(By the way, I’m not really comparing Countdown to something designed deliberately to be the worst musical ever produced. I’m just running out of time to make cheap jokes at its expense.)
Not a lot of surprises in the April DC solicits. Finally, the new Titans series debuts. Finally, Countdown reaches its last issue, along with most of its tie-ins. Still, that’s not to say there’s nothing intriguing here. Let’s get started, shall we?
YOU CAN CHANGE THE NAME OF A ROSE, BUT YOU CAN’T DO NOTHIN’ ABOUT THE SMELL
With a DC/WildStorm miniseries joining the DC/Tangent miniseries, that’s two look-how-different crossover stories running contemporaneously. Obviously I’m a big fan of the Multiverse concept, but this bugs me for a couple of reasons. First, we’ve just spent a year dealing with eleventeen versions of Batman, and I could use a break. Second, these kinds of stories run the risk of diminishing the crossed-into universe.
Maybe I’m bringing my own prejudices in unnecessarily, but it seems to me that DC’s not going to let the more familiar (and more marketable) DCU characters look too much like chumps, even in another editorial board’s universe. The Captain Atom: Armageddon miniseries (and by the way — what is it with WildStorm and “Armageddons”?) let Cap be something of a jerk because he wasn’t automatically as upstanding and square-jawed as, say, Superman or Green Lantern. Really, can’t you map out the DC/WS character beats already? Or am I just flashing back to the JLA/WildCATS crossover from 1997?
I do like Jamal Igle’s art, though, so that makes the Tangent miniseries attractive to me.
TITANS, AGAIN, SOME MORE
You-all should know by now how I feel about the new Titans series. Still, “forge a team from the ashes of old, dead friends?” Good grief. Actually, my first thought was that there aren’t a lot of B-list Titans left to kill.
The more I think about it, the more the “guilt the stars into reuniting” plot really grates on my nerves. Yes, I’ll buy Titans #1, and yes, that validates DC despite my real motives, but darnit, it’ll have to work pretty hard to get me to buy issues 2, 3, etc. There are ways to get these particular characters back together without the aforementioned death-fueled guilt trip. Ten years ago, Devin Grayson and Phil Jiminez had the original Titans group-hug their new series into existence. Say what you will about Devin Grayson, but at least that was something different. The question shouldn’t be “what will it take to reunite ‘em,” but “why have they drifted apart?”
ARTISTS’ ALLEY
Ethan Van Sciver watch: Three regular covers (C. To Mystery, Justice League of America, Four Horsemen paperback), one variant (Titans), and interior art on JLA #20.
Alex Ross watch: Four regular covers, not counting reprints (Batman, Superman, JSA, Black Adam paperback) and a plot assist (JSA).
Very fine Cliff Chiang cover for Green Arrow/Black Canary #7.
BATMAN
While the Batman-becomes-a-New-God rumor seems to have been debunked, apparently we’re still getting a “nothing ever the same” story, “Batman R.I.P.” (I presume DC uses the “NWEBTS” language with hip detachment.) My money’s on Damian, although Bat-Mite is an outside possibility. Grant Morrison’s Batman hasn’t been his best DC-superhero work by any stretch, but it’s still been consistently entertaining. If this means Morrison’s ready to go all-out, so much the better.
Oh, boy: Frank Miller takes on the wimmenfolk of Gotham again (some more), in All-Star Batman #10.
Hey, the Batman: Death Mask manga is being published by CMX! That’s pretty cool. And yes, it is the kind of thing I will buy, xenophobe though I am. Have you seen my Spider-Man: The Manga back issues?
I like the Nightwing #143 cover — a lot going on, but not too busy. Man, that Catwoman cover, though … it practically invents a new fetish, doesn’t it? Yikes.
I’ll probably end up getting at least the first issue of Batman Confidential’s “Wrath” storyline, but I have to wonder whether he really deserves a 4-parter. Oh, wait — looks like it’s set during the Disco Nightwing era. Sold!
SUPERMAN
Bummed that Kurt Busiek is leaving Superman, although if those pesky rumors are true he’ll be writing the Man of Steel in the next weekly title.
Supergirl #28 promises “[t]he last DCU hero you ever expected to see again — one who’s supposed to be dead!” Linda Danvers? (Dead to DC, at least….)
THIS AND THAT
I don’t speak a lick of Spanish, but I’ll probably still check out Blue Beetle #26.
Glad to see Checkmate isn’t celebrating issue #25 by being cancelled.
Looking forward to the Kamandi Special. Those Kamandi Archives always tempt me, so this’ll be a good sampler.
It’s always nice to see Paul Smith’s work, but what does this mean long-term for the art on The Spirit?
COLLECTIONS
So, all of you who’ve been waiting for the Countdown trades … now that they’re starting, let us know what you think, okay? Seriously, I’ll be eager to see how it reads in bigger chunks. I bet it improves.
Hard to believe there’s never been a Legion best-of book before. I’m not really a Legion scholar, but I notice there’s nothing from the ‘80s Baxter series or the TMK series. That’s a pretty big stretch of publishing. Maybe it’ll be the subject of future collections, like the Eye For An Eye paperback?
The Tales of the Sinestro Corps hardcover is $5.00 more expensive, but just 8 pages longer, than the Sinestro Corps Vol. 2 collection. My guess is that a Tijuana Bible is involved.
I read the first issue of Justice ‘way back when, and decided it wasn’t worth a 2-year, bimonthly commitment. Collecting the miniseries in relatively inexpensive paperback form is getting me just that much closer to reading the whole thing. Having grown up with “Super Friends,” I’m supposed to like it, right?
Those of us who remember the fan angst which accompanied the 1986 Superman revamp, and particularly the changes John Byrne made to Krypton, may well find it ironic that the Byrne-written World Of Krypton miniseries (art by Mike Mignola) is now collected along with a bunch of those pulp-Krypton adventures it was supposed to replace. Regardless of which you prefer, it’s not a bad deal for $14.99.
The last Doom Patrol Archives reminds me, once again, that for most of my life they were on the “dead means dead” list. Wonder if they’ll get the Showcase Presents treatment. Speaking of which, glad to see Haunted Tank get a second Showcase volume. Hope that means more Showcase Presents Sgt. Rock, my personal favorite Showcase to date.
Green Lantern gets a third Showcase volume, but we’ll have to wait for Vol. 4 to get into the O’Neil/Adams stories. Maybe Vol. 5 will reprint the GL backups from Flash, which I spent a couple of Comic-Cons tracking down. Not that I’m bitter.
I know I just whined about the Tales of the Sinestro Corps book being so expensive, and here’s the World’s Finest Deluxe Edition with the same price for a lot fewer pages, but come on — it’s an incredibly fun miniseries with great art by the Dude! I am so there.
The Ex Machina Deluxe Edition isn’t quite the same format as the Starman and JLA Omnibii, is it? Seems similar.
AND FINALLY …
The All-Star action figures each look pretty good. I do note that this is the second Super-Lois figure we’ve gotten (the first was that Silver Age Lois in the green-and-yellow outfit). I kinda like the Batman and Batgirl figures more, but it’s not really a competition.
That’s all I’ve got for now. What looks good to you?
January 24th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I found that World of Krypton collection strange, simply because that’s exactly the world DC seems to be doing away with. Weird.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
The oddest thing (to me) about DC’s solicitations was that there *wasn’t* a solicitation for Final Crisis #0 on April 30th. I thought it was supposed to come out the week after Countdown #1.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
I still find it odd that DC would go to the trouble of reviving the multiple earths concept in 52 only to utterly waste it on Countdown–populating most of the Earths with Elseworlds concepts capable of sustaining one comic, and systematically blowing up most of the new ones that showed any kind of promise. I can’t imagine that this is at all what Waid/Morrison et al would have done with their set-up.
And that’s a big part of why Countdown seems like such a waste. A handful of writers actually want to create new toys and set them loose in the shared universe, but editorial only knows how to create hype by junking stuff. Reading the DCU the past year has been like watching as a neighborhood destroys itself in a riot.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Jason: My guess is that Final Crisis #0 will be retro-solicited for April 30, maybe before the May solicits come out. If memory serves, Countdown wasn’t in the May ’07 solicits when they were first released.
Cole: Yep. I hope FC leads to a more familiar, infinite Multiverse.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
My other problem with Countdown is that it’s the kind of superhero comics that I dislike most–a bunch of C-level characters endlessly, melodramatically pontificating about cosmic “POWER”, unmoored from any kind of concern the reader might be able to relate to. (I’m reminded of Superman’s “Our Worlds At War” crossover from a few years back as a prime offender of this school.)
Does anyone really care one iota about Monarch or the Monitors? For all the sound and fury, there’s absolutely nothing recognizable at stake in any of the book’s plots. Any event with the potential to elicit human response is treated glibly–Ray Palmer’s snarkiness after watching all of his friends and wife die a couple weeks back was the nadir. If the characters themselves don’t care about anything that happens, why should we? The “spine” of the DCU is a book that defies you to give a shit about it–and by extension, the whole line.
January 24th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
I think “the last DCU hero you ever expected to see again — one who’s supposed to be dead!” in Supergirl #28 will be Ressurection Man. Isn;’t he supposed to be permanently dead now? Plus he liked wearing the type of hat the person on the cover is wearing.
January 24th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
“populating most of the Earths with Elseworlds concepts capable of sustaining one comic”
I guess that’s a way to look at it, Cole. But it really doesn’t seem that different from what DC did with the original multiverse. They added the Quality comics characters to the multiverse because they wanted another big event with the JLA and the JSA. That was a pre-existing universe retrofitted for the sake of one story. DC had to make several changes to their world to do it, just like DC has said that the world’s in the new multiverse aren’t exactly the same as what we saw in those original Elseworlds comics.
And the only thing that says these worlds can only sustain one story is that only one story has been told about them. Someone recently made a bunch of custom toys with the JLA characters done in the Gotham by Gaslight style. I looked at the Green Lantern toy and really wanted to see a story about that guy.
January 24th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Aside from what I see as creative laziness in grafting old Elseworlds onto the new multiverse, it creates the problem that all of these universes are now experiencing different present times. Why would people from New Earth 2008 consistently travel to the Victorian era of the Gaslight universe? The only answer is that’s when the Gaslight stories are set, and that’s what DC wants to market. In the old multiverse, it was the same year everywhere, which was at least rational on its own silly sci-fi terms. The new version only makes sense in meta terms–the publisher has all of these “what if Batman wore his underwear on the inside–in ancient Egypt!?!” concepts lying around, and would like to milk more out of them. (It’s a complete squandering of the potential handed to DC by the 52 crew, on a level with Marvel’s immediate abandonment of Morrison’s X-Men re-think.)
With Countdown, not only is the stitching showing, the stitching is all there is.
January 24th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
“what I see as creative laziness in grafting old Elseworlds onto the new multiverse,”
By that logic, the original Multiverse was “creative laziness” also. The old multiverse was created in the exact same way as the new one. They had the rights to the Quality characters, so putting those established characters in a story had more impact than making up new ones nobody has heard of. They had the rights to the Fawcett characters, so having Captain Marvel fight Superman is more exciting than making up a new guy to fight Superman. It’s the exact same thought process as Countdown: Arena.
As for the time differences, I don’t see the problem. The chronicles of Narnia had time differences between Earth and Narnia. I’ve read a bunch of other sci-fi novels that said parallel worlds don’t always match up in time lines. I’ve also read sci-fi novels where technological progress was slowed, making the 20th century in one universe look like the 18th century of another universe. And you know what? Pre-Crisis, Bruce Wayne on Earth 1 was decades after Bruce Wayne was born on Earth 2, so timeline fudging was in the original also.
The original Multiverse was made by taking pre-existing worlds and joining them together for the sake of telling stories. That’s exactly what’s happening with the current multiverse.
The only real issue is that they’ve said there is a limit of 52 universes. The fact that DC is using the same process of using established universes isn’t the issue, the inherently limited idea of only having 52 is the problem. Since the final issue of 52 had Rip Hunter mentioning a greater “megaverse”, I’m thinking that’s a temporary problem.
January 24th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Points taken. But I see a lot more potential in, say, the entire Quality line than in the premises of most Elseworlds, which really were designed as one- or -two-issue larks to retell Batman or Superman’s origins in different cosmetic trappings. It’s a shame to see so many cards in such a limited deck burned on stuff we’ve already seen.
I think that the grafting of pre-existing worlds works better when those worlds are more fleshed-out–the Bruce Timm animated DCU, for instance. Now that would make for some entertaining crossovers.
January 24th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Well, Batman Beyond is part of the 52 now. So it’s possible.
January 24th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
OK, who did the headline–and how much of a Mel Brooks fan are you? Either way, thanks for the headline.
I think “there aren’t a lot of B-list Titans left to kill” was actually the name of a rejected summer crossover from a few years back…
January 25th, 2008 at 8:42 am
We each do our own headlines here, Tim, so it was all me. Glad you liked it!
However, I’m more of a Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein fan….
January 25th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
I generally like Mel Brooks, but the only thing I really liked about The Producers was L.S.D., Lorenzo St. DuBois. It’s too bad they took him out of the musical.
January 27th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Yeah, DC’s pricing system seems to be pretty FUBAR. Usually Marvel’s HCs come out with 6 issues and only cost 19.99 while DC’s usually cost 24.99. I was going to get the Tales of… HC, but not for friggin 30 bucks! Of course, I usually get them for 50% off, but this is still pretty lame. Although not nearly as lame as the $100 cover price on the new Absolute LOEG. Talk about raping your fans!