SmartRemarks

After a two-month gap (partially planned, but also including an extra three-week delay), DC released issue #4 of Final Crisis this week.

And… I can’t really say that it was worth the wait.

Here’s what happens in this issue:  with Earth infected by the Anti-Life Equation, the heroes try to rally their forces against those who have been possessed. Meanwhile, Darkseid finishes reincarnating in the body of Dan Turpin.

And, umm… that’s it, really.

We get nothing new about the errant Monitor (the only plot thread that even remotely ties this in to previous Crises). We get nothing about Libra and his army of villains. Nothing about goings-on on Oa. We do get more non sequitur dialogue (the sequence between Green Arrow and the Ray, for example). We’re given the puzzling factoid that about a billion people planetwide were taken over by the ALE… which sounds large but is actually only about 15% of Earth’s population, making it odd that they seem to have a zombie-movie-like numerical advantage in all the crowd scenes. And through it all, every page practically screams at me, “none of this is going to matter to the DCU at large. There is no possible way this story can end except by pressing a giant reset button.”

(Except for the return of Barry Allen, of course. Which is itself a terrible idea:  Barry had one of the best deaths in comics history, by far the most memorable moment of his heroic career, and anything flowing from his return can only undermine that moment and seem anticlimactic by comparison.)

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Tags: Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Green Arrow, super-heroes

Last week brought the release of DCU Decisions #2. While I was ambivalent about the first issue, I have to say I’m seriously underwhelmed by the second. Perhaps it’s just that the dramatic real-world political and economic events of recent weeks make this story seem painfully superficial by contrast… but honestly, even judged just as a comic, I think it’s heading rapidly downhill.

Neither the political themes nor the mystery story go anywhere interesting (or really much of anywhere at all), and the writing is tonally uneven and shows a poor grasp of the characters. Even the art is lackluster; Howard Porter’s work here doesn’t compare well to his own past work, much less to Leonardi’s in the previous issue. (I understand Porter is recovering from a thumb injury, though, so we can cut him a little slack.)

The story deserves no such generosity.
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Tags: Batman, DC Comics, DCU Decisions, Election 2008, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, super-heroes

Sometimes politics and comics do cross-pollinate, notwithstanding what I wrong in my inaugural post.

Yesterday DC Comics released the first issue of DC Universe: Decisions, a four-issue mini-series in which the Justice Leaguers find themselves involved in the political intrigue of a presidential election. There was some controversy (and outright derision) when this title was first announced, centering around the idea that the book would at best be wishy-washy and pointless, and at worst would wind up offering insultingly simplistic caricatures of both serious political ideas and DC’s characters.

DC’s pantheon of super-heroes has always included a handful of characters with overt political identities. On one end of the spectrum is Green Arrow, an outspoken leftist (at least since Denny O’Neil gave him a personality back in 1970), who once even won office (in his civilian identity) as mayor of his hometown Star City; on the other end is Hawkman, a law-and-order conservative. For the most part, however, DC’s characters remain carefully apolitical. While fans can argue at length about why Superman or Batman is liberal or conservative (and there’s at least some persuasive evidence either way), the publisher has no interest in resolving the ambiguities: a large part of the appeal of DC’s most popular characters lies in audience identification, and there’s no percentage in alienating half of your fans by stripping that away. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: continuity, DCU Decisions, Election 2008, Green Arrow, Lex Luthor, Superman