Top 10 WORST Comic of
the Relaunch
Its been a year since DC relaunched its universe, and personally I
think most of it has been good but not all, there are many rotten apples in
this basket.
Here I have made a list of what I think are the worst titles of DC 12
issues into the relaunch(though not all have 12).
Just 3 things before I start, if you want to comment or maybe even share
your own lists you I encourage you to do it but for the record I consider this
3 things
1- I honestly tried to be
as objective as possible with this list, I go on detail of what I think is
failing on this titles but this ultimately MY OPINION, if you don’t agree, is
your opinion
2- If I didn’t read, it is
not on the list, and I read a lot this year.
3- Miniseries and events
count
But First the Dishonorable mentions that for one reason or another
couldn’t make it on the list
*Detective Comics #5-12 by Tony Daniels
*Superman by George Perez
*Savage Hawkman by Tony Daniels
*Deathstroke by Rob Liefeld
Now the List
10- Batman: The Dark Knight #1-8 by David Finch and Paul
Jenkins
What is it?
Issues 1-8 tell the story of Batman pursuing a criminal named White
Rabbit, who keeps appearing in crime scenes and is suspect of giving several
villains of Gotham City access to a Venom component which gives them
superstrength but ultimately leaves them incapacitated after a while, in the
course of the story Batman keeps getting attacked by several of them. And of
course never catches the white rabbit.
What’s wrong with it?
This book is pretty much Like Hush, but not very much, the idea was to
show how Batman fits in the whole DC universe, presents all his crew, his most
known enemies and a new one, David Finch created White Rabbit as an attempt to
be another Catwoman, another sexy female villain to lure Batman and I actually
thought it was interesting and intriguing but really underdeveloped.
Where it fails is simply on the writing, ITS VERY STUPID, the
plot couldn’t be more basic but it always gets more and more complicated and
never in a good way, It’s just Batman following WR, then a villain appears, he
fights and move to pursue White Rabbit again, it gets repetitive very fast also the
underlined story behind White Rabbit is never important, and several side plots
are presented and drop or are just to give a fake sense of suspense, for example
there is a part in which Flash appears and gets poisoned, then he recovers and
appears at the end, this is done only to remove Flash momentarily from the
story but he never serves any purpose to begin with, or another example, in issue 4 Deathstroke appears
completely out of nowhere and attacks batman in his batplane, while in the air,
literally no explanation how he gets there,
destroys the batplane with his sword and fights Batman ON MIDAIR and
then leaves, for no reason, it looked kind of cool, but there is no sense to
it.
Ultimately the book is only meant for the fight scenes and the plot
doesn’t get much attention.
However it’s still entertaining and the art is still good because it’s
just very silly and stupid, there is a scene in which Alfred prepares and ice
cream for Batman and Batman eats Ice cream, and that’s it, is just Batman
eating ice cream for 1 page, that’s this arc in a nutshell.
This arc is completely skip-able and it ultimately has a Major Flaw, Its
forgettable, this book leaves no mark on DC or Batman’s history, 1 year from
now no one will remember this story and I bet that wasn’t the idea.
What could have been done?
Hush it more- Like I said this is a lot like Hush but unlike Hush
that story actually left a mark on Batman, it created a compelling villain and
serve as a big and insight exploration of what Batman is and how he fits in DCs
Universe as well as presenting and interesting mystery (which is kind of easy
to solve but it tries)
I know many don’t like Hush but for what it was it was pretty great, it
changed status quos in an instant and for a long period of time, it left a
mark.
The idea in theory is not bad but it lacks on execution
9-
Justice League International By Dan Jurgen
What is it?
5 Years after the creation of team known as the Justice League the
members of the UN decide to take this new problem of the metahuman populace on
their own hands by assemble a team of various heroes from around the world to
protect the world.
On their first mission they encounter a planet killer enemy and defeat
it but then the entire team is attack when they expected less and they lose
their support with the UN, the team changes and they go after the guy who set
the attack
What’s wrong with it?
This is just a disappointment, the big pull of this book is not really
the set up or the plot but its characters and this book had a pretty good set
of characters, Booster Gold, Guy Gardner, Ice and Fire, all are interesting
heroes with great stories to be told and in addition to those we get some like
August General in Iron and Vixen who are just so under-appreciated, so
underdeveloped that is just criminal, so the idea of having a team made of
heroes who can finally have a place to tell their story it’s just great. The
Gigantic problem with JLI is, this character don’t tell their story, they don’t
get a chance to shine, they don’t get a good development, and after 1 arc, 6
short issues, we get a completely new set of characters to follow, we lose Ice,
Fire, Vixen and Rocket Red in exchange for Batwing and Omac, not to say those
characters are bad, far from it, but what was the point of having all those
other characters in the first place?
This is book that reeks of editorial mandate, is obvious that DC planned
JLI to be a continuation from JL:GL but the relaunch pretty much kill all plans
about it, after that Jurgen tell his first arc and just when that was getting done DC decided to take the
book to another direction, and then another one, so far this is the only book
on DC on this relaunch to had been cancel due some creative changes despite
having decent sales.
Ultimately this is a title that failed to launch, whatever premise or
concept it originally got in the beginning was scrapped out and then it just
wasted whatever advantages it got on every chance
What could have been done?
Consistency- DC needed to define exactly the purpose of this
title before releasing the title, why were this characters in this team, to
what purpose?, this was a book that needed more time to think about before
going to sale
8- The Culling by Scott Lodbell, Tom Defalco, Brett Booth
The Culling is a crossover event composed of Teen Titans, Legion Lost
and Superboy, why is it here and not those titles? Well simply because
individually those titles aren’t that bad.
Culling is definitely not a reflection of any of those titles, it feels
more like an interruption of their stories rather than a continuation, and
despite those comics have lots of flaws none of them are bad enough on their
own right to be here.
What is it?
The secret Organization of N.O.W.H.E.R.E. captures metahuman teens all
over the world, put them on a survival tournament to become killers and be
inducted in the group named Ravagers, where only the stronger and vilest serve
Basically this is Teen Superheroes + the Hunger Games
What’s wrong with it?
Personally I do like Teen Titans despite its flaws, and the whole idea
of the Culling sounds great on paper but it had basically 1 sole problem that
made I fail.
It was too big.
It simply tried to do Way too much that didn’t allow it to focus on
giving an actual story, there were too many characters, too many conflicts, too
much dialog, too much of everything, that is just a hard time to care of any of
them.
The book plans on giving a new status quo to Legion Lost, finally unite
Superboy with the Teen Titans, end the N.O.W.H.E.R.E. storyline in that Teen Titans, and at
the same time have this survival war of superteens, and ON Top Of That, present
a completely new set of characters to Launch the new series of Ravagers, including
the villains, this is about 20-25 characters all fighting for our attention and
none of them is doing anything to deserve it.
That’s is not even to mention Harvest , who is the ultimate villain of
the story, comes out completely underdeveloped and he pretty much comes out of
nowhere, he is interesting as a concept and design, but that’s all he is, an
idea half cooked.
It is just a story that collapsed under its own weight.
What could have been done?
Time - this story needed time and preparation, Its not a bad
idea, It’s a bad execution of an idea, too rush for it to work and too big for
such little space, this could had been its own event with a separated
miniseries that ties into all the books, the end is not even well constructed
with 3 separated climaxes, 1 for ravagers, 1 for TT and 1 for LL, If you
compare it to something like the Rot World event on Swamp Thing and Animal Man,
that took over a year to build up, this needed more time.
No LL- the Legion didn’t need to be part of this at all, this comes out
as the event for the Young Justice line but its appearance is just another
center of attention for the storyline, they are barely affected by this event
overall.
7- The Fury of the Firestorm by Gail Simone, EVS and Joe Harris
What is the first thing you think, when you think of Firestorm?
Well, he dresses in red and yellow, he has radiation/nuclear powers and
his head is on fire
That’s pretty much it.
Well someone at DC was thinking on Firestorm and the very first thing
that came to mind was Jack Bauer on 24.
What is it?
Professor Stein creates something called the “Firestorm Protocol” that
allows a human being transform itself into a superpowered being with the power
of a nuclear bomb, but somehow the thing leaks to a terrorist group and several
countries, basically starting a completely new Nuclear Arms race with
firestorms.
Before disappearing Professor Stein left a final protocol to his student
Jason Rurch, and he and a classmate Ronnie Raymond transform into a new class
of firestorm and join a secret organization to fight terrorist firestorms.
What’s wrong with it?
Do I even need to say it? Who thought this was a good idea!?
This series Fails on many things, but first and main of all is Concept,
as I explain this It might sound like an interesting political conflict comic
with super beings on it of the like a Warren Ellis comic but is just not
developed as such, it feels like it wants to be a regular superhero book but
the underline theme doesn’t allow it, specially cause we never see politics in
action, we never see the sides or the pressure or fear of the country’s
administration regarding this issues, there is no politics in what is suppose
to be the new WMDs.
This book is also extremely violent;
it has some of the most gruesome scenes in the new 52 and for absolutely no
reason, in just the first issue a whole
family is cruelly tortured and assassinated to do, nothing, it was just to show
that the evil guys were evil, later another firestorm who has some kind mental
problems is again, tortured and then dies and no one really cares, then an
entire stadium is destroyed in a terrorist attack and one of the main characters
is explicitly tortured and maim in a full issue, it’s just violent for the sake
of being violent.
Another problem is the Terrorists, they suck too much as
Villains, they don’t show any motivation during most of the story, have no
development whatsoever and almost present no serious threat, they blow up a
whole stadium and destroy the Eiffel Tower and yet they are taken out like
flies in the comic, even the Al-Qaeda in Frank Miller’s Holy Terror had better
motivation than this guys.
And finally the main characters, both are boring and it’s because they
show no personality whatsoever, they feel more like clichés than anything else,
Jason starts and the nerdy kid with problems in house and Ronnie is the rich
and spoiled Jock, Gail Simone does a very poor job at developing them as
anything else and once she leaves the comic the next writers don’t even try.
This is worst on Ronnie because he eventually cares about this whole terrorist
thing and then is captured, tortured and maim which leaves him like more of an
antihero from the 90s, It feels more like a propaganda to join the army more
than anything else.
The last few issues feel very different from the rest of the book must
likely cause it seems DC is dropping the
entire idea they started with, but it still a very poor read, lots of senseless
violence with a pretty stupid underlined message of U.S. vs Terrorism and very boring
one dimensional characters .
What could have been done?
Identity - This book suffers a grave case of an Identity crisis,
it didn’t knew what it wanted to be, a political thriller, a superhero book, a
teen book, an spy book, it just didnt have a definite direction, of course it
doesn’t help that this book passed for several writers, DC wanted to have a
Firestorm Book but they just didn’t have any idea of what that was. I haven’t
read any of it but I heard that the original Fury of Firestorm book had a much
better established political component and that is actually very good, maybe
they should have done something more like that.
Brightest Day?- you could say whatever you can of Brightest Day
but at least they have a better plot than this, is a real shame that Brian
Clevinger lost his pitch, a real miss opportunity
6 –Huntress 1-6 by Paul Levitz and Marcus To
What is it?
Helena Wayne investigates and bust an arms dealer operation but discover
that they are also trafficking with human slaves, she goes to Italy and stops
them.
What’s wrong with it?
IT’S BORING!
Definitely the most boring comic I have read in the entire year.
Maybe that’s not enough for some to be consider among the worst books of
DC relaunch, but you have a plot that can easily resolve in 2, maybe even 1
issue that stretches for 6 full issues, 120 pages, and never gets interesting
to keep going on, at the start of every single chp you can’t help to wonder
“this is still going on!”
The mini is full with patting, a lot of fight scenes and meaningless
conversations with characters that ultimately serve no purpose at all to the
plot and are barely even introduce in the first place, I cannot remember the
names of anybody here.
There are some good action sequences but nothing great, and the book
absolutely Fails at presenting Huntress as an interesting character, She is
written completely unbeatable, extremely cocky and arrogant and just not fun,
there is no suspense cause of this and its just drags on and on.
It’s hard to describe but every chp feels like you are reading exactly
the same thing over and over from beginning to end.
It has pretty good looking art with Marcus To in the pencils but that’s
just not enough
What could have been done?
Another Plot- The purpose of the miniseries was to present the
new Huntress on the DCnU, we aren’t sure but there is a rumor that this
originally going to be E0 Huntress until it was decided to use Helena Wayne,
maybe this provoked the plot to drag on but DC also wanted to keep Earth 2 as a
secret so Huntress doesn’t reveal that she is Helena Wayne on this story, so
basically we don’t get to meet the character at all nor in an honest light, if
it instead had focused on the arrival of Helena Wayne from E2 things would had
been different
5- Hawk and Dove by Sterling Gates and Rob Liefeld
What is it?
Following out of the events of Brightest Day Hawk and Dove reunite once
again to fight crime, in the first arc they fight against the Condor and Swan,
antithesis of themselves and save the president of the US and then team up with
Batman and Robin and face a hunter that is hunting them cause of some ancient
cult to Hawk.
What’s wrong with it?
The art is awful and the story is dull and stupid.
…
That’s pretty much all It.
It’s just very simple but
mediocre on what it does, the first arc Hawk and Dove fight against Condor and
Swan, they don’t do anything special, they aren’t particularly interesting
either, overall they are just lazy villains.
The art is a huge problem here, none existent backgrounds, weird bodies
and without proportion, for example, Damian Wayne, Robin appears on issue 6,
Robin is 10 yo and he looks like he is 16 or older, almost as tall as Hawk and
just too big.
The most interesting parts of this book is the relationship between
Deadman and Dove which carries out of Brightest Day but those are much better
developed in JLD, Dove is actually an interesting character not well developed,
Hawk on the other hand is very dull, he is just a muscular guy with a chip on
his shoulder and also is underdeveloped
I wish I could say more about this book but there isn’t much to, it’s
just a very forgettable book, with bad art and a mediocre story.
What could have been done?
This one is hard.
The whole concept of Hawk and Dove is not that interesting, despite
being in the Young Justice family of titles, this aren’t portray young, nor try
to tap into any of that, the book tries to keep its continuity post the
relaunch acknowledging things like the death of the first Dove and the romance
of Dove and Deadman, but it doesn’t really tap into that either, we don’t get
much into the fact that Hawk died and was revived or how is Hawk connected to
the white light of BN and BD, so it just
comes out as unnecessary information, I guess that if they really wanted to
continue with the story of Brightest day then they should had focus into that,
its not a bad idea to use a series to impulse another one but it needed focus
and definitely a better creative team
4- Green Arrow by J.T. Krul, Keith Giffen, Dan Jurgen and Ann
Nocenti
What is it?
Billionaire Oliver Quinn uses his money to fight crime with a bow and
arrows.
What’s wrong with it?
It’s impossible to really talk about new GA without comparing it with
the Old one, Oliver Queen is one of the characters that lost the all of its
continuity with the relaunch, the old green arrow was mature but flawed, he was
human, made mistakes, had experience and personality, after years of
development he became something unique, New Green Arrow is anything but that.
The new GA, has a childish personality, no experience, he is basically a
young Iron Man, doesn’t work alone but feels like it, he is a Buffoon not and
archer, no longer the liberal hero but almost an anarchist who does what he
wants cause he has money to support himself, basically is the worst version of
the character ever conceived.
Green arrow has always been a character to aboard certain social themes
but it never really take sides on them it just informs of how the situation
works, the run with Krul starts of tossing all of this ideas of violence on
videogames and social network, Jurgen’s run focus more general hero business
but when nocenti takes over it all goes back to preaching.
for example Issue
#10 focus on a girl who has mechanic implants and think she is a robot, or is a
robot who thinks is human, the story is pretty cleaver on what it tries to do
the problem is that Green Arrow feels completely out of place on this story,
this would had been a pretty good story for iron man but it doesn’t make me
think any better of Ollie as a hero, then he tackles the always controversial
99% group and the Occupy movement, it makes
some parallelisms to robin hood, but again, what is so special about this? It
ends up sacrificing the character for the sake of the message that is sharing.
Overall there is nothing else to say about it, it’s just unoriginal,
bland and its very hard to actually care about the main character.
What could have been done?
Back 2 Basics – I think the approach of GA is bad due the concept
that is being presented, there is nothing here but some vigilante who uses
arrows, that’s all, and Green Arrow is way more than that, we need to see the
man behind the bow rather than just an imitation of Bruce Wayne or Iron Man
DC could have perfectly used this chance to tell a story from Oliver
Queen to rival with Bruce Wayne on
Miller’s Batman Year One, a new origin that relies on the character’s
strength.
[U]Brightest Day 2[/U] – during BD a giant star shaped forest appeared
completely out of nowhere in the middle of the city, it was a magical place
where technology, magic and meta powers didn’t work, healing rivers and ghosts,
it wasn’t that good but it was still an interesting concept that I think
deserved a take 2 for consideration.
3- Batgirl by Gail Simone and Ardian Siaf
What is it?
After 3 years on a wheelchair the Vigilante Barbara Gordon dons one more
time the cowl of Batgirl, fighting villains that are basically reflections of
her own insecurities and fears
What’s wrong with it?
I think regressing Barbara Gordon to Batgirl is a very stupid idea, Barb
is way more interesting as Oracle and Cass & Steph are just more
interesting Batgirls, but because of how this is being executed here is worse
than just stupid, it’s offensive.
Just consider the fact that Oracle never really had anything to do with
this, and that TKJ never really influenced Barbara in any fashion other than
something physical, it didn’t drive her to do what she did just changed the way
she do it, what happen to her was a terrible event but that’s all, almost like
an accident, she might had been confined to a wheelchair for years but she
faced that challenge as she always do and never let it beat her.
And yet what is presented her is a Barbara Gordon that was so
Shattered by that event that it
paralyzed her own life physically and mentally even beyond the chair, who
couldn’t wait a second to put the cowl back and froze to the first gun she
sees, she lost all her experience and maturity, physically she is a healthy
21yo woman but mentally she is still 18yo girl in a wheelchair, and going back
to the cowl is just a shackle that ties her to that event tighter than the
wheelchair ever did, Barbara Gordon is now and forever defined by the Killing
Joke and the worst offender, this book is basically giving the message that if
you end up in a wheelchair, if you get a disability then your life is over and
there is no future for you unless you get fix by a “miracle”, Barbara just
never moved on.
And what shocks me the most is that there are many who excuse her
pathetic behavior to the fact that “she just came out of a wheelchair”. If she
does something bad, it’s because of the wheelchair, if she does something good,
is cause is she is moving pass it, how sad it is that everything to blame for
is blamed on her being crippled before.
This offends me profoundly.
Personally there is nothing more I can add to that but I will still put
this 3 links to go with it.
HOWEVER
I will be fair, objectively speaking what’s so bad on this book?
let’s say Barbara Gordon never existed before this series, just no point
of comparison.
What problems does it present?
For starters the Villains, every single villain in this book is
new and is made only around Batgirl, that’s generally not a bad thing except
when is such a direct relation to a single thread of the character, the mirror
was her survival guilt of recovering her legs, Grethel is her anger for the
attack on TKJ, Grotesque wasn’t important he was just a faceless villain, but
Danny was the embodiment of her insecurity, Talon Mary is made around the fact
she hides her own feelings, and finally Knightfall, is just how batgirl would
be if she was psycho antihero, it almost
feels like this could be Sucker Punch and all is happening on Barb’s head, and
actually would had been awesome if played like that.
The problem with the villains is that they aren’t subtle, it’s very
obvious what they are and whatever message they try to make is forced and besides the obvious relation with Batgirl
there is very little going on with the actual characters, and most of the time
present several problems and plotholes.
It’s just so lazy on every case and its really repetitive, without
Batgirl this villains essentially can’t exist so none of them make a big
impression, and ALL OF Them are VICTIMS
They only exist because Batgirl was a victim once.
And that’s all there is on this comic, irredeemable victims and broken
characters who commit murders, terrorist acts, evil deeds or just plain stupid
decisions and try to justify themselves only cause their family died or they
were hurt or had just a bad day.
This is a book about a woman who is recovering her life from a brutal
attack, but for something like that this lacks the element of Barbara Gordon on
it, we only get to see Batgirl.
We don’t see Barbara going out, we don’t see her in a job, we don’t see
her friends outside her own roommate, or Black Canary who is her teammate, it’s
all limited to batgirl, if this is the story of how Barbara Gordon recovers her
life, why isn’t she recovering her life?, unless her whole life is
defined as batgirl, then there is no
point of Barbara being batgirl at all cause there is no Barbara Gordon at
all.
Also the book makes a bad job at showing her trauma from the paralysis
since we never see her while she was in a wheelchair in a flashback, or while recovering,
or before the attack, once again, all is limited to her attack or after it, the
book tries to show us how she feels mentally with her inner thoughts and dream
sequences but without seeing what she lost and recover, it all just comes bland
and poor storytelling. Please show us the reasons why she is feeling distress,
not just have a dream where she is in a wheelchair and her previous self is
nagging her cause it just comes as a pretentious use of first year psychology.
And Barb has this constant inner monologue on virtually every single
scene she is in, and is just unbearable to read, is better to just ignore it
completely because you get absolutely nothing useful from it.
To summarize, this book is not funny, is not inspiring and is not
interesting however it is very repetitive and depressingly dark and violent
without a point to be, is just an insulting and a sickening poorly written
book.
What could have been done?
a-No
Barbara - obvious#1.
b-Full 100% Reboot- obvious#2.
c-Batgirl Year 1.5 - why can’t DC have its cake and eat it too?
Action Comics is featuring Superman while he is starting his career as a
complete rookie, in the meantime we still have the experienced Superman in DCU,
so why not have the Batgirl title in the past and Oracle in the present,
win-win.
d-NO RETCONS - ok, let’s Say that Batgirl HAD to be Barbara, and
that TKJ HAD to be in continuity.
Considering what was lost, the price didn’t need to be this high.
What is it?
After losing his wife in an accident that involved a GPS, Michael Holt
tries to kill himself but is stopped by a vision from a son he never had saying
to him to keep on living and “educate the World”, with this inspiration he
decides to turn himself into a vigilante using his mind and high technology and
help everyone in need
During the series, he stops a villain who used his wife’s GPS to kill
her, goes to another dimension and save a group of slaves with the help of a
transsexual superpowered alien, stops a thief on Valentine’s day, Stops a group
of terrorist that want to blow up a city with a ghost ship, and save his
enterprise from a half human half machine monster
What’s wrong with it?
It’s Fails on every conceivable level. It is not smart, it is not
inspiring and the only entertainment that you can get from it is by laughing at
it.
But why is it so bad specifically?
Mainly is the point that Eric Wallace simply couldn’t make a single
character compelling or even interesting on this comic, Michael Holt quickly
becomes one of the most boring characters I have ever read, every time he does
something to show his intelligence he explains in great detail how this faux
science works but is not really important to know and it drags on every scene,
and it also can become contradictory cause since is science that is completely
made up it lacks sense and is impossible to accept and sometimes completely
fails at the plot on other places, for example an “Earthquake machine” was
created by Michael to be a quake preventer and he explains how it works in both
ways, but why would he create something that very easily can be turn into a
weapon that causes quakes?
The support cast is basically inexistent, the support rarely appears on
the book but when they do, they do nothing important or relevant to the plot or
just annoy the hell out of you, like Jamal, he is this young super genius kid
that work at Holt Industries and Michael choose him to be his successor, Why?
Never explain, he is giving the great total of 6-7 panels on 6 issues before he
gets to this promotion, and after that he gets more time on panel but the fact
that he is the new CEO contributes nothing to the main story, it’s a complete
subplot that goes nowhere because it didn’t had any time to develop at all.
The other 2 members of the supporting cast were Karen, Powergirl
relaunched as just a friend of Michael with no given background in the book at
all, and Aleeka a completely unlikable character that is supposed to be a
romantic interest to Michael but never actually becomes one.
One of the worst scenes in the book is in the first issue where Karen
addresses Aleeka’s problems with her, since is obvious that Aleeka is jealous
of her, and completely out of the blue Karen asks her “its because Im a
white girl, isn’t it?”, If this had been relevant at all and by that I mean
If Karen being white was actually a problem to Aleeka and build on from that,
maybe it would had been interesting, but did not, Aleeka responds that she is
basically jealous of her not cause Karen is white but cause she is rich and
that she could never compete with that to get Michael, and this never becomes
important ever again in the whole series, Is totally out of place, without any
build up to it and with no follow up either, its completely pointless
I particularly love the T-Spheres, the main weapons of Mr Terrific but
sadly here they turn into constant Deus Ex Machinas, whatever the difficulty
is, the T-spheres fix it with little to no explanation on how they work out, in
the worst case of this, Michael uses them to erase the mind of an enemy of his
who discovers his identity, ignoring the moral implications of the act, the way
he does it is by just using a “forget” wave on him, I think he stole that from
MIB.
You can pretty much skip the entire dialog and get a better experience
from the book, and that’s not even going on how badly drawn this book is or how
dull the story is.
If you want to laugh a lot, get this book and read it with your brain
turn off.
What could have been done?
1- Consistent Direction: one of the things that Wallace did with the
book was speed up the developments on the stories so they would end faster, he
wanted to tell a broad amount of stories to show what Mr Terrific could do, but
as a consequence of this it just becomes a book that lacks direction, Is Mr
Terrific a hero of the people, a vigilante, a space hero, what exactly?
This hero needs a reason to exist and he doesnt get one, the whole “Educate
the World” is quickly forgotten in this comic, the whole dimensional aspect of
the book feels completely out of place and becomes highly contrasted with the
urban settings that he is in sometimes; it needed to pick just one direction
and stick with it.
1 – Static Shock by Scott Mc Daniels and John Rozum
This Comic is a Complete Disaster
What is it?
The Teen Hero name Static move out with his family from Dakota City to
New York and…
Fights crime?
…
That’s all I got.
What’s wrong with it?
This book is virtually unreadable. I really had a problem making
coherent summary of the plot cause it just fails to be read.
For those who disagree with this choice as #1, just think this: Green
Arrow was a failure of a relaunch for a character and Mr Terrific was
completely incompetent on its storytelling, Batgirl is borderline offensive and
so on, BUT AT LEAST YOU COULD READ THEM, you can understand the
plot and follow it, such is not possible here.
But we can’t really speak of this
book without talking of what went wrong behind the scenes, originally this book
was going to be written by John Rozum, and drawn by Scott Mcdaniels, but the
idea that Rozum had for the book just wasn’t good with the editor Harvey
Richards, in addition to that the editor also forced some storylines into the
book, one was that Shannon(Static’s sister) was kidnapped and cloned, without
any explanation of how to do this or with any resolution for it, Rozum just
couldn’t agree with the direction of the book and left after just roughly
plotting 3 issues of a 6 issues arc, and left even before the title launched,
instead of actually calling a new writer to fill in for issues 4-6 much less
fix the 1-3 issues, he just leave the writing duties to McDanie, Scott
McDaniel has never written a comic in his entire life, before this project
he NEVER read static in comic form, or even watch the tv show, he was
given a lighting course(pun intended) in Static history, he read the milestone
bible, read a couple of books on how to write scripts and saw the show while he
was drawing this issues. I could go on and on regarding this but it was clear
that the book was doom before it even started.
Especially because the only thing that the 3 of them actually agreed on
was to keep Static’s continuity intact, this was done to honor Dwayne
Mcduffie’s memory who passed away almost a year before the relaunch, however at
the same time DC decided to have Static move to New York, with a new suit, new
powers, added that to the new plots that came out of nowhere, basically
alienating both old fanbase and new readers at the same time, quite an accomplishment.
I will try to interpret the plot.
First Shannon, Static’s sister, is kidnapped and cloned by the main
villain, because Shannon is important, somehow, I don’t know why she is
important or why clone her was necessary, but Static saves Shannon and her
clone but none of them can tell who the real one is and who is the clone, ALL OF THIS HAPPENS OFFPANEL. So the family decides to pretty much adopt
the clone(whoever that is) and move to New York. On NY Static is attacked by a
random guy who dies in the first issue, then he is attacked by the Power
Rangers, and also a piranha man and a joker clone called the Pale man, who is I
think an undercover cop, but im not sure why since this is never important at
all in the comic, and they are all working for the same guy who kidnapped
Shannon and also made sure that Static moved to NY(why?), and they also cloned
Static without knowing so, but the Static clone is good and is also working
undercover inside the evil guys organization and he sacrifices himself to kill
all of them all and save the day, at least I think he dies, the end.
And again, im pretty sure I have some of that wrong somehow, I have no
idea what the villain was suppose to gain of all of this or why, all the
villains are terrible here, the dialog and pacing is completely dreadful and
the art is very bad.
This was without any doubt the biggest Failure of the New 52, I just
hope DC learns from this mistake when it addresses another Milestone
property.
What could have been done?
FULL REBOOT- one of the biggest opportunities of the New 52 is to
have a new chance to relaunch characters to a new beginning, it doesn’t matter
if they actually need them or not but if used correctly can make them shine
once again.
With Static, there is a lot of continuity to it, but none is necessary,
Static can easily start again with those elements that made him work in the
beginning and become a flagship for the whole milestone Universe in DC. But
this book kills that chance. And is even sadder when you consider that they
didn’t started from scratch to pay honor to the work of Dwayne, is funny too
cause Dwayne would had had probably agreed to a full reboot.
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