Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Premise Update

Waaay back in March 2008 DC publicly announced a new series, titled Justice League, by James Robinson and Mauro Cascioli. I blogged excitedly about it here.

Now, finally, the series is set to debut in July. Given the 17-month gap (17 months!!) between announcement and fruition, I thought it was as good idea to see if the series as advertised in 2008 still resembles the one we're getting in mid-2009. Of course, at the time of the announcement, a lot of the details were still preliminary. Still it will be an interesting exercise in how a series is developed to look at whatever changes may have cropped up in the year +.

Here's a page, as presented in this week's DC Nation. (Here's some more ginchy artwork to gaze at).

Seriously...the page you choose to preview is just the male members staring at Kara's chest?!?*Title: Originally this was just going to be called Justice League. Nope, now it's known as Justice League: Cry For Justice (some DC sources list it as JLA: Cry For Justice). I can understand changing the title, but the new one is fairly lame.

*Length: Originally it was to be an ongoing series. Now, it's a six-issue mini. So much for Robinson's "it can go on forever."

*Ray Palmer: Originally it was planned to have Ray Palmer, but "not as the Atom though – at least at first." The cover and preview pages from issue 1, though, have him in full Atom action (along with the newer Atom, apparently). That could just be symbolic, or flashback...or maybe they listened to my complaint that it would be stupid to have Ray Palmer pull a Dr. Pym.

*Freddie Freeman: The original plan was to have Freddy “ideally with the blue costume and a new name." Apparently not so ideally, I guess, because he's in red costume here...What's especially interesting is that on April 6th DC released a "prelim cover" (even though the URL was labeled "cover-final") for the first issue that didn't include Freeman/Marvel at all. The very next day, they released the "final cover", exactly the same except now the Big Red Cheese II is included, frankly looking crammed in wherever he would fit. Cock-up, or last minute correction/change of plan?!?

*Looking at this DC Nation page, apparently Supergirl's chest is going to play a much more prominent role than previously advertised. Hey, I'd look her in the eyes...but they weren't shown!!

So aside from the title, the length, the identities the characters use, and Supergirl's in-your-face bosoms (lighter gravity, don't you know?), everything's exactly the same 17 months later. Good thing it wasn't an 18-month gap, or who knows what might have happened...

6 comments:

Siskoid said...

So that's the big hoo-ha in last month's JLofA, where Black Canary bitches out GL and GL for starting a splinter group... which hasn't happened yet.

Bravo DC, bravo.

Anonymous said...

Wait a minute. Based on who is posing and who is charging toward the camera on the final cover, that gorilla is a member of the JLA. WTF?

Captain Infinity said...

I'm saddened that this has been reduced to a mini. Cascioli's artwork is worth the price of admission.

chiasaur11 said...

Yes. That is a gorilla.

Congorilla! He and Ken Hale should totally meet up for some fisticuffs.

snell said...

Yes, anonymous, that is indeed Congorilla...read here to understand the full glory of this character...

Siskoid, the initial premise was to have the JLA splinter go out to avenge "a big murder" that was going to take place in Final Crisis. Obviously that was meant to be J'onn J'onzz. But as Libra (he did the actual murder) is dead (?) and the Human Flame is going to be running around hiding in his own mini-series, the odds are that premise has also changed. As you say, Way to go, DC.

ShadowWing Tronix said...

Like a death certificate in the DC Universe is worth the paper it's printed on.