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

Last I heard about Invincible it had a nude evil superwoman raping a man

lolwhut

can we get a fiction-wide moratorium on rape for, say, five years?

lol, that sounds awful

at least Alan Moore had the decency to do it off-panel in Tom Strong

for the full horror: http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/4676905.html

jeeeeeeeeezus that is the fucking worst

Actually the fucking worst should be reserved for the comment thread on that

It's safe to say the new DiDio/Giffen homage to Kirby is less successful than OMAC.

Also all 52 alternate Earth Superboys appear to have turned up in Superboy. I expect universe punching to take place imminently.

Tuomas might want to look away, because David Finch's wife Meredith is taking over writing on Wonder Woman and her writing of Tales of Oz is... err... something.

Mark you, David Finch is supposed to be drawing it so it'll probably come out in 2017.

Ann Nocenti (which I've just discovered autocorrects to Nonentity) to write a new ongoing series of Klarion, last seen as part of GMoz' Seven Soldiers. LOOK AWAY NOW.

The bad guy in it runs a 'dark' Metal club and his evil powers increase when he plays metal or techno.

I am afeared.

man i might actually buy that
Worst Ann Nocenti Asides/Monologues/Dialogue

Nocenti has never been a terribly good writer, technically speaking, but her writing comes from such a strange headspace that I almost always find it fascinating. That said, I haven't read anything she's done since she came out of semi-retirement so I have no idea how this particular idea will pan out. But it doesn't sound out of character for her by any means.

oh God, I love Ann Nocenti's dialogue so much, that thread is so misconceived

defend "loving, living... FIST"

Nocenti's dialogue reminds me a bit of Jack Kirby's dialogue from his 70s Captain America comic books (Jack Kirby's 70s Captain America dialogue is also brilliant, btw)

kirby gets a pass because he's kirby imo; i can't imagine getting excited about a kirby book without his art though

xpost

OTM. Nocenti dialogue is very similar to Kirby dialogue inasmuch as it comes off as neither naturalistic nor intentionally stylized but more like they're transcribing otherworldly broadcasts that are only incidentally in some form of English.

And in case any of this sounds like critique, I should say I mostly really like Nocenti and wish there were more mainstream comics writers like her. Not by way of emulating her but in giving voice to their own particular strange mental landscapes.

http://comicsbeat.com/trouble-in-gotham-writer-alan-brennert-says-wb-is-stiffing-him-over-45-an-episode/

not exactly thread-relevant, but still due to the Nelson era

DC Implosion 2: half of the current 52 to be axed, 22 of which are less than a year old

Looking forward (not really) to Cancelled Comic Cavalcade #3.

i hope several people are getting fired on the editorial/executive end but likely just creatives, eh?

if anything they'll be increasing executives with the move to Burbank

like, a lot

Some weird accounting there - 16 titles finishing (the fact three of them are weeklies is irrelevant), 7 of which will be within 12 issues. On top of that I'm sure the DiDio/Giffen Infinity Man book was always planned to be a maxi-series, it certainly read that way (and OMAC was the precedent for that).

The two Future's End weeklies would always have ended at Convergence, and have been replaced with the Convergence weekly. Plus there are two new starting books in March, a Batman one and a sports book that looks like a straight swap with Star Spangled War Stories (which was only ever Palmiotti & Grey's GI Zombie + a backup, and never really fit the war brief).

Aquaman never deserved a second book and the Others has felt like a single plot maxi at best; Secret Origins was a terrible commission that has struggled for focus since the Johnsiverse continuity is so utterly fucked, and about to become fuckeder with Convergence; Arkham Manor doesn't know what it is other than ridiculously slight and Gail Simone's Klarion is cringe-inducing dad-dancing, so a mercy killing. Trinity of Sin is just an excuse to give Pandora an ongoing role, so only ever pandering to Johns anyway.

I'm all for knocking DC for publishing shite - I mean, seriously, who has so much of a hard-on for Deathstroke, A BOOK ALREADY CANCELLED ONCE IN THE JOHNSIVERSE, that starting a new run seems like a good idea? This, on the other hand, doesn't seem that big a deal.

Sorry, Klarion is/was by Ann Nocenti WHICH OBVIOUSLY MAKES IT BETTER.

And I confused Arkham Manor with Gotham Academy. Arkham Manor was clearly never anything more that a mini-series, it's a one-off story about Bats undercover in Arkham as Matches Malone.

Being written by Ann Nocenti makes everything better!

I really haven't been paying any attention to DC - what is Convergence?

Convergence is the sticking plaster which is filling the downtime as DC moves from NYC to Burbank. It's a giant crossover event that covers all titles and replaces them - or we'll see Convergence-only versions of them - in April and May.

The plot is

SPOILER ALERT

Reinstatement of the DC multiverse not only to Superboy Punching the Universe Levels, but to pre-Crisis levels.

Rumours are

MORE SPOILER ALERTS

to expect Kandor Bottle City type plot resolution but across entire Earths/Universes

SPOILERS END

So this is supposed to undo the changes caused by Flashpoint? With the characters returning to their pre-Flashpoint continuities?

What does "Kandor Bottle City type plot resolution" mean here? That the DC universe is revealed to exist in small container that's located in a larger universe?

Apparently (and none of this is published yet so speculation and/or caveat emptor) some will be affected by Flashpoint, and some not. (But this is largely irrelevant, as even in the Johnsiverse some continuities ignore Flashpoint such as SOME, NOT ALL of the GL titles - see me ^^^^^^^^ somewhere.)

Exactly that for the Kandor resolution - that each Earth/Universe (bearing in mind many Earth is only shorthand for the earth-centric continuity of each universe) is in a 'bottle' (for differing values of 'bottle').

wait what? i thought the Johns was on top of the whole GL thing
also how is "bottling" 52 universes different from how it already is? i'm so confused

No, he had carte blanche to do what he liked - or so it seemed. GL:NG was completely 52niverse rebooted so that Kyle Rayner was chosen to be a Lantern in a brand new post-Flashpoint continuity. GL (the main title) got to keep all the pre-Flashpoint continuity, so Hal Jordan was already GL and had had all the pre-Flashpoint activities (Blackest Day etc). Red Lanterns and GLC had some elements of continuity retained and some forgotten. GL:NG then adopted bits of the GL continuity when crossing over with that book, specifically all the stuff with Carol Ferris.

And of course while this was going on, Hal Jordan hasn't had any GL shenanigans in Johns' Justice League, which in 52niverse continuity forms 5 years after the characters origins (except Action comics which was 5 years previous to all the other books for GMoz's run then took place at the same time as all the others). So Hal Jordan specifically has different continuities depending which book he's in.

The DC Universes were all different, as a fudge to allow Golden Age and Silver Age versions of heroes to exists concurrently and to 'fix' continuity. Then CoIE 'fixed' this and publishing History of the DCU (and the first Who's Who) there was a single consistent universe/origin etc. Anything inconsistent with this got published (eventually) as Elseworlds imagined stories. Final Crisis then had Superboy Punch The Universe but this quickly got forgotten because Flashpoint/Johnsiverse. But then Mr Terrific got cancelled and DiDio has a boner for him so Earth 2 in the Johnsiverse then New Gods etc so oops.

My guess is that they might try and go back just as far as SuperBoy Punch The Universe therefore 52 universes exist.

Your explanation was perfectly lucid and yet still made no sense. Thank you, DC.

Is there any way they can really 'go back' without tacitly admitting that the new52 was a failure?

I don't think (outside of the first couple of months) there was anyone other than me reading everything - even the staff, hence all my complaints about editors - so I don't think anyone actually gaf. Plus this will open up Vertigo into the multiverse so may actually improve Constantine/JLD.

It looks like they're going 'back' to 52/Countdown, so this isn't any more of a failure for the 52niverse than the 52niverse made 52/Final Crisis. A cynic might speculate it's part of a bigger ploy to get GMoz writing more books for them.

Haha that took a long time (no criticism of your excellent clusterfuck-summarising) to get to something I care about in the last sentence!

Not to be all extra nerdy, but it was Infinite Crisis not Final Crisis where Superboy punched the universe.

You're right, I had a Crisis of Faith.

Ha! Final Crisis was where he merged into the Time Trapper or some such hooey.

Final Crisis was where Superboy was revealed to be an ILXor, IIRC.

I see. I mean I thought one of the main ideas behind the New 52 was streamlining and while GL and Batman continuity made that impossible in the long run, we can concede in principle that it worked in other areas. Just that the stories weren't good enough to make it worth anybodies while.

Infinite Crisis wasn't a hard reboot in the same sense that Flashpoint was so its a lot easier to walk back from the aftermath of Countdown. If they try to maintain current continuity whilst going back to Countdown then they've only made things worse. At the same time do they really just pick back up where they left off?

Can't imagine how they turn the shitshow around.

Tie it in to Multiversity and explain the last few years only happened in the comic books. Sad voila.

"Simple" plot resolution could be:

CoIE was the bottling process
The post Crisis universe was the bottlers' attempt at covering their tracks
Punchy Superboy/52/countdown etc have all been coverup of the results of somebody trying to beat the bottlers (Superboy punching, for example, created the different Earths but also they recombined within the same story)
The aliens out of Animal Man (since they're the things we know that work best outside of comics panels) finally beat the bottlers and reinstate normality. Convergence is their metatext of how they achieved it.

It's going to be weird that things like Red Sun and True Brit will be 'proper' versions of Superman in a couple of months.

i was still kinda following this up through Final Crisis and i'm still like whaaaaatttt
though i still appreciate your summary, aldo

i totally thought at some point the DCU got shunted back into 52 Earths but now i'm having hard time backing that up

they might try and go back just as far as SuperBoy Punch The Universe therefore 52 universes exist.

isn't the whole point of Multiversity that 52 universes is in fact the Nu52 status quo?

The conclusion of 52 was that 52 Earths still existed but very few people knew. Everybody assumed Countdown, but more crucially Final Crisis (because it had Crisis in the title) would be about them becoming known again, and crossing between boundaries would happen but from memory apart from Superman 3d none of that really came across and imo it became more like a new version of History of the DCU hidden in a New Gods murder mystery with a time travelling Batman and seemed more about the return of Barry Allen as anything else.

Nu52 cant have 52 Earths, because as a minimum Earth Zero, Earth Thirteen (Vertigo) and Eath Fifty (Wildstorm) were merged into the one Earth.

How many were on Rian Hughes' map?

Some of the potential 52 are just daft, for example a 1998 Wonder Woman story that DiDio said in DC Nation editorial #89 happened on Earth 34, the only reference to it.

Have at it:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_(DC_Comics)