As you may have noticed, our new poll is about DC crossover events. Gosh, there are a lot of them, aren't there? Not all of them were well received, however. In fact, the one thing that stopping us from wiping "Bloodline" completely from our collective consciousness is the fact that one out of five entries in the DC Encyclopedia seems to refer to it.
Please vote for your favorite ones and if you have strong feelings about one of them, share them. If some of them aren't familiar and you want more info, let me know and I'll try to do a post explaining them (though that's not always easy!).
Also, tonight I'll be attending a special screening of Batman Begins over in Georgetown with my friend "Aquafan", courtesy of free tickets from Devon (who is definitely "connected") at Seven Hells. Honestly, I'm not really hyped on hearing Batman's origin yet again. The two page "Batman: Who He Is, and How He Can to Be!" has also been sufficient for me. To me, the painful details of how many pushups and chemistry experiments it takes to become Batman usually serve only to de-mystify and water down the character.
As far as I'm concerned, Ra's Al Ghul might as well be Dr. Tzin-Tzin; just another Fu Manchu rip-off, with all the dramatic trappings and purple dialog of a Republic Serial villain, glossed over with a vague environmental motive. And, I beg you, don't flame me for saying that in an attempt to educate me as to what a wonderful character he is. I read his first story when it was published in 1971 and every story with him in it since then, and my opinion remains unchanged: he's hokier than a team-up between the Human Key and the Signalman.
To top it all off, if I see ONE MORE FILM with mumbling Morgan Freeman (a.k.a. "Easy Reader") in it or bloody Michael Caine, I think I'll be driven mad, sew myself a themed costume off panel, and become The Critic, an anti-movie-themed villain. Yeesh, can't Basil Karlo kill these guys off already? The only other Professionally Ubiquitous Actor the film lacks is Gene Hackman and he's probably standing just off camera in his Lex Luthor ascot, waiting for a walk-on.
With all that off my chest, I've heard nothing but good about the film. Bale is physically believable as Batman, it'll be good to see the Scarecrow, and the film should help the public take comic books more seriously (unfortunately it will have the same effect on comic book fans).
I just hope I'm not bored...
13 comments:
Only crossover I ever read was Our Worlds at War (picked up the two trades in 2003). First half was pretty good, second half was okay (though the finale, with all the mourning and memorials was beautiful, especially the part with the JSA about to attend Hippolyta's service). Then again, OWAW seemed more like a Superman story than a DCU story, and of all the deaths that it featured, only Hippolyta remains dead today. Sheesh.
Ah, I forgot that one!
Killing off Hippolyta was moronic. She was a great character and she made Wonder Woman seem human.
I voted, but jeez man my pop up blocker blocked 53 pop ups when I submitted my vote. :)
Yes. I find it ironic that for a Superman story the only real damage occured to the Wonder Woman book.
Hippolyte (dead) and Paradise Island (destroyed).
Quite frankly I don't think I read most of those. I recall some Sins of Youth and DC One Million though.
DC messed up Perez's War of the Gods so much that it failed miserably.
I'd have to say that Crisis was the one I enjoyed most and unfortunately the effects of Crisis still piss me off today.
The others? All forgettable.
Millenium? Yeah. The New Guardians really had an impact on the DCU.
I really enjoyed Cosmic Odyssy - great art and some great characterizations. Also, I really enjoyed Stewart's character arc as Green Lantern when he failed to stop the planet from exploding. An under-rated mini-series to be sure. Of course, I could totally be blinded by the Mignola art and nostalgia on this one.
DC 1 Million (for the most part) was I think the BEST DC crossover. It was the only crossover that was able to successfully manage a complicated plot and a rapid pace, as most crossovers start out BIG and then sort of sputter lamely to a conclusion. With a very silver-agey-type plot, it really cemented the leagacy of the DC universe icons (without having to kill them!), it played wonderfully into the Starman mythology, and in the end, it was such a beautiful love-letter to Superman and the Silver Age.
Not all the cross-over bits worked as well as they should have, but overall, DC 1 Million was one of the few cross-overs that seemed to actually deserve the mega-event hype and still holds up as a solid story.
Got to join in on the DC 1 Million love here. Sometimes I wonder whether Grant Morrison actually IS a god. Everything you said above is true, and in these days of rampant killing off and disassembling, you have to love a crossover that introduces new characters and ideas in nearly every single tie-in issue.
If I'm not mistaken, John Stewart's role in Cosmic Odyssey is still fairly important to his character today. If you read Green Lantern Secret Files and Origins (which embarrasingly, I did--hey, it had Darwyn Cooke art) Geoff Johns dragged out his guilt over having failed to save that planet as the reason why he stopped being "relevant."
I liked Invasion because it reminded me of the Golden age WW2 stories, just without the inherent racism. You had Earth Heroes fighting nasty evil races. You had Daxamites pounding Superman and then choking on lead poisoning. Does Supes finish them off? No, he helps them out and earns the trust of their planet.
It also introduced the concept of the Meta-gene. My favorite bit was when they blew up a hundred humans and expected one in a thousand to survive. Instead they had like 20 survivors in the first batch, some with powers. It was a wink to all the industrial accident survivor-now-turned-superhero.
My all time favorite crossover was the Suicide Squad, Manhunter, Checkmate, Captain Atom, Peacekeeper one called the Janus Directive. Nice cloak and dagger government agency backstabbing and confusion in that one. Plus Kobra was the villain which is always a plus.
You know, given the title, Hal had to be the villain of Zero Hour.
The Hal's-running-out-of-power stories that were backups in the GL series were called...
"Zero Hour" stories.
Most people missed the reference!
The Hal's-running-out-of-power stories that were backups in the GL series were called... "Zero Hour" stories.
Wow. I know I sure as hell missed the reference.
One more example, I think, of how Hal as a villain could have been so much cooler if it had been better executed.
Welcome to the blogoverse, Amy!
Yes, the Zero Hero stories were a shtick in Tom Kalmaku's secret GL casebook. "Zero hour" was Hal's phrase for when his ring ran out of power.
Wow, I didn't know that. You learn some new useless fact every day. Unless you can use it like you used Bizarro-Titano that is...
No pop ups when I checked the vote from home this time, I don't know what the deal was.
And here I thought I was a bottomless well of obscure Green Lantern trivia. I'll have to look that one up.
Also: I haven't forgotten about those mp3s I promised you (as the commenter formerly known as amphetamine). You want those one at a time or all together? I don't want to kill your inbox.
Please send them in invididual emails; thanks, "Amph"!
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