(First, let me apologize for the lack of a post last week. My job is dealing with a whole bunch of new regulations that rolled out on September 1st, and I wound up working 57 hours that week to help out. Blogging kind of fell by the wayside as a result; normal service has resumed now that I’m down to a relatively sedate 50 or so. Now, on with the post!)

Recently, MGK said in one of his posts that ‘Flashpoint’ was the worst crossover since ‘Millennium’. I think this is a little unfair…to ‘Millennium’, an early crossover that should still probably count as more of a “fascinating failure” than a “flawed success”, but did and does have some things to recommend it. Compared to the ambition, energy, and the sheer work that went into “Millennium”, “Flashpoint” is exposed even more as the lazy, slapdash retread that it really is.

For those of you not familiar with “Millennium”, it went down like this. The Guardians of the universe, at that point in DC history, had left the universe to go make nookie with their female counterparts, the Zamarons. But they had announced that there would be a new race of Guardians to take their place, because the universe kind of needs them. “Millennium” opens up with one Guardian and one Zamaron showing up on Earth to announce that the new Guardians would arise from a group of ordinary human beings, and that they had come to find them and teach them about their new role in the scheme of things.

This isn’t a bad start to a crossover; it goes a long way towards explaining why the Guardians have taken three times as many Green Lanterns from one planet as they have from some entire sectors, and the idea of seemingly ordinary human beings who have a great cosmic destiny is a classic trope that can be well-handled. The actual people involved (the so-called “New Guardians”)…well, let’s give credit where it is due and point out that it was a real and earnest effort to create a racially diverse group of protagonists that included an openly gay man and a Muslim woman, two groups that are more underrepresented now than they were in a mid-80s crossover. But we should also admit that this was the mid-80s, that Steve Englehart’s attempts to inhabit the mindset of his ethnically diverse cast resulted in some painfully awkward stereotypes, and that the resultant superheroes were frequently and powerfully lame.

But of course, it wouldn’t be much of a comic-book crossover if there was no conflict, and this one had as its villains the Manhunters. I forget whether this was the point at which they revealed that all the Manhunters and the Manhunter organization and everything “Manhunteresque” was actually a front for a group of androids that were the Guardians’ first attempts at creating a universal police force, or if that had been known already and this was just where the Manhunters’ master plan was revealed. But basically, the Manhunters decided that they’d just seen off one group of Guardians, and the universe didn’t need another, and they were going to scuttle the attempt to create a new breed of Guardians before it started. And building off of the events of ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’, they had found that sphere that Harbinger had recorded the entire history of the DC Universe on, which turned out to be kind of a bad thing for her to do on account of how she had used the Monitor’s technology to find out the secret identities of every superhero in the world.

This meant that the Manhunters had known for a long time who the Guardians would turn to in order to protect their successors, and had planted “sleeper agents” all over the world. So there were lots of shocking betrayals, as long-time supporting cast members turned out to be androids or traitors (or, in the case of Laurel Kent, an android traitor.) This was a pretty good idea for a dramatic story (at least, good enough that they would shamelessly rip it off in a couple of decades for “Infinite Crisis”), and it did give us one of the best crossover moments ever as Batman shows up in Commissioner Gordon’s office to tell him about the situation. He says as he’s climbing back out the window, “The Manhunters have placed sleeper agents all over the world,” and Gordon pistol-whips him across the back of the head, shoves him out the window, and says, “I know.”

This is followed up on in Batman’s own book, which is something else worth commenting on; after hearing comics fans’ complaints about two consecutive crossovers where the tie-ins were meaningless “red sky” issues that just had the logo on them to get completists interested, “Millennium” actually had events in the main series that were followed up on in that week’s actual comics. A major character’s death happened in one of the tie-ins, the heroes found out about the bad guys’ base in a tie-in, and basically the main series was just the spine of a much larger story. Which means that the “Millennium” trade paperback makes the series seem a lot worse than it was. It also gave comics fans a whole new area of complaint: “Why do I have to buy every single tie-in just to find out what’s going on?!?!?!?!?!?!”

In the end, “Millennium” did have a lot of problems. Booster Gold’s heel turn and subsequent betrayal of the bad guys is so ineptly handled that even the writers didn’t seem to know what side he was on (I actually asked; Englehart was firmly convinced that Booster Gold was cynically switching sides to whoever seemed most likely to win, while Dan Jurgens said that Booster was always a good guy and was playing the Manhunters for suckers by exploiting his reputation as a greedy cynic.) The actual New Guardians were incredibly stupid, both in their specific concepts and in the general idea that creating a new breed of Guardians of the Universe would result in just another super-hero team, and their series only lasted twelve issues. And a lot of the writing, in retrospect, feels clumsy and stilted. But it’s worth remembering that the tentpole crossover was in its infancy back then, and the writers and editors were feeling out a lot of the rules as they went along. There was a very real honesty to it that I admire, an attempt to really do something worthy of their readers’ time and money instead of just this year’s crossover, and it did a lot more right than it’s remembered for.

I somehow don’t think people will be saying the same thing about “Flashpoint” in 20 years.

Any artists interested in a brief collaboration – other than those I’m already working with – shoot me an email? I have an Idea.

JUSTICE LEAGUE #1: The reason people keep calling this “like a comic you get with an action figure” is because it’s just that: it’s very generic and barely does anything. Geoff Johns has a few good lines, and Jim Lee is still an excellent superhero artist (a terribly boring costume designer, mind you, but a great artist), but you could have Alan Moore and George Perez teaming up to create the greatest superhero book of all time and if it was twenty-four pages of Batman and Green Lantern snarking at one another plus a brief fight with a parademon it would still be boring.1 There’s just no there there; it’s empty and moribund, and all the craft in the world can’t disguise that. Surely we can aspire to better than competency for DC’s supposed flagship book? (See also: John Solomon’s old complaint about webcomics where the first installment is “hey everybody here’s my cast and I promise exciting fun times starting with next week” and apply it here.)

ACTION COMICS #1: This is a really great comic in all respects, except that the Blue Jeans Superman costume is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Every time I see it in a panel I am reminded that I am reading a Superman comic where Superman is dressed like a dork. It just takes me out of an otherwise first-rate Superman book, which hearkens back to Superman’s 1930s trustbusting roots in a way that feels organic and unforced and fresh, and gets Clark’s Lois and Jimmy early-relationship dynamics right, and has Clark exploring his growing powers in a neat way, and on top of all of that comes up with some clever minor revisions to the Superman mythos (either Clark or Lois are working for a paper other than the Daily Planet? Whaaaaaa?). But seriously, it is like Grant Morrison saw the Super-Armor costume and thought “well, I can top that.”

JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL #1: Surprisingly tepid. There are some good ideas here (Batman being an “unofficial” member of the team who shows up despite nobody in power wanting him there) alongside some odd ones (Godiva? Really? I mean… really?) and Yet Another Guy Gardner Tantrum, but this book doesn’t have any of the personality I think everybody hoped a new JLI comic would have and that Generation Lost in fact did have. It’s not terrible by any means, but it’s very much Just Another Team Book, which has to be regarded as a disappointment given the brand in question. Also, Vixen is once again so obviously just there to round out the demographics that I mentally have started calling her “Token.”

GREEN ARROW #1: Basically Green Arrow is a hero who is also kind of a douche, except it’s not Guy Gardner-style entertaining in the least.

STORMWATCH #1: You kind of have to love that Paul Cornell’s answer to the redundancy of Stormwatch in a universe that already had the Justice League is to say that Stormwatch are the real defenders of Earth and that the Justice League are posers, and to have the Martian Manhunter be the one to say that to boot. That takes balls I didn’t think anybody writing for DC still had. Plus, it turns out that this book is the temporal successor to Demon Knights, Cornell’s other nuDCU comic, and that’s cute. I’m not sure how long all of this will last before the DC Importance Police show up and remind us all that Hal and Barry and Ray Palmer are so much cooler than anybody else you guys, but for now it’s amusing and a decent book.

OMAC #1: It’s twenty-two pages of Keith Giffen doing an extended Jack Kirby homage. Because I like Keith Giffen as an artist and a writer, I will not use the words “jacking off” to describe this in any way.

BATWING #1: This was really quite decent. I don’t think it’ll last very long, but they’ve clearly gone and worked up an entire African superheroing mythos for the backstory of the comic, which I can appreciate even if it’s only to have victims for Batwing to avenge, and the art and story are genuinely strong. This was probably the nicest surprise of the first week’s batch of #1s and I hope I’m proven wrong and that DC can write a book about an African protagonist that their core audience of fanboys (who are their lifeblood and we all know it) wants to read. I don’t think I will be, though.

MEN OF WAR #1: I like war comics. This is a lousy one. I get that the idea of “war comic in a superhero universe” is a good one, but other than a token superhero-related disaster – one so generic that this could be set in any universe at all, one that could have as easily been a meteor strike because it was just that abstracted – they instead spend an issue writing a terrible war comic, one where a soldier lures a bunch of enemies into a cave and then comes out with an assault rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other like he’s Arnold circa 1986, except it’s a beefy white dude with a moustache instead because you can still have those in war comics.2 Then there’s a backup story where the soldiers have to make the tough call of whether or not to kill an insurgent girl child soldier, which is actually a great idea for a war comic short story, until it turns out that she’s not a soldier at all and instead an evil terrorist was using her as a decoy, which sucks. Garth Ennis would not use this comic as toilet paper.

SWAMP THING #1: A really good start to a comic that seems to remember that Swamp Thing is supposed to be a horror book, and generally heads in that direction, and is only marred by the fact that Yanick Paquette is forced to demonstrate, yet again, that there is not a single superhero artist on the planet who can make the Super-Armor look good.

STATIC SHOCK #1: Perfectly acceptable comics, but feels like issue #47 of an ongoing Static Shock series rather than a fresh #1. Static’s powers are poorly explained, and that doesn’t matter to me because I’ve already read all the Static comics there are, but maybe in a #1 issue that comes alongside a reboot of the entire comics universe the comic is in, the writers could possibly take a panel to explain who the hell Hardware is and why he is in my Static comic, on the assumption that someone who wants to read this as their first comic – and remember, this is a comic slightly tied into a once-successful cartoon – could know the basics about Static’s MO? I mean, I get that not every issue can or should read as a potential reader’s first issue (I think that trope can oversimplify the comics reading experience), but I think that rule should always apply for the first issue of a book.

HAWK AND DOVE #1: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAA oh god they’re serious

LATE ADDITION: BATGIRL #1: Wow, this was lackluster, and I never thought I’d say that about a comic written by Gail Simone. I mean, Simone has made one or two mistakes as a writer – everybody has – but she’s never written a comic I would honestly call “boring” before. But Batgirl is a boring comic, despite it ostensibly doing what a first issue of a superhero comic should – I mean, there are the requisite number of fights and everything. But the constant narration is overwrought in the extreme, the choice to make Barbara’s physical return as Batgirl a sort of sequel to her Oracle days via some odd unexplained miracle of spinal regrowth is just weird, and the most interesting thing about the entire comic turns out to be that now Commissioner Gordon is also a redhead like his daughter.

1. Also it would make reference to the sex life of Nostradamus, who in this continuity would also be a legacy precursor to Blue Beetle. [↩]
2. And when they are Harvey Bullock, but that’s it. [↩]

In the recommendations made to Jim after his recent post, mixed in among the thirty thousand odd recommendations of Avengers Academy (which isn’t bad by any means, but seriously, it’s not even in the top dozen things Marvel is putting out these days) were a couple for Uncanny X-Force, which I wanted to echo because UXF manages to be a massively entertaining comic despite having the uber-tired premise of “we’re the X-Men who totally kill baddies,” which should earn it some sort of award for operating under a handicap.

It’s a good comic for two reasons: it has consistently good art, and Rick Remender knows both what he wants to do with the characters and the larger story he wants to tell, which is why he’s selected characters that benefit that story. Wolverine, obviously, but a supporting cast of Psylocke, Fantomex and Deadpool all work well – and then there’s Archangel, and the biggest coup Remender’s managed on UXF is that he’s finally pulled the trigger on Warren Worthington, who was always basically a boring character with wings when he wasn’t being Archangel, by turning him into the next Apocalypse.

Remender rightly saw that Warren was only ever even slightly interesting when he was at war with his evil self, which suggests that the evil self is what was really interesting all along, and thus far that appears to be the case: evil Archangel is much more interesting than good Archangel/Angel ever was, not least because he’s such an atypically pleasant and polite murderous maniac. And best of all, given the most recent issue, it appears that this character shift is going to stick for the next few whiles, if only because as of the events of issue 14 I can’t see a way that they can redeem him any time soon.

Which is good, because the X-Men, as a franchise, should float a character from good to bad or vice versa from time to time: the best villains in the X-books are always those who have sort of a point, and Archangelypse (who, after all, only wants to commit mass genocide so that humanity can eventually survive the coming of the Celestials) fits the bill. Besides, with Emma Frost and Magneto and even the likes of Legion, Scalphunter and Frenzy ending up all in the X-Men’s ranks, it was well past time that one of the X-Men turn bad to balance the scales.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Heya folks, it’s Jim.  Jim Smith.  I’m stating my name over and over because I’m about to ask for comics recommendations, and I’m trying to make sure everybody knows who’s asking.

So by November it looks like my pull list will be down to ten books: Alpha Flight, Captain America, Captain America and Bucky,Daredevil, Fantastic Four (or FF or whatever), Herc, Legion of Super-Heroes, Legion Lost, Secret Avengers, and Thunderbolts.  And Herc is ending in November, so that sucks.

This is perhaps the fewest titles I’ve collected in over a decade.  Admittedly, in these troubled times I should probably be glad to save money by buying fewer comics, but you have to understand my background–I used to have to drive 40 miles to the nearest comics shop, so I developed a strong urge to make each trip count.  Nine comics a month feels…un-American or something.

That’s why I’m here asking for books I should start picking up.  This is kind of self-serving, but it’s Labor Day weekend and I happen to know you have nothing better to do because the whole internet went on vacation but you’re checking this site for updates anyway.

Now, you’ll notice I’ve only got two DCU books on my list.  There is a good reason for that: DC has spent all summer trying to get everyone to try out any of their fifty-two titles, so I have had plenty of time to think it over, and only two of them really won me over, and that’s mostly because they pick up from two series I was already reading.  So there’s not much point in trying to sell me on any DCU stuff right now–yes, I know Grant Morrison’s writing Action Comics, and there’s really nothing else you can add that hasn’t already been taken into consideration.

Other than that, suggest whatever the hell you want, as long it’s a current ongoing monthly.  If I can read Alpha Flight, heaven knows I’ll try anything.

My post-Fan Expo-debrief is up at Torontoist.

…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.

1. 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. [↩]
2. And did anybody really MISS Darkseid? [↩]

So Black Panther: The Man Without Fear may have a really terrible title, but other than that minor issue, David Liss and Francesco Francavilla have been putting out quality work: it’s a great “gritty urban superhero” comic, and with the most recent story arc Liss has really been taking it up a notch by emphasizing that the Black Panther isn’t like Daredevil and shouldn’t try to solve things in a straightforward beat-them-up way; T’Challa is a brilliant tactician and his style of superheroing should reflect that.

However, because this is a great comic, to make this point they dragged the Hate-Monger out of mothballs – the real Hate-Monger, not that schmuck who showed in that Punisher story a while back. Yes, they are trying to bring the Black Panther back to his A-game by having him fight Adolf Hitler’s disembodied spirit. It is understandable that you might not know about this, since the sales numbers on Black Panther have been underwhelming to say the least, but now you have no excuse, because you are missing T’Challa versus Hitler.

I mean, look at this: this is as simple and wonderful as comics panels get:

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

So I saw a few days ago where artist Patrick Zircher was advocating a Marvel Universe reboot along the lines of the one DC is doing.  And basically I think that’s a stupid, stupid idea.

Case in point–DC has spent the whole summer running from the term “reboot.”  They even have a FAQ somewhere where they explain to retailers that it’s not a reboot.  They know nobody who was reading the comics before September wants to hear that.  All I know is that Superman continuity seems to have been totally jettisoned, so to me that sounds like a Superman reboot.  Does that make it a line-wide reboot?  Well, if the Superman reboot means that Robin is meeting Superboy for the first time ever in Teen Titans #1, I’d say 99% of Teen Titans stories from the last ten years don’t count anymore, so that sure smells rebooty to me.  Shared universes don’t get “a little” rebooted.

The general idea of Zircher’s argument is that Marvel needs more readers, and decades of backstory creates an obstacle preventing new readers from getting into the product.  A line-wide reboot, then, has all the series and characters start over fresh at the same time, so that new readers are not “put off by storylines wrapped in 50 years of arcana” and do not have to “read a wiki entry to know what the hell’s going on.”  Setting aside personal feelings about Marvel canon, this may sound very appealing.  And indeed, I’m always seeing some guy (often in the comments on this very site) proposing a series of reboots, so that every few years everything gets reset, so nothing has time to get old or convoluted.

Here’s the problem: It will never happen.

continue reading "Why Reboots Don’t Work"

Last week…okay, this week, but it was meant to be last week…I talked a bit about Terry Pratchett’s latest novels, and someone suggested in the comments that I should write a “So You Want To Get Into Discworld” post. This is actually a really good idea; the question of “Where do you start with the Discworld books?” is a pretty common one among fans of the series. Much in the same way as “Doctor Who”, in fact, and much for the same reasons; both series are very long (32 seasons of Doctor Who, 38 Discworld novels), both have very loose continuity that enables you to jump in at different points (lots of Doctor Who fans have started with “Rose”, lots of Discworld fans have started with “The Wee Free Men”) and both have beginnings that aren’t necessarily the best in their series (Doctor Who starts with a relatively-inaccessible black-and-white episode from the infancy of television, while Discworld’s first book was written as a random fantasy parody, and is something of a hodge-podge of ideas.) But as both are tremendously rewarding to the long-term fan, both are worth getting into. So where do you start?

With “The Robots of Death”, a classic Fourth Doctor…no, wait. Sorry. Got a bit mixed up there. You start reading the Discworld novels with the understanding that you really do not need to read them in order. It helps you to understand a few details, such as why the Librarian at the greatest institution of magical learning on the Disc is inconveniently stuck in the form of an orangutan, and why the Thieves’ Guild of Ankh-Morpork is a fully-licensed and authorized body of law enforcement, but it’s not actually necessary. Each book is fully stand-alone, they frequently feature different casts, and Pratchett is one of the best expository writers in the business, so you should be pretty good to go no matter what point you pick to jump in.

That said, there are better spots to jump in than the first book. It’s interesting, and you’ll want to come back to it sooner or later to catch up on some of the things he’s helpful enough to establish at the beginning, but it’s also very clearly Pratchett’s juvenalia, and Rincewind (the main character of the first couple of books) is probably his least likeable protagonist. Not that he’s unlikeable, but he’s a cynic and a coward and really only has one bona fide moment of true heroism in the roughly seven books he stars in. So we can skip ahead a bit, past the first five books that Pratchett uses to establish the concept in his own mind and figure out what he wants to do with the fictional universe he’s creating as he goes.

Which means that the first book to start with is ‘Wyrd Sisters’. It’s a sharp, funny, easily accessible book that satirizes Shakespeare (the plot is sort of a bizarre remix/mashup of Macbeth, with the witches as heroes and the king as a villain) while establishing a lot of the core concepts and characters that you’ll see recur over the course of the series. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and the kingdom of Lancre all get an excellent introduction for the casual reader (even though Granny Weatherwax has previously appeared.)

From there, you can comfortably read ‘Pyramids’, ‘Guards! Guards!’ (the novel that introduces the City Watch, probably the best-loved characters by fans)…skip ‘Faust Eric’, which is a pretty direct sequel to one of the first five books, but then you can read the next six in a row (‘Moving Pictures’, ‘Reaper Man’, ‘Witches Abroad’, ‘Small Gods’, ‘Lords and Ladies’, ‘Men At Arms’.)

Now go back and read the first five. By this time you’ll be attached enough to the characters that you’ll feel comfortable reading through the first two (slightly sloggy) novels, and by ‘Equal Rites’ Pratchett’s writing skill has evolved to the point where you’re reading perfectly serviceable fantasy novels. ‘Mort’ is excellent (and has sometimes been my advised starting spot), and ‘Sourcery’, while a little rough in places, does answer a lot of questions you might have had about how magic works on the Disc.

Then go back and read the one you skipped, and pick up again with ‘Soul Music’. Not only will you understand pretty quickly why I suggested going back and reading the early books (‘Soul Music’ and ‘Interesting Times’ are fairly direct sequels to the earliest books) but you’ll also be struck by how much Pratchett has evolved as a writer in those first eleven years. He went from being a good writer to being a truly great writer, and as you continue onwards, you’ll be impressed even more. All of them are worth reading, and by the end, you’ll be just as much of a fan as I am.

And at some point, you’ll want to read them all over again from the beginning…