Wow, DC have really jumped over a big bucket of shark related substances.
Honestly, are they so bereft of anything new or interesting to do with their characters that the best they can come up with - after endless crossovers and events that go nowhere, only to be replaced by more of the same thing, including a current event which is a countdown to another event - is to dredge up every. Last. Antagonist from 20+ years of comics history to make an invincible superteam of superbaddies that will inevitably be stopped with some random punching and kicking?
Bad enough they fished out some of the suckier in-continuity villains - Cyborg Superman, anyone? - but they're even pulling out disasters that should be left in the back of beyond such as Monarch in Countdown.
Freaking MONARCH!
Considering everything relating to DC is currently continuity porn of the highest order - that their last couple of events involved threatening you with the return of the multiverse (Infinite Crisis), taking it out of the equation (One Year Later) then stabbing you in the face with it (52), how on Earth does bringing back a character who nobody can explain properly in terms of continuity (read this for hahahas), or even justify which person he should actually be (he's going to be Captain Atom! No, now he's Hawk! No, wait, he's actually Captain Atom! No, wait...) help anyone clear up DCs already increasingly messed-up Universe? It's even more stupid when they just had everyone spend two years buying crossover comics by the boatload in a supposed attempt to streamline the bigger DC picture.
All of these people working at DC seem to either have
a) a huge boner for comics from the Silver Age or
b) an even bigger boner for comics from the 90s, resulting in a desperate attempt to shoehorn both of these never-to-gel slices of comic history into one great big pile of DOESN'T WORK. Bad art, bad covers, more bad art, terrible plotting, awful declamatory "listen to my self important verbosity that supposedly contain gravitas but actually sound like a ten year old wrote me" speeches, endlessly lame portrayals of females and super-token minorities, Dan Didio completely ruining the end of one of the few highlights of recent DC history (MULTIVERSE, LOL) and a TOTAL INABILITY to leave ANYTHING alone, ever.
Maybe it's too much to ask that someone at DC gets the notion of a myth, legend or story carrying a part of its weight by the fact that it has an ending.
At some point, everything just stops and the story is all the more powerful for it. It's Robin Hood firing that final arrow, or King Arthur sailing away to who knows where, or Ewoks using Darth Vaders funeral pyre to toast their marshmallows.
The moment you start to pick at it, to consider bringing some element of that myth back in a way that disturbs the original telling - man, you've screwed the pooch. The finality of what made the original statement so powerful - so final - is gone, and it's gone forever. In recent times, comics have had (shall we say) something of an issue where this is concerned, with its wonderful revolving door policy on death.
Well, DC just slapped down yet another example of stupidity in the form of The Anti-Monitor returning.
Yep, the biggest badguy of all time, suddenly back like nothing ever happened. Not only does this cheapen the myth of Crisis on Infinite Earths for the sake of BLOWING YOUR MIND for about, oh, five minutes, it also causes huge amounts of problems with regards logic and common sense.
Let's see, Superboy Prime, Cyborg Superman, The Sinestro Corps and the Anti-Monitor.
Oh, and Parallax. AHAHAHAHA 90s FOR THE WIN!
....Jesus.
Now, Superboy Prime was a match for practically everyone in the DC Universe on his own.
Anti-Monitor went beyond that and was the ultimate shitkicking supervillain, requiring not just the regular heroes to take him out but the power levels of the original superman and Superboy Prime to slam his ass in a ditch, too.
Already, this game is over. Logically, they should be able to stomp everyone into a finely mushed up sauce and be done with it. Throw in all the rest, and there isn't even a chance in Hell the lame duck superheroes can beat them all.
Of course, they will - no doubt with yet another Deus Ex Machina involving The Spectre - and at that point, I'm surely going to look back at every crossover these guys appeared in from Crisis on Infinite Earths right up to Infinite Crisis and wonder why everyone huffed and puffed so badly to take them down individually.
DC Comics seem to have become creatively bankrupt. This latest development says to me, hey, you know what, we're screwed. We have nothing particularly original to do or say with these costumed clowns anymore so here's the ultimate in mega crossover porn for anyone who really, really enjoyed reading Armageddon 2001, that Parallax fiasco and anything else deemed so confusing we did our level best to either ignore it or indeed admit that it ever happened.
But HERE'S MONARCH BACK FROM THE DEAD ANYWAY!
Yawn. On the bright side, once this crapfest of a crossover is done and dusted, they can't bring anyone else back to fight against a huge collection of Superheroes. Unless, of course, they run with the Super Zombie Monarch Barry Allen tie-in I've been hearing so much about lately.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I don't get it. I read the Sinestro Corps issue, and thought what it promised down the line was an extremely bad idea. Yet looking across at websites that usually stick a great big fist down DCs throat as a result of how bad their comics have become, they were (by and large) singing the praises of this thing.
Almost without exception, people love it with some hailing it as "book of the year".
All I know is, I'm now looking over at that Hardcover Crisis on Infinite Earths Absolute edition, and thinking wow...what was the point? There's 400+ pages of billions of people dying, Universes disintegrating, Barry Allen running into a (temporary?) grave, the original Superman taking a piece of myth by retreating into...someplace else (the mystery of which has already been unraveled and ruined) and more besides. All that epic drama, that struggle, that sense of actually having resolved something and arrived at a conclusion.
But wow - despite being punched into an anti-matter Sun, blown up, disintegrated and probably spat on, just like that, the Anti-Monitor is back.
Bang goes the myth, and here comes commonplace mediocrity to replace it.
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