Remake/Remodel: DC Rebirth so you don't have to

as it happens, the homeless population of Seattle lives in a tarzanesque hoovertown that's being terrorized by begoggled morlocks

at least this is pretty otm

Batman Rebirth #1 is considerably better. Tom King, who I love, is co-credited with Scott Snyder for the story; I've read nothing by the latter but I gather he's the batman go-to guy of the moment? I'm totally out of tune with what the dark knight is (or even "is") in DC's current universe. Millionaire ubermensch in the nu-Tony Stark mode? Stoic super soldier with a desperate desire to be a mentor? Morrison-esque untouchable icon? Or Miller-esque sadist bad cop? In twenty pages (this is less of a chapter one and more of an opening paragraph), he's most of those things, more or less, from page to page.
There's a lot of out of sequence story pushed together here. Bruce is training a protege to be not so much a robin as a lieutenant? And he's fighting to save the city. And defusing a bomb? And doing one-handed chin ups off the side of a building while taking a business meetingThe desequenced storyline connects thematically with the current baddie of choice: a version of Calendar Man who does a weird Benjamin Button thing and regenerates anew from his husk of body as the seasons change. He's threatening Gotham with, i dunno, SPORES, I guess. The whole thing is over before it really gets any footing but it's certainly promising. King's tough guy batman dialogue is sufficiently pulpy to hit the spot for me:
http://i.imgur.com/JSyrTZG.png
Mikel Janin's arts is reasonably functional but his bruce wayne looks too much like a young Jon Hamm for my taste. The backgrounds are either undelineated pastels or overcrowded messes of computer assisted art. Worse, Janin's layout grids feel oddly static; witness this triptych of alfred dropping an avocado into the batcave (yes, seriously):
http://i.imgur.com/2QdizWO.png
This book is apparently spinning off in two directions: an eponymous Batman book written by King with next-gen Marc Silvestri David Finch and "All-Star Batman" with Snyder and JR jr.

Green Lanterns Rebirth #1 reminds me of how much I have always loathed Geoff Johns' writing. SO much overwrought self-referential exposition and soap opera monologue. It's like somebody read a lot of Claremont but felt that his characters just didn't talk to themselves enough. I've tried to read Johns' earlier takes on the Lanterns and hoo-boy they're not good. I gather this story takes place in a heavily crafted, thoroughly delineated Lantern Johnsverse and guess what? You don't need to know anything about it to recognize that this is a mismatched buddy cop story and nothing but.
Three pages of ponderous introductions reveal the Guardians are being chased by those dumb Invasion aliens and there's a Pandora's box or who knows what. And now we've got "real life problems" with the two new Green Lanterns on earth and because Marvel seems to be selling more with diversity, one is a presumably middle eastern guy who looks like The Rock and apparently got the ring in guantanamo (what the fuck?) and the other is a presumably latino woman. She's named "Jessica Cruz" but I'm not sure what race means when everyone in the world looks like a Maxim action figure. Here's the totally normal way Jessica is met by a friend:
http://i.imgur.com/SpZow3g.png
In a pair of brilliant character designs, our middle eastern lantern who is TOTALLY NOT A TERRORIST Y'ALL wears a balaclava and the female lantern has no irises and some sort of strange lantern shaped eye highlight and impossible posture.
http://i.imgur.com/yJpmbnM.png
also, hands are hard to draw.
http://i.imgur.com/VzUNSlX.png
So these guys meet and they bicker and then Hal Jordan shows up and they are put on notice that they've got to MAN UP and be partners because there's some huge universe changing thing happening and they don't have TIME to put up with you ROOKIES. Just once it would be nice if the new Lantern could come on board during a period of peace and go through several years of regulation training. Anyways, Hal ditches them and then there's a splash page with a bunch of evil red Lanterns and one of them is named ATROCITUS and the other one is a splayed vampirella on a throne of skulls with an impossibly placed evil cat between her spread legs and the cat has a power ring on its tail and jesus christ am i supposed to take this seriously or what.
The art is total bog standard raised on Image stuff; I was surprised the penciller is Noah Van Sciver's brother but that probably just tells you where my reference points are at these days.

the cat Red Lantern was one of the GOOD things to come out of all that GL hubbub years back

Superman Rebirth #1 is something different from all the rest of these. Where the other three pamphlets serve as reboots of one fashion or another, the Supes book is a muddle of near-hopelessly mashed up continuities with visual details, historical eccentricities and superhero trivia explicitly cherrypicked and reshuffled into a barely coherent guidebook for an uncertain future. We get Byrne's Fortress of Solitude and cleaned up blacksuit Fabio Superman with a beard and Nehru jacket superman and secret agent Lana Lang and SEVEN PAGES of Doomsday Death of Superman recaps and all of this patent absurdity is treated so deadly serious and served by the most apathetic dialogue and lack of action. The transition between panels here is emblematic:
http://i.imgur.com/Mn8QIsJ.png
THE HORROR! THE PAIN! "By the way, that's an interesting device you're using there." "I MAKE things to help me DO things." Hmm, yes. I see, I see.
The plot synopsis, such as it is has Lana Lang trying to take dead superman's body to be buried in smallville when alt-superman shows up to stop her and then they convolutedly stroll down multiple reality memory lanes. Then they bury him and alt-supes smiles. The big takeaway is that dead supermen rise again. Except when they don't and they probably won't now. Except probably they will. I barely follow and I definitely don't care. Read all this essentially meaningless word soup and tell me how much patience you'd have for more:
http://i.imgur.com/BQTTTsf.png
Doug Mahnke's art is... not good. That's a Major Bummer (pun intended) as I grew up reading The Mask and loving his weird mix of photorealism and caricature. I don't know what you'd call this though:
http://i.imgur.com/3D7W6C2.png

in sum: it's been since morrison stopped batman and dini stopped detective since i followed a dc book regularly. Collectively, these four books don't make any compelling argument toward my giving a shit about the structure of their newest universe. I suppose I'll have a go at Tom King Batman but horrendous Top Cow style art may make even that unbearable.

Ugh, that's Mahnke?! His stuff was soooo good when I left DC a few years ago (apparently the same time as you).

Geoff Johns GL has always been dumb as dirt (yellow equals scaredness! red equals angryness!) but that corner of the DCU was pretty fun up until Blackest Night.

Johns' GL was okay, but the Green Lantern Corps was really fun for a while, especially when Dave Gibbons was writing/drawing it. It had a sort of a 2000AD style "space weirdness" vibe to it, with an interesting rotating cast. But then all that Red/Blue/Orange/Pink/etc Lantern Corps bullshit started happening, and everything was swallowed by Johns' silly megacrossover, at which time I bailed out. I did eventually read Blackest Night, but it was just filled with the sort of grim'n'gritty stuff (pointless, gruesome characters deaths, gratuitously gory action scenes, macho posturing, etc) Johns now seems to be highly critical of, so pots and kettles etc.

Noah Van Sciver's brother has been drawing ugly Green Lantern comics since years before Noah was drawing badly-printed sad-sack bakery comics

(and was the first Quitely fill-in on New X-Men, the only thing I've ever read by him)

yeah for a minute there i was like who's Noah? didn't even realize Ethan had a brother

shared feelings on Mahnke btw

The crappy quality of the Mahnke art must be because of the inker, right? He was still producing great stuff in Final Crisis, it's hard to believe his art would've deteriorated so much in only a few years.

The last image Forks posted looks as if Mahnke's pencils were inked by Liefeld, with all the cross-hatching and wrinkles and weird lifeless eyes.

Do any of these Rebirth books actually follow up on the cliffhanger of DC Universe Rebirth #1? I'm still confused on where exactly the Dr. Manhattan plot is supposed to continue?

Mahnke's Johnsiverse work was appalling.

Having them in my 'to read' pile I can't answer for definite but I'm 99% certain none of them follow up the end of DCU Rebirth #1 Special in the slightest.

http://i.imgur.com/BQTTTsf.png

by my count there's 260 words in these panels and none of them are interesting, informative, witty or even comprehensible without the context of however many back issues of superman I'd have to wade through to work out why there are two supermen and one of them is steroidal will riker

the cat has a power ring on its tail

waht

how did i miss out out on this startling development in the dcu

i feel like it says something profound about the cultural milieu of the 90s and the 10s that returned-from-'death', black-suited superman sported a mullet then and now has a beard and both are used to denote that he has been profoundly changed

brb gonna write a thinkpiece on the man of steel and men's grooming

The cat (Dex-Starr or something?) has been around for at least like six or seven years at this point, TBF.

jesus christ dex-starr's origin story is one of the most harrowing things i've ever read

animal abuse + rage-fuelled cosmic powers = comics aren't just for kids anymore!

I've often worried about Geoff Johns. Some of the stuff he writes is like seeing a kid who's constantly drawing pictures of his house on fire and his family dead on the lawn. I hope he's okay.

xp (or not) Yeah, don't read Bleez's then.

challenge accepted!

*reads bleez's wiki entry*

oh god no fuck you geoff johns you are genuinely the worst thing to happen to superhero comics in the last 20 years

i feel like it says something profound about the cultural milieu of the 90s and the 10s that returned-from-'death', black-suited superman sported a mullet then and now has a beard and both are used to denote that he has been profoundly changed

Hasn't growing a beard been used as a shorthand for "becoming more serious" in fiction at least since the aforementioned Riker did so in The Next Generation?

Also, IIRC Supes already did that in the early 90s when he executed those Kryptonian mass murderers, and after that went wondering in space because he felt he wasn't fit to be Superman again?

I'd like to find a website that gathers all of the Johns gratuitous violence panels in one place. There is this one but that's just skimming the surface.

I could identify some of the Geoff Johns bits in 52 by people being ripped in half or dismembered.

tuomas, do you want to start the 'superman's grooming: an intensive textual analysis' thread or shall i?

Old Lunch super otm re: kid horror pictures

I mean, I used to draw a lot of gruesome stuff as a kid cuz I loved horror movies and things that were grody, but I'm talking specifically about that kid you ask to draw a picture of mommy and he just goes ham scribbling an indecipherable mass with a black crayon to the point of ripping the paper to shreds while rocking in his seat and humming tunelessly to himself.

a behind-the-scenes peek at geoff johns' creative process

https://i.makeagif.com/media/8-14-2015/bB0ttL.gif

Tuomas, as I explained ^^^^^ this is that same Superman. The actual same one.

Didn't know about Bleez. Is it that hard to create a female superhero/villain without gruesome rape involved?
Still 100% behind Dex-Starr though

It's proven pretty difficult for DC, sure.

Although, to be fair, not all of their female characters' origins involve gruesome rape. Sometimes that's just how they're ultimately dispatched.

Bleez was once a princess on the planet Havania, renowned for her great beauty. Many men sought her hand, but she rejected them all, often in an extremely rude and abrasive manner. Two of her suitors, especially humiliated, sought out a Sinestro Corpsman and tempted him with stories of Bleez's beauty. He went to Havania, where he murdered Bleez's mother and captured Bleez, taking her to Ranx the Sentient City. For some time during the events of the Sinestro Corps War, Bleez was raped and tortured by members of the Sinestro Corps, but managed to escape when Ranx came under attack during the Battle of Mogo. The Sinestro Corpsman who had originally abducted her pursued and caught her, and forced her to kiss him. As she was being pushed to her limits by this final indignity, a red ring found Bleez and inducted her into the Red Lantern Corps. Her blood was transformed into burning plasma, and she vomited it into the Corpsman's throat. Before he could recover, she killed him in a blind fury. Later, she was among the strike force that ambushed the Green Lanterns transporting Sinestro back to Korugar for execution.

oh look the dc universe wiki has a page devoted to comic-book sexual assaults :( http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Sexual_assault

In a vague attempt to provide any kind of context and/or justification, the Red Lantern Corps are formed through RAGE so they all have pretty horrific origin stories.

On the other hand, the person that created them did so knowing they would all by definition have horrible origin stories.

The only justification I can come up with is that Kirkman is worse

Disagree! But I have a weakness for Bendis-y talk talk.

They can both be terrible, but Kirkman doesn't have control over a whole company's universe (except in the obliquest way as Image's COO).

seemed like refried horseshit to me, but what do i know.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/green-arrow-might-be-the-biggest-surprise-of-dcs-rebirt-1780887777

Tuomas, as I explained ^^^^^ this is that same Superman. The actual same one

But isn't that Superman the post-CoIE version, the one who existed from the Byrne reboot up until Flashpoint? So basically what they'd done is kill the Nu 52 Superman and bring back the regular version?

exactly

Yes. Plus that Lois. And their son, Jonathan.

Johns has written individual comics I have liked and Kirkman hasn't. But yeah, unlike Johns, I guess Kirkman doesn't drag everyone else down with him.

Beardy Superman is really the post-Smallville, post-Infinite Crisis Superman, with younger (dead?) parents rather than the Byrne version with ol' ma and pa.

I thought he was the Adventures Of Superman Superman? He was in Convergence at least.

Kirkman is actually good example, because Invincible kinda presages the tonal shift in DC comics after Johns and his followers took control: that odd combination of Silver Age pastiche interspersed with bursts of gore and violence they could never have done back in the days when the readers were mostly kids. But IMO this is more forgivable in Invincible since it's an original creation, and that tone was there right from the start, so it's not like Kirkman was derailing beloved cultural icons or anything.

otm - at least kirkman was shitting in a sandbox of his own creation