Classic EBI #99: The Makings of a Universe

For years now, I’ve maintained a steadfast and unbroken tradition of not being at San Diego Comic-Con. This is not for lack of desire. So today, I take a look at the stuff happening in San Diego this year I wish I could be a part of…

Everything But Imaginary #407: What I’ll Miss in San Diego

But moving back in time, it’s January 25, 2005 and I’m taking a look at just how tight the continuity of the DC Universe has become in the last year or two. I’ll leave you guys to decide in this counts as irony or not.

Everything But Imaginary #99: The Makings of a Universe

I believe in credit where credit is due, so you’ve really got to give Stan Lee props for really creating our current concept of a superhero “universe.” Oh, superheroes had met before. All of the top National (later DC) Comics heroes had come together as the Justice Society of America in the 40s. Superman and Batman frequently appeared together in World’s Finest Comics. Even Atlas (later Marvel) had their collections of World War II-era characters like the Invaders and the All-Winner’s Squad.

But it was Stan the Man, writing approximately umpteen billion Marvel comics every month (this record would be held until Brian Michael Bendis broke into the business) that really started to forge a world with his creations. The adventures of the JSA didn’t impact the characters in their own titles, nor did the various team-ups that had happened. What Stan did, and did so well, was begin to mix events from various comics. If the Thing lost his powers in Fantastic Four, then he’d be powerless if the team happened to appear in Avengers that month. If Spider-Man was on the run from the law (in other words, if it was a day of the week ending in “y”), Foggy Nelson may have mentioned it in Daredevil. This was nowhere more evident than when Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver — villainous foes of Iron Man and the X-Men, reformed and joined the Avengers.

These days, though, Marvel has sort of lost its cohesion as a universe. Each of Spider-Man’s three titles seem to exist in their own pocket world and barely connect. Nearly two years have passed in Daredevil during Bendis’s run, while other Marvel titles have only progressed a few months. Why, Magneto took over the entire city of New York at the end of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, and not a single other title even made reference to it. Except for comments in various titles about the events of Avengers Disassembled and the gloriously continuity-heavy She-Hulk title, it’s hard to feel like there’s a Marvel “universe” anymore.

But man, DC is trying to make up for it.

As Marvel’s titles have grown looser and looser, DC’s are getting tighter. And I’m going to warn you right now, this column is about to get spoiler-heavy for half of the books in the DC line, so if you see a title bolded you don’t want to know about, you may wanna skip ahead.

It’s easy to point to Identity Crisis as the genesis of this transformation. Like the ending or hate it, it was a huge storyline that has had an astronomical impact on the DC Universe. Just a month after the story’s conclusion, we’ve already seen fallout everywhere: the death of Robin’s father has impacted his own series, which in turn has impacted the other Batman-family books. It’s also being dealt with in Teen Titans, and dealt with extremely well. The Titans are also dealing with Lex Luthor’s battle armor, lost during that miniseries.

The apparent death of Ronnie Raymond is the very catalyst for the new Firestorm series. As if that weren’t enough, it’s sparked a storyline in Manhunter, as DC’s newest vigilante is trying to hunt the murderous Shadow Thief.

In Flash, Wally West has to cope with the fact that his uncle, the paragon of virtue Barry Allen, was one of a subset of the Justice League that agreed to tamper with the minds of their enemies — and what’s worse, has to deal with restoring an enemy who, in turn, is threatening to turn many of his reformed colleagues like Trickster, Heat Wave and the Pied Piper back to their old dark ways. In Adventures of Superman, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are struggling with the same revelation.

And that’s just the stuff directly from Identity Crisis.What other links are appearing among the many titles of the DC Universe lately?

• After the events of “War Games,” the Birds of Prey have recruited a new member and left Gotham City, impacting every Batman title, particularly Nightwing — because he’s still in love with Oracle. Plus, the cops of Gotham Central are even more hostile towards the caped crusader than ever.

• Speaking of Nightwing, Starfire has quit the Teen Titans to join his team, the Outsiders, to try to help him cope with all the trauma in his life as of late.

• Speaking of the Titans, they’ve linked up with two other titles. Green Arrow’s sidekick, the new Speedy, has joined the team. A few months ago, the young heroes got caught up in a time-travel adventure that wound up restarting the entire universe for the Legion of Super-Heroes, and writer Mark Waid has promised that he and Barry Kitson are doing the new Legion as the official future of the DCU — it’s up to the other writers to get them there.

• In Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman title, we met the all-new (yet all-classic) Supergirl, who’s about to get her own title. There’s also a rumor that she may check in with the Teen Titans herself. Plus, Loeb is currently milking DC properties as diverse as Kamandi, Cinnamon, Jonah Hex and the Freedom Fighters for the current arc in that title. He’s brought back characters that haven’t been seen in years.

• In Wonder Woman’s title, she’s gone blind after a battle with Medusa. When she guest-appeared in Adventures of Superman, not only was she still blind, but she was wearing the same blindfold. Not too hard a trick, of course, since the two books share a writer, but it’ll be more impressive in a couple of months during a promised crossover with Flash.

• Speaking of crossovers and books with the same writer, Bloodhound wound up merged with Firestorm (both books by Dan Jolley) and the Monolith lent a hand against Solomon Grundy to Hawkman and Hawkgirl (two books by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray).

“Okay, Blake,” you’re saying, “We get your point. There are a lot of crossovers. So what?” My, you can be rude sometimes, did you know that?

Here’s the point of all this.

A few months ago a group of five writers, Brad Meltzer, Judd Winick, Greg Rucka, Geoff Johns and Jeph Loeb, conducted an interview where they promsied that they were building the future of the DC Universe. And if you look at the books I’ve mentioned, you see their names all over the place, along with other talented writers like Devin Grayson, Gail Simone, Marc Andreyko, Bill Willingham and others I will feel bad later for leaving out.

Clearly, this is going to be a monumental task, even looking ahead to promised events such as DC Countdown and the enigmatic Crisis 2.

Those stories are going to be the framework of the DC Universe of the future.

What we’re seeing now, across the entire line, is the foundation. We’re seeing the hints, the clues, the groundwork. And knowing that this is what we’re seeing, we get to have all the fun of watching as everything is put together.

Some people, I understand, don’t like continuity that tight. I know that. But for those of us who do, watching as it is created before our eyes is something really really incredible. Something amazing.

Something I once may have even called Marvelous.

FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: January 19, 2005

While we’re on the subject of those truly remarkable books, I have to give credit again to Geoff Johns for turning out the best comic book of the week, Teen Titans #20. Since the murder of his father and the death of his girlfriend in agonizingly short succession, Robin has tried to repress his emotions in an effort to prevent from becoming more like Batman (which was nice and ironic, since repressing his emotions only made him more like Batman). This issue dances around some action, but at its core is a heartfelt examination of a son’s grief and his desperate attempt to continue forging his own future, and not let it be determined for him.

Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People’s Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the Christmas-themed eBook A Long November. He’s also the co-host, with whoever the hell is available that week, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcast. E-mail him at BlakeMPetit@gmail.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page.

 

 

Classic EBI #87: The Shock of the New

In this week’s brand-new Everything But Imaginary column, I’m taking a long look at the divide between American, European, and Asian comics, and wondering if the digital frontier might not be the place where such divisions disappear.

Everything But Imaginary #395: The Cultural Divide

In this week’s Classic EBI, though, we’re going back to November of 2004, when I was sadly bemoaning the trouble new characters have finding an audience. Some things never change.

Everything But Imaginary #87: The Shock of the New

One complaint you can hear coming from virtually any comic book store is that there isn’t enough new product on the market. Everything is just another endless retread or another X-Men or Batman spin off or something that’s been seen a thousand times before. This is a legitimate complaint, one that I completely agree with, and one that is only midly diminished by the fact that whenever somebody does try something new, nobody buys it and it’s cancelled within 12 issues.

It seems a bit pointless to even dredge it up at this point, but that’s exactly what happened to CrossGen comics. They burst onto the scene in 2000 with a wave of fresh, original comic books, new characters, new styles, stories in nearly every imaginable genre… and then the whole thing fell apart because not enough people were willing to give something new a chance. Excellent comics like Abadazad, Route 666 and The Crossovers are lost to us now. We may never find out how Negation War would have ended. I may weep.

I have to give DC Comics the most credit, out of the Big Two, for being willing to try new properties these days, and for trying to let them find their audience, but sometimes it’s just not enough. It was announced with a whimper a few weeks ago that Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti and Phil Winslade’s The Monolith will end with issue #12. This is incredibly disappointing to me. It really was, in a way, the perfect “bridge” property — it took place in the DC Universe, so it wasn’t completely divorced from the familiar, but it wasn’t tied or linked to any preexisting DC character or concept, so it was easy enough for someone who’d never read a comic before to get into it.

The concept was smart and simple — a Hebrew golem, a good spirit given life in a body of clay — is found after decades of imprisonment and becomes a personal guardian for a down-on-her luck young woman in New York City. Maybe that’s what killed the book — the protagonist wasn’t really the Monolith himself, but Alice Cohen, the girl he protected.

Whatever the reason, this was a smart, well-done series, and its impending demise is really sad for me. If you can still hunt it down, do so. At only 12 issues for the entire run, it won’t break your bank, and it’s a title worth reading.

Other comics still have a chance. Bloodhound is another new DC property with no evident ties to existing comics. Written by Dan Jolley with art by the ex-Supergirl team of Leonard Kirk and Robin Riggs, this book follows Travis Clevenger, a cop who was sent to prison for killing his partner. Cleve is released from jail to help track down a superhuman killer.

Like The Monolith, Bloodhound takes place in the DCU (characters use LexCorp computer systems and Cleve is going to meet Firestorm soon), but it isn’t linked to any old property. Plus, it’s not a superhero comic, even tangentially. This is more of an action drama about a good cop gone bad trying to atone for his sins. It just happens to take place in a superhero world. Fans of Powers and Alias might find something to their liking if they give this one a try.

DC has had better luck, of course, with its Vertigo line. Quriky books like Preacher and Transmetropolitan were allowed to flourish, grow and tell the course of their stories, a trend that continues today with incredible titles like Fables and Y: The Last Man. Even books with tangential links to the Vertigo corner of the DC Universe, like The Witching, are given room to grow. [2011 Update: The cancellation of The Witching was announced shortly after this column was written.]

Over at Devil’s Due comics, the company best known for breathing new life into the 80s nostalgia genre with G.I. Joe and Voltron, they’ve got a few original projects of their own as well. Misplaced, a sci-fi romp, has been around for a while, and last week they launched their new superhero line, Aftermath. (There is a rule in comics that every company has to attempt its own superhero line within the first five years. This is why CrossGen heroically folded after four.)

Now the comic book industry needed another superhero line as badly as I need another Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese, but if they’re going to do one anyway, they got off to a pretty good start. Chuck Dixon (an old favorite writer of mine) kicked things off with Breakdown, an examination of a superhero whose life is falling apart.

Jeff Carey, a.k.a. Paragon, was one of those bright, shining superheroes that beat up on the bad guys and was a media darling, before his high profile and public identity exacted a terrible price on his wife and son. Shattered, he pieces himself back together. Although the first issue doesn’t explicitly say so, one gets the impression that this title will be Jeff’s quest for revenge. Not the happy-go-lucky superhero he once was, is he? In truth, the premise sounds an awful lot like The Punisher, only with superpowers, but the difference here is that Jeff was once a good, decent, likeable man, whereas Frank Castle was pretty much always a sociopath.

So what about Marvel? They’ve got young titles, right? They must have some new properties in there. Let’s see, what’s been around less than a year or two? Excalibur, She-Hulk, Astonishing X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, New X-Men: Academy X, Gambit, X-Men Unlimited, Marvel Age Spider-Man, X-Men Go Hawaiian… ooh, here it is! Runaways.

Here’s a product with no overt ties to any preexisting Marvel property — a bunch of teenagers who find out their parents are supervillains and go on the run. A simple concept, one well-loved, well-executed and well on its way to being cancelled.

Or is it?

In an uncharacteristic show of good sense, Marvel is giving this struggling remnant of the Tsunami line another chance as a “Season Two,” the same trick Wildstorm is playing with Sleeper. Now if only someone could persuade them to do a Sentinel Season Two (it’s loosely connected to the X-Men corner of the Marvel Universe, but it’s really a strong standalone comic), I would start giving Marvel a lot more credit for creativity.

I know we’re reluctant to drop money on an untested property. There are a lot of comics, after all. But next time you’re at the comic shop, look over your pull folder and see what you’ve got in there. Look at those 17 X-Men comics, nine of which suck. Then look at some of these new titles you’ve never tried, never heard of and don’t have an opinion about… yet.

And give something new a try.

FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: October 27, 2004

Solo #1 actually kind of fits into the discussion of new titles, which is what got me thinking along those lines in the first place. While it’s not exactly a new property, it is a new concept, an anthology title that DC Comics deserves a lot of credit for giving a chance. Each issue of this comic will feature a single artist given free reign to tell stories, alone or with writers, with established characters or with worlds of their own. Tim Sale took the challenge first, giving us really good takes on Catwoman, Batman, Supergirl and Superman, along with a few other stories, helped out by the likes of Jeph Loeb, Diana Schutz and Brian Azzarello. The quality of each issue of this title will no doubt depend on how good each featured artist is, but this opening installment was flat-out excellent. Fans of Batman: The Long Halloween and Superman For All Seasons should definitely give this book a shot.

Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People’s Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the Christmas-themed eBook A Long November. He’s also the co-host, with whoever the hell is available that week, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcast and the weekly audio fiction podcast Blake M. Petit’s Evercast. E-mail him at BlakeMPetit@gmail.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page, and check out his new experiment in serial fiction at Tales of the Curtain.