Comics: DC Relaunch & Infinite Crisis
Jul. 19th, 2011 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaYes, folks, I'm still on a comics bender. I thank you for your tolerance.
A while back I posted me and K's proposed list of Comics to Get when DC Relaunches which wasn't as many comics as we could afford and we were toying over which other comics to get, like, stuff that we wanted to give a shot or were kind of curious about but not sure about, that kind of thing. We ended up with twelve monthly titles because that'll be enough less than £30 a month that I can still pick up Farscape comics, or Star Wars series (I used to get a few monthly but Dark Horse canceled my favourites and the ones I like run alternating arcs every few months now), or the odd one-shot without going over budget.
This whole buying superhero comics monthly instead of picking up trade paperbacks YEARS after the fact because the new ones always look so expensive is new to me, and K hasn't done it since he was in high school. So. We will see how it goes. But at the moment, I'm really enjoying being a comics geek - I'm feeling good about being randomly picky about what I read and just...going on a mad dash reading about chicks in capes and occasionally Superman (and occasionally Batman, but only under protest and with a lot of laughter).
SO ANYWAYS. For posterity, I'm gonna post Chez Becka's list of Comics. Some of you will be pleased to note I took suggestions on at least one addition. ;)
Justice League
Justice League International
Wonder Woman
The Savage Hawkman
Mr Terrific
Supergirl
Batgirl
Batwoman
Batwing
Catwoman
Green Lantern Corps
Stormwatch.
The Savage Hawkman is one K threw in there at the last minute as a "why the hell not!" since neither of us really know anything about him. Justice League International is one of mine that I'm a bit ambivalent about. I'm kind of pissed about three of the characters (why does Batman need to be in YET ANOTHER BOOK, why does Booster Gold get to have his low-selling solo title canceled only to be put in charge of the JLI, while Power Girl gets her low selling title canceled only to ALSO have her team retconned from existence, and honestly, every white Green Lantern gets to be in a title where they are the only Green Lantern, while John Stewart, who is African-American, has to share top billing with...a guy who is also already in JLI?), but I'm really excited about four of the characters, (August General in Iron? Communist Superheroes? Yay! Fire and Ice apparently have an awesome female friendship and I know nothing about Vixen and clearly that needs to be fixed). So I'm like...half expecting to quit this title in annoyance, but I do think I should give it a shot. Stormwatch is another one I know nothing about but is on there from recommendations from friends, as is Batwoman. K also threw in Batwing because he was going to get one of the Batman titles (since he's a huge fan) but none of the blurbs really grabbed him and he figured Batwing sounded kinda interesting and probably needed the readership more.
Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of "Gotham" stories. The dark, gritty, grim side of the DC universe. Urban legends instead of the stuff of myths. They're the sorts of stories that rise and fall on the protagonists for me because the stories themselves, while I would never dismiss the skill it takes to write them well, are just never going to be exactly what I come to comics for. I don't read comics for dark, frightening stories. I would live in Metropolis, not Gotham. I can go into that world and I can appreciate them - hell, there are some really good Batstories out there. Just, broadly speaking, it's never going to be my favourite thing. I'm excited for Batgirl on the strength of the writer and what I like about Barbara Gordon (who, let's face it, is unusually positive in her reasons for crimefighting; most of the Bats do it because of tortured personal history, but she doesn't and can be kind of a goofball - at least as Batgirl - despite ferocious competence), more than because I like the idea of a Batgirl. (Whereas I like the idea of a Supergirl; I also like Kara Zor-El).
So like...I think that Stormwatch has that same gritty universe element. So, I'm not sure how I'll like it? But I am interested in it because of how it was recommended to me and also because it's folding a whole new mythos into the DC universe since it's being taken in from the Wildstorm imprint. Similarly, I'm uncertain how I'll respond to Batwing and Batwoman, but I'll give them a go. I really know nothing about Batwing. Batwoman I know has a killer awesome artist, so at least it will be pretty, I mean the art for her initial run is just phenomenal, but I haven't actually read it yet (it's next on my list). It is written by the fantastic Greg Rucka though, so again, that gives me hope that her character will anchor me into her world.
Aaaaaand, that's what I'm getting.
Meanwhile, I've continued my mad, selective dash through the DC universe and I've read both the Supergirl run (which I'd read part of before) and the Infinite Crisis event (though not all its tie-ins).
I present brief reviews!
Supergirl
Okay so this is the version of Supergirl that started in 2005. So like, Kara Zor-El, Superman's cousin, rather than Linda Danvers and that whole Earthbound Angel thing which I never really got into. Though I did like that one graphic novel where there was the crossover between her and Kara from the Silver Age. Anyway, I'm babbling.
I'd read what turns out to be the middle of that run before, and I liked it. It was basically what solidified Kara's character in my head for me. The thing about her is that she's an orphaned, alien teenager who behaves...like a teenager. But the other thing about her is that I don't think there's any narrative merit in writing anyone in the Superman Family as anything other than, on a fundamental level, noble. And the arcs I read are interesting in that regard because if she makes mistakes, they are in service to a massive, driving desire to help, but she is also headstrong and confident enough that she's not just following Superman's lead. I liked that her convictions took her to strange places, that she considered things from different angles. It wasn't perhaps always explained that clearly, but the best way I can express it is that she doesn't understand Superman's insistence on adhering to a policy of non-interference. He'll save a man falling from a building, but he won't try to teach that man not to fall in the first place, and to try and teach him to fly would be unthinkable. But Supergirl would think it.
Anyway, there were some interesting arcs in the middle there with her trying to cure a little boy with terminal cancer and refusing to give up even after he died because of time-travel and super science and a conviction that just because it's weird to human sensibilities doesn't make it wrong and the suggestion that she'll fundamentally alter the flow of human history was cool.
But anyway, then I read the rest of the series and bits of it are terrible and bits of it are okay but none of it really sings.
Honestly the start is godawful. Like at the time, I kept trying to make excuses for it and like it? But it's just bizarre. The writer was trying to do all sorts of weird, dark stuff, and honestly, after the writer changed, it literally retconned half the shit she did and felt as the results of rare Kryptonite poisoning which is hilarious and depressing. The opening twenty or so issues really did feel...I don't know. As I just said, one of the things I like about her is her independence and that she isn't a child who follows someone else's lead, but she was also a sixteen year old who'd just been orphaned and was clearly spinning out of control and I did spend issue after issue wanting to yell WHERE ARE YOUR PARENTS? WHY IS NO ONE PARENTING YOU? YOU NEED A DAMN HUG WHETHER YOU WANT IT OR NOT.
So whatever, the run under the first writer is pretty awful. Then we get to the trades I read which were kinda cool.
Then the whole thing gets hijacked by the whole New Krypton arc that ran through the Superman, Supergirl, Action Comics, Adventure Comics (I think?) AND its own various mini series and honestly it was just the worst example of why I don't like that sort of thing. Sometimes you can do that well - and still make a series feel like it's telling its own stories, but in this case, it just felt like I was getting a fifth of the story. And honestly, it's a shame because I think the writers did the best they could, and because there IS some genuinely interesting stuff for Kara here, with her parents and her world temporarily returned to her, her decision not to abandon either her adopted home or her increasingly unstable mother is interesting and the kind of...combination of nobility and will with teenage angst that I like.
But it suffers - through the fault of the DC editorial department, I'd guess - from being so fragmented it's reasonably hard to follow anything but the broad outlines of the storyline by just reading Supergirl. But it also suffers in that I would have found the storyline about Supergirl's self-doubt and confusion about her role as hero and ending up distanced from her real and adopted family, so much more compelling (since it was competently done here) if we hadn't only just gotten out of the really awful initial run that handled that so badly. So it felt like, we escaped the bad first run, got a few good arcs that somewhat fixed it, only to immediately rehash stuff.
I do find myself wondering how it would have played if I just hadn't bothered reading that initial run but whatever. I think I still would have been annoyed at the disjointed way the story went, and given it continued for like a year, it was a pretty long time to be reading less than half a story.
And after that it's been better, like it's been fine. It's been fairly good but not spectacular. With the weird exception of the three-issue Bizarro arc which I actually found really quite compelling, which surprised me given I usually haaaaaaate Bizarro stuff.
So. There you have it. There are a couple of great arcs, and a really intriguing character hiding among an authorial tendency to focus on teen angst instead of a teenager dealing difficult situations.
NEXT UP, Infinite Crisis.
Okay so first off two things. 1) I like, ideologically, the way that DC tends to metatextually explain its various reboots in quasi-fourth-wall breaking storylines. 2) I am prepared to not get every reference in a big crossover event like this.
That said, I really feel this story was...a lot of good ideas wasted in execution. There's just too much here, and there's no time to linger on any of the important beats or tell a really coherent emotional storyline.
They needed to make the series longer or simplify it or find a way to hang more of the pertinent plot points of fewer plot threads and just relegate more of the characters to only being in tie-in also-ran mini series that are referenced very lightly in the main comic.
One of the reasons I was even interested in reading this was because I wanted to see more of the fallout of Wonder Woman killing Maxwell Lord, which is a story point I love. And I knew that one of the plot threads of Infinite Crisis was supposed to be the DC Trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman falling out with each other. So I own that I came to this comic with those expectations. And also that Wonder Woman is the only comic of the era I really have read that much of, like, right around the time of the crisis. But, I think that's useful to illustrate some of what I'm talking about in terms of sacrificing emotional resonance because there's too much crammed in there.
In the Wonder Woman comic, we see Diana fighting the OMACs on Themiscyra. We see the process of her decision to tell her sisters to retreat with the Gods but leave her behind. It's actually an incredibly moving sequence - something I really wanted to cap for the picspam I recently did, but couldn't distill it to a few panels.
In Infinite Crisis, this event is basically retold in about a page and a half and it's so mechanical. Diana's decision to stay behind seems oddly arbitrary without context. And of course some of this is because in Wonder Woman's comic, we also have the context of thirty issues of story building up to that point. But a lot of it is because we're seeing it in such short form.
Knowing that, it made me wonder what else in the series was a short retelling of something bigger and more important from an individual comic. Like what happens to Bludhaven with Nightwing, or the Flash storyline that is...really hard to follow just from the comic itself.
Sure, there are a bunch of really nice character moments sprinkled throughout - I don't want to take away from that. But overall, the series felt expository. It felt like it existed to tie together all the other series into a single narrative (and then this happened, and then that happened, and then this happened), like the story equivalent of the villain explaining his plan. It makes sense and I can follow the plot, but I don't care as much as I should or would like to. And the things that do occur solely in this comic - at least I assume - such as Power Girl's recollection of her lost life - really are quite good, but wedged between so much else, even if it doesn't get lost, even if it doesn't need more space (and I'd argue most of it does), it feels off balance in the hail of references to other events that feels like a constant barrage of "previouslies" from the start of a television show.
To an extent I think that the authors are in a no win situation here. I am not coming at this as one of their core demographic, and I know that if I read more of these series, I would probably get more out of seeing them so explicitly tied together. That said, I didn't feel that way about references to Wonder Woman's series; I mostly felt miffed it wasn't as cool without the context and all truncated like that.
As I said, I think it needed to be leaner and quieter and probably it should have focused exclusively on Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman. Any of the rest of the stuff should either have been told in a different series, with very sparse references to each at key points so a reader of both knows how they link up, or the writers should have worked out how to hang those events into the main storyline.
Moving away from structure to a more personal issue I had - I disliked their characterisation of Diana in the first issue.
As I said, I love that she killed Maxwell Lord. I think it was really well-handled, it's a genuinely interesting question, and frankly, I find what she did fairly unassailable and yet understand why it was so poorly received by everyone. I think Batman and Superman's reactions do not necessarily shed a very favourable light on them, but I loved Wonder Woman's quiet acceptance of that, but far more than that, I loved that she refused to apologise or say she was wrong to do it.
She regrets that she had to do it, but not that she did it. And that's a difference that goes to the core of her character, I think.
So I really liked when she first shows up in Infinite Crisis and she and Batman and Superman are being very blunt with each other. But then out of nowhere Superman is stopping her from killing another supervillain? Like, what? That...really threw me because, well honestly because the REST of the series doesn't have Diana in it that much but what she is in is fine - like, again it tends to focus on her being fairly together, and she doesn't ever recant her actions.
And I did like the bit at the end where Batman has a gun to Alexander Luthor and is asking him what it is he deserves, and Wonder Woman throws down her sword and is like, "it's not worth it," and Batman just sighs and goes, "I know". Because that is a great way to show that they weren't going to kill him. That they both understand that's not something to do lightly, and it ties in a lot with the themes of failure and exhaustion that run throughout. And if only she'd not had that really weird sudden earlier apparent desire to just start killing supervillains randomly it'd play like that. But as it is, it's...at least open to being interpreted as her having changed her mind.
And like...EITHER WAY we needed more time with her to see that.
Which is, I guess, my complaint. I know that my expectations were skewed because it's one of the reasons I read it, but I really don't think they spent anywhere near enough time on the dissolution of the Trinity and them coming back together. In Rucka's run, Wonder Woman slowly loses everything. And while, yes, there is a lot of feeling for her evoked in the text, it's also about a...narrative undercurrent to her story. It's about that isolation being a thematic, atmospheric issue, constantly. I feel she is alone, that she is losing people, in that run, in a visceral way. I don't get that in this run. They fall out, go their separate ways, fight their separate fights, and yes, eventually have a few reunions scenes that are quite nice, but I don't get a sense of...the loss of not having each other to rely on in the meantime. I don't know how it's affecting them, how they are doing things differently that they wouldn't otherwise do. And if this is supposed to be a story about that, that's...at the very least a huge missed opportunity.
Plus, DEAR LORD WHY WAS DIANA TRYING TO KILL THAT GUY. Ugh. I just...the Maxwell Lord thing was so clever BECAUSE it wasn't just a case of, "he's a villain who I have determined deserves death because he'll try to kill us again in the future". It was clever because it wasn't that old question of whether or not Batman should kill the Joker. It was a very specific situation that involved a man she knew there was not even the possibility of containing safely, and when she knew that for an absolute fact. So just...blargh. That was dorky. I choose to ignore it.
In sum: it was okay (weird Diana moment aside), but mostly it just felt more like a plot outline than an actual story.
A while back I posted me and K's proposed list of Comics to Get when DC Relaunches which wasn't as many comics as we could afford and we were toying over which other comics to get, like, stuff that we wanted to give a shot or were kind of curious about but not sure about, that kind of thing. We ended up with twelve monthly titles because that'll be enough less than £30 a month that I can still pick up Farscape comics, or Star Wars series (I used to get a few monthly but Dark Horse canceled my favourites and the ones I like run alternating arcs every few months now), or the odd one-shot without going over budget.
This whole buying superhero comics monthly instead of picking up trade paperbacks YEARS after the fact because the new ones always look so expensive is new to me, and K hasn't done it since he was in high school. So. We will see how it goes. But at the moment, I'm really enjoying being a comics geek - I'm feeling good about being randomly picky about what I read and just...going on a mad dash reading about chicks in capes and occasionally Superman (and occasionally Batman, but only under protest and with a lot of laughter).
SO ANYWAYS. For posterity, I'm gonna post Chez Becka's list of Comics. Some of you will be pleased to note I took suggestions on at least one addition. ;)
Justice League
Justice League International
Wonder Woman
The Savage Hawkman
Mr Terrific
Supergirl
Batgirl
Batwoman
Batwing
Catwoman
Green Lantern Corps
Stormwatch.
The Savage Hawkman is one K threw in there at the last minute as a "why the hell not!" since neither of us really know anything about him. Justice League International is one of mine that I'm a bit ambivalent about. I'm kind of pissed about three of the characters (why does Batman need to be in YET ANOTHER BOOK, why does Booster Gold get to have his low-selling solo title canceled only to be put in charge of the JLI, while Power Girl gets her low selling title canceled only to ALSO have her team retconned from existence, and honestly, every white Green Lantern gets to be in a title where they are the only Green Lantern, while John Stewart, who is African-American, has to share top billing with...a guy who is also already in JLI?), but I'm really excited about four of the characters, (August General in Iron? Communist Superheroes? Yay! Fire and Ice apparently have an awesome female friendship and I know nothing about Vixen and clearly that needs to be fixed). So I'm like...half expecting to quit this title in annoyance, but I do think I should give it a shot. Stormwatch is another one I know nothing about but is on there from recommendations from friends, as is Batwoman. K also threw in Batwing because he was going to get one of the Batman titles (since he's a huge fan) but none of the blurbs really grabbed him and he figured Batwing sounded kinda interesting and probably needed the readership more.
Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of "Gotham" stories. The dark, gritty, grim side of the DC universe. Urban legends instead of the stuff of myths. They're the sorts of stories that rise and fall on the protagonists for me because the stories themselves, while I would never dismiss the skill it takes to write them well, are just never going to be exactly what I come to comics for. I don't read comics for dark, frightening stories. I would live in Metropolis, not Gotham. I can go into that world and I can appreciate them - hell, there are some really good Batstories out there. Just, broadly speaking, it's never going to be my favourite thing. I'm excited for Batgirl on the strength of the writer and what I like about Barbara Gordon (who, let's face it, is unusually positive in her reasons for crimefighting; most of the Bats do it because of tortured personal history, but she doesn't and can be kind of a goofball - at least as Batgirl - despite ferocious competence), more than because I like the idea of a Batgirl. (Whereas I like the idea of a Supergirl; I also like Kara Zor-El).
So like...I think that Stormwatch has that same gritty universe element. So, I'm not sure how I'll like it? But I am interested in it because of how it was recommended to me and also because it's folding a whole new mythos into the DC universe since it's being taken in from the Wildstorm imprint. Similarly, I'm uncertain how I'll respond to Batwing and Batwoman, but I'll give them a go. I really know nothing about Batwing. Batwoman I know has a killer awesome artist, so at least it will be pretty, I mean the art for her initial run is just phenomenal, but I haven't actually read it yet (it's next on my list). It is written by the fantastic Greg Rucka though, so again, that gives me hope that her character will anchor me into her world.
Aaaaaand, that's what I'm getting.
Meanwhile, I've continued my mad, selective dash through the DC universe and I've read both the Supergirl run (which I'd read part of before) and the Infinite Crisis event (though not all its tie-ins).
I present brief reviews!
Supergirl
Okay so this is the version of Supergirl that started in 2005. So like, Kara Zor-El, Superman's cousin, rather than Linda Danvers and that whole Earthbound Angel thing which I never really got into. Though I did like that one graphic novel where there was the crossover between her and Kara from the Silver Age. Anyway, I'm babbling.
I'd read what turns out to be the middle of that run before, and I liked it. It was basically what solidified Kara's character in my head for me. The thing about her is that she's an orphaned, alien teenager who behaves...like a teenager. But the other thing about her is that I don't think there's any narrative merit in writing anyone in the Superman Family as anything other than, on a fundamental level, noble. And the arcs I read are interesting in that regard because if she makes mistakes, they are in service to a massive, driving desire to help, but she is also headstrong and confident enough that she's not just following Superman's lead. I liked that her convictions took her to strange places, that she considered things from different angles. It wasn't perhaps always explained that clearly, but the best way I can express it is that she doesn't understand Superman's insistence on adhering to a policy of non-interference. He'll save a man falling from a building, but he won't try to teach that man not to fall in the first place, and to try and teach him to fly would be unthinkable. But Supergirl would think it.
Anyway, there were some interesting arcs in the middle there with her trying to cure a little boy with terminal cancer and refusing to give up even after he died because of time-travel and super science and a conviction that just because it's weird to human sensibilities doesn't make it wrong and the suggestion that she'll fundamentally alter the flow of human history was cool.
But anyway, then I read the rest of the series and bits of it are terrible and bits of it are okay but none of it really sings.
Honestly the start is godawful. Like at the time, I kept trying to make excuses for it and like it? But it's just bizarre. The writer was trying to do all sorts of weird, dark stuff, and honestly, after the writer changed, it literally retconned half the shit she did and felt as the results of rare Kryptonite poisoning which is hilarious and depressing. The opening twenty or so issues really did feel...I don't know. As I just said, one of the things I like about her is her independence and that she isn't a child who follows someone else's lead, but she was also a sixteen year old who'd just been orphaned and was clearly spinning out of control and I did spend issue after issue wanting to yell WHERE ARE YOUR PARENTS? WHY IS NO ONE PARENTING YOU? YOU NEED A DAMN HUG WHETHER YOU WANT IT OR NOT.
So whatever, the run under the first writer is pretty awful. Then we get to the trades I read which were kinda cool.
Then the whole thing gets hijacked by the whole New Krypton arc that ran through the Superman, Supergirl, Action Comics, Adventure Comics (I think?) AND its own various mini series and honestly it was just the worst example of why I don't like that sort of thing. Sometimes you can do that well - and still make a series feel like it's telling its own stories, but in this case, it just felt like I was getting a fifth of the story. And honestly, it's a shame because I think the writers did the best they could, and because there IS some genuinely interesting stuff for Kara here, with her parents and her world temporarily returned to her, her decision not to abandon either her adopted home or her increasingly unstable mother is interesting and the kind of...combination of nobility and will with teenage angst that I like.
But it suffers - through the fault of the DC editorial department, I'd guess - from being so fragmented it's reasonably hard to follow anything but the broad outlines of the storyline by just reading Supergirl. But it also suffers in that I would have found the storyline about Supergirl's self-doubt and confusion about her role as hero and ending up distanced from her real and adopted family, so much more compelling (since it was competently done here) if we hadn't only just gotten out of the really awful initial run that handled that so badly. So it felt like, we escaped the bad first run, got a few good arcs that somewhat fixed it, only to immediately rehash stuff.
I do find myself wondering how it would have played if I just hadn't bothered reading that initial run but whatever. I think I still would have been annoyed at the disjointed way the story went, and given it continued for like a year, it was a pretty long time to be reading less than half a story.
And after that it's been better, like it's been fine. It's been fairly good but not spectacular. With the weird exception of the three-issue Bizarro arc which I actually found really quite compelling, which surprised me given I usually haaaaaaate Bizarro stuff.
So. There you have it. There are a couple of great arcs, and a really intriguing character hiding among an authorial tendency to focus on teen angst instead of a teenager dealing difficult situations.
NEXT UP, Infinite Crisis.
Okay so first off two things. 1) I like, ideologically, the way that DC tends to metatextually explain its various reboots in quasi-fourth-wall breaking storylines. 2) I am prepared to not get every reference in a big crossover event like this.
That said, I really feel this story was...a lot of good ideas wasted in execution. There's just too much here, and there's no time to linger on any of the important beats or tell a really coherent emotional storyline.
They needed to make the series longer or simplify it or find a way to hang more of the pertinent plot points of fewer plot threads and just relegate more of the characters to only being in tie-in also-ran mini series that are referenced very lightly in the main comic.
One of the reasons I was even interested in reading this was because I wanted to see more of the fallout of Wonder Woman killing Maxwell Lord, which is a story point I love. And I knew that one of the plot threads of Infinite Crisis was supposed to be the DC Trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman falling out with each other. So I own that I came to this comic with those expectations. And also that Wonder Woman is the only comic of the era I really have read that much of, like, right around the time of the crisis. But, I think that's useful to illustrate some of what I'm talking about in terms of sacrificing emotional resonance because there's too much crammed in there.
In the Wonder Woman comic, we see Diana fighting the OMACs on Themiscyra. We see the process of her decision to tell her sisters to retreat with the Gods but leave her behind. It's actually an incredibly moving sequence - something I really wanted to cap for the picspam I recently did, but couldn't distill it to a few panels.
In Infinite Crisis, this event is basically retold in about a page and a half and it's so mechanical. Diana's decision to stay behind seems oddly arbitrary without context. And of course some of this is because in Wonder Woman's comic, we also have the context of thirty issues of story building up to that point. But a lot of it is because we're seeing it in such short form.
Knowing that, it made me wonder what else in the series was a short retelling of something bigger and more important from an individual comic. Like what happens to Bludhaven with Nightwing, or the Flash storyline that is...really hard to follow just from the comic itself.
Sure, there are a bunch of really nice character moments sprinkled throughout - I don't want to take away from that. But overall, the series felt expository. It felt like it existed to tie together all the other series into a single narrative (and then this happened, and then that happened, and then this happened), like the story equivalent of the villain explaining his plan. It makes sense and I can follow the plot, but I don't care as much as I should or would like to. And the things that do occur solely in this comic - at least I assume - such as Power Girl's recollection of her lost life - really are quite good, but wedged between so much else, even if it doesn't get lost, even if it doesn't need more space (and I'd argue most of it does), it feels off balance in the hail of references to other events that feels like a constant barrage of "previouslies" from the start of a television show.
To an extent I think that the authors are in a no win situation here. I am not coming at this as one of their core demographic, and I know that if I read more of these series, I would probably get more out of seeing them so explicitly tied together. That said, I didn't feel that way about references to Wonder Woman's series; I mostly felt miffed it wasn't as cool without the context and all truncated like that.
As I said, I think it needed to be leaner and quieter and probably it should have focused exclusively on Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman. Any of the rest of the stuff should either have been told in a different series, with very sparse references to each at key points so a reader of both knows how they link up, or the writers should have worked out how to hang those events into the main storyline.
Moving away from structure to a more personal issue I had - I disliked their characterisation of Diana in the first issue.
As I said, I love that she killed Maxwell Lord. I think it was really well-handled, it's a genuinely interesting question, and frankly, I find what she did fairly unassailable and yet understand why it was so poorly received by everyone. I think Batman and Superman's reactions do not necessarily shed a very favourable light on them, but I loved Wonder Woman's quiet acceptance of that, but far more than that, I loved that she refused to apologise or say she was wrong to do it.
She regrets that she had to do it, but not that she did it. And that's a difference that goes to the core of her character, I think.
So I really liked when she first shows up in Infinite Crisis and she and Batman and Superman are being very blunt with each other. But then out of nowhere Superman is stopping her from killing another supervillain? Like, what? That...really threw me because, well honestly because the REST of the series doesn't have Diana in it that much but what she is in is fine - like, again it tends to focus on her being fairly together, and she doesn't ever recant her actions.
And I did like the bit at the end where Batman has a gun to Alexander Luthor and is asking him what it is he deserves, and Wonder Woman throws down her sword and is like, "it's not worth it," and Batman just sighs and goes, "I know". Because that is a great way to show that they weren't going to kill him. That they both understand that's not something to do lightly, and it ties in a lot with the themes of failure and exhaustion that run throughout. And if only she'd not had that really weird sudden earlier apparent desire to just start killing supervillains randomly it'd play like that. But as it is, it's...at least open to being interpreted as her having changed her mind.
And like...EITHER WAY we needed more time with her to see that.
Which is, I guess, my complaint. I know that my expectations were skewed because it's one of the reasons I read it, but I really don't think they spent anywhere near enough time on the dissolution of the Trinity and them coming back together. In Rucka's run, Wonder Woman slowly loses everything. And while, yes, there is a lot of feeling for her evoked in the text, it's also about a...narrative undercurrent to her story. It's about that isolation being a thematic, atmospheric issue, constantly. I feel she is alone, that she is losing people, in that run, in a visceral way. I don't get that in this run. They fall out, go their separate ways, fight their separate fights, and yes, eventually have a few reunions scenes that are quite nice, but I don't get a sense of...the loss of not having each other to rely on in the meantime. I don't know how it's affecting them, how they are doing things differently that they wouldn't otherwise do. And if this is supposed to be a story about that, that's...at the very least a huge missed opportunity.
Plus, DEAR LORD WHY WAS DIANA TRYING TO KILL THAT GUY. Ugh. I just...the Maxwell Lord thing was so clever BECAUSE it wasn't just a case of, "he's a villain who I have determined deserves death because he'll try to kill us again in the future". It was clever because it wasn't that old question of whether or not Batman should kill the Joker. It was a very specific situation that involved a man she knew there was not even the possibility of containing safely, and when she knew that for an absolute fact. So just...blargh. That was dorky. I choose to ignore it.
In sum: it was okay (weird Diana moment aside), but mostly it just felt more like a plot outline than an actual story.
