…was more like Flashpointless, am I right?
Honestly, this is probably the worst major comics event I’ve read since… probably Millennium. It was genuinely terrible, across the board bad: whole heaps of joylessness shoved into comic after comic after comic. I mean, we all knew that Flashpoint was just an excuse to hit the reset button so they could proceed with the reboot12, but all of the sub-events seemed designed to just be an exercise in demonstrating to the reader how very serious and dark this new alternate reality was:
- Batman: Knight of Vengeance: Thomas Wayne is a crazy murderer! So is Martha Wayne!
- Deadman and the Flying Graysons: The Amazons kill everybody!
- Citizen Cold: Captain Cold is a hero! But he’s not! So he kills everybody! Then he dies!
- Deathstroke: Deathstroke rescues his daughter – by killing everybody!
- The Outsider: The Outsider kills a bunch of people we like in regular comics!
- Project: Superman: Superman is held captive for years and years, until he breaks out… and kills a dude who was responsible for holding him captive!
- Grodd of War: Gorilla Grodd kills everybody in Africa who isn’t a smart gorilla! And then he throws a tantrum and kills some gorillas!
- Emperor Aquaman / Wonder Woman and the Furies: Both sides commit multiple genocides!
- Legion of Doom: I’m not sure. I tried to read the first issue and then I said “no, wait, this is dreck” and gave up. But, I am going to go out on a limb here – I’m betting a lot of people got killed.
And all of that is before we discuss the main series, wherein we learn that they made Captain Marvel grim-and-gritty in this universe. Captain Marvel. What the hell, DC.
I mean, how much killing does it really take to underscore the point that Earth-Flashpoint is a horrible place? At a certain point it all just fades into meaninglessness, a body count for the sake of a body count, all of it entirely without heft or import because it’s effectively an “imaginary story” giving the serial reader no point at which to sympathize or otherwise care about the dead bodies left in its wake. For a comics company that has predicated its existence on the idea of stories that “matter” to create an enormous Macguffin of a story that only exists to propel the company into its reboot is shocking for all the wrong reasons.
All the moreso because we already have a perfectly good example of a linewide “imaginary storyverse” event that was both entertaining and popular. Does anybody remember the Amalgam universe? Really, the comparisons between it and Flashpoint are numerous: an alternate universe with no “importance” beyond the event itself, explored in a number of smaller stories to offer up a hint of the enormity of describing an entire continuity in a dozen comics. Except that Amalgam wasn’t terrible.
- I’ve said my piece about that already, but will add that >Justice League #1 is a boring, generic comic that seems to have no point other than let people play with Darkseid again. Someone on Twitter described it as “like a comic you get with an action figure,” and that is pretty accurate. [↩]
- And did anybody really MISS Darkseid? [↩]
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y’know, it kinda occurs to me that maybe Flashpoint is the Ultimatum of DC comics. What with all the murdering and grimdark++ going on.
The Outsider was pretty decent tho. Of course, not having any links whatsoever to the main, er, “plot”, maybe that helped. Seeing the general tone of Flashpoint I was almost expecting CRY FOR JUSTICE!!!111 levels of terribleness there. 😐
To be fair, I thought the idea of having the Captain Marvel powers be split amongst several street urchins and one live tiger was actually an interesting approach.
Only read the Booster Gold issues… because, well, that’s one of the few DC titles I still have. And even that just gave me the booboojeebees.
Hopefully the girl (Flashpoint Parasite?) that Booster met there is also the one on the JLI cover. She was interesting. Moreso than the rest of Flashpoint, from the sounds of it… which isn’t saying much.
Yeah, the Captain Marvel concept (splitting the powers among the kids, not the grim and gritty makeover) seemed like it had great potential. So of course, that was the one concept DC didn’t give its own miniseries. I guess Canterbury Cricket was too important.
But I have to take issue with this…
“I mean, we all knew that Flashpoint was just an excuse to hit the reset button so they could proceed with the reboot”
I’m pretty sure DC didn’t even decide they were doing a linewide reboot until around March, by which point Flashpoint would have been mostly finished. So yeah, this really was pointless.
What do you mean Flashpointless?!? I think Enrico Colatoni and Hugh Dillon do a great job of conveying the stresses and conflicts of being Emergency Task Force members in a nameless city which is Toronto… not to mention all the Geminis it’s won for excellence in…
…oh.
So Flashpoint was a flop? bah… guess the reboot made everyone forget about what Eobard Thawne did to the timestream… or whatever it was I stopped reading Flash when Impulse was gone with YJ.
Well I DID miss Darkseid, especially “Ironside heard when reading & cold demeanor” Darkseid, since I find unforgivable that villains of epic magnitude always get jobbed or spat on with shitty stories.
I Hope they ‘ll bring him back to the pinnacle of ” great villains to be used ONLY if the story is good” & by good I mean powerful villains following their ideology & defeated only after a lot of efforts from the heroes or the desperate plan.
Now if Darkeid died like in the JLU cartoon, I’d say don’t bring him back since you can’t top that But in fecal crisis a karaoke song killed him…I think it really Needs correction .
yep I remember Amalgam & it was glorious! just pure fun!
The issue with Darkseid is that he’s the go to big bad guy for every damn instance where they’ve needed a big bad guy in a new comic and if you divorce him from the Kirby fetishism, he’s not actually interesting enough to carry it, barring stuff like The Great Darkness saga.
Thanos is weirdly the other example of this but at least has a bit more substance to him as a character.
Weirdly, Thanos has benefited a lot from being a Darkseid ripoff. If you stick Thanos in a book, it’s not immediately more interesting, but I’ll give it more of a shot than I will Darkseid, because Thanos has gotten more facets to his personality than Darkseid has (or even can, with that name).
What really surprises me is that, even after all of this, “people in the internet” still drool over Geoff Johns work like it’s the best thing since sliced bread and he’s still being given more and more creative power like it’s no big thing. I hate to sound like the angry comic book guy, but I think this reboot thingie is just the epitome of the slow descent into creative bankrupcy DC has been going through and nothing will change until the heads are cut off.
Nothing against Jim Lee (when not drawing) but as long as there’s an obsessive fan like Geoff Johns and a short-term-solution kinda guy like Dan Didio seems to be at the helm of the ship, I don’t really see an end to it.
Again, I don’t know the inner intricancies to the whole editorial process, and I’m not actually sure of who decides what at a corporate level, but I think most of us agree that DC’s properties have been severely mishandled these last few years, and every attempt at a solution that has come its way only seems to make it worse, and it’s Didio and Johns who are the faces of the company right now so…
Anyways, I agree that this Justice League issue was mediocre at best. I also don’t see how any of DC’s books quality or marketability will improve if its always the same creators behind them.
My take away from Flashpoint is the following:
1) It’s all Barry’s fault – the entire event is due to the former Saint of the DCU, the guy who saved the universe in Crisis, doing something so incompetent that it reads like something from Garth Ennis’ “The Boys” but played straight. And we’re still expected to be sympathetic to him …because….?
2) This whole thing with heroes obsessing over their dead relatives is a disturbing recurring theme in Geoff Johns work – one can actually read “Flashpoint” as virtually identical to one of Johns’ first JSA stories with Atom Smasher and Extant. But the emotional arc is something he’s done over and over again in his work. Of course, if you check his biography, it’s obvious WHY he does it – but at some point it should stop being the central theme of his writing.
Dont’ forget Tangent too, another REALLY weird alternate universe
Darkseid actually was an interesting character…when Jack Kirby was writing him. Practically no one else really “gets” him (there were moments on the animated DC shows, but that’s about it), so he’s usually reduced to “big powerful evil totalitarian guy”.
I liked Grant Morrison’s Darkseid — and I would have liked to see more of that take on him, and the New Gods in general, but very sparingly.
But perhaps Countdown, with Darkseid sitting on a sofa in Mary Marvel’s apartment drinking tea, set the bar so low that I would have liked anything better than that.
As far as the reboot in general… I’m just not interested. Maybe there are good stories to be told, but I’ll probably never know. Also, Flashpoint sounds dreadful.
“But perhaps Countdown, with Darkseid sitting on a sofa in Mary Marvel’s apartment drinking tea, set the bar so low that I would have liked anything better than that.”
See, that’s exactly what Kirby’s Darkseid WOULD do, though.
Morrison’s Darkseid? Really? Personally, I think that maybe it was when Darkseid went down to Green Arrow and the Atom that he just became impossible to take seriously as a villain anymore. But I think Morrison is the most overrated writer, so there is that.
Darkseid works really well as a villain in stories like The Great Darkness Saga in no small part because, even though he loses at the end, he’s still terrifying; he beat Mon-El into a coma, and Superboy and Supergirl together could only hold him off for moments. Once the Atom and Green Arrow can beat him, he’s a joke.
Darkseid was also an interesting villain precisely because he wasn’t always a villain: he was effectively one of the heroes of Crisis on Infinite Earths and Cosmic Oddyssey. An incredibly powerful, incredibly evil villain with whom you can do business, and who recognizes that he shares an interest in preserving the overall system is potentially a very interesting character.
But as for Flashpoint, of course it was pointless. All these big crisis-crossovers lately have been pointless. A “big event” is not a big event if you do one every summer. Here’s a crazy thought: let a single status quo last long enough that it makes sense to call it the status quo before you blow it up.
Crisis on Infinite Earths worked so well because the Silver Age status quo that it ended had been around for twenty-odd years by that point, and was the only status-quo anyone at the time knew. I still don’t know what stories are or are not in continuity since Infinite Crisis. So who cares if they’re changing everything again?
Which I guess is the point, in the end. Certain things, whether great villains or radical alterations to the story-universe’s status quo, are very powerful in small doses, but once you overuse them, they become ridiculous.
Richard, I definitely agree that Darkseid’s been diminished as a bad guy. However, I think the Darkseid story that Morrison did was actually good. Darkseid, like most people that run empires, is cocky as fuck. He didn’t view the Atom/Green Arrow as a threat, and that was his undoing. Of course, in a straight-up fight, Darkseid would wreck those two guys, but in that situation, I thought it worked.
I’m not entirely against the reboot, and to have it coincide with the same-day digital launch is a dare I say it brilliant idea.
But there were so many ways to go about executing the idea and DC choose the most round-a-bout, meaningless way.
Darkseid was awesome in Final Crisis and…. uh…
…
Eh, it wasn’t great, but I still think it worked better than Fear Itself has so far (at least in terms of the main story – most of the Fear Itself tie-ins are much stronger than the Flashpoint ones.)
Darkseid is not an issue #1 villain. Darkseid is a mortally-terrifying force of undeniable, implacable evil. You need the assembled force of the entire Legion as well as a resurrected Highfather, a restored Orion, and three billion superpowered Daxamites to force him to a stalemate, and then you collect your wounded and call yourself lucky and pray he never comes back. Going to Darkseid right off the bat is not the result of a deluge of new, breathtaking ideas.
Yes, splitting Captain Marvel into different kids was a neat idea. I liked it when it was Captain Planet.
Footnote #2 has me thinking about “Miss Darkseid” like “Miss Sinister.” Both options are creepy.
Yep, lots of people died in gruesome violent ways in Legion of Doom. I got more enjoyment out of slamming it in reviews than I did reading the issues themselves.
Don’t forget about Secret Seven, in which Shade the Changing Man is crazy and kills people. That really isn’t too different from the usual Shade, though.
Hey, I *liked* Millennium, right up until the last issue. Sure, it had problems with embarrassing cultural stereotypes, and some of the retcons were absurd (the ENTIRE town of Smallville as sleeper agents, really?), but its heart seemed to be in the right place. It was about super-heroes actively trying to make the world a better place, rather than merely stopping the latest attempt by Darkseidicus to Destroy Everything and Everyone.
And then the last issue hit, and they turned the Chosen into another freakin’ bunch of super-heroes. Blech.
That said, I maintain that Extrano is STILL an insanely great untapped character. Think about it… a flamingly gay sorceror supreme. Tell me you couldn’t get 100 issues of fun out of that.
Apparently it doesn’t even have a real ending. While everyone is still fighting Barry resets the timestream. AGAIN.
It’s like changing the channel in the last 5 minutes of a show. When even the writers don’t care how emo Superman/Evil Aquaman/Castrating Wonder Woman ends then you know it’s bad.
@RichardAK: An incredibly powerful, incredibly evil villain with whom you can do business, and who recognizes that he shares an interest in preserving the overall system is potentially a very interesting character.
Aaand now I can’t stop picturing Darkseid as Al Swearengen.
For an issue from a company that’s supposed to be through with writing for the trade and all about the single issues, Justice League #1 really reads like, at the most, half of an issue of a comic book about the Justice League. (And much more like The Brave and the Bold #1, featuring Batman and Green Lantern.) I mean, out of your seven-character cast three never appear at all, one never interacts with anyone else, and one doesn’t show his face until the last page.
Also, if Johns knows what he’s doing at all (which is never a safe assumption), Darkseid won’t ever show up on-panel in this story, and the climax battle will be with Kalibak or Lashina or the like. Or Barda or Orion, even.
“Aaand now I can’t stop picturing Darkseid as Al Swearengen.”
“Those cocksuckers on New Genesis keep trying to fucking stop me from getting my hands on the god damn Anti-Life Equation!”
I’m assuming Farnum is Desaad and Dority is Kalibak in this scenario?
You skipped a few… like Secret Seven: Shade the Changing Man kills everyone, by accident.
It was Keith Giffen who said that “DC editors pass Darkseid around like a bong.” Spot on.
Amalgam was fun. Tangent too. But of course, they were meant to be alt.versions, not horrendous dystopian versions.
Dos it make be a bad person if I actually enjoyed Batman: Knight of Vengeance? I mean it wasn’t groundbreaking and the twist was fairly obvious, but it at least gave a complete story with a beginning/middle/end that actually felt like a Batman (elseworlds) story.
The comics universes give us these alternate dystopian realities as an excuse to:
1) work out some genocidal tendencies without it ruining the illusion of real-world consequences
2) create alternate sexier costumes for the female heroes
3) make us think they’re being cutting-edge storytellers just because the stories have massive body counts
If President Obama calls a moratorium on this crap and forces Marvel and DC to straighten their sh-t up, he’ll win re-election for certain.
The “twist” ending wherein Barry basically has to say: “Oh…wait…it WAS me who fucked everything up by doing something so against my character and dangerous to all of humanity that I’ve explained in this very story why it shouldn’t be done…because I was feeling extra sad…”
…that made me roll my eyes.
The fact that you can read the entire five issue Flashpoint miniseries and all of the connected miniseries all the way to the end of each and still not really get a clear explanation of why some things in the DCU are being wiped clean and large parts of others (read: the stuff that is selling – Batman and Green Lantern) aren’t is just an insult to people who were willing to devote the time and believe this could be done cleanly only to be further strung along with the last minute introduction of mysterious female character narrating the coming together of different time-streams and no real closure.
Will it accomplish the stated intention of making it possible for new fans to jump on and not feel intimidated by decades of continuity? Sure — if they don’t mind not getting what happened in the last few years of Green Lantern or the labyrinth Batman and bastard son/multiple Robins/extra Batgirls/women thing and don’t mind them (maybe) clearing up what happened at the end of Flashpoint — a large event itself — at the beginning (hopefully?) of their clean, brand-new start.
I think the most charming thing about the Flashpoint tie-ins was that Legion of Doom issue when Heat Wave straight-up curbstomps Animal Man.
I kinda want the next big event to start with Rip Hunter showing up out of nowhere and just straight up slapping Barry Allen in the face. Full Aparo backhand.
And when Barry asks what the hell that was about, he just glares.
Yes! Finally! Someone else who loved Amalgam!
God, Marvel vs. DC/Amalgam might have been the last gasp of the Silver Age on a companywide scale, wasn’t it? It was corny, kind of stupid if you really looked hard at it, but it was so earnest and fun that you overlooked the flaws and got on with Wonder Woman and Storm fighting the HELL out of each other.
I’m going to go read it again RIGHT NOW.
Almalgam was pretty fun. Pick up the issues whenever I see them in a quarter bin.
Got the one with Sgt. Rock and his Howling Commandos.
The Unstoppable Gravy Express’ description of the Flashpoint TV series makes me worry that this terrible comic run will ruin anybody’s enjoyment of the show by association alone.
And the idea of Darkseid as Al “Swearingagain” is immensely amusing only for the chutzpah factor. What would the Thanos equivalence of that be?
Thanos is brilliant because his whole concept a fat kid with bad skin trying to get the attention of the goth girl, because he thinks she might be be able to look past the fact he’s a fat kid with acne for some reason.
The Goth girl thinks he’s sweet but doesn’t want any part of this.
IT’s a little creepy because High School finished a while back and the fat kid got a good job and hit the gym and he’s still doing this.
Well, it’s also creepy because he wants to kill everyone and has at various points. But essentially, Thanos is a romantic comedy character.
Thanos never really seemed that close to Darkseid’s ideology.
In fact , Thanos while doing malicious things such as dissecating his own mother to see how the titan body works seemed more motivated by curiosity than evil for evil sake.Even in annihiltion where his role was beyond perfect, he helped Annihilus at first to see what would happen if the universe goes kablooie , finding radical change fascinating.
Now when it comes to his love , I’d say the goth girl does love him but thinks he’s a bit clumsy & excessive when he shows his affection while she wanted far simpler things from him & waits until he finds out himself.
Dammit. Now I can’t stop picturing Seth Bullock in the Orion helmet and Jane as Big Barda.
Brad Dourif as Metron. Why have I never though of that before?
First off, one clarification from above; DC had apparently been planning this for a couple years, which sadly shows that many recent arcs (like JSA) were purposely filler arcs.
As for Flashpoint, it happened. Not mad or happy about it, more indifferent. I’ll give a few books a shot, but we’ll see where the universe goes from here. I’m still curious as to what their backup plan is should this reboot fail.
And yes, Amalgam is fun! I bought all that shit when it first came out, and I enjoyed most of the goofy combinations (I broke the brain of a friend who likes Chamber when I showed her Generation Hex).
So, Booster Gold…”the greatest hero you’ve never heard of”, protecting the timeline, etc….not so much, eh?
There’s just no way DC’s been planning this. No way. This is the definition of last ditch effort.
I can really, really get behind the idea of Thanos as the flagbearer for a new generation of romance comics. Over at the Factual Opinion they discussed the idea of The Rise of Arsenal as a romance comic, and I love that too. Romance in comic books has plenty of room to be weird and unsettling in new and exciting ways. Let’s see more of that.
DC claims that Time Masters mini from a while back was a Flashpoint lead-in but I don’t really see how.
And the countdown to the event that “fixes” Barry’s fuckup and resets the status quo begins… now.
Chris: if history is to be our guide, we’ll first have at least three events in which the archvillain wants to do this and stands as a proxy for fans of the previous status quo, and is thus suitably beaten to a bloody pulp by the proxies for the current writers.
I think you’re all just missing the exciting storytelling possibilities that come out of this new reboot. Just look at the new JLA – Batman’s a dick, Green Lantern’s an ass, and Superman is a thug. I await eagerly the stories that can be told of these macho idiots posturing at one another!
And I can’t wait to see what kind of manhating psycho-lesbian feminist they turn Wonder Woman into!
Can we do some kind of Thanos/Archie crossover where he moons over Lady Death while she flirts with Archie to the shock and disgust of Betty and Veronica.
So where does Deadpool fit into this Thanos romcom concept?
On the subject of Darkseid: They are putting him in the Justice League book just so they can leave him ‘dead’ post-Final Crisis, but still get to use him, since they are telling a ‘past’ story of the origins of the Justice League team.
It does seem like the ‘reboot’ was something they wanted to do, but kept pushing back the start to after the ‘next’ big event book.
Inifinite Crisis could have ended in a reboot to go along with the restart of the multiverse, but they didn’t seem to do much (other than have Jason Todd alive again, etc). Final Crisis too could have caused some sort of reboot, but they kicked the can again. Blackest Night + Brightest Day seemed like a perfect way to reboot … they even did some mini reboot stuff (undid some deaths, brought back Vertigo characters that had left, etc). Heck, the whole Time Masters mini was resolving the Batman thrown trough time thing … why couldn’t THAT have been the reason for the reboot? No, instead the stupid rebirth of Barry (and Zoom) which led to him retroactively given a tragic origin, results in a double reboot. Not to mention random cosmic lady saying “oh by the way, we are putting Vertigo and Wildstorm (and Static) in, so somehow that causes the JSA to not exist”. Except of coure, some of those people were already (back) in the DCU before Flashpoint, but whatever. At least it explains the costumes, the Wildstorm universe and it’s 90-tastic fashion has infected the rest of the characters’ styles.
I wasn’t going to comment, but then I saw there were 52 new comments and felt that enough was enough. It would not stand! That said, I felt the main storyline was absolutely flash-pointless, other than to further underscore that superheroes should never do anything for their own benefit, lest they completely fuck up everything in the universe. Also, Justice League #1 was pretty weak sauce. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Flashpoint No.5:
– Pew! Pew! Villain after villain getting smushed in an attempt to generate Fuck Yeah moments!
– It’s Barry’s fault, all of it, because he prevented Reverse Flash from murdering his mother, and even though the murder itself didn’t change the timeline at all, undoing it caused calculated damage to the timestream.
– Once Barry fixes his mistake, the universe reverts to normal. As far as the end of this issue is concerned, Flashpoint and the reboot are unrelated. Arg.
Joel: “There’s just no way DC’s been planning this. No way. This is the definition of last ditch effort.”
Absolutely right. DC was soliciting pitches for new series set in the old continuity “earlier this year.” They were using Brightest Day to relaunch properties that they’ll relaunch again this month.
All the spin about DC plotting this last year is just that: spin. Maybe a few people at the highest levels were talking about it, but most of the writers and editors working for DC don’t seem to have known about the relaunch until March at the earliest. It smacks of incompetence and desperation.
And now they’re canceling collections of old DCU stuff at the last minute …
http://www.comiclist.com/index.php/lists/dc-comics-extended-forecast-for-08-17-2011
FU DC.
Wait, wait, wait, did MGK review the new Justice League #1 and I missed it? Say it ain’t so! I’ve searched the archives but I couldn’t find anything, was for a third party website…?
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Geoff Johns needs help. And Comics aren’t where he’s going to find it. When are we going to get around to flushing this nerd, once and for all?
http://rule63.paheal.net/_images/fb1de3ef7fabd94f423aa179afa69f1b/27449%20-%20Darkseid%20DC.png
http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhn8mg44SF1qzf0o8o1_500.gif
Anti-life is my anti-drug
@Zifnab: That’s just encouraging Betty to do her stabbity-time schtick.
… Is this just a way for comics to deny us Rex yet AGAIN?!
to all of those who want a Deadwood New gods… I won’t deny you that picture , So swears Devilkais!