DC All In And The Crisis Junkies
NOTHING BUT THE LOUDEST COMICS, THAT'S OUR GUARANTEE
Before you say anything, I known I’m showing up fashionably late to this particular party. You have to understand, however, that this is, in itself, cause for celebration. I’ve said this before and I expect to say it again a few more times before this year is through: DC Comics are running a very competent direct market comic book publishing operation. Which, for our purposes, means that they surrounded the launch of their big rebranding special spectacular with a salvo of known quantities. For them, it means strong message discipline, focus everyone’s attention on the shiny new thing while pleasing the regulars. For me, it means there wasn’t all that much to write about in last week’s comics.
That is in no way a bad thing, by the way! But this late in the game, you already know how you feel about Chip Zdarsky’s Batman run, and nothing I write could change your mind, not really. Meanwhile, the winning combo of Wilson and Takara are still making the Poison Ivy comic you know and love, Kelly Thompson still does a killer Birds of Prey, this time alongside Sami Basri, and yes: Shazam! still completely rules, and Josie Campbell is taking confident hard swings, with the steady hand of Dan McDaid holding it down with pitch-perfect cartooning. I pride myself on trying to make this work as informative as I can make it, but there isn’t much to inform you of here, beside the fact that you should really, really check out Shazam!.
What else would I be talking about? The rumors that Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee might be coming back to Batman to deliver a work that is going to be at least as mediocre as Hush? The just announced relaunch of Youngblood under the pen of Rob Liefeld, which I’m not even going to try and joke about, because all the good jokes about Youngblood were written twenty years ago, and all the bad jokes about Youngblood were written ten years ago. You read this newsletter for a curated version of the news, and you trust my judgment when it comes to triage, so let me tell you this: All In is the news, and therefore we might as well get to it, and spare you the unpalatable stream-of-consciousness mix of pretentious opinions and too-specific-to-be-funny-to-anyone jokes that we usually call “recapping the week”. BUTTON!
Let’s start at the nitpick and work our way back. There is one bit of false advertising in the DC All In Special. It’s presented as a flipbook, which implies that you could read it in one way or the other and get the intended effect; it’s not, and the fact is betrayed by its own naming convention. There are two comics in this. One is named “Alpha”, and one is named “Omega”. You’re supposed to read them in that order, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. This is the one truly bad thing I have to say about this comic, which I’ve found to be wildly enjoyable.
Alpha, being the part written by Joshua Williamson and drawn by new DC standard-bearing artist Daniel Sampere, is the easiest of the two to summarize, mostly because it’s a comic Joshua Williamson has already done a bunch of times. It is a Big Event recap and epilogue, which isn’t necessarily launching current storylines as much as it is populating the horizon with things that will arrive in a few years’ time.
Its shape is that of a crowdpleaser’s crowdpleaser, and appreciation will vary depending on your patience for that kind of thing. This one has perennial fan-favorite and general former fuck-up made good Booster Gold, most recently of the wringer that is several Tom King comics, at last seen as the hero that he is in the eyes of those annoying twitter users that claim to have read 52. (I’m being really mean right now and I don’t necessarily mean all of it.) Around him, in two-page spreads each more luxurious than the last, are quite literally all of your favorites, each playing their part in the grand tapestry of a universe-changing epic.
And it would be incredibly easy to be cynical about all of this, doubly so if you have feelings anything like mine about Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths, but:
It’s really well done, in part because it is impossible for Daniel Sampere to make a bad-looking comic at this point in his career, following his incredible level up across the pages of Wonder Woman.
As with so much of his most recent work, Joshua Williamson has enough formal flourishes in there to give the proceedings the flash it needs while foreshadowing the fireworks on the side opposite.
I am in fact one of those suckers for whom the prospects of Booster Gold realizing his potential plays, and I’ve always been, and sometimes I catch myself thinking about the Legion of Super-Heroes too.
What of this comic’s other half, then? Well I wish there was a better way of putting it, but the sum total of my feelings about the matter can fit in this two-word sentence: DADDY’S HOME.
Yes, I hate this sentence too, and yes, we’re going to unpack that. First and foremost, I’m talking about dearest daddy Darkseid, standing in glory he hasn’t had in a good long while. That’s Wes Craig you’re looking at, letting go of the loose neatness of comics like Deadly Class and Kaya, and instead clawing and scratching his way to the grandeur of Kirby at his most maximalist. It’s raw, and it’s packed with the kind of primordial energy that makes every scene the coolest thing you’ve seen in a big two direct market book all year.
But then, I do also mean that this is Scott Snyder’s return at the DC Universe wheel, and that makes this comic particularly eager to take some very hard swings. Obvious comparators would bring up Jonathan Hickman and Bryan Hitch’s Ultimate Invasion right about here, because that’s also a comic in the universe-creating business, and because you could already see how much Snyder loved the cues in that playbook on Justice League. All of that is relevant, but not that much. First, because All In does in a single admittedly oversized issue what Hickman did in four. Second, because here, we are playing at higher, very much existential stakes.
This is Darkseid, as terminal and as evil as could be, fighting the way of the world itself and rampaging through the higher planes desperate for change. The subtext, as it was in Dark Nights: Dark Metal, is easy enough to parse: this is a comic for the malcontents; this is a comic for those that have grown tired of comics comfortably playing the hits without challenging their characters in any way that would matter. And from there, it makes a promise in the shape of a whole new universe. Comics on hardcore difficulty, a universe entirely antithetical to the idea of business as usual. Three new series, and then possibly more, full of things you’ve never seen before. How successful are they at that? Well, give me the time to finish that paragraph and we’ll get there. Good news: we’re done here. That’s Omega.
You could fit the case for Absolute Batman #1 within a single sentence, and you could make it by mentioning a single name. It’s Batman, by Nick Dragotta. Right then and there, you’ve already been given most of the information that you require. You know Nick Dragotta is a master; you know this comic will be exquisitely designed, furiously kinetic, and powerfully expressive and evocative. If you’ve paid attention, you won’t be surprised when he and colorist Frank Martin adjust during the flashbacks, making the edges and the colors just a touch softer. It’s five dollars American for forty pages of masters at work. That kind of deal is too good to pass up.
But if you were to zoom out, if you were to look past the immediate thrills on display, you’d start noticing just how much Scott Snyder has put in there. You can see the ambition in how purposefully it has been shaped: it’s a series of carefully built reveals, with a couple of really clever fake-outs, that all build anticipation for the most major reveal of them all, which is the origin story of this new rock hard slab of Bruce Wayne. The commitment to structure is so extensive it’s visible in the multiple instances of call-and-response, from Alfred’s bike to the zoo plaque about the many wild things about bats.
Along the way, you have a number of exciting twists and turns. Some are strict inversions of the familiar iconography: the Batman you knew was rich and spent his time in a cave, this one is a working-class scrapper who lives atop unfinished skyscrapers. (Also, he hangs upside-down.) And then we extend that to our cast of characters, adding an intimate dimension to Gotham’s most infamous, in turns whose ambition can only be exceeded in the pages of the current volume of The Ultimates.
(Short aside: The Ultimates #5 is, as one would come to expect if they had been paying attention, the perfect answer to the question of what “the Earth-6160 Hawkeye” would be, it’s the same kind of alchemy, of changing the world and the characters to make the pieces fit in a place acknowledging the realities of life in the here and now, but people more qualified than me should speak about the full breadth of those changes.)
And then, you have the twists that play with more specific elements: there’s the dinner scene from Year One, turned into a display of the horror and depravity of the new Black Mask; elsewhere you see the TV talking heads of Dark Knight Returns, delivering exposition as Batman gets ready to do his grim business. It’s what you know, but not in the way you know it, and piecing it together has been an absolute delight.
It’s a very generous comic, and you will notice new things about it every time you pick it up. Until last night, my latest was that there are only two two-page splashes in this issue, one has the title, and one has the credits. But more importantly, one is of a gun, and one is of Batman. You get it, right? This is the whole story in two pictures. This is as Bat as it gets. But then someone else posted about it and now I’m just jealously looking for the next great revelation. If other books in the line can be this ambitious, this is going to be a game-changer.
In Marvel Comics, meanwhile (this transition entirely stolen from Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum), Sentinels #1, a comic book that feels oddly desperate. It was always going to be hard to build a winning proposition from a comic whose setup (it’s the mutant killers working for a straight-up fascist, not the ones that killed all your favorites, but the ones that took over) felt so anathema to the X-Men fandom as it exists post-Krakoa, but the angle was workable, so long as Alex Paknadel and Justin Mason could land a good enough premise. They can’t, despite trying several over the course of this first issue.
It is an action comic about paramilitary goons thrown at some of mutantkind’s deadliest mass murderers with barely any action in it. It is a drama about people getting progressively dispossessed of their own bodies by a machine that is killing them that jumps into its central dilemma while its cast are still mostly strangers to us. It’s also a tale of one man having to navigate his identity and his worldview among people that would have him killed without a second thought, starring a character who has no qualms about selling out. And Onslaught shows up at the end, just to make the whole proposition even shakier.
Having read a fair few 2000 AD comics by now, I can assure you I know this comic on a molecular level. It wants to be Judge Dredd, which is what anyone trying to claim Robocop as its own is trying to do, but it doesn’t have the satirical verve or the unflinching commitment to its own morality. It wants to be a future war comic in the vein of Bad Company or Rogue Trooper, but it seldom acknowledges the absurd or the surrealist inherent to its situation. Much like its characters, then, this is a book that feels like it was sent out to die, and in my hands, that’s exactly what it did.
And that’s all the fun that was fit to print for this week! It’s an exciting time to do this, so expect the next one sooner than you’d think and/or like! In the mean time, reach me for any reason and at any time on Bluesky, Pillowfort, and other places that aren’t Cohost (R.I.P.)! And then, get yourself a light scarf you can pack in your bag! And at the end of it all, HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!