On his weblog, Impulse co-creator Mike Wieringo talks about the death of Bart Allen:
This one hits a bit closer to home since I was in on his very beginnings, having been asked to design his IMPULSE persona when Mark Waid created the character in FLASH (which granted me the title of ‘co-creator’… but make no mistake, this was all Mark’s baby. I was happy to accept the royalties and residuals that came from that status, but I didn’t have any illusions). Let me be clear– I haven’t read FLASH #13. I don’t really read that many superhero books anymore because the dark and depressing nature they’ve adopted just doesn’t interest me. I got my fill of that in the mid 80’s with DARK KNIGHT and WATCHMEN. I’ve read many reviews of the ‘event’, though… and I think the reaction overall has been that the story was 1) very badly done… and 2) in the end, a real yawner and not something that’s had the ’stunning event impact’ that DC was hoping for. I think this is symptomatic of the idea that fans are simply getting a bit weary of all this kind of thing. I think that the event-comic-that-heralds-the-death-of-lots-of-characters has become the new gold-foil/Lenticular/Acetate/holographic cover of the 2000’s. They’re stunts… gimmicks meant to sell comics. The writing seems to have taken a back seat to earth-shattering events that are having less and less impact as they are overdone.
He also compares the “stunt” mentality Marvel and DC seem to have fallen into with their respective universes to the “We don’t need writers” attitude that came after the birth of Image, that resulted in comics with great art and crappy stories. I remember those days well, and not kindly.
“Maybe I’m just a middle-aged fuddy-duddy who has lost touch with what makes for interesting comics.” No Mike, I don’t think it’s you.
June 27th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Don’t forget kids! Spider-Man/Fantastic Four is on sale RIGHT NOW!
June 27th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Wow. That sketch of Bart almost makes me nostalgic for the little twerp.
Almost.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Weiringo mentions the possibility that the current problems are editor driven. I think he’s right, that’s at least part of it.
In one interview I read from Paul Dini, he said that Dan Didio proposed Countdown to him and described what kind of comic he wanted it to be and what he wanted to happen. It seems like a lot of the disjointed nature of Countdown comes from that. Like it’s more concerned with linking to other stories in the DCU than actually telling a story of it’s own.
A lot of what’s going on in DC feels editorially driven right now. With Civil War, I can see how they’re setting up a new status quo to try and tell interesting stories. Whether the stories are actually good or not, it really does feel like that’s part of what they’re trying to do. DC just feels like they’re tweaking a formula of killing X number of characters and revealing Y number of secrets to get Z number of sales.
I still feel like the writers at both companies care. It just feels like editors are looking at readers current tendency to buy event books and trying to force that trend to last forever. It’ll pop, sooner or later.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
“It’ll pop, sooner or later.”
I think you’re seeing that to an extent with DC’s Amazons Attack “event”. They’ve just got too many “pies in the oven” (DC, not the Amazons), and the apathy directed toward Attacks is coming through loud and clear.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
“Weiringo mentions the possibility that the current problems are editor driven. I think he’s right, that’s at least part of it.”
Ditto. I’m tired of “events” and “deaths” from the big two. Comics are incredibly stagnant right now. Marvel and DC are producing some of the most uninteresting stuff that I’ve read in a long time. This whole marketplace is really artificial right now. Everyone is doing what they can do sell comics, but no one is thinking about producing quality stories. The big two have lost their eye on the real prize.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
I think he makes a good point about the editorally/event driven mentality at Marvel and DC these days, but for me a lot of it has to do with execution. Civil War set up an easily understandable (and easily revoked) status quo, and the Death of Captain America benefited from being well-written, well-drawn, and having actual ramifications. Contrast that with the never-ending Crisis at DC, where even those who’ve been reading DC for years don’t really know what’s going on (and in many cases, don’t really care), and where the relaunch of, and subsequent death of, the Flash was horribly handled from start to finish.
The fact that it’s yet another “funny” character that DiDio’s DC has offed recently just makes it even more pathetic.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
I think the companies are trying too hard to prefabricate the kind of “sentient universe” idea that Grant Morrison has been known to go on about. For that to work successfully, you must depend on happy coincidence or have one talented person write and edit virtually every book in the line (as with Stan at Marvel or more recently, on a micro-level, Morrison’s Seven Soldiers.)
DiDio’s way, the connections are too forced, too much the focus of otherwise meaningless stories. What made the interconnectedness of the early Marvel universe so appealing was its casual place in the background. It’s far better when connections are created in part by the readers, rather than being explicitly spoon-fed to readers by the publisher in comics that read like Cliff notes. Reader participation in universe-building, a cousin of inter-panel closure, is precisely the interaction makes shared universes come to life. Having all of the dots tediously connected by the company in an endless succession of crossover events is a weak substitute, the product of diminished imaginations.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
I agree that Marvel seems do be doing it better than DC.
People debated whether or not Iron-Man and Captain America were acting like the characters they’d known for decades. However, they debated about *characters*. Whether the characters were inconsistent or not, those guys still seemed like characters who were driving a story.
Infinite Crisis felt like a bunch of stuff happened, then it was over. In Crisis on Infinite Earths, I knew more or less what the conflict was and who was behind it within a couple of issues. This time I went through Countdown to Infinite Crisis, 6 months of lead-in minis, then 3 or 4 of the actual IC comic before I knew what the heck the event was about.
And it doesn’t seem like Marvel has been as bad about the deaths, either. Perhaps I missed a bunch, but it seems like Civil War had a lot less deaths than IC. I remember the New Warriors, Goliath, and Cap dying. At DC a couple heroes died fighting Superboy Prime and it barely got any comment because the death toll was already so high.
June 27th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
I don’t think he’s dead for long, he’ll be back.
and Iron Man is a Skrull, it’s the only way I’ll come back to Marvel in full force
June 27th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
My guess is that Iron Man isn’t a Skrull, but someone close to him is. Someone who was feeding him information, and maybe distorting that info just a little here and there. So his big failing in the end will have been trusting that person.
Just a theory.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
I read this story arc and liked it. I thought the final issue (issue #13) was powerful and portrayed bart as an absolute hero, no questions asked. I have heard nothing but accolades for this story arc and the only negative seems to be that Marc Guggenhiem is not going to be writing any more issues of the Scarlet Speedster.
I suggest Mr. Wieringo pick up issue #13 and read it for himself before listening to what a handful of people say. I think he would be proud of Bart.
June 27th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
I agree with Mike. I’m just about done with superhero comics these days. As the prices on the books go up, the major companies kill off the characters I actually want to read about and give me less and less reason to care.
June 28th, 2007 at 9:36 am
somebody actually wanted to read a Flash Bart book? I like Bart, but he was a terrible bore as Flash.
July 1st, 2007 at 4:51 pm
When artists gained all the power in comics, their work suffered as a result, because as unfashionable as it is to say so anymore, good storytelling requires a certain amount of discipline, and as those artists gained power, they lost discipline as a direct consequence.
The exact same statement is every bit as true today - all you have to do is replace the word “artists” with the word “writers” in the above sentence, and Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar stand revealed as the twins of Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane, because with both sets of creators, their work was much better when they weren’t allowed to do what they wanted.
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:56 am
All recent events in Marvel and DC have made it really eazy for me to stop collecting comics altogether. A) They cost too much B) The stories suck C)There is not enough ethnicity (if thats the correct spelling). Every wednesday I feel cheated out of my money. So thanks for killing superboy, cap, bart, wally, and whoever buys the farm this week! Its helped me to buy a new car with the money I saved!
July 3rd, 2007 at 7:12 pm
I haven’t followed the business much as of late, but I’m willing to bet that DC has been in a sales slump and, as such, their corporate taskmasters demand an increase, they don’t care how, or else. That’s why someone like Dan Didio comes up with this stuff. Why else? Company wide events are a pain in the ass and no one on the creative side likes doing them, it’s tantamount to being dictated what to write/draw. I highly doubt he wants to do it, but thast’s his job - pushing product. Yeah, it’s so bad that my local comic store started putting titles I had no interest in into my pull box.
“I don’t recall asking for ‘Countdown’.”
“Well, it’s the follow up to ‘52′, you got that, right?”
“Yeah, hence no ‘Countdown’.”
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: DEATH TO THE MINUTIAE OF CONTINUITY!!! It’s killing what very little life is left of the super hero comic.