DC fans, help me out: I know there have been more invisible aliens than the three I name here, and the ones hassling Grifter. For some reason, the first ones that come to mind for me are the ones that gave Animal Man his powers, and I'm not even positive on that. But, sometimes the trouble in building a patchwork world like the DC universe is that there's some overlap, some redundancies.
Grifter #2 should be next week, but today is the first batch of second issues in DC's 52 initiative or reboot or whatever we're calling it. By rights, I should give them credit for their success--personally, I'm buying three more DC books than I was prior. (Static Shock, Demon Knights, and OMAC, all for at least their first six issues. Ignore the fact that I'd be reading other DC titles if they didn't get cancelled out from under me...) And I'm pretty sure the sales have been massive, although the #2's may be the real test: who comes back for what.
Still, and keep in mind I'm not DC's target audience for these books, I'm not impressed. I generally hate DC's wishy-washy "it's not a reboot, unless it totally was" policy. Bleeding Cool pointed out co-publisher Dan DiDio's current position that all Crisis events have been removed from DC continuity, which is not a big deal for some characters, and for others is like playing Jenga and your move is to remove the table you're playing on. My thought is, either have continuity, or don't. Stop trying to have it both ways. (I usually like continuity, but there's a lot the last few years that I wouldn't mind seeing cut.)
I know, I know: slavish devotion to continuity should not get in the way of telling a good story. Fine. Then tell some good stories. I enjoyed the issues I read, even if they didn't blow my mind, and even Grifter was at least middle of the road, with potential. Word of mouth and word of blog, books like Batman, Wonder Woman, and Animal Man came out of the blocks strong, and I could be interested in picking up the second or even third prints later. Then there are the middle of the road books, and then the books that disappointed on every level.
Actually, 'on every level' may not be correct, since while most readers would consider Red Hood and the Outlaws or Voodoo to be generally terrible, I can't say they won't find some audience. That's not an encouraging notion...MightyGodKing has a handy chart ranking the DC52 in both quality and introduction to the characters, and it's about 50-50 good/bad. So...that was the best DC could do, eh? I didn't expect every book to be gold, but the bar was higher than that; and I feel like DC took a big chance and played it relatively safe.
Grr. Anyway, I'm not thrilled with Marvel right now, either, but we'll harsh on them some other time.
1 comment:
Hey Goo,
yeah you're right, there probably has been a bunch of invisible aliens running around, but it's hard to remember them all.
You can look up aliens in the DCU with Wikipedia. I found a few that could make themselves invisible:
-The Appelaxians: They did need to build host bodies, so maybe they're sorta invisible?
-Can Durlans become invisible?
-The Invisible Raiders are a race of yellow skinned Saturnians with abilities similar to the Faceless Hunter.
There's probably more of them around so here's the link so you can find more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alien_races_in_DC_Comics
I'll talk briefly about Didio's Crisis declaration on my blog, but basically that's bullshit! You hit the nail on the head with DC being wishy-washy; and partly because of this they're going to lose more readers than they've gained.
I'm with you about Marvel, as I was truly turned off by them with that stupid Fear Itself "event". It was a waste, and served only to make Stark a drunk again(like he needed help in that department) and restore Steve Rogers as Captain America again. I know they had to do this in time for the movie, but knowing there was a movie coming down the pike, couldn't Marvel have just as easily has Steve kidnapped after CW, fake his death, but let the rest of the MU think Steve was dead w/o actually killing him? Bucky still could have filled in as Cap, and you would have had the same type of stories that Brubaker wrote with BuckyCap. Stupid Marvel.
I will say on the bright side, Cable coming back during the whole X-Sanction storyline, and the new Point-One minis coming out, do restore some of my interest in Marvel. Other than that, they all suck.
Oh and nice skit....
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