The Purple Tux
With just enough education to perform.Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Spoiler.
DC's Countdown to Infinite Crisis has arrived, hot on the heels of the DC Universe tone-setting miniseries, Identity Crisis.
If you are still reading, your name must be Sheynis, or you must be very, very bored. Or perhaps a hardcore superhero comic book fan who enjoys Google.
So. DC Countdown to Infinite Crisis. I'll call it DC Countdown for short, or maybe just Countdown. 80 pages for only 1 buck. (Actually, 70 pages of story plus a couple of ads. I counted.) It's a great deal for comic fans and new audiences. Look, if you haven't read it yet, go and do so. I was about to write a little review but I've decided I'm just going to go on a diatribe instead. Thus, spoilers abound and I will assume you, the reader of my neglected blog, either has already read the story or has no investment in what's being spoiled.
Okay? Okay.
First off, I think there plenty of things to like about this comic book. Most notably, it's a bargain. In today's market, you never, ever, see an 80 page giant comic for only 1 dollar. (Typical comics are 32 pages, including 10 pages of ads, for 3 bucks.) Plus, this particular beast has a Jim Lee and Alex Ross collaboration! That automatically makes it one of the coolest looking covers of the month.
The interior art isn't too shabby, either. These guys are some of DC's best talent, and they're in top form here. So there's no real complaining. Right off the bat, you get your money's worth. Now it's the story that's everyone's conversation...
I remain apathetic. No, actually, that's not true. I'm more indifferent. On one hand, it has well-crafted prose and the narration from our point of view character helpsmake Blue Beetle more sympathetic than he's been in a long while. Three different writers worked on this story, but it's not choppy (except for the parts where it plugs the upcoming miniseries spinoffs). Really, despite any opinions about the story itself, the character of Ted Kord is very well-written and by the end of the first chapter or two, he's already got the audience on his side.
This is a character written with depth. More than his heroism, his foibles are made evident right away, so it's very easy to relate to this guy, despite his fashion sense. Also, his friendship with fellow low tier superhero Booster Gold is well-written. Even if you've never read anything with Booster and Beetle, you get a good sense of who these characters are and how they relate to each other and the rest of their superhero community. Essentially, you don't need to have much prior knowledge of DC Comics to get into this story... Though prior knowledge does help a lot. Otherwise, the writers did a great job of setting up the mystery for Blue Beetle to solve.
What doesn't fly with me is how the writers show us WHY Beetle is a lower tier hero. When he approaches his peers, he's constantly belittled and ignored, and that just doesn't make sense. Batman is a hard man, sure, but why does he have to be written as a prick? He should be smarter than he acts in Chapter One. Martian Manhunter is an even worse person in this story. You'd think one of the kindest superheroes in the DC Universe would have a little bit of patience for a guy who almost died while trying to solve a mystery that affects the rest of the superhero community. Here, Martian Manhunter simply and coldly dismisses Beetle offhand. This works in the more comedic books (ie, Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire's Justice League comics), but in a serious story like this, Martian Manhunter simply comes off as horribly out of character. He's forced to act in a particular manner in order for the writers to hammer home the point that Beetle is all alone in his righteous mission. Even when Wonder Woman tells Beetle that she believes in him, she doesn't actually DO anything of importance to help him. He's on to something that affects their world and she lets him, a lower tier hero with no superpowers, continue on his own? I can swallow that, but it just makes the story feel a bit weaker.
Worst of all is the outrageous retcon in the revelation of Beetle's ultimate villain. Maxwell Lord? Please. I'll admit that it was very clever of DC and the writers to come up with a reasonable explanation for his presence, but this is still kind of a slap in the face to fans of the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire comics. I'll be the first to proclaim that retcons usually don't bother me (in fact, I'll go on and say that I liked Sins Past a whole lot), but this is a bit too much. They've taken what was once a greedy but charming and innocent and comedic character and turned him into the new mastermind of this Infinite Crisis. That's pushing it, man. It's not so much that I feel this new revelation has tainted the old stories, it's more that I find this ridiculous and hard to swallow.
I know I said it was a reasonable explanation earlier, but I still find it hard to swallow because Max Lord has never been shown to be this damn sinister. There's never been any inkling that the buffoonish side to his character has always been a front. I mean, in Amazing Spider-Man, we always knew Green Goblin/Norman Osborne was one bad dude, and well, Gwen was blond, so that explains that. See, that makes sense. That's interior consistency. I can buy that. I can't believe Maxwell Lord could do all this, though. It's just too much.
To top it all off, after all this build up for Beetle's character and making him really cool for a new generation, he dies in the final page. It was a glorious death, but as some readers would say, it's just shock value. Now, I don't mind shock value in my superhero comics at all. I want my superhero comics to shock me. Maxwell Lord as the newest and deadliest threat to the DC Universe shocked me, but it was a ridiculous shock. Blue Beetle getting one bullet to the brain was a cool death, after 69 pages of fumbling heroism. But I can't get over that freakin' Maxwell Lord is the fool who popped him!
That about spoiled the story for me.
Oh yeah, and tossing in those little previews to the miniseries was pretty lame, too. Well, the introductions to the Rann/Thanagar War and OMAC were sensible, but the Day of Judgment and Villains United previews were a little too blatant. I understand, though, as this is a comic meant to promote DC. But from an objective standpoint, those scenes do detract from the overall feel of this story.
And, you know, that's pretty much what this comic book is. 80 pages for 1 dollar. You know how the old Transformers cartoons were basically 22 minute, animated commercials for the toys? Well, Countdown is basically a 1 dollar advertisement for DC comics. I can't dispute the value of this comic. You get your money's worth, that's for sure, but just remember that this comic only sets you back a buck.
When all is said and done, after Identity Crisis and Countdown, I'm going to have to admit that the DC Universe is no longer a superhero universe that excites me. Every day my fondness for IDC is diminished. DC is moving in a direction that ties all of their books together. Crossovers and continuity seem to play big roles again. I know; most fans applaud this move, and I can't begrudge anyone the joy of seeing their favorite comics crossover with tighter continuity all around. But I definitely prefer the Marvel way, where continuity doesn't have to always be acknowledged and where allusions, not blatant advertisements, are used to generate excitement for other related comic books.
Lately DC has been trying to get it so that it feels like every single book, no matter how minor (Firestorm? Manhunter? Please.), is an important chapter in the overall story of the DC Universe. So all the dangling plot threads from IDC and the outcome of Countdown will give all the DC books their plots for the next year. Very convenient, but it's not something I can invest myself in any longer. I'll still read DC's mainstream universe superhero comics, but things are different for me now. I can't be bothered to care about every single facet of the DC Universe and I don't enjoy it when I read a DC comic and figure out that unless I pick up a comic I'd never pick up, I'm missing a piece of the big story. So Jason Todd is the new Red Hood. I didn't even flinch when I spoiled that one for myself.
All that said, despite the fact that I now, by far, prefer the Marvel Universe over the DC Universe, I will give props to DC the company. Its multitude of imprints provide a staggering amount of quality reading material. Vertigo, WildStorm, America's Best Comics, CMX manga, Humanoids, Paradox, 2000AD, even Mad Magazine.... That's just a bonecrushing list. Marvel just has Marvel Knights, MAX, and Icon. Most MK and MAX books (with the notable exception of Supreme Power) are basically Marvel Universe comics, anyway. Icon provides some variety, but so far it only publishes two titles (Powers and Kabuki).
The real crisis is that DC has so many top tier books from their other imprints and people mainly care about what happens to Superman next week. A pity.
