Comicry #1

 After (yet another) long hiatus, I am return-ed again, but this time it’s to expand upon what was intended to by my comic book discussion series that never made it past the introductory entry.  So let’s try this shit again.  There’s major life stuff to update, but it isn’t happening here.  So if that’s what you’re interested in, and not comic books, please just move on…

With that out of the way, let’s dive in.

First of all, I haven’t actually picked up my new comic books from the shop in a month.  There’s a reason for that, which I’ll get into another time.  Suffice to say, I’m not entirely up on what the world is doing.  But I have had ample opportunity to go back and re-read some older stuff.  Case in point:  Final Crisis and Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge.

From the first time I read it, I’ve thought Rogues’ Revenge (heretofore to be known as FC:RR for easiness) was a pretty awesome story.  Geoff Johns has nailed the Rogues every single time I’ve read him write them.  Just pitch perfect.  His Captain Cold, in particular, is one of my absolute favorite villains.  This series really just kind of existed to clean up some loose ends for things that spun out of Infinite Crisis and leading into Flash Rebirth (which I hate).  With Bart Allen dead and the hands of the Rogues, and Inertia still alive, there was plenty of surface motivation for the characters.  The real motivation ended up being leaving as clean a slate as possible for Barry Allen’s return.  All traces of Bart and Inertia are gone, as they’re both dead (though Bart returned as Kid Flash in another Final Crisis tie in, Legion of Three Worlds…go figure).  The Rogues aren’t out on the run anymore, back in their base city of operations, ready to engage the Flash in "the game," as Cold refers to it.  And Zoom (the second character to act as a Reverse Flash, a.k.a. Hunter Zolomon) is depowered, so that the original Reverse Flash, Professor Zoom (a.k.a. Eobard Thawne) as Barry Allen’s main foil.  At the time, the depowering of Zolomon was a bit of a shock to me, considering that Barry had only just returned in the pages of the main Final Crisis series.  It was a little hard to read the intentions behind that at the time.  It has ended up being the thing I’ve hated most in comics because it led to Flashpoint (which was AWFUL), which led to the "New 52" (which I’m still a little upset and on the fence about how much I enjoy it).  All in All FC:RR was an enjoyable series.  Didn’t really have any need to be a Final Crisis tie-in, but I know that’s just a way for publishers to sell more books.  To anyone who enjoys Flash mythos, I’d tentatively recommend it, but, really, you’d need to be up to date (as of it’s publishing) to really get the full idea of it.

As a quick aside…  The story arc in the Flash: Fastest Man Alive series where the Rogues and Inertia kill the then-adult-and-The-Flash Bart Allen is fantastic.  I own all 13 issues of that series, and really, they’re all pretty damn good.

Now then….on to Final Crisis….

The first time I read this series in it’s full entirety, I hated it.  With a passion.  Didn’t understand what the fuck was going on half the time.  Didn’t get why things were happening, felt like I missed an issue between issues (as if some magic issue 2.5 existed between 2 and 3, for instance), and sometimes assumed I’d flipped multiple pages instead of just one.  But this time around….I kind of enjoyed it.  Don’t get me wrong….it’s still quite hard to fully understand (it just goes completely off the rails between issues 6 and 7), but there is enjoyment to be found.  What’s really strange is that the showdown with Darkseid, who’s been built up the whole time as the "big bad" is really just meh.  He doesn’t turn out to be the final villain.  No, no, that dubious honor went to Mandrakk the Dark Monitor, who was some kind of cosmic vampire thing.  It wasn’t entirely clear how that worked.  From what I could gather, he was the corrupted form of the original/best Monitor of the Multiverse.  Or something like that….again, not entirely clear.  What always killed me about Mandrakk was that, in the main FC series, you don’t see him until like halfway through the last issue, #7.  No, he was introduced and given a full backstory in a tie in series, Superman Beyond 3-D.  Yep…the ultimate villain of your major crossover series was introduced in a tie in comic.  Just despicable.  Not to mention bad writing.  Really, the story is pretty damn good up until that Mandrakk shit starts in issue 7.  The first 6 and a half issues of Final Crisis made for a good story, start to (mostly) finish.  And don’t even get me started on the literal Deus Ex Machina at the end of issue 7, called the Miracle Machine, that grants someone a single wish.  Superman uses it to fix EVERYTHING that happened in FC by wishing for "the best for everyone" or something similar to that.  It was just….I don’t even know what to call it.  So, overall, I can’t really recommend Final Crisis to anyone who isn’t a DC fanboy, or at least what I would call a DC Scholar….someone who knows their shit when it comes to the (former) DC Universe.  Anyone who is a novice, layman, or new to comics would just be 150% lost.

As for the New 52…..meh.  Kind of underwhelming through 3 and 4 issues.  The books I’m enjoying most include some real surprising gems, like Frankenstein Agent of SHADE and Demon Knights.  Other favorites include Justice League International, Blue Beetle, Batgirl, Teen Titans, Aquaman, and the Green Lantern family of books.  I’ll get more into the New 52 in another Comicry installment (hopefully relatively soon…before the first books get shitcanned at issue 8).  I’ll try to dive into some of the continuity issues DC is trying really, really, REALLY hard to ignore, too.

Until the next time…

Sayonara.