Thursday, May 6, 2010

It's Such A Thin Line Between Stupid And Clever

Some thoughts, both shallow and deep, on this week's War Of The Supermen #1 (stick around for the last one...it's a doozy):

**So, probably nobody thought ahead to rocket a baby off of this one, eh?

**I would have said SPOILER ALERT. But that panel is not from the comic; I scanned it from this week's DC Nation page. In other words, if you read ANY OTHER DC comic this week before you read WOTS, DC already went and spoiled it for you. What, you guys couldn't think of any other way to pimp the series besides giving away the biggest surprise?!?

**Let me check something here--in the past year we've seen General Lane kill Kryptonians by the boatload--with red sun radiation, with green kryptonite, with gold kryptonite, with magic, and blowing up their planet. Hell, for all I know, he even managed to kill some with kindness. Lex Luthor has been trying to kill a Kryptonian for at least a decade or so, DC time, and hasn't managed too. And now Lane can kill them at will, and on a genocidal level--but he still can't manage to kill Superman?!? This is just another case of J'onn J'onzz-itis: having someone supposedly supremely powerful get whupped so we know what a bad-ass the villain is, and then having Superman swoop in to save the day. Really, aren't we over this shallow tactic yet, DC?

**So, the DC Braintrust® revised continuity to restore Kandor (99.9% of whose inhabitants we never met or learned anything about); threw away credibility to have Kara's parents end up in Kandor; wiki'd post-Crisis Brainiac so he still stole cities AND would come to Earth; completely ignored seventeen other stories to get a Phantom Zone and a Zod who at least vaguely resembled the ones from the movies; less then a year after Busiek did the same story, launch a major storyline wherein Earth people suddenly don't trust Superman for no particular reason; went through an ungodly amount of rigamarole to establish New Krypton (99% of whose inhabitants we never met or learned a thing about); we exile Superman not only from Earth, but from his own comic books, for over a year...

We go through all of that just to blow the frakkin' place up? Really? Somehow this story you wanted to tell involved going through incredible contortions just to invent 100,000 people merely to kill them? New Krypton is just this years version of Bialya (right down to the ridiculous 4-issue "event" to wrap it up)? Genocide porn as a motivator, again?!?

Pathetic.

**But here's the beauty part. The court has ruled that the Siegel estate owns "depictions of Superman’s origins from the planet Krypton, his parents Jor-L and Lora, Superman as the infant Kal-L, the launching of the infant Superman into space by his parents as Krypton explodes and his landing on earth in a fiery crash."

Ahhh, but if some other parents launched some other infant from New Krypton, and he doesn't land on Earth but is found in orbit or some such, well, that's not covered, is it?? DC would own that one (actual legal opinions may vary). Insane, or crafty?? Tune in in 2013 to see...

As Nigel Tufnel said, it really is such a thin line...

1 comment:

  1. I jumped off ACTION & SUPERMAN some months ago as I got bored with Nightwing, Flamebird & Mon-El and became angry at DC as they tried to made us forget what Captain Atom was up to these last few years, then tried to jump on the final months of WORLD OF NEW KRYTPON but it bored me again with a lacklustre whodunit, then jumped off ADVENTURE COMICS when they tied it to LAST STAND... and, all of that for this?? Really distasteful... Congratulations, DC, from now on I'm going to avoid the Superman line of books as if they were kryptonite...

    ReplyDelete