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Thursday, April 19, 2007

You Say You Want A War? Well, You Know...

World War III. I'm with Chris Sims on this one, Morrison's version was much better.

To start off, I know Black Adam is a badass, but to have one man against the entire world of superheroes is almost ludicrous. He has the same power as Captain Marvel, the same, and yet no one could stop him? Really? Even with "godlike rage", I still find the whole premise a little hard to believe. I thought when they first announced this story that he would have at least the Great Ten or some other collection of supers on his side.
And the narration by Martian Manhunter? I wanted to weep the writing was so bad. There was all this wild shit going on, but it was anchored with J'Onn's existential crap that made me want to put the book(s) down sometimes. How did Black Adam's mind make him emo?
As far as the Titans tragedy we were promised, Superboy Prime beat them much worse and no one cares about a reanimated corpse dying. Or Young Frankenstein. Though Beast Boy's minimal reaction to the death of a girl he supposed love with all his heart seems to be in line with the callous joking he did when he thought Everyman died.
I enjoyed 52 Week Fifty but, then, it didn't have Martian Monologue. I would have preferred Black Adam actually doing something in five issues besides causing random property damage and killing throwaway characters. Again, Superboy Prime already went there and set the bar pretty high.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Big Mike dissents! Granted, World War III was not a classic work of the superhero genre. I'm not going to bag it up and keep it with 'whatever happened to the man of tomorrow'. But I certainly found it interesting and entertaining.

I definitely would have trimmed the J'onn internal monologue a bit (we were almost getting into Bendis territory with that one), but I thought it was an enjoyable read and had some pretty bad ass fights.

In terms of Black Adam's power... DC is making a concerted effort to reassert the Marvel family as some bad mufuckas and I think this is a good start. Besides, there's always instances of certain characters' powers fluctuating relative to others to move certain plot arcs along (see also: Deathstroke in Identity Crisis).

I was never expecting WWIII to be great, but I think it was what 52 has been all along: solid and readable. My perception is that a lot of people have feelings of disappointment about the direction of some characters in OYL and are directing a lot of that at WWIII. I didn't love it, but I didn't dislike it either.