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

You figured that out? I know people who investigated it for quite a while before coming to that conclusion.

Of course, besides "smoking pot" a lot of those kids poured into the streets determined to shut down cities to stop a war and wound up arrested en masse. A few of them were shot dead for protesting that war. And some of them bombed buildings. They were all naive, and some were just playing at being revolutionaries, some did or went on to do good as a result of their determination to make the world fairer - and some did evil things themselves.

 

And there's not a thing intrinsically immoral or lacking in morality about revolutionary action if you believe the institutions of society are evil or inherently obstructive to the good. You often find that kind of reasoning among young people.

BTW, nothing I said was meant to suggest that I "hung out" with anyone doing anything. "I grew up as part of a cohort many of whom decided" was meant as an alternative way of saying "grew up in a generation" used just to avoid an overly-familiar construction, and I can see that it's misleading and obtruse. I think I'll edit that.

 

Yeah, but how many of those bombardiers stopped because they both 1)were successfully changing the world and 2)had superpowers which rendered them invincible to most forms of neutralization?

Edit: my bad. "Cohort" conjures up a subunit of a legion to me, and thus people you associate with, but of course there's the sociological meaning. However, I got to sneak in a sweet namedrop.

 

But that does lead me back to what I was saying, that the world has to defeat Superman, at least to the extent that Superman must reconcile himself to the world always sort of sucking. Which is sort of sad. Say, is Grant Morrison writing about himself again?

That said, maybe it really would be sadder if Superman, of all people, never tried at all.

Okay, you're talking me into it a bit.

 

It doesn't matter that much, because that's only half of my point.

The other half being: Clark is a good human being by nature - or more accurately, by definition of the character.

No matter how powerful he becomes, he will never become corrupt or knowingly do evil. He's fundamentally different from you and me and those anti-war kids and the cops and everybody else.

I'm sorry - that is implausible, and as far as I'm concerned isn't made one bit more plausible by the long-time, oft-repeated insistence that because he was "raised with good values by good parents" he therefore has been a model citizen ever since he completed his toilet training early.

If you accept that goodness as part of the implausible definition of an impossible character, nothing in what Clark's doing in this story challenges or makes unlikely his evolution into a responsible Superman. Without it, no version of the character works believably except mayber Liefield's original version of Supreme.

As I said, given the course he's on now there's no trick at all to inventing events that will bring about the character epiphanies needed to make him Superman. I'm real interested to see how Morrison's going to do it, though. That's what telling a story is.

What happens to Clark when one of his "direct actions" turns out to be just flat out wrong and hurts an innocent person?

 

Agreed. I can't say I'm totally on board with what I've seen so far, but I think they have the right basic idea.

Actually I think a good middle ground would simply be the George Reeves Superman. On the surface he was the noble, upstanding role model of course, but when it actually came to knocking the bad guys around, you could definitely see a bit of an edge and moral crusader vibe to him.

It helps that he only really went up against bank robbers and other real world criminals.

 

All right. You've mostly convinced me. Someone was right on the Internet; you don't see that every day.

Ha, Supreme. I sorta liked that series. It's really a concept that hasn't been much explored, as compared to the Superman-becomes-a-dictator that got halfway done to death between Miracleman, Squadron Supreme, the Authority, and Red Son. "What if Superman had no code against killing or loyalty to any system, but he also had no social agenda, no particular affection for anyone or everyone, and were simply an ass?"

I especially liked the bit where he made a terrorist guy's head explode, and the other bit where he reduced the Doomsday/Mongul hybrid character (Khrome--I feel like I'm outing myself) to a walking collection of fleshless organs inside a nuclear reactor, then blew said organs apart. It might be because I read it when I was about eleven.

 

Riffing on the Cunnigham interview itself: yes, yes, there's no "indictment of marriage." It's just that none of us currently working in the industry really like chicks all that much if they're not busty and falling out of their costumes.

 

Unfortunately, that question has a real short and simple answer:

We're all screwed.

The fact that Liefield couldn't see how curtailed the story potential was there is just more evidence of his genius.

I see that in one of his panels for Hawk & Dove he once again does his high-angle shot of a guy "walking an invisible balance beam" for no reason at all. Has he ever actually watched human beings?

BTW, let's ponder for a moment the fact that we all know that real soon now Clark will acquire the ability to fly at super speeds and to change the course of rivers and hurricanes with his bare hands - but he doesn't know that. In fact he can't have any reason to suspect it, because no matter how fast he can run right now, no matter how many guys he can fight off, even though bullets can't hurt him, how can he imagine that he's going to grow up to be God?

 

You know, I was going to say that I feel bad for these guys' wives, but I'm reading it all wrong. What they're saying is that happiness is uninteresting to an outside observer, and the converse, that unhappiness is more interesting, and finally that marriage is identical to happiness.

So, really, now I'm just jealous. What a smug bastard!

I dunno. I thought Eric Stephenson handled it pretty entertainingly up until it got derailed by the Extreme Sacrifice crossover.

Plus, Brian Murray was probably the best artist in Liefeld's studio.

And, no, I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment. I liked Fraga and Mychaels too, although I really do wonder what happened to Murray, whom I recall as being actually kind of great.

He just has an idiosyncratic style!

No, although I can point to a period in his career where he had an idiosyncratic style. Before that, and after that, he just sucked. It was a really short window, basically between the start of the second Youngblood series and whenever he gave up on it. Actually, I guess that makes it a long window, although I think I'll run with "short" because releasing five or so issues in two years isn't something you call attention to when defending a guy.

 

I'm sure someone (possibly even myself) has brought up in the other relaunch thread but I thought I would suggest that people google up "Project Superman 2000" the pitch from Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Mark Millar, and Tom Peyer regarding their attempt to reboot the character for clues as to how this particular incarnation of the character and his supporting cast will be handled. It is a very interesting read.

 

And suddenly Superman has become a way more interesting character.

Yeah this is a big improvement over the usual "all moral god character who is boring".

 

I enjoyed Green Lantern interrogating Batman about his powers. "Are you freaking kidding me?"

Also "I figured it works by concentration. You...weren't concentrating."

 

I thought Justice League #1 was a lot of fun. Flashpoint #5 was the disappointment.

 

This preview is pretty neat. Superman originally started in an era when there were not a lot of ways to protect the common man from the whim of the rich and from big business. Seeing as how many in the US (and Canadian) Government wish to return to this era, it seems like a great moment for Superman to return to his original form.

Also, the original Superman never had Ma and Pa Kent to teach him right from wrong. He was raised in an orphanage. Any word on how this versions adopted parents will fit into the picture?

 

Morrison says both Kents are dead by the time Superman makes his debut, but they did provide the basis of his moral outlook.

The Kents adopting him has been part of the Superman story since ( the original ) Superman #1 from 1939.

 

The is a nice Wikipedia summary here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_and_Martha_Kent

So we are basically going back to the pre-Crisis status of the Kents.

 

Morrison is a notoriously slow writer and for some reason he's always put with extremely slow artists. I'd say 2 is about all he can handle and I hope that he's pretty far ahead on Incorporated or Action Comics.

 

I agree. I really like the idea of taking the character's real origins in the 1930s and adapting the early stories and outlook to make that part of his current back-story and continuity.

And I think it works a little better in this decade than it might have, oh, thirty or forty years ago when showing him as a rebel and defiant of authority would have seemed more self-conscious and forced. As an example of the latter, look now at O'Neill's Green Lantern/Green Arrow "road" stories. As much as we may admire them they're also heavy-handed and determinedly "hip."

IIRC, his original origins and early adventures were somewhat adapted to serve as Kal-L's, weren't they? In the mid-1980s DC published a "Secret Origins" story for the Earth-2 Superman incorporating things like his busting into the governor's mansion to secure a pardon for a wrongly-convicted death row inmate, etc.

Among other things, Byrne adjusted Clark's status quo to reflect a little more of the common experience of young people in our time - most twenty-somethings (or thirty or forty or even fifty-somethings) have one or both parents living and active in their own lives. Blame that on penicillin. OTOH, whether it's integral to their origins or not (as it is with Batman) the orphan status of the hero is part of the origin of quite a number of the most popular superheroes - Spider-Man, for example, in addition to Bruce and Clark.

 

What about the Green Lantern title?

Is Hal Jordan the Green Lantern because the description of the title implies that the title character may be somebody else?