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

[Broccoli]

While I think it is more than 20 pages (given the $4 price), your point is noted. I'll wait for the trade.

[Nerys Myk]

20 pages of story plus more pages featuring a "behind the scenes" look at how the comic was made.

[Myasishchev]

Indeed. Story pages =/= pages of book. Not a typo.

[C_Miller]

Yeah the Behind the Scene pages of Justice League are the biggest rip off ever. I am not paying an extra dollar for a few pages I may flip through once. Biggest example of a money grab ever.

Also Johns' writing style is not meant to be read monthly. So decompressed and each issue is so insubstantial.

[Admiral_Young]

@Myasiachev speaking about the story page content issue (I forgot to address your comment after Action #2) I'm in total agreement with you here and think it is outrageous myself and yeah a few pages of extra content doesn't make up for the fact they're short changing us but for me personally at least I'm a sucker for that stuff so I liked it. That is the only reason I praised it last month.

[Myasishchev]

^Indeed. Although beyond that it's a decent enough comic. At $3, I'd give it a B (or B+ on a curve).

You know, I've been relatively uninterested in Babs Batgirl, but I was reading some of Cass Cain's series yesterday--Babs Gordon is in it a lot--and I'm actually sort of warming to the idea of getting rid of Oracle.

Now, I thought it was pretty great/important that they had a disabled character in a major role. Sure. On the other hand, Oracle--the concept--is a narrative cheat. Got a problem? Well, let's ask Oracle to look on the Internet to solve it. What does the inside of that enemy base look like? Let me download the schematics. Where did the criminals take their hostage? Kidnappers tweeted that they're at this address. Who is Lady Shiva? Let's look at her Facebook page.

The Net is vast.

P.S. Of course, this is also an excuse to bitch about a ten year old comic, and:
1)how that series abandons its central conceit of being about a feral human by issue five--how, you ask? through frustrating, time-compressed years of hard work? fuck no, Cassandra learns to speak because magic! and writing a character with no language is hard;
2)how even before that they seemed to confuse having no language with being mute or even worse, just not knowing English very well ("you don't understand what I'm saying, do you?" "no" WTF come on); and
3)that the art, until Eaglesham comes aboard, is both kind of bad and hilariously inappropriate--it's all cartoony and loose, because child abuse, murder, and death duels are the wackiest of subjects you can write about.

Oh, and I was thinking--this is the DC property they will never, ever make into a film. Can you imagine a movie with Cass Cain in it? Can you imagine the acting nightmare that would be? Full face mask and no words? It'd be amazing to watch someone pull that off, but they'd never try. Nell is no model for a successful action franchise.

[Admiral_Young]

Indeed. Joss Whedon can write and direct it and it would be called "Batgirl: Hush"

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I'm enjoying Action so much that I'll gladly pay four bucks for more like the first two issues; I don't give a shit about page count as long as I'm entertained.

I can't buy a cup of black coffee for a buck.

[Guy Gardener]

The new 52.

Batman Year One is a movie now.

Verbatim pratically from the comic book.

Motion comics are special, and it requires at least 6 times the art a regualar comic would with out the aid of Chinese child labour, unless you're going to have southparklike animation like with how they did with the Buffy Season 8 Motion Comic.

How many of the new 52 are going to at least become motion comics once you considert hat they have upteen thousands and thousands of digital subscribers who already have their bank accounts synced into DC directly.

All of them?

[Myasishchev]

I've never seen a full motion comic, but the wee bits I've seen look bizarre and unwieldy.

I was thinking about Batwoman earlier and how she was supposed to be a soldier (can those negatively affected by DADT go back now?), which would have involved, perforce, killing people with guns, or providing support for the killing of people with guns. My question is why does Batman care about lawful homicide when civilians do it but he does not care about someone who swore an oath to lawfully kill foreigners and enemy U.S. citizens under the auspices of the U.S. military? Shouldn't he be like, "Fuck you, take off that symbol, you were a murderer in training, blah blah blah I'm an asshole Gotham is mine"? At the very least, he should question her commitment to the no-kill rule, since obviously she was at least intellectually prepared to take lives. (Let's assume, of course, that the 100,000 incidences of severe trauma to the head, spine, and torso provided by expert Bat-martial artists never killed even one person.)

I mean, I guess he doesn't care when cops do it. He cares when other superheroes do it. Huge blindspot in his bullshit moral system, though, isn't it?

[Guy Gardener]

Superman Red Son is so good.

Killing because Uncle Sam says so, is a loop hole, but what about bad soldiers and bad wars?

Bruce Wayne has to be thinking about getting into private security across the world just to make sure it's done right so that Blackwater and others don't continue to run roughshot with the planet.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Myasishchev wrote:

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I've never seen a full motion comic, but the wee bits I've seen look bizarre and unwieldy.

Marvel was doing "motion comics" forty years ago:



They looked bizarre and unwieldy.

[sojourner]

Damn, comics shop missed half my pull from last week and their credit card system was down. No comics for me.

[the G-man]

sojourner wrote:

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Damn, comics shop missed half my pull from last week and their credit card system was down. No comics for me.

It's stuff like that which is having me move more and more toward iTunes comics

[Broccoli]

sojourner wrote:

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Damn, comics shop missed half my pull from last week and their credit card system was down. No comics for me.

Credit Card problem aside, I wonder how many of the comics you could have culled from the shelf.

I'm curious to see how sales do in the second month of the "New 52". As I referenced earlier, when I was in my comic shop on Monday, I noticed several of the #2s still on the shelves. I guess they could have been new printings and/or reorders.