Aldo reads DC's New 52 (So you don't have to)

Also the deal where she's editing Dial H must be a little odd anyway - is she taking time out from VP work for it, is she effectively already massively overpaid for it, is she doing it evenings and weekends?

(I was always a dick ;_; )

lol

ANYway...I have to wonder if there are any worried rumblings among the top brass at DC. I don't know what the sales figures look like at this point, but the number of high-profile people who are jumping ship over exceedingly shitty editorial/managerial decisions sure looks like a disaster-in-waiting from the outside. Most puzzlingly: I don't really understand why ANY of this was allowed to happen! The whole New 52 initiative seems like the kind of last-minute Hail Mary you'd play if your company was severely in the tank and on the verge of failing completely...but I don't think that was the case? It just seems like massive and devastating restructuring simply for the fuck of it, with no room for reasoned judgment or reflection.

I dunno, having worked in several large-ish organisations, the "massive and devastating restructuring simply for the fuck of it" button gets pressed depressingly often. Short-termism seems to be the root of all managerial evil.

Isn't that the 'brief-sales-boost-from-series-reboot' button? You do that often enough and the whole thing dissolves into incoherence (this being comics that's saying a lot) and eventually there's nobody left in the room listening to you any more.
Seems to me they've been rebooting in faster and faster intervals (like rebooted Superman and Spiderman films coming five or so years after the last ones), and they've either gotten to or are really close to a reboot singularity where every issue is an origin story (which actually I would read since it would read like The Caterer)

(I was always kind of impressed with Byrne's 1986 Supes reboot since so much of it has survived all the reboots since)

That's a solid starting point from which I started collecting a few years back. Years and years and years of a continued story without anyone getting the jitters and hitting restart.

In many respects, triangle era Superman is pretty much my platonic ideal for how in-continuity comics should be structured/handled.

I had to look that triangle thing up since I had no idea what you were talking about - that is pretty clever!

Right? And they brought the triangle numbering back for a year or two recently, sometime after Infinite Crisis and just before Straczynski came in and wrecked stuff pre-New 52. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most solid Superman run in recent memory.

tbf I understood exactly what sic was getting at, and Berger staying on in any way that is NOT Vertigo-related is ridiculous. She's virtually synonymous with Vertigo, in my book, and the fact they're screwing with it is pretty much a dead giveaway she'd be on the way out.

http://fflivewire.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/High_Five.gif

BTW http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=42536

Ultimately, the conclusion that I've come to this week (and, yes, you may say that I'm a few decades late to that conclusion) is that my market is largely existing at the suffrage of corporate entities who really don't care about us whatsoever. While in the past, specific individuals within those corporations have done their best to shelter us, but now that comics have been "discovered" by Hollywood, et al (remember: always be careful what you wish for!) the pressure is on for comics to conform to their rigid values. Even if those values will ultimately sell fewer comics, and harm the very medium from making short term decisions.

I'm saddened by this realization, and I am horrified, and it's making me question every thing that I do, and, if it even, in fact, is wise to continue to stay in retail. Three weeks ago, I would have laughed at any suggestion that I wouldn't be doing this until well into my sixties.

truth sadface

The saddest thing about new 52 is that DC didn't pick writers with good ideas, they basically picked their fave writers (Johns), former Vertigo writers, and the hottest of the early 90s and thought it'd make for a great comic line

It was kinda loose and implied before, but after reading that, I'm straight-up boycotting DC until they get their shit together. Assuming they ever do.

xpost Yeah, I mean...Harras just packed the store with his old '90s Marvel cronies. I don't have any beef with Lobdell, but giving Liefeld the control he had was ridiculous. And Howard Mackie?! Seriously!? Dude's up there with Loeb and Austen in the Shitty Scripter Hall Of Fame.

Howard Mackie is the worst, but he's a decent editor IIRC

Lobdell and Nicieza are not too hateable but even I was able to see them as hacks by the late 90s. Occasional nice stuff, but way too rote on average.

I know DJP will disagree to an extent. I liked Lobdell + Bachalo but that was a bit above the average. Too much soap opera with no ideas beyond cookie-cutter melodrama and bad stereotypes

I wouldn't call Nicieza a hack per se; he's a little more inspired/coherent than that

Lobdell is the platonic ideal of a good hack, though; I loved reading him but he often was scraping by on bare minimum

personally it drives me crazy that no one besides me thinks Waid is terrible

xpost: lol

Waid is hit or miss for me. Amazing that he made his name with such a steaming pile as Kingdom Come.

I think the thing that briefly made me cheerlead for Lobdell more heavily than I actually felt was merited was that half the things people held up during his tenure as gross failures of characterization that never should have happened were things Waid did in his X-book, like having Cannonball sulk in a tree worrying about whether he'd ever make a good leader after years of him being team leader in New Mutants and X-Force.

(Lobdell can totally take all the blame for X-Men Unlimited #4 tho)

Nicieza's done some decent stuff, but (as I'm pretty sure I posted elsewhere) his Thunderbolts run (or at least the stretch I read, tbf) was incoherent and wretched. Which was the last thing of his I've read and which has colored my opinion of him somewhat.

Lobdell was good at pulling shit out of his ass and juggling it with enough chutzpah that his shit juggling almost seemed like a rational act informed by forethought.

I've come around on Waid a little bit from the day when I threw his first FF issue in the trash but remain largely unimpressed.

I'm actually a really big fan of Lobdell's early Uncanny run (maybe up until around the point when Madureira came onboard). I think a lot of that stuff tops the last couple years of Claremont's run, easily.

Nicieza gets an eternal pass from me for Psi Force and his backup stories in Classic X-Men

I may overrate some of Lobdell's Uncanny run because I loved JoeMad so much

You guys are doing the "this crap was slightly better than this other warmed-over dogshit" game.

eh, not really

unless your thesis statement is that Psi Force sucked, in which case we are in an eternal fight

I never read it, but I admit the latter half of the series, which he apparently penned, could have been awesome.

he wrote 3/4 of it; took over at #9 and the whole line was cancelled at... 36? 32? something in the 30s

I gave up on Psi-Force long before he started writing it. It was horrible. It's a shame that only the first 9 are on MDCU as I'd give them a shot.

So you're basically saying he peaked with his first published comics

You guys are doing the "this crap was slightly better than this other warmed-over dogshit" game.

Yeah, sorry, that discussion has no place in a thread about the New 52.................

personally it drives me crazy that no one besides me thinks Waid is terrible

i've never read a good comic book by waid, and his run on fantastic four, where the thing meets jack kirby in heaven, is an all-time low. guy should never be allowed to shit up marvel comics.

as for karen berger, as someone who has basically spent her career being the 'nice' face of corporate comics, i can't say my heart bleeds for her particularly now that her paymasters have decided she's no longer a useful conduit to exploitable 'properties' or creators. i'm sure her golden handshake will be far more generous than anything received by the large majority of the freelancers who worked for her.

I like Waid's run on Flash, although I haven't read it since it came out so time may not support that conclusion.

In any case...

Action Comics #15: Ummm... GMoz's Action run is all a 5-D illusion? Who else went back and checked the number of worlds before and after the cataclysm to see if there were 52 left? He's slap bang on form here (and even the backup is great) but, as I've said before, this has so little to do with the Johnsiverse I have absolutely no idea why DC are persisting with the idea it's one of the New 52 (see also Batman Inc). Last issue's story took place about a decaxe in the future, and this issue takes place simultaneously in the past, the present and the future. I think the trade of this is going to be a great read, and I look forward to re-reading once done, but to be honest as a monthly floppy I'm finding it kind of infuriating as it feels like you need to be checking other issues all the time or at least not be distracted by reading other things. On that basis, I still have mixed feelings about the book and it doesn't liven up my week's reading.

Animal Man #15: Featuring Frankenstein, which means you'll need to have read Frankenstein #15 to know how that turns out before he gets here. Except it's not published yet. TOP PLANNING. So, they beat all the gorillas in a couple of pages and walk over America some more. The flashback to the 'present' pans out exactly as you thought it would, and in the future Buddy has a nightmare about the past, from before they all got in the camper van. Having finally got to Metropolis, where the secret prison of the guy that can beat Rotworld is, amid much speculation they're going to find Superman they find Green Lantern. Although not a Lantern we've seen before, and obviously they haven't been reading Earth 2 because in there Alan Scott beats Grundy when he turns up as the Earth 2 King of Rot. Rot is kind of how I feel about this book now, if I'm honest. It's clearly not a real future, and is so obviously full of padding it's not that engaging. Swamp Thing is clearly driving this narrative, and actually being good is obviously in its favour. But more on that later. As for this, it's 2 pages of resolution of the last plot then 18 pages of nothing then 2 pages of cliffhanger. Just like the last half dozen issues. Disappointing.

Batwing #15: Western science beats African magic. GOT THAT? A massive electric Bat-net stops the baddie from mind-controlling people and Batwang decides not to throw him off a roof, just to show what a good man he is. Pity he's still a cop accepting bribes, eh?

Detective Comics #15: There's a great story in here about the resolution to the Clayface and Ivy marriage story but it's kind of overshadowed by the Penguin plot in which we get another blonde smoking slightly shifty anti-hero to go with the ones in Justice League Dark and Wonder Woman. Is it any wonder then this feels like it's going over old ground? Especially when it's a core Bat-book during a massive Bat-crossover that it doesn't go near except referring to it in one panel? The backup is really kind of excellent though, with the full story of Clayface and Ivy told with pace and poise. You know what it reminds me of? Concrete. And you can't say that about many books DC are publishing these days.

Dial H #7: Nelson and Roxie continue to look for another dial, slowly picking up clues (mainly in France). The great thing about this is the balancing of comedy and moving the plot forward, even if it's just goofing off with barking mad and useless characters. At the end, Mieville show's he's read The Invisibles and the bad guy is revealed as GMoz's time centipede thing. A trick is missed by not calling him the Human Centipede, I fear.

Earth 2 #7: Alan Scott gets used to the idea of being Green Lantern and Hawkgirl tries to intimidate him into embracing his Lantern-ness. There's an underground base and then NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO who wanted Mister Terrific back in this? We'd only just managed to forget about him! But then... yay yay yay we might be getting Red Tornado soon! Although I don't know why I'm looking forward to it, they'll probably bollocks it up as badly as Blue Devil. It's come to this, that the base expectation for any DC book now is that it'll be crap and if it isn't then we all applaud. That can't be right, can it?

GI Combat #7: How can a comic featuring a giant Nazi war wheel driven by the corpse of Erwin Rommel and destroyed by a ghost, a magic tank and a guy in his 80s be bad? That's right, IT CAN'T. The Unknown Soldier backup is solid enough and closes the story out, but the ending is a bit corny. You know what though? I can't help thinking if the book had started with Haunted Tank rather than giving JT Krul YET ANOTHER chance then it might have built up a slight head of sales and wouldn't be getting cancelled. Maybe a lesson to be learned there, but Johns and DiDio aren't in the game of learning.

Green Arrow #15: Oh God, this is dreadful rubbish. The not-concluded Hawkman stuff from last issue (which appears to have been concluded off-page) has left Oliie with a head injury which may or may not mean this whole issue is being imagined. Anyway, he breaks up a dog fight where the dog (the special favourite of on of the main bad guys) fights the other main bad guy for a diamond ice pick. "Made of real ice - geddit?" says the main bad guy. No, we don't. This needs putting out of its misery.

Stormwatch #15: Is this actually worse? I think it might be. There's a quadruple bluff and the guy from the first couple of issues (who we might have all forgotten about) turns out to be the bad guy behind everything and not shy of killing a roomful of kids to frame Midnighter. There's implanted memories (which in a twist I'm sure Pete Milligan assumes is SHOCKING) which may actually be inverted and the Midnighter might be the only one with the implanted memory, which is that everybody else has implanted memories saying he's bad... and emo Apollo flies into the sun to mope. Presumably his bedroom wasn't far enough away. Confusing rubbish, bordering on unreadable.

Swamp Thing #15: Compared to Animal Man, as you really have to do since they have the same plot, this is a work of genius. On its own merit, it's a pretty competent comic telling of the journey of Swampy and Deadman to Gotham looking for Batman, and finding Batgirl, interspersed with the 'now' of Abby trying to escape from the castle as Rotworld starts. It's just so much of a shame that this whole tie-in exists and that it's supposed to be part of the Johnsiverse - it would probably make a great standalone GN, but DC know better. Of course they do.

Phantom Stranger #3: They know well enough to produce this execrable crap. Written by their head guy. Words really can't describe how awful this is, honestly. It's a number of action poses, linked by some dreadfully stilted dialogue including a section where a character looks like he's going to discover God but goes to Thailand instead. There's a talking dog and the POWER OF PILATES. And wow, another slightly magic, wisecracking, sinister sidekick who smokes. That's 4 now. Who ever said DC had run out of ideads?

World's Finest #7: Damian shows up to help and it turns out Darkseid is KONY 2012. Really? REALLY? Ugh.

Yep, I'm hoping the Action Comics will read better collected (as in, not "I waited a month and all I got was 20 pages and Sholly Fisch")

To counter on Waid, I've liked quite a few of his books: 52, Daredevil, Brave & Bold, ASM (for a couple issues), Birthright, LOSH (for the first year, anyway), and FF (for six months, anyway). He has some less lovable traits (an inability to do "dark" - cf. Irredeemable) and his 90s work is all flat-out dud, but his work is generally fun. He's basically the old codger BKV.

BKV has written Y, Runaways and Saga - Waid's best work is at least a grade below that.

Y went on for what seemed like an eternity, it was way too long. Decent editing could have trimmed at least a year's publication out of it.

a comic featuring a giant Nazi war wheel driven by the corpse of Erwin Rommel and destroyed by a ghost, a magic tank and a guy in his 80s

http://www.stupidgifs.com/images/full/624.gif

I thought Y was all pretty good though, but I am always in favour of a writer who has an interesting world and a bunch of stories to tell having the time to do that, rather that Oh well better get on with the main plot.

Yeah, have enjoyed Y and Runaways much more than any Waid comic I've read, tho' the v mediocre artwork on Y has always been a bit of a barrier to pleasure for me

Sorry, not a qualitative comparison -- more that I find both their comics fun, easy reads but ultimately disposable -- i.e. how I read comics as a kid.

it turns out Darkseid is KONY 2012. Really? REALLY? Ugh.

Darkseid got caught jackin' it in the street.

It's both. Power Girl goes to Africa to look for an Apokolyptian satellite dish and gets attacked by some child soldiers. She says she's seen KONY 2012, but that deals with Rwanda, and this isn't Rwanda so must be something different... then the kids have a gun from Apokolips and get sucked away by a Boom Tube. While he says "Come to me, children."

As bad as it sounds, but possibly not as bad as earlier in the issue where an elephant telepathically tells her he hasn't seen men running about with big bags of cash.

fucking hell

And yet, not the worst book DC published last week (see Phantom Stranger).