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Story and content-wise, the New DC has the exact same sorts of problems that the Old DC had because it's being handled by the exact same nearsighted management and mindset that rendered so very many of their franchises toxic and unreadable in the first place, before the big public shows of "re-energizing" the brand. Except now they're working with a company that seems fundamentally weird and unpleasant, having "broken" many of their formerly-useful tools and staples of a functional mythos in some effort to achieve short-term shock value/shlock value gains. In the meantime, they have alienated a literal litany of their own writers and artists with confoundedly meaningless decrees, most of these at the very last minute, cultivating a very creator-unfriendly environment wherein draconian corporate interests matter first and creativity-fueled interests matter last or not at all. Being "old fans" or "new fans" has nothing to do with it. Rearranging creative teams left and right, forcing rewrites of formerly-approved material at the eleventh hour, and flat-out kicking writers off books with no warning is a lovely way to run your comic book company no matter its condition. The company-wide-but-not-really universe reboot obviously didn't cause any of these kinds of issues, but was an overall symptom of the problematic management mindset that has turned its own recurring stupidity into an internet meme.
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May 3, 2014 09:55
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You're correct. Punching reality to bring people back from the dead was totally plot-relevant, but something called a Purple Death Ray was apparently too campy.
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May 7, 2014 03:42
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BigRed0427 posted:Is anyone else a fan of Azzarello's Wonder Woman? I got volume 3 and decided to reread the first two for a refresher. I honestly don't know what to think about it. Mainly because my displeasure of DCs grim dark direction is becoming a massive psychotic loving hatred. I feel like he is trying to tear down everything that makes Wonder Woman shine, if that makes sense. How Amazons are born, Hephaestus saying the lasso is not magical. (Though the wedding with Hades says otherwise) plus just regular over the top blood and guts. Even putting aside his women-hating interpretation of the Amazons (a face-value retelling of a myth that originally hated women is still women-hating), the pacing is slow as hell and Wonder Woman herself is far too underdeveloped for a character who's been starring in thirty issues of this series. She spends most of every storyline being flustered or bamboozled by her co-stars, who Azzarello seems far more interested in, which might be fine if those co-stars don't occasionally spend literal whole issues babbling nonsense to each other about nothing of significance. Quickly now, without looking anything up, someone name something memorable that happened in the latest issue. The book does have a lot of consistently nice art, and Azzarello is obviously a skilled enough writer so that none of the content is actively terrible like some other books. But there are still a whole lot of better books out there right now, in both DC and Marvel's titles, so I've never really understood the leeway that people give to this one.
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May 17, 2014 10:33
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She's not so much winning the Amazons' leadership either as much as she's going "I'm now your queen by default, so do what I loving say or else" while they grumble and complain about it. If this is Azzarello's idea of "redeeming" the Amazons, I actually prefer it when he left them alone.
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May 17, 2014 21:08
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Dark_Tzitzimine posted:I'm curious about this, aside of the skin color is there any difference or relevance to their race? This creates a national mindset where young people of color are not able to see themselves or others like them and feel invisible or underrepresented, other than as stereotypes. This also makes it so that white people have a skewed, distorted view of the world around them that doesn't reflect reality, and makes it easier for young white kids to see themselves as the "default" and everyone else as the "other." So, yes, even something as "aesthetic" as the skin color of your characters in your books, even disregarding any other changes, is incredibly relevant. Flameingblack posted:But like someone else brought up, does it matter if Aqua Lad is black or white or purple? He's from the loving ocean, it's not like he's from a struggling family in Harlem, how do you look up to that as inspiring? At least make the attempt to diversify the characters instead of just changing their skin color and literally nothing else changes. More to the point, the reason that diversity in this context is important is so that people can look at a character who, by all rights, doesn't need to be black but is black anyway just to show that a character doesn't need to be white; the fact alone that you considered this Aqualad character to have had his race changed when he was always black suggests that there is a bias, either consciously or unconsciously, towards "white Aqualad" as a norm and anything else as a deviation from that. Diversity is important in this context because little black kids can look at a character that looks like them in their books and perceive that his powers and origins don't need to be based on their race, just like white characters don't need a racial reason to have their powers and storyline. So that not every single non-white character is either Luke Cage, whose storyline was laced with racial issues, or Vixen, who got her powers by African magic. Not that there's anything wrong with Luke Cage or Vixen at all. We need minority characters in books where their minority status affects their characterization and daily lives, like them and like the new Ms. Marvel...and we also need minority characters where their minority status doesn't seem to affect too much, like Aqualad and the new Ghost Rider. We need both those things and more because we need to offset this bizarre disingenuous perspective that some minority characters are done "right" or done "wrong" based on how their minority status is handled, and in the meantime straight white male characters can literally be done in any possible way and no one would ever, in a million years, say something like "Wow, what a bad straight/white/male character."
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May 28, 2014 22:29
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Huh, I thought Akins did pretty good on his parts as well. I don't think I would be able to tell the difference between his and Sudzuka's fill-ins if I were given just a couple seconds, cursory glance at them.
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Jun 2, 2014 20:36
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Man, I wonder if this is how fans in the 90s felt went Wonder Woman went from George Perez to Mike Deodato.
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Jul 24, 2014 20:42
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Stop ruining my analogy with facts! 
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Jul 25, 2014 00:14
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The JMS Earth One? I seem to recall it having an emo whiney Superman being just the biggest douche about things ("woe is me, I have superpowers") until he was literally forced by circumstance to have to start doing something good with his abilities. The villain was Square Enix. Ah yes, these series of reviews more or less comprise my thoughts on that whole thing. BrianWilly fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 19:37
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That cosmology is Super Cool, the one thing I'm a just the teeniest bit iffy about is that it calls Morpheus the Dream King. Nein, sir, that would be Daniel. Morpheus is hella dead. ...Unless Sandman is now out of continuity with the Nu 52, particularly since Hector and Hippolyta presumably never existed, and we've retconned it so that Morpheus is Dream again.  Of all the "legacies" to be wiped out...
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Jul 30, 2014 05:49
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glitchwraith posted:There is also the fact that the Endless tend to not differentiate between new and old iterations of themselves, even when one has a completely different origin like Daniel. Daniel is Dream, and Dream is Morpheus. Sure, Dream's siblings all call him Dream instead of Morpheus, which is just one of many things that many other people call him, and call each other by their core titles. Even the new Dream isn't truly "Daniel." All the same, I thought it was made fairly clear that the old titles no longer apply to the new Dream. So it's just strange to see "Morpheus" mentioned so directly in an "official" universe guide, especially if Morrison wrote it since he's not one to skimp on these details without very good reason.
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Jul 30, 2014 22:52
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Ahghhghg shameful double-post.  Meant to edit, not quote.SalTheBard posted:Thats good to hear. My wife prefers female-centric comics (and Thor / Loki) so it's good to know that she will have something new to read.
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Jul 30, 2014 22:54
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Isn't the Speed Force supposed to take care of this exact specific problem?
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Aug 8, 2014 20:43
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Did anyone read the Sensation Comics thing with Wonder Woman? Anyone else think it was...kinda bad? Here we have Gail Simone with the entire limitless breadths of her imagination to choose from in order to craft a Wonder Woman story completely unrestrained by any continuity or continuum, and what we end up with is Diana making GBS threads on Batman for two issues whilst fantasizing about murdering his rogues. Why? Why is it so hard to write a Wonder Woman that isn't savage or patronizing?
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Aug 28, 2014 01:52
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Is that really going to be the Teen Titans cover? Three characters who don't actually exist anymore, in an original lineup that also didn't exist in the new canon, selling a book that features none of those characters?
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Sep 10, 2014 02:23
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As far as I can tell, Azzarello's approach towards the feminist principles of Wonder Woman is that sure, men are bad, but women are just as bad!...which of course overlooks the fact that, historically and currently, men en masse have not been victims of women en masse. In that light, insofar that Wonder Woman had always been created and empowered by female goddesses, and Azzarello has changed it so that she's now created and empowered by male gods (Zeus, Ares, Hephaestus) for no particular reason, yes there's a bit of a paradigm shift away from her iconic pro-female roots. As of this moment I'm not sure if there's one single goddess in her own pantheon that Diana is on very good terms with. Hera, perhaps, if we stretch it. And then you consider the type of raping, misogynistic god that Zeus actually is in all traditional sources, and him being Wonder Woman's father becomes even more disturbing. Azzarello seems to have gotten around this issue by...just flat-out ignoring it, I suppose. And then you combine all that with how Azzarello has vilified the Amazons with the some of the vilest, most anti-feminist stereotypes around, and it's easy to see why a lot of feminists have had issues with the overall changes he's made to Wonder Woman's origins. What once was a mythos filled with admirable, powerful, mentoring female characters is now a flock of dour, unlikable shrews, along with the menfolk who condescend to help them with their troubles. But yeah, sure, Azzarello's run hasn't been too bad if we ignore literally all the iffy messages in it. edit: ...That all came out way harsher than I intended it to be. Ahhh, don't listen to me, I'm just the one guy here who finds his run to be more puffed up than it deserves to be. BrianWilly fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 03:44
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Well that seems like an interesting question that the comic itself should have tackled instead of glossing over. "If that rear end in a top hat is my father, am I still as good as I believed?" But if she's ever had any ambivalence about being the daughter of Rape God then I must have missed it. Instead of having issues with her father, she's instead shown having tons of issues with her mother and her sisters, and being more bemused than horrified by her new Olympian family. Frankly, I don't believe that Azzarello thinks any of the changes he made are iffy at all. It took something like twenty issues for him to even remember to deal with the mess he made out of the Amazons. I'd be shocked if he even brings up Zeus' name in the...heck, how many issues are even left of his run anyway?
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Oct 14, 2014 04:34
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Of course a child isn't a bad just because their parent is bad, but I'm saying that I don't get the impression Azzarello even thinks Zeus is bad at all. Like, he thinks it's cool if Wonder Woman was the daughter of Zeus, and she needs to be Zeus' daughter for his entire storyline to work, but he just kinda skips over all the problematic parts of Zeus' mythology in order to make this new origin more palatable. And since Wonder Woman For a run that's so lauded by the masses for being faithful to ancient mythology (despite the fact that it's honestly just as selective as any other comic book about the parts of mythology that it wants to be faithful to), it's rather conspicuous that this aspect of Zeus hasn't been touched on at all, whereas all the worst, most repugnant aspects of Wonder Woman's old feminist, Amazonian family has been brought to the fore and everyone can just say "Ah but see he's telling the myths accurately!"
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Oct 14, 2014 05:06
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TwoPair posted:Yeah she really should have had a reaction to it totally man If your intent was to show pro-feminist panels from this book you probably should have picked different pages.
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Oct 14, 2014 06:54
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And their Amazons aren't the mythological Amazons but people will line up for blocks defend Azzarello's vilification of them based on how true he's being to mythology*. *Believe it or not, he's actually made them worse than they were in the original myths. If there are no awful acts from Zeus for Diana to react to then I don't want to hear another word about how great Azzarello is at depicting mythology. Hey, look, I actually have no problem with a "vanilla" depiction of Zeus that downplays his rapey, murdery ways, in order to make him palatable for a more palatable story. That's how most retellings of myths do it, after all. But if you're going to play it like that then you don't get to have it both ways. You don't get to say "Ah, see, my Hera is the vindictive bitch shrew from the tales and the Amazons are man-hating barbarians as they're meant to be, but hell if I'm gonna show Zeus loving little boys in the guise of an eagle! That'd be wrong!" Teenage Fansub mentions that all authors pick "the parts that serve the story he wants to tell," which is true. The question then becomes, well, why does the story that Azzarello wants to tell so very conveniently paint such a negative image of the sisterhood of Amazons and goddesses that were once Diana's friends and patrons, while it also just so happens to skip over any sordid mythological details that would have made Azzarello's new WW origins -- now with additional man parts because god forbid we neglect the men in a Wonder Woman origin -- particularly hard to swallow? Why does Azzarello's choice of mythological fidelity just so very conveniently downplay any potential misogyny on the part of the myths, while highlighting all traces of misandry? The question was asked: what is it about Azzarello's retcons that particularly violates WW's feminist principles? Well, here's your answer. Take it or leave it. BrianWilly fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 07:58
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Hahahahaha I'm sorry but that WW was some hilarious shark-jumping bullshit and I can't believe so much fuss has been made over this dumb crap. Zola was Athena the whole time, for some reason! And she gave birth to Zeus, somehow! ?????????? My one consolation is that this will soon be forgotten by the masses like most of the dregs of Wonder Woman's writers.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:05
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Oh yes. I surely am.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:08
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How was Athena-as-Zola possibly foreshadowed in Secret Origins? Athena claims in WW #35 she was born as Zola twenty years ago...but Athena, in her own real (kinda badass) form, was present when Diana rescued Steve Trevor in the Secret Origins issue that Azzarello himself wrote. If anything, that just proves there's no way that Zola could possibly have been Athena all this time. (On top of the fact that, y'know, the two of them share absolutely no attributes whatsoever; large, small, significant, incidental, literal, figurative, narrative, or poetic. Azzarello might as well just declare that Zola's really Hestia in disguise for all the sense it would make, or that Jimmy Olsen is actually Julius Caesar.) Not many writers are half-assed inattentive enough to retcon themselves in the span of a single week, but as I'm sure we can all agree by now, Azzarello is no ordinary writer!
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Oct 30, 2014 08:23
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On a brighter note, Sensation Comics has improved quite a bit since its first couple Simone-written chapters. Its strength is also its biggest weakness though, in that you're never quite sure what you're gonna get.
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Oct 30, 2014 23:04
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How many more snarky remarks can we make about DC only doing this to kill off their old characters? I only ask because, uh, I came here to do just that and found myself beaten to the punch rather continuously. But yeah, I'll probably be buying most of these. I'm weak, I admit it. If this is going to be these characters' last big hurrah for some time then might as well help send them off with a bang. And it's not as if DC has been maxing out my credit card lately anyway.
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Nov 12, 2014 06:49
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Hahahhaah what the gently caress, Magog? Again? It's like no one at DC ever understood the point of that character. Then again, they did write Watchmen prequels, so maybe that goes without saying.
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Nov 19, 2014 01:44
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Marvel is certainly "better" at worldbuilding coherency given that they don't tend to retcon characters out of existence for no reason and stuff like that, but let's not totally dismiss their capability to be just as idiotic as DC when it comics to pointless and counterproductive retcons. What's happening with the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver right now is the single most laughably-incomprehensible and corporate-driven "decision" of the past year. Also, every time I try to give Bendis a chance again, I'm astounded at how badly he manages to mangle X-continuity, including his own continuity, into a bizarre unlikable mess.
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Jan 5, 2015 21:38
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What is happening on his face?
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Feb 4, 2015 12:06
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I haven't been paying much attention and trying to figure out DC's website is like peering into Delirium's realm; when does Convergence start, precisely? I wanna make sure I don't miss it.
BrianWilly fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Feb 6, 2015 |
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Feb 6, 2015 00:57
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Nah, most archers will leave their bows unstrung most of the time so the string doesn't get damag...oohhh he's actually nocking an arrow, isn't he? Nevermind. Man, April's so far away. It's just oh so unfortunate I won't be reading any DC before then, isn't it?
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Feb 6, 2015 01:30
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Well, technically I'm still following Sensation Comics, but...irregularly. It's always charming, but it's not always quality charming.
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Feb 6, 2015 01:44
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