Posted by Richard Pulfer on Mar 2nd, 2010
The big release on DC’s side is “First Wave #1″. No relation to the Sci-Fi TV show, the mini presents Brian Azzarello’s decidedly pulp vision of the DCU. To begin with, he’s strung together a gritty gun-wielding Golden Age Batman with a struggling Doc Savage and even the Spirit to boot. Throw in the Blackhawks and a couple other pulpy touches, and you have the makings of a pretty interesting re-imagining of the DCU.
In JSA All-Stars #4, the JSA splinter team faces off with Johnny Sorrow’s Lovecraftian machinations, while Star Girl realizes why she’s been important to the bad guys’ plan all along – and what she must sacrifice in order to stop them. The issue also features a back-up story featuring Liberty Belle and Hourman – a husband and wife super team caught on opposite sides of the JSA split – who team up to stop old adversaries Tigress and Icicle.
With James Robinson already writing the regular Justice League of America book, the final issue of the mini Justice League: Cry for Justice seems like an afterthought. Still, there are probably a couple surprises in Cry for Justice #7, which shows the last days of Hal Jordan’s villain-hunting task force before merging with Donna Troy’s team in the regular series. With Arsenal maimed and missing an arm, there’s probably at least one potentially world-shattering thing happening this issue.
Lastly, Milestone Forever #2 shows how the Milestone Universe – with heroes such as Static Shock – ended up in the DCU in the first place, and what effect this reality-altering merging had on its inhabitants. Written by Milestone turned DCU writer Dwayne McDuffie (Justice League Unlimited), the issue is a must for Milestone fans looking for revisit their favorite characters one more time – and see what the future holds for them.
Related posts:
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- Comic Rundown: You and Captain Can Make It Happen
- Comic Rundown: A Dead New Year
- Comic Rundown: Sweet Salvation
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Related posts:
- Comic Rundown: World War Hulks? Seriously?
- Comic Rundown: Cap’s Tea Party
- Comic Rundown: You and Captain Can Make It Happen
- Comic Rundown: A Dead New Year
- Comic Rundown: Sweet Salvation
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What’s this? A week without any new Black Lanterns? Has DC lost their minds?
…And if they have, is there any way we can prevent them from finding those minds for, oh, let’s say, the next ten years or so?
;^)
Having just read the Batman/Doc Savage one-shot, I must say I’m really interested to see how First Wave plays out. DC are really taking advantage of their Multiverse these days, which can only make for exciting new stories.
I will give DC credit for that much, certainly. The one thing that bugged me about the original Crisis was simply the fact that the Multiverse didn’t necessarily need to be destroyed, just streamlined considerably from what it had been. It wasn’t necessary to try and shoehorn everything into a single, self-consistent universe, since that’s simply not possible in a storytelling medium like this one, and not with a company with such a rich tapestry of characters as DC — which, lest we forget, also includes characters inherited from defunct publishers (Charlton, Fawcett, etc.) that DC acquired over the years. I think the current DC Multiverse, with its hard-coded 52 alternate Earths (as opposed to the dozens if not hundreds that existed pre-Crisis) is a much more elegant solution to the continuity problem than just pretending fifty years of stories never happened and rebooting the whole company at once.
In a way, the tables have turned now. Back in the ’80s, it was DC that had the convoluted mess of continuity, while Marvel fans could enjoy the fact that their comics universe of choice was at least internally self-consistent (within reason). Now that DC seems to finally be getting their act together in this regard, as much as possible anyway, it’s Marvel that now has the migraine-inducing morass of alternate Earths and parallel worlds, to the point where even Uatu the Watcher himself has probably just thrown up his hands and run off to sip margaritas in Nassau or something.
Though, you know… the Crisis was done as a celebration of DC’s fiftieth anniversary… a milestone Marvel will reach next year (the modern Marvel Universe is generally accepted as having first appeared in Fantastic Four #1, cover-dated November 1961). If the House of Ideas ever gets the notion to do a little multi-dimensional weed-whacking, that’d be the opportune time to do it…
Well, first off, we are indeed out of Blackest Night territory because the series is wrapping up – so expect a declining number of undead heroes in the weeks to come (hopefull).
I don’t think Marvel has quite as many parallel Earths as DC – and if they do, they very rarely cross-paths. Marvel Zombies is about the only one which regularly crosses the Slider portal, spinning out of Ultimate and crossing briefly into 616. That said, Ultimate and 616 have cross paths, leaving most other alternate reality (like say 1602) pretty much self-contained.
Personally, I think Marvel does a little better job actually building stories around these alternate realities and possible futures instead of just treating them like one-shots, which was mostly the case with Elseworlds.