Son Of A Bitch!
I...I apologize for the profanity. No wait, I take that back. What I mean to say is GODDAMN Son of a Bitch!
Well, needless to say, I bought and read the final issue of Justice League: Cry for Justice. Needless to say, I am...wroth. AND pissed. And confused.
I mean...what the HELL? What did poor old Roy ever do to James Robinson anyway?
When this whole thing started, I was actually enjoying it a bit. Yes, it was QUITE ridiculous, and way over the top, and the characterization of some people was hideously off-base, but still...there were some amusing moments. It was so completely, unrelentingly terrible, that it was fun.
However.
I think that we crossed the line between campy and fun-to-hate a ways back. For me, it was when Robinson had Prometheus rip Roy's arm off. It went to bloody, serious and NOT funny in a nano-second. Talk about killing the momentum!
And speaking of killing...here be spoilers for those of you who haven't read it...what is up with offing a little girl? Shock value? We've been shocked and shocked and shocked over the years, and I'm getting just a little tired of it. I can only assume that the writers were having trouble dealing with the fact that Roy had a young daughter, and how to write her.
That's easy, you write her being adorable. I LIKED Lian. I wanted her and Sin and Milagro to get together in kindergarten and form their own Justice League. Guess that's not going to happen now. In addition to Lian's crumpled little body being found in the wreckage of her house, they also appaently blew up Star City. And some OTHER cities. I hate it when fictional real estate gets destroyed. I go into a tizzy every time they wreck Opal City or the JSA Brownstone, and I'm still in a snit over Warriors.
And then Oliver shows up at Prometheus's lair and shoots him in the head with an arrow. This was after he spent most of the issue taunting all the helpless heroes. Every skill, every plan, every talent they had, he was able to thwart. I hate that. I don't like seeing the Justice League run around like chickens with their collective heads cut off. And Prometheus isn't even worthy of being able to sneer at them. Doctor Doom can sneer. The Joker can sneer. So can Sinestro. Prometheus? Please. He's a lightweight, no matter HOW smart the writer keeps telling me he is.
Starman is one of my favorite books of all time. I can't reconcile the care that James Robinson took in setting the mood, and writing that book with the bathos and chaos of this mini-series. I can only assume that it was actually his evil twin.
As for the rest of my books...Jonah Hex was pretty good. JSA: All-Stars didn't have Magog getting punched in the face, but it DID have Sand...and he had dialogue! Woohoo! Detective Comics was good, Nemesis was weird, but interesting, and Cinderella and Jack of Fables were charming as usual.
But man, I'm still in a pissy mood.
posted by SallyP @ 12:24 PM
19 Comments:
Yeah, as I've said elsewhere -- I thought Cry for Justice was going to end up being a camp classic. Instead, it's being reviled -- and justifiably so. Why couldn't Lian have joined Sin if the writers were having trouble with her? It would have made perfect sense! And what did Roy ever do to deserve all this grief? He's suffered more horrible personal tragedies -- REPEATEDLY so -- throughout his fictional lifetime than just about any other super-hero I can call to mind. The whipping boy of the DCU, that's Roy.
He should get mad and join Atrocitus and Mera -- and form a club!
Here's a thought about the whole Cry for Justice thing, in hindsight: Wasn't it all HAL's idea to start with?
They killed Lian? That's just wrong. I mean, I've always considered her father an unrepentent moron (though a loveable one) but there was no need for her to die for that.
By the way, love the idea of Lian, Milagro and Sin as Lil' Justice. Irey West should join them.
Any more candidates for Lil' Justice?
Whoa...killing a little girl. Really?
I haven't read any of this series since the first issue. Hopefully it's the death-knell of all this pointless tragedy and we'll soon go back to comics being fun again.
I KNOW. Prometheus as written by Grant Morisson was not invincible, just well prepared. And he had FUN with it. Very off the cuff, and while dangerous, never pointlessly destructive. Robinson made him far more sadistic then he needed to be. My explanation is he is the real imposter and the guy he killed in that Faces of Evil one shot was the real guy.
AND ANOTHER THING...Not only was there no realism or logic to how unbeatably prepared he was in Cry for Justice, there is no logic to the fact that Green Arrow turns around and gets the drop on him in another dimension, shooting him in the head....Green Arrow... Green Lantern, Capt. Marvel, the Flash, Miss Martian...all can't lay a figurative glove on him, and GA waltzes right up (again, IN A DIFFERENT DIMENSION) and shoots him in the head. With a bow and arrow. Piss-poor writing Mr Robinson.
Ditto to all. Nauseating.
Yeah, it's pretty poor writing. And art. at least, in the first issue or so, the art was rather pretty. And the final shot of Ollie was nice, but the other artists brought in, weren't up to the level of the original.
I'm not really sure WHAT happened, but it all just deteriorated so...quickly. As Sea points out, there was a certain campy charm to it originally, but the way that poor Roy and Lian were treated...basically just to give Ollie angst, really annoys me.
It's really not all that hard to give Ollie angst anyway. Just burn his toast in morning.
I remember reading not very long ago an issue from Teen Titans focused on Roy and his relationship with Lian... And it was good! It was fun! and Lian was actually an interesting character, not only a nice addendum to Roy.
And now this? Not only is unecesary, the whole issue is chaotic, and poorly writen. Most of the time I don´t know where the action is, or why are everybody so angry or desesperate (or so they say, not that they have ANY facial expresion).
I don´t know. It´s just nasty.
Exactly. I can accept comic book stories dealing with the death of children if they're GOOD stories. When Buddy Baker's family died in Animal Man I damn near cried...but I didn't hate Morrison. I wouldn't have hated him even if they'd stayed dead. Because he was DOING something with it.
It's all very well to say, as I'm sure someone will, "Well, beloved children die all the time, ignominiously and without a dramatic final scene. That's just life." Except that this isn't life. This is comics. If we wanted to see real life in all its bleakness and lack of salvation, we'd pick up a newspaper instead, not a story about the Justice League.
Morrison's story about the death of a hero's loved ones worked because he grappled with these issues head-on, with pain and loss and injustice and with the fact that heroes don't always save the day even in the DCU. Cry for Justice was just...just...
...words literally fail me.
I don't think I need to tell you how upset I am over Lian's death. And now doubly glad I wasn't reading the series. Just skimming this issue in the comic shop was enough trauma.
Lian isn't, or rather, wasn't hard to write. The writers who didn't want to deal with her left her home with the sitter or in school. But some writers did wonderful stories with her. The Titans story a while back when she was kidnapped was well done. And the one before that when her babysitter ran off with her. Lian was well used in a lot of stories. It just required writers to actually be, you know, creative.
I keep thinking of Lian growing up in that alternate universe and taking Roy's place and it just makes me tear up.
And I like the thought of Lian, Milagro, Sin, and Irey together, fighting badguys! Maybe in an alternate universe...
They blew up Star City? Didn't Dr. Light pretty much do the same thing right before One Year Later?
I know he trashed at least half of it, because I remember Ollie being mayor, but half the city was a war zone walled off from the non-destroyed part.
Amen, Sally. This series does bring out the profanity--witness my own reaction on Der Blog.
Mr. Ashelford--potential members for a new Young Justice roster also include Damian Wayne, Maxine Baker, and Aaron Langstrom. I've put some concept art on my other blog in case you're interested :)
oh lordy don't put damian in a mini justice league.. or actually do. Damian vs Lian and Irey's adorableness would be heaven to read about!
Well, I just read the issue. It's incredibly badly done, narrative, pacing, dialogue, art wise. There was no point to killing Lian, or maiming Roy. They'd get the same effect by blowing up Star City. Or as Sally said, this is Ollie! He angsts over a dropley of rain FFS.
The blogosphere's reactions to this issue is way more interesting that the actual book, or whole mini series for that matter.
btw, who's Milagro, Maxine Baker and Aaron Langstrom?
Milagro is Jaime Reyes' sister, Maxine is the daughter of Animal Man and Aaron is Man-Bat's little bundle of joy.
They would be great as a little league, specially if they're anything like the children I know - who aren't usually too keen on hanging out with the kids of their parents' friends.
I'm off to read Batman and Sons, as you smart people have probably done, to restore my faith in super-humanity.
Well, at least a blown up Star City provides a lot of shovel-ready new jobs when the second stimulus gets passed!
It's books like this that make me want to pound my head against a wall and scream "Why am I trying to make a living selling this crap?"
But then I read First Wave, Detective, Secret Six, Wonder Woman, etc. and I fan the tiny little flame of hope within me.
On another note, I rarely post but I drop by daily to see what you've posted and I wish I had droves of customers like you! Great Job!
I'm not particularly happy with the state of my comics this week...as you can plainly see. And yet Wonder Woman was a thing of joy.
I don't mind a death that is well done. I miss Ted Kord every single day, and yet you have to admit that his death was actually very well done. It meant something, and he was a hero.
Big Barda's death on the other hand drives me insane, because she was killed without a peep or a fight in her kitchen. Big Barda! Of all people! Her death should have been something operatic!
Poor little Lian getting squished in her house...and for what? I don't care HOW bad the writer SAID that Prometheus was, he never came across as a genuinely terrifying baddie...just a blowhard. He kept saying he had solutions to everything that the heroes could come up with...but how do we really know that? They didn't SHOW his solutions, it was all a lot of smoke and mirrors.
Bah!
You know what I miss? The liberal Ollie who cares about humanity, who's a moralist and the Jiminy Cricket of the Justice League. What happened to that Ollie? I mean, I get the Grell run, I get the Smith/Meltzer runs when he came back. Lately, though, Ollie is a more curmudgeon Batman who's allowed to kill on occasion when the writer wants to. If this is Ollie, let's kill him again and bring back Connor as GA.
Maybe since it's such unmitigated crap that we'll soon discover that this all happened in unsolidified time. Then Booster can ride to the rescue in a time sphere and we can all pretend like it never happened... because it won't have.
Yeah... I know... I'm just grasping at straws.
I just don't understand how this can be the same writer that handled Solomon Grundy's death with such emotion and depth. SOLOMON. GRUNDY. What the heck happened?
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