Everyone Appreciates Power, and Hierarchies
Well gang, it happened: the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe has changed. We were warned, all of us, through the strangely compelling medium of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's sleeveless workout outfit Instagram pictures, but some of us, admittedly including yours truly, chose not to believe until it was too late and the new world had made itself irrevocably known. But what exactly is the new hierarchy of power in the DC Universe? It took me several weeks of extremely serious pavement-pounding, tree-shaking and lips-loosening, but I was able to get the gist of how things were now, and I bring it to all of you now in the name of clarity. The hierarchy of power in the DC Universe goes as follows:
Top of the command chain is David Zaslav, a dog-brained imbecile on the warpath against everything good and beautiful, whose actions would read as malice if they weren't transparently those of a man trying to apply the industrial logic of linear television to the streaming catalogue era of media consumption. A fool's fool, a total loser in the ways that do and do not matter to Wall Street, this dumb overpaid asshole has the power of life and death over most of the things you love, and as such he lies heaviest in the balance of power of the DC Universe.
THEN you have Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, the actor-turned-media-mogul co-owner of the XFL, who rumor has said is the new point of contact for all things having to do with the DC Universe as a film serial, or is he? Until it is all out there, I will believe that it's just the natural extension of the promotional campaign for the Black Adam movie, itself a 15-year-old confidence trick started by whoever told Dwayne that, since Superman has been weak to magic in the comics, Black Adam, a character obscure enough at the time to have his own running plotline in 52, was technically more powerful (and also cooler) than Superman
Immediately under him, there's Jim Lee, he rules! Looking forward to that new WildC.A.T.S.! I'm not about to make fun of him in any way, dude's good! Wildstorm forever!
We have a few corporate people below that, they aren't really of note so we'll skip to The dreaded Geoff Johns, whose ghost still lingers over DC Comics like the final issues of a year-late bad Watchmen crossover comic that no one asked for. Somehow unable to fuck clean off, the man I found myself unable to make excuses for anymore is seemingly returning to Big Time comics full-time, pretending his disastrous tenure as a film executive didn't happen, and relaunching a Justice Society of America ongoing because it is the only move of his that is yet to have been done better by a younger and cooler writer. And they have the gall to call it The New Golden Age. And before you say anything about his latest cry for attention: YES. OBVIOUSLY, WE'RE GETTING INTO THAT AFTER THE JUMP.
And then, of course, as is inevitable, we have Batman. That one is self-explanatory. Then it's Superman. And then it's Harley Quinn. Then it's Aquaman. Then it's the Flash, unless Ezra Miller gets caught eating human flesh in the time it takes me to finish this writeup. Then it's Shazam. THEN it's Black Adam. And then it's Batgirl. Then it's all your favorites. And then below that are former Editor-In-Chief and current Un-Person Dan Didio's favorites. So if you were looking something new having to do with the Metal Men, well, bad luck.
And that's it! That's all you need to know! So now, when something at DC is bad, you know exactly who to blame. YOU'RE WELCOME.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: COMICS CRIT FOR THE POWER BOTTOMS
If you don't mind, we're going to talk about the first 28 pages of Flashpoint Beyond #6, and the five issues plus a zero that precede them, before we talk about the final two, which is all anyone else wants to talk about. It is, against all odds and probably my better judgment too, a pretty good comic. Purely taken on the surface level, it delivers the raw thrills of Flashpoint as a premise, the ones that got it turned into a universe soon to be turned into an Ezra Miller vehicle, with more clarity and a better quality of spectacle than Geoff Johns could deliver in 2011. With the input of Tim Sheridan and Jeremy Adams, the story of Flashpoint is pulled into focus, like it never had been before.
There is, obviously, the fun of watching a fucked up universe where seemingly everything that could have gone wrong has, with extreme prejudice, dive deeper and deeper into its own apocalyptic wrongness, but that is only the backdrop to the meatier emotional journey inside, about characters letting go of their traumas and learning to accept that the tragedies they went through do not define them. Admittedly, this is all very standard stuff, but executed with care, and illustrated with all the talent Mikel Janin and Xermanico bring to the table? It is a hoot. There are two moments in this latest issue that are just textbook, chef's kiss, absolutely perfect Batman, and also someone earns their own breakthrough through shooting someone in the face. Few things are more entertaining. This part, and how wild it gets? Perfect, no notes.
This is not to say that there are no problems, mind you; the bookkeeping stuff, where it devises one more all-new Great Theory Of The DC Universe, is at best completely inelegant and at worst absolutely unreadable kludge. In theory, I like the idea of acknowledging Time, and therefore Memory, and therefore the History of the DC Universe itself, as things that we as people shape through Emotion, and giving metaphysical weight to that process, but the way the argument is laid out in the book itself is so completely obtuse and confusing that I am not sure I got it down correctly, despite the fact that I'm confident enough in my reading to have it see print in this here newsletter. It makes sense, I swear it does, but it is a total headache.
And then, of course, there is the Geoff Johns at the heart of it, kicking and screaming all the way, swearing he will not be written off from mainstream cape comics despite the many valid reasons why he should. A lot of it is in the unexplored subtext; this is, after all, a story about preserving the Flashpoint universe, and its place in the history of contemporary DC Comics. There are parts that are entirely harmless; table setting for the forthcoming JSA comic in the form of a list of names that are embarrassing, but in a charmingly dated way. And that just about does it for the first 28 pages of Flashpoint Beyond #6.
Those last two pages, then. Turns out that the team that brought you Doomsday Clock are going back to the well, despite having run out of things to say about Watchmen and its relation to the DC Universe as a literary project partway through their first go-around, like there was an intense demand out there for a comic about the secret daughter of Ozymandias hunting the secret son of Doctor Manhattan across the multiverse, like these are things worth considering and remembering, like this is in actual dialogue with Watchmen. There isn't and these aren't. The fun of sacrilege would be one thing, like that time when a Batman that was also the Joker took the dead body of a Batman that was also Doctor Manhattan and put his brain in there, becoming a cosmic multiversal god bent on remaking reality into his twisted nihilistic and inevitable shape, but this isn't even that. This is a comic made just because it can be made, and it can be made because a disgraced film executive went back to writing comics, and the company he works for infamously defrauded some comic book creators.
For those of you keeping score, then: this comic is 28 pages I really liked, and 2 pages of everything wrong with comics as an industry. Is that good? You tell me.
Almost ten years ago to the day, I picked up a copy of Journey Into Mystery #645, and it is a comic that I have thought about for ten years. I think about it now because of a comic that I picked up last week, called A.X.E.: Death To The Mutants #3, which deals with similar ideas, albeit in a different way. JiM was an intimate tragedy, the final farewell of Kid Loki, forced by their own machinations to be subsumed into his status quo as Asgard's most hateful schemer. Death To The Mutants is a great big event comic tie-in full of big time characters and explosions, in which Phastos hits the literal reset button on The Machine That Is Earth, a character that was just as affable, clever, and fun as Kid Loki. Both even end on nearly the same image of a character sat down on the floor crying and clutching an object representing what they are.
But here's the thing: Journey Into Mystery #645 isn't a tragedy, not really. It looks like it, and it feels like it, but of course, it's a trick. Loki had made himself too beautiful and too complicated to ever fully disappear. That's how we get to Young Avengers! That's how we get to Agent of Asgard! That's how we get to the endless disappointment in everything Jason Aaron did in the endgame of his Thor run! Loki couldn't be anything but their own ability to change, and this is why returning them to the status quo was always a doomed endeavor.
The same cannot be said of The Machine That Is Earth, because, well, it is a machine. And so, what should be a victory, Earth being saved from self-destruction, the hardware reset into the status quo, is as bitter a tragedy as it gets, the exact polar opposite of Journey Into Mystery. In the ten years between the two comics, Kieron Gillen has become an expert in twisting the knife, and he knows that showing us characters being made to figure out a new way while embracing who they are will only make it sting worse when the new is forcibly taken from us. This is, in microcosm, the whole of Judgment Day: we must find a new way, because returning to a status quo that has failed is a tragedy. We can't do the same thing over and over again.
Anyway, looking forward to Dark Crisis On Infinite Earths #7, in which the Teen Titans are gonna fight Deathstroke to preserve the DC Universe as it is! That sure isn't a fucking bummer!
Wow! It sure has been a while, hasn't it? Yeah, sorry about that. You know how it is, sometimes the comics are good, but in a way that is self-explanatory, which is a good problem to have if you're a reader, and a terrible problem to have if you're a critic. But we did it! We came back! I don't know what the future holds but I sure as hell am not done with this! Sorry haters! I'll come back when I come back, and while I'm away, keep the fire burning, keep the light bright, and, forever, HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!