DC's New 52: Reviews and Discussion (Spoilers welcolme and likely)

But they are funny deliberately or not and certainly better than his current work. Here is some of Byrne's greatest hits .

 

Wow. Harlan Ellison has nothing compared to John Byrne!

Birthright's story wasn't that bad overall. I think it is the art that really kills it.

The other problem with Birthright is that none of the major changes that it established were incorporated into the then-current Superman mythology all that well if at all. It made Birthright just seem like a one-off, out of continuity story.

 

Actually the friendship between Lex and Clark was. It was about the only thing that was kept from it since Johns retconned Clark's origin to feature the Legion and Chloe

 

I thought Birthright was a great kind of rethinking of Superman's origin. A good modernization. I will say I liked it better than Man of Steel (didn't like Byrne's depiction of Krypton, though I did like most everything else). I must say, I do like Clark and Lex being friends, which is one of the few Smallville things I actually really like.

 

I don't buy that, as far as I'm aware the birthing matrix is in there simply because Byrne's version of Kryptonians are a straight forward lift of Asimov's Spacers (Specifically the Solarians) and so he similarly lifts their method of conception.

 

Did they use that specific term, too? Birth matrix? ETA: I looked it up and they fucked for a while until they became hermaphrodites. You will believe a man can have two sets of genitalia? Actually, I already did, but that's beside the point. And that doesn't make a lot of sense; if you were engineering it, I imagine you'd keep it simpler and just engineer women capable of clonal reproduction at will, or through external hormonal treatment, not a hermaphrodite capable of sperming themself like a banana slug. And if you can crate a "transducer lobe," I don't think this is a bridge too far...

Anyway, yeah, I can totally see the lift though--from telekinesis to the phobia of contact. It also seems very familiar to me from more contemporary SF, specifically the neohumans in Houllebecq's Possibility of an Island, and while I suppose he might have read Man of Steel (iirc, Houllebecq read American comics as a kid) he far likelier got it from Asimov.

But I dunno. I was thinking about it a little more and it made me wonder if that's why Matrix Supergirl was named Matrix, and he had different plans originally. I mean, "birth matrix" makes semantic sense, "Matrix the shapeshifter" less so, and you'd think you'd eschew using the same word for different concepts if you didn't intend to tie the concepts together.

Then again, I'm just blue-skying and probably projecting my own ideas onto that.

 

That's something from later books - Byrne seems to lift directly from one text - The Naked Sun, I can't remember what they actually call it and I don't have a copy to hand (anyone?)

She was called the 'protoplasmic matrix' and that was shorten to Matrix. I think Bryne just likes the term because of it's biological meaning.

 

Yeah but Dude, Dad does build interstellar spaceships in the garage. There's a definite cool factor, there.


Byrne's narrow-minded, arrogant and not much of a thinker and there's no reason to pretend that's not so. None of which has much to do with how well he draws.

 

I wonder if Morrison is going to bring back Beppo? There is a lot of fun to be hand from a monkey that can throw it's poop at super-speed.

 

I liked the little story in Action 900 (drawn by Ryan Sook, who is a little like Greg Land if Land were talented and not a copyright violator) where Jor's a drunk who looks like an off-his-feed Aragorn and hires a guy to build the ship for him.

A bit overshadowed by Superman becoming a communist agent in the Goyer story, though.

 

Last Night I read Justice League Dark and I must say that outside Madame Xanadu, Constantine and Zatanna I wasn't sure who or what else to expect.
Shade the Changing Man?!?! Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time and to top it, I know nothing AT ALL of the character. Xanadu I really don't either but between this and Demon Knights I'm going to get to know her.
The art was beautiful, well done. The cameo by the JL was modest.
I'll be picking this up, especially if the art team stays through the first arc.

 

JL Dark #1 had the only actual modern appearance of the Justice League this entire month, right?

 

Wow. Catwoman #1 was... odd.

I think I sort of liked what it wanted to do between the first-person narrative and showing Selena Kyle's ways but I think they also went too far in other respects. I mean she ambushes the guy in the bathroom, we get the splash page with her all bendy and hot. Then she attacks him, the person she knocked out to pose as comes-to and then like in a couple of panels she's just busting her way through the Russian dive as Catwoman.

It just seems like an oddly "paced" book and the action panels aren't quite as well presented as the beauty panels and dialogue ones. Not that I find anything necessarily wrong with it but it seems like the bulk of the artistic talent just went into drawing Selna/Catwoman as well as possible and everything else was pretty much an after thought.

 

I liked the part I saw where she slices a guy with her fingernails. Because that's what cats do, right?*

I'm sure there was another page after that where she actually does something that could kill him.

Right?

*Not to speak of. My impression is that cats pin their prey and sever their spinal cords with their jaws. Did Selina do that? This comic may be worth getting after all.

 

The slashing panel you saw occurs after she head-checks the guy into a bathroom sink basin (I think cvats do that), then she slashes at him a couple of times before having to leave due to possibly making noise and the sedative wearing off the bartender -whom she is posing as to infiltrate a Russian mob hangout.

At the very least the comic is worth the "fan service" in it, but the story it's hard to tell at this point as this issue was sort of the pre-credits sequence.

I also, finally, got Batman #1, this one I liked a lot more than The Dark Knight, though I sort of hoped they'd do away with all of the variations of Robin and just stick with Dick Grayson or no Robin at all. The style of the comic is better than TDK's and I liked Bruce's inner monologue in this book. (I also liked the 1989 Batmobile being seen in the Batcav. Commissioner Gordon also looks a bit like Gary Oldman's version of the character which a nice touch.

It also seems like it has an interesting story it wants to build, again, I liked Batman #1 better than TDK#1, sooner or later I should get DC#1.

Oh, also liked Batman's use of gadgetry (including the exposition ear/eye piece) in this comic.

 

Dan DiDio has tweeted that no Crisis events have occurred in the 52 Verse! LOL...

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/10/01/all-crisis-events-removed-from-dc-continuity/

 

Rob Liefeld blew it, then; he mentioned a Crisis event in "Hawk and Dove" #1. Of course, it's not unusual for Liefeld to be a screw up.

But to be "serious", this leads to more potential clues of the existence of Wally West. If Barry Allen never died in a Crisis, then Wally West probably never became the Flash.

Also, the lack of the original Crisis would mean that the unlimited multiverse still exists; but they do have that one sticky bit about the Anti-Monitor mattering in modern Green Lantern stories. Then there's Final Crisis which is pretty important to Batman Incorporated and Dick's time as Batman (both already mentioned in DCnU).

I just don't think Didio thinks much of this stuff through; he just throws crap in the air and tells Geoff Johns to clean it up.

 

No, because the relaunch holds open the possibility that no such multiverse ever did exist.

 

Except that, if Flashpoint is considered, it did.

 

Flashpoint's done. If they don't refer to the multiverse again, it's not functionally a part of the nuDC universe. Nothing can be inferred from past continuity at this point, because now it's all changed as much as they decide they want to change it.

Don't worry, I'm sure that in the long run they'll drag just about everything from the last seventy years into the new comics in one form or another - it's the way these things work. After the reins are loosened a little, every writer who comes along has some favorite bit from an old comic that they want to resurrect in some way.

That doesn't mean, though, that the retelling will resemble the original. They managed to get the Earth Three supervillains back in after the Crisis, after all, though now they were on Earth Two.