Category Archives: Opinion

Why is Vertigo a Proving Ground for DC/Marvel Talent (Instead of the Other Way Around)?

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In his article on Karen Berger’s legacy at Vertigo, Sequart’s Julian Darius cites the imprint’s role as a “proving ground” for talent. Many well-known comics writers made their mark with a magnum opus at Vertigo — Grant Morrison with The Invisibles for instance, or Brian Azzarello’s 100 Bullets — and have gone on to mainstream success at DC and Marvel.

But isn’t that backwards?

I mean, that’s like J.K. Rowling following up Harry Potter with a long career writing Forgotten Realms novels. Or Steven Spielberg following up Jaws and E.T. by directing episodes of shows like Cheers, M*A*S*H and L.A. Law for the next two decades.

If that’s what someone wants to do, that’s great. R.A. Salvatore has carved out such a niche in Forgotten Realms that his name is a bigger draw than the universe’s brand. I’d bet Geoff Johns feels like he has the best job in the world.

But it seems…broken somehow that even when an author makes a splash telling their own stories, the main measure of success is a career working on pre-existing character concepts controlled by Warner Bros. and Disney.

Quick Thoughts: DC’s New 52 Wave Three

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So, along with the origin issues in September, DC is also launching four new ongoing series. Here are my first thoughts:

Talon – Spinning out of “Court of Owls.” Sorry, but I tuned out right there. I’ve never been a big fan of the Bat-verse (heresy, I know), so a Batman spin-off doesn’t really do much for me.

Sword of Sorcery – A genre book similar to All-Star Western and G.I. Combat. At least to start with, it’ll be headlined by a revival of Amethyst, with backup stories about a post-apocalyptic Beowulf. This is the one I’m most interested in, not for Amethyst or Beowulf in particular, but to see what DC does with the fantasy genre. Demon Knights has been a fun read, and is currently the DCU book I’m most eager to read when a new issue comes out.

Team Seven – Set shortly after the Justice League’s debut, about a special-ops team put together to counteract superhuman threats. The team features characters from all over DC and Wildstorm, including younger Deathstroke, Grifter, Amanda Waller, and others. This seems like something I would have been fascinated by 10-15 years ago when I was more heavily into the DC Universe itself, rather than seeing the DCU as just the setting for some comics I read.

Phantom Stranger – His origin and connection to Pandora. Um…no. In my opinion, the Phantom Stranger should be left mysterious. He’s the Phantom Stranger, not the Phantom Guy that the Audience Gets to Know Well. The fact that they decided to re-introduce him by giving him a definitive origin suggests they’ll be taking the character in…I don’t want to say the wrong direction, but certainly a direction I’m less interested in reading.

IGN contacted DC and confirmed that they won’t be canceling four books right away, though in a Newsarama interview, Dan Didio reiterates the plan to stick with 52 ongoing series in general, so we’ll probably see a brief bump in September followed by a few books getting canceled in the next couple of months.

I’ve noticed lately that the less connection a book has to the mainstream DC Universe, the more appealing I find it. That’s kind of sad, but I think it’s partly the fact that DC is actively courting an audience I’m not part of, and partly a consequence of my slow drift away from the super-hero genre and toward sci-fi/fantasy.

So how about you? Which of these books do you find most interesting?

Geoff Johns’ Flash: All About Speed?

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Monday’s post about how Wally West’s dynamic character makes him harder to reboot than Barry Allen got me thinking about something Geoff Johns said to Hero Complex when he took over the book back in 2009:

But you look at what the theme of Flash’s book has been for the last 200-something issues with Wally West and it’s been about a man trying to fill someone else’s boots. It doesn’t really have anything to do with speed. I mean, it has something to do with speed, but it was not totally what the book was about. The new Flash that I’m doing is all about speed.

At the time, I found it disingenuous because Geoff Johns wrote six years of that run himself, and he could have focused more heavily on speed with Wally West if he’d wanted to. And I found it worrying because he felt Wally’s defining characteristic was wanting to be like Barry Allen. Not the journey of becoming a hero, not learning to be an adult, but specifically trying to be someone he’s not.

But now I find the quote even more annoying, and here’s why:

Geoff Johns’ Flash, from Rebirth through Flashpoint, is not all about speed. It’s not even about hope, as suggested in Blackest Night.

It’s about a man so driven by grief that he nearly destroyed the world. Not even through speed, but through time travel.

The great over-arching Flash story from 2009-2011 might have been more appropriate for Booster Gold or Rip Hunter. (Or maybe Green Lantern/Hal Jordan, considering that it sounds a little like Emerald Twilight and Zero Hour when you break it down that far.)

Oh, well. Time to chalk it up as one more missed opportunity from that run, and Move Forward.

Where’s Wally West? C2E2, Dan Didio, and the Illusion of Change

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First off, sorry for the lack of updates last week. Sometimes, life gets too busy to blog.

There’s been a lot of talk about Wally West since C2E2 panels brought up the usual non-answers, and a Bleeding Cool reporter accidentally asked Dan Didio about Wally.

He explained that fans had grown up with Wally West, seen him get married and have children and with the de-aging of Barry Allen, it would cheat those fans who grew to love Wally to de-age him as well.

As a justification, it’s a bit disingenuous. “We shouldn’t do to Wally what we did to Barry” kind of suggests that maybe they shouldn’t have done it to Barry either. And while there’s something to “We’re making your favorite character go away because we know you wouldn’t like what we do with him,” it seems like it would rank right up there with “I don’t want to ruin our friendship by dating you” on phrases that people like to hear.

At Boston Comic Con, Francis Manapul mentioned a rejected a Wally cameo that he tried to put into an early issue of the New 52 Flash.

He doesn’t say how Wally would have appeared, and frankly, that’s a problem in itself. A few months ago when I met Brian Buccellato at a signing, he pointed out that having Barry Allen young and Bart Allen as Kid Flash kind of squeezes out Wally: Wally should be somewhere between Barry and Bart. But if Barry never died, and Bart’s already Kid Flash, where does that leave Wally?

There’s just no room for Wally West in the DCnU.

I kind of suspect that’s by design: A lot of Didio’s statements line up with that first panel of Comic Critics up above (though I’m sure he did watch Justice League Unlimited – and note the reference to the same nostalgia cycle I talked about recently), and he’s often talked about how Barry Allen is “more iconic” and otherwise superior to Wally West. I’ve long thought, cynically, that “more iconic” means “the version I grew up with,” but as I mull over the words reported by Bleeding Cool, I think it means something else. Continue reading →

Return of the 1990s: The 20-Year Nostalgia Cycle is About to Turn Over

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There’s no question that the 1990s are back in comics. Many of DC’s New 52 redesigns have been likened to the early 90s Image Comics look, and creators like Scott Lobdell and Rob Liefeld, virtually absent from DC for years, are now on multiple books. The Extreme-verse is back. Valiant is relaunching.

And you know what?

There’s going to be more.

Remember When…?

Pop culture nostalgia runs in a 20-year cycle. The 1970s had Happy Days and Grease. When I was growing up in the 1980s, it seemed like everything was about how great the 1960s were. (Oh, the hoopla over the 20th anniversary of Woodstock…) By the 1990s, we had Dazed and Confused and That 70s Show, and of course the first wave of big-screen TV remakes of shows like The Brady Bunch. Over the past decade or so we’ve seen Transformers and GI Joe made into mega-blockbuster movies.

People in the prime of their careers can create new pop culture inspired by their childhood or teenage years and get it produced and distributed. People who want to revisit those years can finally afford to buy the new version of that Millennium Falcon playset they wanted when they were 9, or see that band in concert that they wanted to see when they were 15. People who have children want to share those things they remember fondly from their own childhood.

What we’re seeing in comics is merely the leading edge of the wave of 1990s nostalgia.

Now, I’ll bet a lot of you are dreading this. “But the 80s were good!” you’ll say. “The 90s sucked!” Continue reading →

Should Jay Garrick be Stuck on Earth-2?

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Earlier this week, a reader asked me what I thought of DC’s decision to move Jay Garrick out of the mainstream DC Universe and put him in a separate universe (specifically Earth 2) with no links to Barry, Wally and Bart.

At first I was disappointed to lose the legacy aspect of the characters. I think it adds a lot to the Flash mythos to have Jay, then Barry, then Wally and Bart as a series of heroes inspiring and mentoring one another. On the other hand, the old scheme of tying the Justice Society of America to World War II and the Justice League to the present has been getting harder and harder to maintain over the last couple of decades. From that standpoint, I’m OK with them returning to the multiverse approach…as long as they treat the alternate reality as a first-class setting (like the Ultimate Marvel universe), not as something expendable. (How many characters did DC kill during Countdown to Infinite Crisis just because they weren’t from “New Earth” and therefore didn’t matter?)

Moving Jay Garrick to Earth-2? Sure, I can handle that.

But I’m not so sure about this Earth-2.

Over the past week, as we’ve started learning about Earth-2 — in particular the new takes on Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman — just about every new piece of information makes me less and less interested in the series. It’s all about death, all about heroes who kill — and that seems to be the selling point. I’m sure “What would you have to do to teach Superman to kill?” could be a fascinating story. But it’s not one I’m interested in reading as an ongoing. (That, in fact, is why I haven’t read Mark Waid’s Irredeemable — by all reports it’s a great story, but not one I want to read.)

I hope the teasers we’ve gotten over the past week are about a jumping-off point, rather than representative of the tone of the series. That the other heroes of Earth 2 aren’t going to be surrounded by and dealing out death, but rather carrying on the legacy as their world’s trinity fails. A dark, Flashpoint-like take on the Justice Society could be interesting, but if this is the only place we’re going to see Jay Garrick for the foreseeable future, I’d much rather it be in a setting where the Flash can be the kind of hero who tips his hat in respect to each person he saves.

Update: Just a day later, DC revealed Jay Garrick’s new costume and more information about his role in Earth 2.