...Again with the crisis!
I think seven months off is a good enough break! (Sheesh, what have I been doing?) What can I say? City Of Heroes is a very absorbing game. That and I'm no longer working at a comic shop. Yet the addiction remains strong, and some "events" all but require commentary. Such as the following:
Countdown To Infinite Crisis
Writers: Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka & Judd Winick
Pencilers: Rags Morales, Ed Benes, Jesus Saiz, Ivan Reis & Phil Jimenez
Inkers: Michael Bair, Ed Benes, Jim Palmiotti, Mark Campos & Andy Lanning
Colors: Moose Baumann, Hi-Fi, Paul Mounts, Guy Majors & Steve Firchow
What Has Gone Before:
In a bizarre attempt to unify the superhero community "like the good old days," the ex-wife of the Atom used one of his spare suits to intentionally injure and accidentally kill Sue Dinby, the wife of Ralph Dinby, the Elongated Man. Her furtherance of the plot involved a faked attempt on her own life and putting a contract out on the father of the current Robin. Captain Boomerang fulfilled the contract, but was shot dead by his victim. The investigation of Sue's murder revealed that she had been raped years ago by Doctor Light, but when caught, the Justice League voted to have Zatanna "magically lobotomize" him instead of otherwise bringing him to justice. It was further learned that this was not the only time the memories of villains had been erased, and that Batman's memory of the rape had also been removed.
What Happens Now:
Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle, has discovered a plot that has involved the manipulation and bankrupting of his company, which, among other things, had a contract to dispose of the kryptonite that had encased the spaceship that brought the most recent Supergirl to Earth. In the process of the investigation, he calls in a lot of old markers, with Oracle, the former financial backer of the Justice League, Maxwell Lord, and the League itself. He asks his old "partner in crime" Booster Gold to help, but he's reluctant to blow his last chance to capitalize on his old rep.
Ted enlists other heroes to investigate the cleaning out of a Kord Company warehouse, which had contained the recovered kryptonite. Though even Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) and Superman show up, nothing is found and Ted is abandoned...just as a group called the Madmen show up to take him apart. Boomer Gold arrives to disperse them, in costume for the first time since Sue Dinby's death, but he is subsequently injured by a lightning blast meant for Ted, which also destroys Ted's house.
Unknown to Ted or any other hero, the villain's Oracle, Calculator, is also concerned about the disappearance of the kryptonite and relates his concerns to Lex Luthor. He is meeting with a cabal made up of Black Adam, Ra's Al-Ghul's daughter Talia, Deathstroke, Doctor Psycho, and Doctor Light, who are plotting to expand their "society" and take their revenge against the superhero community.
In the wreckage of his house, Ted discovers that the scarab that had previously empowered the original Blue Beetle is again active, and leads him to an encounter with the wizard Shazam. Ted had been trying to find a Marvel to help him with the scarab, but Shazam tells him they're otherwise occupied and teleports him away, sans scarab. Ted summons his Beetle ship to pick him up, but it's been booby-trapped and Ted barely escapes the explosion. Taken to the JLA watchtower to treat his wounds, it seems that only Wonder Woman believes that Ted has discovered something. The League's attention is distracted by an emergency transmission from Adam Strange of Rann, requesting help against a Thanagarian invasion. Ignored again, Ted returns to his investigation, discovering that a bit of Booster's old robot compatriot, Skeets, had been planted on his Blue Beetle costume as a monitoring device. He tracks the transmission to a highly secured citadel in the Swiss Alps. Inside, he finds a computer with complete dossiers on the superhero community, most notably Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, including their secret identities.
As Ted discovers that the Blue Beetle file is stamped "deceased," the mastermind of the conspiracy arrives to confront him: Maxwell Lord. The entire operation was conceived and carried out by Lord to combat what he feels is the domination of the highly superpowered heroes over the regular human populace of Earth. Ted tries to get away, but is stopped by an operative of Lord's, employing an "O.M.A.C. protocol" to turn into a superbeing that effortlessly defeats Ted. Max gives Ted a final ultimatum: join him or die. Ted chooses the latter and Max obliges. He then sets "Project: O.M.A.C." into motion, saying, "It's time to save the world from itself."
An Infinite Crisis...to your wallet!
First off, bravo to the DC marketing department: Who can resist 80 pages of story for a buck? Obviously not me, and since this book sold out at DC two days before it actually went on sale, at least the retailers think no one else can either. But that isn't the true genius of this book. Though it's called a "countdown" to this "Infinite Crisis," (and there is a countdown motif at the beginning and end of each of five chapters in this book), it's really the intro to four mini-series, six issues each, one of which will lead into the actual "crisis." (Ads for each are prominently placed in the book, which is otherwise happily ad-light) Yeah, that's right. Twenty-four issues and you don't know which series is the ACTUAL "Infinite Crisis" intro. If you remember the "Our Worlds At War" maxi-series of 2001, you have reason to believe that there will be a whole bunch of books that will have "Infinite Crisis Tie-In!" emblazoned on them, but will have, like, one page where something related to the "Infinite Crisis" occurs, but it won't have anything to do with the rest of the book and will have little to do with advancing the "Crisis" storyline. And if we can take anything from any of the DC Universe-spanning "crises" that have taken place since the seminal "Crisis On Infinite Earths" event, this is little more than a big-ol' marketing ploy designed to bump up sales on DC books.
Which is hardly illegal, and I know the comic biz is entering a slow period even as the national economy is ramping up. Comic books sales are counter-cyclical like that. But another lesson from the first big "Crisis" (which had a fairly good reason to be, in that it "solved" the rampant continuity problems of the DCU), is that whatever Executive Editor Dan DiDio says in his "Crisis Counseling" column (in this issue) about this "Infinite Crisis" having "changes [that] will be far-reaching and its effects everlasting," we KNOW that, while one or two heroes might go away for a while, or even semi-permanently, ultimately, things WILL return to the status quo. That and you'll be out something on the order of fifty bucks or so trying to follow the whole pointless saga.
That said, this sales-driven event might have some redeeming value if what actually happens in the "crisis" is at least interesting, if not compelling. Given this genesis and its execution, I hold out little hope for that. Look at the writing credits. Geoff Johns is a competent writer and can turn out some good books. Good books, not great books. I had the opportunity to read through the entire run of the current JSA incarnation, which he co-wrote with David Goyer, who's now gone on to bigger and more lucrative things in Hollywood. When those two were workin' their mojo, there was no better team book out there than JSA. When Goyer left, the book took a dip. Not a big one, but enough that I eventually lost the thread of the story and stopped reading the copies I was buying (the ultimate endorsement of one who can read as many books as he wants for free!), and then I began to forget to even look at the book, let alone buy it. I've also read John's stuff on The Flash. Again, good but not enough to get me to follow it, even for free.
Greg Rucka dropped by the comic shop a couple years ago, since he was in town to promote his first prose book and my manager had sent him an e-mail asking him to come in if he could. Real nice guy. He took the time to chat with some customers, including a regular who was a big fan, and even signed some issues. So I really hate to say that I think his books suck, but if I gotta be honest.... I gave his first story arc on Wonder Woman a chance, given what a nice fella I found him to be. Guh. A nice build-up to a climax that had ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the story arc he'd so carefully built up over the previous four issues. I gave his initial run on Adventures Of Superman a try as well. Do you know how tiresome it is to have the superhero that defines the term written as a wimp? Oh, you read it too? Double guh! It scored well compared with the senseless action and inappropriate Buffy-esque dialogue of Chuck Dixon's maiming of "The Big S" in Action Comics, but that ain't saying much.
Judd Winick. Would saying "guh" or "triple-guh" be too much or not enough? The non-superhero stuff of his I've read is really pretty good (Barry Ween, the one-shot "Road Trip" comic). The first superhero book of his I remember reading was the Titans/Young Justice Graduation Day re-format mini-series. A more boring mini-series I've yet to read. Then again, there was his work on the six-issue Green Arrow/Green Lantern crossover, but he wasn't solely responsible for that debacle. The man just doesn't have the knack for the superhero thing, whatever his other comic-related talents are.
So you put two poor comic writers together with a good but unspectacular one and what do you get? Well, at least it looks good! The "Who's Who" of artists on this book shows, even if the actual paper used ain't so hot. [Then again, what do you want for a buck?] But as far as the actual story that they describe, it's déjà vu all over again. If you really enjoyed the Identity Crisis mini of last year, you ought to be well pleased, for though Brad Meltzer has nothing to do with this book, it rolls out in much the same style as that series. You take a second- or third-rate hero (Blue Beetle for the E-Man, here), set up a big conspiracy that involves similarly low-rent DCU villains, tart it up with the first-stringers that'll bring in the fanboys, tell it in flashbacks with turgid narration (this time peppered with words of slavish devotion to the big-league heroes) and wind it up with a big WTF revelation of the bad guy behind it all. Simple enough formula, but it comes off very over-wrought and leads at least me to the conclusion of: okay, and I'm supposed to care...how? Yet again, we've sacrificed a character who may have been trivial in the general DCU continuity, but was tons of fun in the Formerly Known As The Justice League mini-series of early 2004, and as it happens, is still great fun in the "I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League" arc of JLA Classified. And to what end? To make the other DCU heroes seem all dark, complex and cool? There's a problem with that, if this be the operative theory, and the problem's name is "lack of follow-through."
I get the feeling that there's a HUGE level of Marvel envy over there in DC Land, to the extent that Marvel heroes are generally viewed as much more human, real and relevant, and DC heroes remain very simple, namby-pamby and un-relatable. Perhaps a debatable point, but I don't think these huge "crises" are the way to fix this problem. However gritty, dark or cool the mini-series writer(s) make the heroes and/or villains involved, if the regular book writers don't or won't carry that over, then nothing changes. The DC editors really need to take the reigns and get their books going the way they want them, instead of relying on these company-wide events to drum up sales that'll disappear once folks realize that the regular books aren't nearly as cool as the mini/maxi-series.
If you want "Marvel-quality" characterization with your heroes, why don't you get Marvel-quality writing? Them boys have stellar talents like Brian Michael Bendis, J. Michael Straczynski and Warren Ellis working hard for a reason: they put out fantastic work that is sometimes controversial, but is rarely (if ever) gratuitously so. Amazing Spider-Man is great again because the stories are character-driven again, and the characters are true to their history even as JMS moves them forward. Same thing with Astonishing X-Men: Joss Whedon knows these characters backwards and forwards, and even when they get wordy, it still works because these are, in the end, people you know and love. This is what DC needs to get, and in the large list of creators, I don't see writers that really know their stuff. Where's Mark Waid? Dan Jolley? I see Andy Lanning's at least getting his inking on, but him and his writing partner Dan Abnett did great work on The Legion and are kicking major-league ass on Majestic. Fer cryin' out loud, where's Kurt Busiek when you really NEED him?
And even if for some bizarre reason you can't get these guys (Waid, Jolley, Lanning, Abnett and Busiek are ALL doing work for DC right now), look at the other big thing Marvel's been doing lately, tracking down and hiring fresh talent from outside the comic world. Folks like Whedon and Straczynski did some significant work before signing with Marvel, but they're not comic writers by trade. Yet not only did Marvel hook up with them, they were put on A-level titles, and to knockout success, as it happens. The only move comparable to that I've recently seen from DC was the Jeph Loeb/Jim Lee pairing on Batman, which gave us that book's best stories since Denny O'Neil and Neil Adams back in the early '70s. But that only lasted twelve issues. Who's writing it now? Judd Winick. Hell, look at what Loeb's doing on Superman/Batman. If they wanted to, DC could get all old-school and call it "World's Finest Comics" again and not a soul would protest the move. So DC has some high-caliber talent under contract and occasionally puts them where they can do the most good. But where's the consistency? Don't get me wrong, Marvel has its own set of problems and inexplicable decisions. They cursed the main X-Men book with Chuck Dixon for a while, and much as DC thinks John Byrne can do a good job with Doom Patrol, Marvel seems to think that Chris Claremont can write a halfway decent book in this day and age (go figure!). But the point remains: big flashy maxi-series are no substitute for finding, hiring and KEEPING the best writing talent possible on your core books.
Not to say that there won't be some good talent on the mini-series that go forth from here: Dave Gibbons on the Rann-Thanagar War, Gail Simone on Villains United, and Bill Willingham on Day Of Vengeance (the less said about Greg Rucka on The O.M.A.C. Project, the better). But it will all come back down to the "Infinite Crisis" mini- (maxi?) series, and if that means going back to this triumvirate of writers, then let's not bother, okay? Countdown To Infinite Crisis is worth what you pay for it, but you and I both know that this is the cheap taste. The hard stuff's gonna cost ya. If you bought the whole Identity Crisis mini, you're out about $28, not including taxes. If you dug it, then via con Dios on Infinite Crisis and the intervening mini-series. If you didn't, go cold turkey now. God knows I'm on the wagon!
Recommendation: Buy It...and only it!