Great Ten #8 gave us:
A two-millennia old robot with an I Ching based operating system fighting fake Chinese gods.This series hasn't gotten a lot of attention, and most of that has been dismissive, of the "Oh, smooth one, DC--why release this series years after the team was introduced in 52, and without creator Grant Morrison writing it? What a stupid idea!"
Well, I give you it wasn't the brightest bit of marketing, and the iron wasn't exactly hot when this series was struck. But so what--that really has nothing to do with the quality of these particular issues, does it? And I'm pretty sure that if Grant Morrison had wanted to write a Great Ten comic, DC would have wet themselves to give him the opportunity to do so.
Tony Bedard and Scott McDaniel have been doing a great job with this series. Maybe not a home run, but certainly a solid sliding triple.
And in a time when we're all whining about DC being hung up on the past and whiter than white, shouldn't we all be at least checking out, if not actively supporting, a series that gives us 10 Asian heroes, and a whole new heroic spot previously unexplored on the the DC Universe map? That doesn't mean we stop complaining about Ryan Choi's unnecessary death...but shouldn't we also be spending money on a good super-hero series that's not by the usual DC death cult, or by the "hung up in the 1970s" cult--a series that's doing exactly what we say we want them to do? Or, despite what we say, are we just going to ignore it because there's no Superman or Batman or Teen Titan involved? Or reject it out of some self-fulfilling "it will never succeed" cynicism?!?
Your local comics shoppe doubtless has back issues of this just lying around. Or, since it's almost done, pick it up in the inevitable trade. Pick them/it up, or you're missing some good comics, is all I'm saying. I mean, an I Ching based robot, people--and he's just one of ten!!
4 comments:
You have a point. I haven't exactly fallen in love with McDaniel's recent art, but I'll at least check it out.
OK, the whole comments deal is being pretty unstable today, so apologies to everyone.
Mark, let me just say that I don't think G10 is being just high concept or "crazy for crazy's sake." I can't speak how much of this had been done in Grant Morrison's initial creation of them, but Bedard is doing a fine job of creating separate, interesting origins for all of them.
As to whether they're too tied-in to Chinese heritage/mythology, in this case these characters are all either created or operated by the Chinese govt--in that view, of course they're all going to reinforce Chinese heritage, for propaganda/cultural reasons.
There's the other good thing Bedard has done with the series: some of the G10 are pro-govt, some are working for the govt only because they have to, there's differing opinions on Taiwan and Tibet...it's a good range of individuals, not a cookie-cutter, monolithic view of China (as much as I can tell about China, of course).
I don't want to overpraise the series, but I think it's pretty good...
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I included the most recent issue in my stash this week. It actually was pretty good.
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