I'm at the DC Rebirth retailer road show

I read a lot of stuff from early in Didio's tenure. Blackest Night seems to me the line of demarcation when things started to sour quickly.

There was a *brief* period when DC were pretty good during Didio's tenure -- maybe starting with Seaguy/Catwoman/Gotham Central up to the end of Seven Soldiers

If you mean the Brubaker / Cooke / etc Catwoman, that predates Didio joining the company. Gotham Central began in his first year, two years before he rose to full power, and may have been commissioned before he joined at all. (Plus, Rucka has expressed specific bitterness about Didio's attitude toward it later.) Seaguy is the only one of those to be published after Didio became boss, was almost certainly commissioned earlier, and was under Berger anyway. (I think the other two were far better Morrison, personally - I've never gotten what Seaguy stans were clicking with.)

It just now occurred to me that Seaguy was almost certainly initially pitched as Seaman.

IMO, Seven Soldiers/52/Final Crisis/Batman is Morrison's magnum opus and works amazingly well read as a single work

As a Morristan - he was my favourite writing-only comics writer from the age of eight or so, though I didn't realise 'til my teens - I both concur with this and think he went off the rails almost immediately afterwards.

Happy was an embarrassingly awkward Mark Millar cover band. His first two issues of Action were dynamic and involving, then a wasteland of tedium with the alarming exception of #10, which felt like a burst of self-analytical id. Supergods was a hideous autohagiography, and the presentation of DC business history a whitewashing that Action 10 felt like a belching reaction to.

Multiversity was a pointless shambles, attempting to polish rims on a speeding car that's on fire, to avoid sitting inside it. (Pax Americana issue was great, though.)

Annihilator was cringingly undergraduate My First Creative Writing Exercise About Writers Block bullshit, not even rescued by Frazer Irving, so great with Morrison in 7S and ROBW, largely because he decided to include approx two panels of background per issue. I couldn't connect to these people or believe they existed because a) they were hack cliches but b) they weren't even existing convincingly in an environment or setting. Why keep having action scenes and chases when there's no sense of place?

And Nameless squandered one of Morrison's three best collaborators ever on a six-issue shaggy dog horror story, that again didn't even build scares or tension bcz I couldn't tell who anyone was or what they were supposed to be doing, let alone follow or care what was really, secretly going on. I'm not bothering with his violent Santa Claus miniseries that's going on now, and figure I'm probably off the bus altogether.

Oh yeah, the first issues of those aborted WildCATs and Authority runs were whatever-whatever too.

And the Robbie Williams booklet was embarrassing dickwaggle, presumably commissioned through his corporate motivational speaking company thingo.

I both concur with this

Except I only read the odd bit of 52 in the shop and later on bought one or two that turned out to tie into his Batman mega-run.

I'm a huge Morristan, too, but I'll admit that I've read next to nothing he's done since that block of genius. Although much of it is still somehow piling up around my place, waiting to be read (e.g. his inaugural issue of Heavy Metal, which I was initially very excited about but which looked fairly uninspired when I thumbed through).

52 started off kinda shaky and was occasionally bogged down by the weaker writers (and, one assumes, editorial interference) but it eventually came together quite nicely against all odds. And it seemed like those weaker writers were forced to step up their game a bit to keep up with Morrison.

They're reprinting it as (I think) two super-fat trades soon so this is a good time to check it out.

Supergods was a hideous autohagiography, and the presentation of DC business history a whitewashing that Action 10 felt like a belching reaction to.

OTM. Lost quite a lot of respect for the dude after reading the terribly partial and inaccurate Supergods - for someone so keen to stress, in that bk and elsewhere, his working class socialist credentials, he sure sounded like a good corporate shill, and his comments about Chris Ware from around the same time were similarly obnoxious and ill-informed.

Seven Soldiers is my favourite Morrison work of the 00s, and Final Crisis is not bad either, but IMO both of them suffer from the thing I mentioned above: by the final issue there are so much subplots left open that said issues are absolutely crammed with stuff, which leads into things getting resolved in a quick and unsatisfactory way (the Guardian's part of the SS finale is compressed into a mere news article, the morticoccus subplot in FC is resolved in one offhand panel, etc), or they're not resolved at all (what exactly happens to Klarion? why and how did Barry Allen come back in FC? etc, etc?).

52 is fun to read, but the four-writer thing means that a lot of the plot elements and hints it introduces ultimately lead to nothing. Douglas' old blog posts go into detail about that, and I fully agree with his points.

I do agree thought that all of Morrison's work that came after FC is worse than what preceded it. Despite their flaws SS, 52, and FC are all good comics, and FC in particular is a flawed masterpiece... Without the awful pacing in the final issue, it'd be the best comic he ever wrote.

Sorry, a typo there, I meant to say that that *Seven Soldiers* is the flawed masterpiece, not Final Crisis.

Seriously, do yourself a favor and read his Bat-epic. It's amazing and an amazing feat of deep long-term plotting.

And a lot of the dangling plot stuff is because these are still mainstream DC projects rather than discrete and finite works unto themselves. The Klarion bit I can 'klarify', at least: I believe his final appearance in 7S was meant to lead directly into his first appearance in Kirby's Demon series. Can't remember how that works chronologically, exactly, but I believe that was the intention.

IMO, Seven Soldiers/52/Final Crisis/Batman is Morrison's magnum opus and works amazingly well read as a single work

I have no problem with that, though I still have a lot of love for The Invisibles (and like many here I skipped on 52 quite early).

I'd forgotten Happy, I had somehow never even heard of Annihilator (probably - the cover looks familiar), I was properly unnerved from the first issue of Nameless that I read, and I can confirm that Klaus is entertaining but uninspired.

Ah well, he's Grant Morrison, he was never one for stopping where he should.

Anyway, this is 19 issues over 4 years, none of them for DC.

Gotham Central began in his first year, two years before he rose to full power, and may have been commissioned before he joined at all.

In fairness to Didio, this does mean there was a period while he was at full power and GC was still great, which is all Chuck was saying. Now obviously ordinarily "Don't stick your dick in the well-regarded series" isn't something you'd get credit for as a EiC, but we're grading on a curve here.

Don't forget 18 Days, which continues to be bait-and-switch solicited as a Morrison title and which I continue to buy for some reason (he does at least occasionally co-write an issue).

I have great, great affection for The Invisibles and I will always hold it in high esteem as a cultural artifact and on the basis of how much of an impact it had me, but it's kind of a mess story-wise, especially compared to that later stretch of DC greatness.

xpost

But on his first Kirby appearance he's alone on Earth, while SS ends with him becoming (possibly?) the new king of Sheeda... So there's really no continuity from one to the other.

The same thing also happens with Frankenstein: in SS he's trapped in the Sheeda future, and IIRC Klarion is controlling him. But in FC he's back on 21s century Earth and working for some government agency, with no explanation.

(xxpost)

That was an answer to Old Lunch's comment on Klarion.

Also, I do get that Barry Allen's comeback in FC was used as a prelude to him getting a new ongoing series, but it really wouldn't have hurt if Morrison had at least inluced *some* explanation why he's back, now it just comes off as deus ex machina.

imo Morrison's Batman run kind of fell off in the coda w/the Leviathan plot, but by that point he was trying to work around or ignore the fact he wasn't working in anything connected to actual continuity anymore

Without the awful pacing in the final issue, it'd be the best comic he ever wrote.

I love that final issue of Final Crisis, I think it's the highlight of the series!

Agree that Action Comics/Annihilator/Nameless/Klaus/Multiversity/Happy were all not much cop, albeit with occasional standout issues like Sic mentioned.

Seven Soldiers/52/Final Crisis/Batman is Morrison's magnum opus

Totally, and I'd include JLA and JLA Classified in there too.

(And the second, nu-52 season of Batman Inc is a lot less inspired than what came before it, Batcows excepted.)

All-Star Superman is also technically tied in with that magnum opus (with the various permutations of Nebula Man being the thread tying that to 7S and JLA Classified).

I realize I still haven't read the new 52 Batman Inc yet. It appears that I may have dropped the Morrison ball at just the right time, eh?

It's pretty good! But it's a small, downbeat ending - it works better as a conclusion to the Batman story than as an ending to the magnum opus (which should probably end at Batman and Robin).

Oh yeah, the first issues of those aborted WildCATs and Authority runs were whatever-whatever too.

Was there ever an explanation as to what happened with these never getting to issue 2?

Same thing that happened to the 1963 Annual.

(The Authority did make it to #2, five months later, and then had #3-12 by a different creative team a few years after that.)

Don't even talk to be about that damn 1963 annual!

what is that exactly? morrison couldn't be arsed? artist problems?

#1 was so spectacular he decided to stop there

Jim Lee

Aside from the fact that it's a nonsensical, IP-stealing, passive-agressive, creatively bankrupt comic made by misogynist garbage people, I thought DC Rebirth was okay.

Well that's a pullquote.

Aside from the [...] aggressive [...] comic [...] people, [...] Rebirth was okay.

- Chuck Tatum

The reviews are in:

DC Rebirth [...]a[...]

Just reread Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, and, in its own way, it's just as violent and depressing dead end as The Killing Joke..

Yes, Moore has much to answer for wrt modern day DC's embrace of the grim and the grit. It's just that they tend to forget the attendant wit.

Torrented Rebirth, it was rubbish

Xpost

Yeah, Moore's worst stories feel like a prototype for Didio's DC - nostalgia mixed with ultraviolence - rather than the progressive grim and grit of the 80s-90s, which at least pushed some new narrative ideas, if too often humourlessly. In "whatever happened..." bizarro commits genocide, lana lang burns to death, superman cries alone in a room - it's quite a nasty, cynical comic, not the elegiac tone I remember.

I tried to read Rebirth. How can anyone get through this many badly written captions? Geoff Johns has absolutely no sense of language, of rhythm.

This was such a hit I didn't even get to read it to find out if it was complete shit (as I assume) before selling out.

seriously?!

Yep. Every retailer I know has blown through these. IDGI, but whatevs.

Moore has much to answer for wrt modern day DC's embrace of the grim and the grit.

Yes, it's definitely his responsibility.

yr literalism is striking as always

although he has answered, raised incantations, and summonses protective beards many a time against such accusations

https://www.instagram.com/p/BF6Mx7lm_F4/?hl=en

Tom E on Rebirth: http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/145207290801/danare-we-the-baddies