WARNING: This article contains spoilers so if you are catching up and don't want some plot points revealed, go do your reading and come back later!!
By: Andrew O’Brien
By: Andrew O’Brien
This October I will be
giving 9 dollars to DC Comics every week until April without even
purchasing a monthly ongoing title from them. "Why Andy", you ask with anticipation. DC has decided to try and capture lightning in a bottle again
by going back to their old tricks. What? You just started reading DC
with the New 52? Well sit down and let me teach you about DC and
their weekly addiction. In 2006 DC was coming off their highly
regarded Infinite Crisis crossover, and decided to follow it up with
a weekly series called 52. This was a high risk move because the series revolved around a year without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman,
instead focusing on many “B and C List” characters like Booster
Gold, Black Adam, and Steel. To hedge their bets, the creative tour de force of Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka,
Mark Waid, and Keith Giffen (plus the excellent editing skills of
Steve Wacker) made the entire venture much less perilous and 52 was a tremendous
success.
Then came the troubles of following up a
successful weekly series. (Or any success in the comics industry for
that matter.) DC thought they could do it again. Directly following
52, DC had the tremendously disastrous Countdown series
(or Countdown to Final Crisis, if you actually made it to the
halfway point like I did.) To be honest, there were aspects of this
weekly I didn’t hate, like the search For Ray Palmer in the
Multiverse, but overall, this series was pointless. It
had no relevance to Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis, and the
addition of the “to Final Crisis” was the most transparent
marketing ploy in comics of the last decade. After that came
Trinity, which did pretty much the opposite of 52 and
focused completely on Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman fighting
Morgan Le Fey or something dumb like that. Again, to be honest, this
entire thing was pretty forgettable and the current crossover story
“Doomed” is a better Trinity story involving Superman
turning into Doomsday. DC sort of gave up on the yearlong weekly
after that, putting together the critically acclaimed Wednesday
Comics (only 12 or so issues) and then the bi-weekly Brightest
Day/Justice League: Generation Lost series (which were actually
pretty damn good, so it's a shame they were erased less than 4 months after
completion.)
Since the conception of
the New 52, DC has seemingly learned their lesson and stayed away
from the weekly sauce ...until now. They’ve decided to break into
daddy’s proverbial liquor cabinet and go all out with 3, count’em THREE weekly comics: Batman: Eternal, Futures End,
and Earth 2: World’s End... but are these titles going to be a
rip-roaring good time like 52, a bad trip like Countdown
or a meaningless blackout like Trinity? I’m glad you asked! Let's explore each one starting with
the strongest title and ending with the weakest.
1. Batman: Eternal-
No surprises here. DC knows how to make a book about Batman. This is
the strongest solely because of its creative team. It’s helmed by
Scott Snyder (the now unchallenged lord of Bruce Wayne’s life) and
a group of other writers including James Tynion IV, Tim Seely and Ray
Fawkes, many of which have been writing within the Batman books for
well over a year, so just based on the group’s collective
experience, this series has some strong legs. The story is also one of
its better points with the majority of it revolving around James
Gordon and the corruption rotting the GCPD just as one of Gotham’s
greatest crime lords returns. The book is about Batman, but uses him
more so as an observer to all the hell taking over his city until he
eventually puts all the pieces together and saves the day. This book
also reintroduces Stephanie Brown into the DCU, a character I
personally did not care for in the Old DCU, but I'm actually enjoying (so
far) in her new origin, so that says something to the series as a
whole. Also, with issues being drawn by great artists like Andy
Clarke, Dustin Nguyen, and Guillen March, there is no shortage of
things to be excited about!
2. Earth 2: World’s
End- This is just my prediction (since this comes out in
October) but I think Earth 2: World’s End is going to be
solid, but perhaps a bit weaker than Batman: Eternal. I’ve been
reading Earth 2 since the beginning, so maybe I’m a little
biased, but the story through both James Robinson’s and Tom
Taylor’s work has been leading up to something like this, and as far
as these three titles go, this seems to be the most natural evolution of the bunch.
It’ll also be strong because it’s the most focused, being about
the last days of Earth 2 before the inevitable Earth War Crisis
that’s bound to happen come next year. (Don’t believe me? Read the
end of Forever Evil and tell me I’m wrong.) Even though it’s
about the end of an entire Earth, it’ll probably have the smallest
cast, which leaves things wide open to explore more meaningful
character moments.
Tom Taylor is the current
writer on the book, and the lead of the weekly, and although his only
other work I know of is Injustice: Gods Among Us, he’s been
killing it on Earth 2 (even though, like Injustice, it’s been
about an evil Superman. Hmmm... Curious.). The weak aspects of this
book are the other writers: Marguerite Bennett, Daniel H. Wilson, and
Mike Johnson. Hopefully they'll surprise me, but as of right now, my expectations are low. The good news is they'll have back up from the strongest of the three weekly art teams in Eddy
Barrows, Jorge Jimenez, Stephen Segovia, Paolo Siquiera, and Tyler
Kirkham backing them up. (Plus it’s probably the shortest so you
don’t have to invest that much into it.)
3. Futures End- Hey,
guys! Have you picked up the incredibly popular and interesting issue
#31’s of Frankenstein, Grifter, The Fury of
Firestorm: The Nuclear Man, or Mr. Terrific yet? No? Wait..
you’re telling me that all of those books got cancelled? When?
Within the first year or so of the New 52? Really? Then why is there
a weekly where all of them are the main characters?? This is why
Futures End is the weakest of all the weeklies. I mean... why
base an entire event off of characters who have failed within the
last couple years? In addition to this blunt fact, the choice of writers is
strange. For this title we’ve got Brain Azzerello, Jeff Lemire, Dan
Jurgens and Keith Giffen. Azzerello and Lemire are two of DC’s
brightest writers, but they’ve never really worked on these
characters before. Lemire has worked on Frankenstein, but the
character he’s really known for right now, Green Arrow, dies within
the first issue. (Which I think is a total fake-out by the way.) Whereas
Jurgens and Giffen are comic industry icons, but their time has come
and gone. They’re still good at writing, there’s no denying that,
but you don’t have them helm an industry wide event (unless it’s Giffen and it involves space shenanigans like
Annihilation.) It’s also really weird that the bulk of this
series takes place in a dystopian future that’s 5 years away. This can only mean one thing... there’s
going to be some timey-whimey, wibbly-wobbly stuff that stops any of
this from happening, making the whole series wasteful. Now, I don’t
want to completely bash this series (even though it’s easy.) There
are parts of it that intrigue me. I would like to know how Mr.
Terrific became such a douche, and I really like Batman Beyond
(because I grew up in the 90s), and I genuinely need to know why
Superman is all covered up. So with all of this plus the glimpses of
great writing like Animal Man’s eulogy, I will soldier on and keep
reading this. Overall I think it’ll turn out to be alright, but if they erase
these events completely, like I predict, I’ll be upset. (Oh yeah and OMAC
got cancelled too)
There you have it. DC is
hitting the weeklies again and they’re hitting it hard. I think you
should give them all at least an issue or two. Who knows... maybe you’ll
wake up one day with 20 issues of one of them and just then,
realize you are now committed and have established an endearing love
towards Grifter, or Spoiler, or Earth 2 Batman or something. That’s
what happened to me. One day I realized I own all four volumes of 52
and somehow, a Booster Gold shirt got in my closet. Man, those weekly
hangovers sneak up on you.
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