SUPERMAN #1: Elements of this are interesting, and George Perez both knows how to write dialogue and breakdown a page, and the plot of the book is quite good. But Jesus Merino isn’t George Perez; he’s not even close to being George Perez, and every page with its gorgeous and perfect Perez breakdowns just reinforces for me the fact that Perez isn’t actually drawing the book. Merino is at best competent, and that in turn brings down the book for me. That, plus the stupid Lois/Clark breakup and the stupid Superman de-aging and the stupid stupid stupid new Superman costume, make it hard for me to enjoy this comic: the Superman status quo got fucked up worse than just about every other comic in the nu52 and I find it hard to be enthusiastic.
AQUAMAN #1: This was really quite good – a strong example of what all the #1s should have been. Aquaman gets a dramatic entrance, gets a fight scene, gets some nice character moments, has his powers and backstory introduced efficiently, and the initial threat for the first story arc gets set up. Geoff Johns had to sell Aquaman here, and he managed it expertly. Other than Batman, probably the best of the “Justice League Member” comic #1s. But not the best nu52 of the week.
I, VAMPIRE #1: This is the best nu52 of the week, and I was extremely surprised by that. I wasn’t expecting much out of this, and the epic vampire war comic it in fact turns out to be is goddamn great. It’s moody and bloody and probably completely incapable of coexisting longterm with the DC Universe, what with the fact that the first issue has the evil vampires massacring thousands of people in Boston. But regardless: I enjoyed the hell out of this.
THE SAVAGE HAWKMAN #1: Completely incoherent. I mean, this isn’t just “okay we’re gonna step into the middle of the ongoing run” that some of the other nu52 “no really it’s a reboot” comics like Green Lantern are. This seems to be stepping into the middle of an ongoing comic that didn’t exist before this, and it’s not a good comic either. Hawkman’s new outfit is stupid and ugly. The story is both boring and hard to follow. The dialogue is retarded. The art is confusing. Hawkman is still Hawkman, so I’m not going to pretend that I was coming into this unbiased, because fuck Hawkman, Hawkman sucks. But – I mean, Catwoman and Red Hood may be staggeringly sexist stories, but at least you can sort of read them. The Savage Hawkman, on the other hand, is almost unreadably bad; it’s the Manos, The Hands of Fate of the nu52. It’s so bad, and bad in so many ways that are unexpected, that you just have to kind of stare at it.
VOODOO #1: Now this, on the other hand, is conventionally terrible in the ways we have come to expect from the nu52. Here, I will spoil it for you: ten pages of Voodoo doing sexy stripping, a token action sequence featuring the secret agent lady that isn’t really exciting, and then the other secret agent, for no apparent reason whatsoever, asks Voodoo for a private lapdance and then tells her he is a secret agent keeping an eye on her, so she kills him with alien-shapeshift-claws. There. You now have no reason to read this comic ever. (Wait until Sami Basri illustrates a comic that isn’t a shitburger, because the art shows talent – but still isn’t reason to read this comic.)
JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #1: Too early to tell. Peter Milligan is going full-bore weird with this book, and when Milligan does that you need to give him two or three issues to figure out what the hell he’s up to. But it’s a nice-looking and readable comic, even with all the weird, so tentative thumbs up.
THE FLASH #1: I remember back when Geoff Johns introduced that Patti character pre-Flashpoint someone complained that he was clearly going to set up a love triangle, and my response was “no, Barry’s married, they have to pull a One More Day to do that,” and then Barry Allen went back in time and annihilated Wally West (or possibly Bart Allen – the jury is still out) from existence so he could have warm fuzzy memories about his dead mother, more or less, and as a result now he and Iris are no longer married so there’s a love triangle. Kudos, guy who said that thing last year! I genuinely could not have called that! Anyway, if you can get past that, this is a perfectly decent superhero comic with gorgeous art from Francis Manapul, but this isn’t anything you’ll remember a year from now.
ALL-STAR WESTERN #1: It’s a Jonah Hex comic by Palmiotti and Gray. You know it’ll do what it says on the tin, and you know it’s gonna be good. Moritat’s art is nice, and a Jonah Hex story set in 1880s Gotham City is an interesting idea. It’s not very Western-y, but eh, whatever. It’s Jonah Hex beating people up and shooting them and stuff. What more do you want, anyway?
THE FURY OF FIRESTORM #1: And Gail Simone goes 0-for-2 with the nu52 so far, which I genuinely could not have guessed would happen, because come on, it’s Gail Simone! But this comic is not very good. The villainous mercenaries (and man, can I just say that the nu52 has so many frigging villainous mercenaries?) are over-the-top, but that is a minor complaint: the problem is that the book goes sharply off the rails at about the two-thirds mark, because before that Ronnie and Jason are normal high school students, but then out of nowhere Jason is privy to the secrets of Firestorm in advance, and then Ronnie and Jason start fighting each other, and the dialogue just starts being not very good (and seriously saying this about a Gail Simone comic is so goddamn weird you guys), and… ugh. This one was a huge disappointment; I was expecting a very good comic and this is not that thing at all.
BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT #1: The cliffhanger of this book is Two-Face demanding that now he be called “One-Face.” (Also he is the Hulk, it looks like.) If you need anything more from me to understand that this is a really bad Batman comic, just ask.
BLACKHAWKS #1: This actually managed to entertain me despite some obvious and glaring problems. It doesn’t identify a lot of its characters clearly (or in some cases at all), and in a book with a large cast that’s important. The art is… not very good, frankly, and there are several points where it simply doesn’t mesh with the writing (like where one character complains that a baddie is biting her two panels before he bites her). And of course, the plot point that someone has managed to take a picture of the super-secret Blackhawks would probably make a lot more sense if the super-secret Blackhawks didn’t have Blackhawk insignias on all their planes. But, even with all of that, the comic has a lot of energy to it, and the idea of “G.I. Joe in the DCU” is a pretty good one, and the dialogue is fun and the story okay. I can’t call this a good comic, because it isn’t really good. But it’s fun in a trashy way, and the potential for it to be good is definitely there.
GREEN LANTERN: NEW GUARDIANS #1: So the first half of this comic is… a retelling of Kyle Rayner’s origin? And then it flashes forward? I think? I’m genuinely not entirely sure; the comic doesn’t do anything crazy like label a flashback sequence as being a flashback sequence, or anything like that. Anyway, it then becomes a sort of rote “get the team together” story where they’re all gonna beat up Kyle, more or less. You can skip this, as Larfleeze does not show up anywhere, and what is the point of having the various spectrums of Lanterns if you’re not going to put Larfleeze in the damn comic, I ask you.
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So the stink of Red Hood and the Outlaws kept you from getting Teen Titans too I see.
Teen Titans and Superboy, together, have me beginning to suspect there are two different people named Scott Lobdell writing for the New 52. Cause both those books were competent, decent, and intriguing… And Red Hood was horrible (and not just the awful misogyny, the rest of the dialog too) beyond belief.
I disagree with you on Voodoo, which I thought was actually much better than 20 pages in a strip club had any right to be, and Savage Hawkman which was merely pretty mediocre, not nearly the abomination you apparently read. I thought Superman was mostly really good. Like, you can tell Perez was doing his damnedest to write Superman right, despite all the bullshit the relaunch forced on him.
Green Lantern: The New Guardians was perfectly decent, but I find it odd that they did Kyle’s origin. No origin for Hal (thank christ, considering how many times Johns has told that tale the last 7 years) in GL. No origins for Guy or John in GLC. Do they think all the “new and lapsed” readers this might bring in will know all about Guy Garnder and John Stewart, but be clueless on Kyle Rayner? And the rest of the book… Completely by the numbers “putting a team together” (with a completely unnecessarily detailed shot of a disemboweling) story, but competently done. Shrug.
Flash: God I hate love triangles in comic books. Although at least it’s not a Barry-Iris-Flash or Barry-Patti-Flash love triangle. Nothing real compelling in the story, but also nothing bad. Art is amazing. But I just fucking want Wally West, you DC motherfuckers.
MGK, I’m finding it fascinating to compare your reviews with those of Rob Bricken over at Topless Robot.
You, being a DC fan, have such an interestingly different outlook than he does as a DC newbie. You both know horrible books when you read them, but you two have some wildly diverging opinions on some of these.
Farwell, I had a similar thought reading Batgirl: The only thing we get about her backstory is that she got shot and put into a wheelchair, and now she can walk again. Which doesn’t tell newbies much, and it left me confused (how is she walking? Was she ever Oracle?).
ALL-STAR WESTERN #1: It’s a Jonah Hex comic by Palmiotti and Gray. You know it’ll do what it says on the tin, and you know it’s gonna be good. Moritat’s art is nice, and a Jonah Hex story set in 1880s Gotham City is an interesting idea. It’s not very Western-y, but eh, whatever. It’s Jonah Hex beating people up and shooting them and stuff. What more do you want, anyway?
This part seemed the most interesting to me. First of all: Jonah Hex? Really? Is there demand for this character? Was there a Western revival that I didn’t notice? Are they trying to ride the wave of popularity of a movie that flopped more than a year ago? And given that you’re making a Jonah Hex property at all, why take him out out of the Western setting? (Topless Robot makes it sound like Gotham is now out West, and that would be a pointless change right there, but even if so fighting a serial killer is completely different from bandits or cattle rustlers or whatever.) I mean, OK, if you want to have a bounty hunter with a scarred face anywhere in the 19th century, that right there would make people say “Jonah Hex ripoff” so I can see why you might as well use the man himself, but if you set it a century later people would say “Deadpool ripoff”, and Sherlock Holmes was a ripoff of Auguste Dupin and everything Lovecraft wrote was a ripoff of everything else and no one cares. Why not just be daring, come up with a completely new 19th-century character, and have Hex cameo in the third issue to see what happens?
More generally, it makes me think that this “not just a bunch of superhero books” thing mentioned a few days ago is doomed. Good idea, ass-backwards execution. Seavey said they’re doing it well, and reviews here and at TR seem as good as the rest of the crop if not better, but it seems to me like missing the point.
Is the Flash (Barry Allen) superhero even though he’s a forensic scientist? Of course he is, that question doesn’t even make sense. He has a distinctive look and a larger-than-life identity and goes out and catches criminals and protects normal innocent people. The fact that his day job is kind of related to that is irrelevant; the Flash is one of the most unambiguous superheroes there is.
So why are people looking at the Blackhawks or Jonah Hex or the Frankenstein series or whatever and saying they aren’t superhero comic books? They are, they’re just in unusual settings.
You know what an actual non-superhero series would be? A soap opera-style series that happens to be set in the DC shared universe. Or a political thriller series. Or someone from the DC universe that falls into a Narnia-esque dimension. (Although Travis Morgan in Skartaris doesn’t seem like breaking the mold too much.) Or the Books of Magic. Or something set in the far future (that isn’t about people with unique powers, aliases, and spandex costumes).
I don’t know. All the obvious caveats apply; I haven’t read any of these new series yet and might not. But something about Jonah Hex made me think that too much of this seems a bit too familiar in too many wrong ways.
Cyrus, you seem like a nice fellow. But if you don’t like Jonah Hex I’m not sure we can be friends.
There must be some demand for Jonah Hex. His previous series made it to issue #70 or so, and the only reason it stopped was because it was immediately relaunched with the rest of DC’s line. The only thing different here is that he’s hanging out in Gotham City for the time being, where we can see how he operates in/against “society.” Given that they even kept the writers, this is a case where DC didn’t break a working formula, they just changed it up a little.
I think the ultimate goal will be to show that either A) Hex can’t function in an actual city because he doesn’t play by those rules, or B)He’ll do just fine, because we’re all uncivilized at heart. Or something.
Now as long as they can avoid bringing in a Wayne ancestor who dressed in a bat costume, we’re all set.
Hey, I’ve got nothing against Jonah Hex. I love him as much as any character I’ve only actually seen in a Justice League Unlimited storyline. He’s my fourth-favorite Adam Baldwin character!
So obviously there is demand for it and I just didn’t know about it. My mistake. It did make me think about the non-superhero comics, though, and I still think it’s interesting how superhero-like they seem. Or I could be completely wrong about that too.
Well, part of it is that “superhero” can be a much broader genre than a lot of people realize. So long as it is an action packed story about a larger than life hero (sometimes with superhuman powers), it can qualify. Beowulf could be considered a superhero. John McClane could too.
The fact of the matter is, when you want to, you can see superheroes everywhere. DC and Marvel do action-oriented comics, superheroes or no, and sometimes the lines are blurry. What people are talking about is more that DC is widening that line with some of these new comics. Sure, they’re a little superheroish, but they’re still divergent from the norm. It’s seen as a good sign because it means DC is experimenting, dipping its toe in slightly unfamiliar waters. If such a move is successful, it might encourage them to be even more experimental.
It’s seen as a bad sign because many people suspect it won’t work, thereby discouraging DC from trying new genres and further convincing them that nobody wants to read non-superhero comics.
I just have to ask: did The Savage Hawkman come packaged inside the Ark of the Covenant?
Man, why do they keep giving Batman writing duties to artists? Have they not learned their lesson yet? Did we really need the figurative rape of two of Batman’s best villains in two different titles?
RE: Gail Simone 0 for 2 — I’m so glad someone else said this, because I was wondering if there was something wrong with me. I mean, it’s GAIL SIMONE, right?
I noticed something was off in Firestorm when the fourth panel in, there’s a guy with TWO LEFT ARMS. Not the first such glaring Nu52 mistake I’ve caught, either. The new folks in charge (WB Marketing, apparently) seem to misunderstand what “editing” a book means.
I read a bunch of the f2 yesterday at a reading party, and I have to say that I thought Voodoo was the most surprising of the bunch. Yes, it’s about a stripper. But that’s what Voodoo has always been..from when Jim Lee created her to when Alan Moore wrote her…but the comic intro’d the character, supporting characters, set the storyline, intro’d some complications, and left on a cliffhanger to lead to issue 2. It’s pretty much what you defined as a good 1st issue.
Was it a great comic? No..but it was solidly written and drawn and hit the marks..which is more than I can say for the bulk of what I read.
Finally read Superman. Jeepers, it reads as if they demanded Superman be rebooted as a bad imitation of Silver Age Stan Lee stuff (conflict! Angst! loneliness!).
I’m still not sure of the point of setting these books five years into the reboot DCU. But I guess starting at the beginning would make the non-reboots stick out a bit too much.