Kid Amazo arc; yes, the Warren Ellis arc; yes, even the introductory Grant Morrison arc. So yes, the book degenerated quickly into JLA Inventory Drawer Adventures, but I can’t point the blame entirely at editorial on this one.
Speaking of squandered chances at writing the Justice League, while I do generally like Brad Meltzer’s work I am sorta pissed that in his Justice League of America #0 he brought up all these possible interesting and cool things he could have covered during his JLA run but then the two things he actually followed through on were “So Roy and Hawkgirl totally hook up” and “I always thought Geo-Force and Vixen got a bum rap.” And when Alan Burnett got a three-issue run recently he didn’t even bother to pay attention to any of the individual characters’ speech patterns. That must cut down on writing time, anyway.
The current DC Infinity Inc. book is bafflingly pointless. Infinity Inc. is the junior JSA, but since no one at DC seems to know that, the series has no hook and no audience. Even with Pete Woods coming onboard for art that thing’s gonna be cancelled within the year.
I like Secret Invasion but we’re only one issue in and I’m already getting really tired of dumb “hey look it’s this character if they were a skrull MAYBE THEY’RE A SKRULL but probably not” covers for random books.
Awhile ago in JSA Geoff Johns gave Batman a line referring to Dr. Mid-Nite that was something like “Dr. Pieter Cross believes himself to be blind. In reality his vision has increased to cover all spectrums, but he doesn’t realize it.” Then Batman doesn’t, like, tell him that or anything. What a dick. This was like four years ago and they never brought it up again, I assume because they realized it made no sense at all.
Mark Waid writing Superman as a vegetarian is one of those things where Waid fell in love with his own ‘bit’ despite the fact that it makes no sense and even contradicts his beloved silver age lore (beef Bourguignon with ketchup, anyone?). Maybe stuff like this is why Waid will never be put on a Superman title as the regular writer after all, he kinda seems to shoot himself in the foot a lot as a writer. The Brave & the Bold seemed like the perfect book for him, as did Legion of Super-Heroes, but even when paired with rock-solid artists Waid was only able to make those into B+ books at best. It’s been a long while since anything Waid wrote was in that A-level category.
Oh, speaking of Legion: Here’s a real “haha what the fuck” moment — rather than actually write a review of Legion of Super-Heroes in the 31st Century #3, a kid-aimed comic based on the cartoon series, this guy decides instead to use the space to tell us over and over how much he’d love to fuck Infectious Lass, maybe with Saturn Girl thrown in for good measure. It starts off “Ever since I saw her in Superboy number two-o-one, I fell in love with…Infectious Lass. She looked exotically hot. She had the power to give you fever…” and goes downhill from there.
I just learned that Kobra was created by Jack Kirby. That makes him even cooler than the fact that he’s one of the only villains ever to have his own book. Kobra needs to be reimagined by Grant Morrison and, oh, let’s say Justiniano.
At this point, Vertigo has evolved to the point they should just acknowledge they can’t keep a Swamp Thing series running and give the character back to the DCU. I can see where enforcing the strict divisions was necessary at the beginning because otherwise Vertigo wouldn’t have been taken seriously as a separate imprint, but now the most successful Vertigo series have no connection to anything outside of themselves (or other Vertigo series) so letting the DCU stuff go wouldn’t hurt the company any. It’s not like Constantine is needed back in the DCU, but Swampy is. They don’t need to maintain character exclusivity to keep doing Vertigo mature-reader non-continuity reimaginings of DCU concepts anyway.
Neil Gaiman noted in the intro to the Legend of the Green Flame that there was a time when he was fast-tracked to be the new hot DCU writer–he was all set to take over Swamp Thing after Rick Veitch, but that all went to hell after they shitcanned Rick’s Swampy-inhabits-the-cross-of-Jesus-of-Nazareth story. And Sandman does feature a lot of DCU standards in its early years, from Oreo-chomping J’Onn J’Onzz to Element Girl and Lyta, Lucien, Cain, Abel, Matthew, etc. But sometimes I do wonder what we would’ve gotten had Gaiman done more relatively straight DCU stuff–obviously it’s unlikely we would’ve gotten an awesome Green Lantern Corps or Teen Titans out of him, but what could he’ve done with Arion? Amethyst? Hercules? Isis? Dare I say it–Shadowpact?
I get the impression Grant Morrison didn’t really explain anything about his plans for revamping the New Gods to anyone before this series was written, because other than New Genesis and Apokolips crashing into each other and merging into a single planet there’s really no setup for anything coming next other than some vague expository captions. And didn’t that planets crashing into each other and merging bit already happen once during John Byrne’s Jack Kirby’s New Gods run? Whatever, like most Countdown tie-ins the best one can say about this is that it’s over, which is kind of a shame because I was kind of enjoying its first couple of issues. Overall it’s certainly nothing approaching Jim Starlin’s best work though. It’s also a real cheat that they didn’t really end the story here and held it out so that something would lead back into Countdown. Mostly the feeling I’m left with is just “Man, I’m glad this crap is over.”
Batman #675:
Slightly off, weak fill-in art mars this otherwise sterling Grant Morrison-scripted issue ramping up to the much-ballyhooed “Batman R.I.P.” storyline. Grant really makes the Nightwing-Robin dynamic work well, though I’m not really buying the obviously Spirit-influenced Jezebel Jet character as anything but a plot point necessity so far — god save us from a spotlight issue exploring her inner depths though. Looking forward to seeing where this is going.
Checkmate #25:
I never totally fell in love with this Greg Rucka-scripted (latterly with Eric Trautmann helping out) series, as some issues packed all the excitement and action of a board of directors meeting and the large cast meant a lot of characters were defined by little more than a job description, a nationality, and an ethnicity. I’m sorry to see it effectively ending though, as Bruce Jones coming aboard to write means I’m dropping it like it was Jones’ amazingly awful Nightwing run. It’s a shame, as this series often seemed packed with ideas that Rucka never really got a chance to explore fully and which will now probably lay fallow until the property gets inevitably cancelled and re-revamped. Maybe it’s the fact that Checkmate is fighting Kobra throughout this fairly solid issue that makes me afraid this title is going to immediately turn into G.I. Joe next month, but if nothing else Rucka carved out a nice little niche for secret agent action within the DC Universe, assuming Jones doesn’t screw it all up.
Shadowpact #24:
As this series sputters to a close (I believe next issue is the last) it’s hard not to think that it’s amazing that it lasted this long while managing to do nothing but squander its potential. While the lead-in Day of Vengeance mini-series was surprisingly good, the ongoing has been a real waste of good characters. On paper it seems like it should work — Fables writer Bill Willingham writing (and initially, drawing) a group of magic-based characters within the DC Universe — and as a longtime fan of Willingham’s Elementals work I was hoping for a return to glory. Unfortunately, it seems Bill can’t write superhero-type characters he didn’t have a hand in creating (or defining, in the case of Fables) for shit. The series has been handed off to Willingham’s assistant Matthew Sturges to wrap up, like the turgid Salvation Run mini-series, and if Willingham didn’t have a handle on the book, Sturges’ awful, overly explanatory dialogue makes it clear he doesn’t have any better clue. Character from the past: “I cannot believe I’m in the future!” Character from the future: “Well, it’s the past for me.” No fucking shit. A magical imp says “Peace, out!” Really. Nonsensical plotting is made only slightly clearer by Phil Winslade’s decent art, and it’s nice to see Blue Devil maybe getting back to his proper status quo (though Sturges still manages to throw in completely ridiculous justification for the prototype of Blue Devil suit being more powerful than the second iteration), but it’s far too little to recommend this.
Countdown To Final Crisis #1:
I covered the failings of Countdown already in Countdown To Final Crisis is Consistently Terrible, so rather than elaborate at length in reviewing this issue I’ll simply add this: thanks god this shit is over, and that the events of this issue have already been undone by the announcement of Ray Palmer being a character in James Robinson’s new Justice League book, Donna Troy being in Judd Winick’s Titans, and Kyle Rayner being back where he belongs AT LAST in Green Lantern Corps, because the idiotic ‘team’ they form in this issue is completely undesired by any audience and will be hopefully immediately forgotten. Paul Dini’s writing shows signs of the self-awareness that’s crept into the final issues of Countdown — the protagonists are uninvited party guests who’ve overstayed their welcome, trapped in crumbling relationships built on nothing, who’ve gotten this far on a positive attitude and lots of denial — but really, this issue should have been an apology, and we didn’t get it. Ah well, at least we’ll be getting a hardcover collection of Kirby’s OMAC out of the deal. I just hope no one scarred by Countdown’s incompetent hackery associates Final Crisis with it in any way due to the mid-series title change and misses out on Morrison’s series because of it. (Last thought: why is Marvel’s character Apocalypse on the Source Wall? Ahh, why bother putting any thought into it.)
Fables #72:
While Bill Willingham’s mainstream DC work can be frustratingly inconsistent, Fables is nothing if not consistent. Nearly every issue features work by the same team, and the occasional art fill-ins are always high quality one- or two-shot stories and not randomly dropped in the middle of longer stories. As a monthly reader, it’s easy to see the book has found its real audience in collected form on the shelves of Borders and Barnes & Nobles everywhere rather than in comic shops — even Mark Buckingham’s page layouts leave conspicuous gutters on either vertical edge to allow for the tighter binding of trade paperbacks. Willingham’s Cinderella-as-a-secret-agent story here is a well-timed change of pace easing into the next major storyline heading up to the promised “everything will change no we mean it” issue #75, and I’m glad to see the book’s success hasn’t made them too trepidatious to take chances — if anything, the remarkably consistency of the book gives them a stabler ground off of which to springboard new ideas. Still looking forward to what’s to come, which is pretty good for a Vertigo series passing its sixth year.
Hulk #3:
Jeph Loeb is the only guy in 2008 who thinks it’s still high-tech and cool for a guy to command a computer by verbally addressing it as “Computer” the way Captain Kirk did in the sixties. He is also the the only guy who thinks a secret agent — nay, a HEAD secret agent, a leader of secret agents — would not have heard of forensic audio reconstruction. This issue is basically a long boring fight scene pretending to be a murder mystery, containing a few truly heinous WTF moments (robot harpies with Banner’s deceased wife’s face?) but is at least mostly well-drawn. I don’t really find Ed McGuinness’ style appropriate for this book, though — everything he draws looks bright and shiny by default, which worked well on Superman/Batman but doesn’t work as well here. Only recommended if you really like Ed’s art, because the writing is just not good.
Justice League of America #20:
Good to see Dwayne McDuffie return to scripting after the awful Salvation Run tie-in three part Alan Burnett fill-in, and the Ethan Van Sciver art provides a nice change from Ed Benes’ hyper-idealized superhumans. Also a nice surprise is that this is basically a Flash story with Wonder Woman co-starring, and a better Flash story than we’ve gotten in the Flash’s own book in awhile. After nearly two years of this series we still haven’t gotten a really compelling case for this particular grouping of the League though, and I’m waiting for that one killer JLA story in this series to make it happen. This isn’t that story, but it’s a good little one-off that at the very least Flash and Ethan Van Sciver fans would do well to pick up.
I’ve been seeing Stan Lee getting a lot of flak for his writing lately, but really, anyone who thinks Stan is truly a terrible writer just really shouldn’t be reading Marvel comics, full stop. Mostly people seem to criticize his dialogue and execution, and relegate him to the nebulous and somewhat backhandedly complimentary role of mere “idea man.” I mean, if being an “idea man” was that easy then Stan’s original concepts which defined and still dominate the Marvel Universe and its various related media such as Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Hulk, and Iron Man would have been long ago supplanted by newer creations. Frankly, it’s arguable that the only true A-list Marvel properties from the post-Stan era are the Punisher and Wolverine, both of who date back to the 1970s. Besides those two, there’s a long line of semi-successful and failed B- and C-list properties like Cloak and Dagger, Longshot, Gravity, Power Pack, Dazzler…this could go on for pages and pages.
While some think execution of a story is more important than the idea behind it, I disagree entirely — they’re at least equally important. And regardless of what you think about Stan’s writing, the peaks of his accomplishments — his FF run with Kirby, especially — are far better than most of the overwrought, smug irony-ridden comics that today rehash those selfsame ideas ad nauseum and ad infinitum. Embellishing an idea is a skill. Coming up with idea after idea after idea (in conjuction with Kirby, Ditko, etc. of course) for the solid period between FF#1 and Amazing Fantasy #15 goes far, far beyond that. So you gotta give it up for Stan. FACE FRONT, TRUE BELIEVERS! I’m totally a DC guy but man, Stan back in the day gave the industry a kick in the ass that probably saved it. Plus the dude’s just got character and style. I know Stan’s a corny motherfucker and I know he’s written a pile of shitty comics since that golden period, but when I see ol’ Stan I can’t help but grin like a lunatic. I’m more than willing to forgive Stan’s excesses and enjoy his sporadic current work for what it is. Stan just makes me happy.
That said, one in awhile you’ve gotta wonder sometimes what was going through Stan’s head, especially when you see something like what’s in the boxed-off, highlighted portion of Stan’s Soapbox on this Bullpen Bulletins page:
What the hell? Marvel’s biography of HITLER? Evidently this did actually come out as HITLER: HORROR AND THE HOLOCAUST. Can’t figure what the angle here was, but hey, I guess if you throw out enough ideas sooner or later you’re bound a have a few of those ideas turn out to be really really bad ones.
Also, I bet thousands of people out there would totally buy t-shirts with softball-slugging funky ’70s headband Luke Cage on the front.
I always enjoy stumbling across easter eggs, cameo appearances, and messages hidden in the artwork of comics. It’s something about the fact that it’s something the artist didn’t have to draw, that they just put in there purely for the fun of it or to let you know something about them. Alex Ross is probably one of the best-known for this, putting the Beatles into Marvels, the Monkees into Kingdom Come, etc. etc. etc., but there are thousands of easter eggs, hidden messages, and unauthorized cameo appearances scattered throughout the pages of comics of all types. Sometimes they’re obvious, sometimes they’re subtle, sometimes you wouldn’t even know they were there unless someone pointed them out to you. Some are just cool little shoutouts, some have gotten people fired. Groo The Wanderer used to have a secret message in every issue, and back when I was a kid I used to spend hours poring over my Groos trying to find them. Some were really easy to spot but I’m sure I never found a lot of them. These days I don’t really have the time to go specifically looking for hidden messages, cameos, and easter eggs, but I try to note them when I spot them, and here I present a bunch that I don’t recall seeing documented elsewhere before.
Check out this panel in Marvel’s Strikeforce Morituri #7 (June 1987) drawn by Brent Anderson & Scott Williams:
“The Horde” is an alien race in the future that Strikeforce Morituri fights, and which has apparently managed to somehow collect not only Captain America’s shield, the Silver Surfer’s board, and a miniaturized Galactus helmet but also a bunch of Green Lantern power batteries, Batman’s giant penny, and even Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet!
What do the X-Men do on their day off? Hang out in the future at the same bar as Sun Boy from the Legion, apparently — that’s Kitty Pryde, Colossus, and a standing Professor X there chatting it up. Note this backup story from Tales of The Legion #320 was some of the first pro work of future name creators Dan Jurgens & Karl Kesel — even the letterer of this story is still working, on and off.
Shoutouts to comic creators of the past are pretty standard, especially in Batman comics where it’s always “Hey there’s a crime down on the corner of Sprang and Giordano”, but I liked this from Detective Comics #785 by Brubaker & Zircher:
Those are the full/real names of (top to bottom) Dick Dillin, Don Newton, Gene Day, and Gil Kane. I assume that would be Win Mortimer at the bottom.
From the fantastic Solo #7, Mike Allred’s love letter to classic Silver Age DC Comics: Captain Action, a licensed toy character that hasn’t been seen in the pages of DC Comics since 1968 (and that DC doesn’t have the rights to):
Unauthorized guests always seem to sneak into comic-book weddings (those crowd scenes must just be too tempting — or too boring to draw), but on this Elementals cover the unauthorized party-crashers far outnumber actual Elementals characters: among others are Cerebus, Casper, the Phantom, Space Ghost’s sidekicks, Prince Valiant, Snarf, Gumby, Doc Savage, the Lone Ranger, Superman’s lurking behind the Comico logo, and even Calvin & Hobbes snuck in.
Finally, this is a cameo of sorts but other than that I really don’t know what to say about it other than that it’s somehow sadly hilarious. From the letters page of Joe Matt’s Peepshow #10, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer:
What easter eggs, hidden messages, and cameo appearances have you found lurking in the pages of your favorite comics?
As Countdown/Countdown To Final Crisis limps into its final month, it seems as appropriate a time as any to take a look at the series, because let’s face it, if it’s sucked consistently for 48 weeks, it’s not going to suddenly get great. Oh sure, it did take a step up in quality around the time of the midpoint title change — but only one step. The problem from that point forward was that there was at least the chance an issue could be decent, so each week the reader would think well hey it’s POSSIBLE Countdown won’t be utterly cringe-inducing this week. After that midpoint shift there might be decent Pete Woods or Scott Kolins or Jamal Igle art instead of utter shit Dennis Calero or Carlos Magno art but still, once you actually read the thing oh my god it was always just stupid shit that made no sense whatsoever.
The problem wasn’t that it was weekly. I have no problem with weekly as long as it’s done well and consistently, as it was in 52, which always had at least good-to-decent art and was always well written. When I was a kid I thought Action Comics and Millennium each coming out weekly was an awesome idea until I actually bought those series, and they sucked (well, the Blackhawk strip in Action was good). I have wondered for years why Marvel didn’t just put out Amazing Spider-Man more often instead of having secondary spinoff Spidey books; now, thanks to the consistently mediocre three-times monthly Amazing I see why*. It can be done though, as 52 proved; it just wasn’t in Countdown. (I have high hopes for the upcoming Busiek/Niceiza/Bagley Trinity weekly project.)
All of the spinoffs were consistently terrible as well — except for half of one book. It’s a shame Steve Gerber’s Dr. Fate got shoved under the Countdown To Mystery banner, but it clearly had nothing to do with Countdown anyway as it involved no outside characters and Gerber admitted knowing nothing about what was going on in Countdown (granted, Steve had bigger problems at the time than keeping up on the weekly doings of Jimmy Olsen and Mary Marvel). The Countdown Presents: The Search for Ray Palmer “one-shots” were useless — DC couldn’t call it a miniseries, since that would imply some sort of narrative progression. So even though it was series of connected issues starring the same characters that came out sequentially, they’re all somehow ‘one-shots’. Yeah, fuck you too, DC. We’re not all that stupid. Countdown: Arena was just so offensively bad it made me wonder what the hell kind of promise I saw in writer Keith Champagne’s JSA fill-in issues. I haven’t even been able to convince myself to read past the first three issues of Countdown To Adventure (Forerunner…shudder). Lord Havok and the Extremists was pointless — even DC couldn’t pretend they give a shit about this series, they didn’t even care enough to bother to get the number of issues in the series right on the cover. It was a shame, too, because the concept behind it could have led to an interesting satire on the Marvel Universe — but it didn’t.
And that’s the real problem with Countdown: the concepts behind it weren’t inherently bad, and it’s easy to see how they could have led to some really cool stuff, but the execution was just awful. I honestly don’t think any of the multiverse/time-travel/whatever stuff is particularly confusing, as some people seem to think. I don’t think it’s being done at all well in Countdown, but that’s a failure of storytelling, not of the multiverse itself.
My first comic in memory was an Adventure Dollar Comics giant which started off with a straightforward Flash story (why I picked the book) and continued with Deadman, which at the time was the kind of thing they’d probably shunt off to Vertigo these days, and then rolled into an awesome JSA story with a completely comprehensible 2-page explanation of Earth 2 and why this Flash (COOL THERE’S ANOTHER FLASH?!!) wore a hat and this Green Lantern (ditto) was vulnerable to wood. I just accepted it and rolled with it and enjoyed the hell out of it, and I couldn’t have been older than 8. It wasn’t even slightly confusing and it made me excited to learn more. Wow, that Shazam guy is on yet another Earth? Cool! And there’s, like, an EVIL JLA? Awesome!
It’s not like the multiverse/time travel stuff isn’t being done well at DC right now — I’m enjoying the hell out of it in Action, Booster Gold, and Justice Society of America (and I’m glad to see DC finally getting serious about the Legion of Super Heroes in the last year or so because it’s one of their properties with the most untapped potential–I mean, it frankly could be a mass-market commercial juggernaut, since it combines elements of sci-fi, superheroes, soap opera, and fantasy. Done right, LSH could be Star Wars times X-Men times Lord Of The Rings.)
But Countdown is continuity-laden to the point of being mired and unable to rise above it, with its mediocre writers tethered to an interminable, barely-advancing plotline and without the latitude to introduce any more interesting aspects to the series.This shit CAN be a lot of fun when written properly, but it’s not INHERENTLY a lot of fun just by itself, and that’s the premise Countdown seems to have gone with.
The best thing one can say about Countdown/Countdown To Final Crisis at this point is that it’s almost over — with each issue one can look at the decreasing numbers on the cover and think “That’s not so many left, thank god — and then Final Crisis is absolutely going to rock bells.”
Perhaps the series was doomed from the first by its very name: after all, a countdown implies nothing really happening, but the promise of something interesting immediately afterwards — and that’s how it worked out.
* Although this week’s Zeb Wells-written issue was actually quite good.
So Wonder Woman has been relaunched with an ALL-NEW ALL-DIFFERENT approach about a hundred times and almost every time it ends up being basically the same old thing. One of the revamps that happened when I was a kid was when she went from the top with the eagle on the front to the one with the stylized ‘W’ symbol on the front. I never did know how they explained that in-continuity at the time, I just realized her costume was different when she showed up in JLA, but today I discovered the explanation and it couldn’t be dumber if you tried.
So Diana Prince and Steve Trevor get in a standard fight with two standard spies and Steve gets injured. Instead of flying Steve to the hospital at super-speed or something they call an ambulance for him and while Diana’s hanging around waiting for the ambulance these women just walk up to her out of the crowd. full size image
The “W” stands for “women”, you know. full size image
“Can’t decide…which top to wear…can’t decide…better ask Mom, she always says I have no taste…”
So she flies back to Paradise Island where Hercules has chained all the Amazons like he does every time he shows up. She beats him in the standard Wonder Woman fight with Hercules and then they get down to the really troubling business: which top to wear? full size image
The “W” stands for “women”, you know. And to top it off, in case you hadn’t realized it by now, the symbol is actually 2 W’s on top of one another, for Wonder Woman.
