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...
Again, please:
So this is Robinson & Gates' idea of good characterization: have this lame ass guy keep repeating his name, and keep emphasizing that it's also his job description. Again and again.
