Tag: DC comics

DC’s Beach Blanket Bad Guys Summer Special Review Tally:

  • Joker: a few pages in a gorgeous art style, basically recreating/spoofing the Batman v Superman fight with him and Bizarro, the costume is the Joker!Batman from Injustice 2. In fact it feels like an Injustice 2 fight. It’s the Joker, so meh. But not insufferable, which he normally is for me. Lingering mean-spiritedness vibe though
  • Lex Luthor: basic Lex ideological disconnect with Superman’s existence. Nothing new or fresh (red trunks eyeroll). Nothing offensive.
  • Mr Freeze: cute as all get out. Worth the price for this adorable story alone. Art also the style I like
  • Cheetah: A good summary/primer of her character, especially for Rebirth, compassionate Wonder Woman, Pallas would be a good character to bring into the main books
  • Black Manta: GOOD Manta story. Nice to see him doing his shipwreck scavenger thing without Aquaman showing up. Excellent highlight of his ruthlessness and practicality, the shred of compassion in a bucketful of callousness 
  • Giganta: Is this one of the Harley writers/artists? It has that vibe and humor, and was a great lighter story. “There’s a giant woman here. And she destroyed out school. *beat* She destroyed our school! *cheering*”
  • Grodd: I sighed when I saw it was Seely writing. It tries to be a good story, but ugh. I skimmed through it. I can’t articulate why I found it bad, only that I did.
  • Deathstroke: O…kay. That was a twist. Black humor and yep, this fits for a Deathstroke story involving a little kid.
  • Penguin: Oswald is an incel. Yep.
  • Crime Syndicate: Eh, hard for me to get into the Dark mirror Universe of Earth 3. The face Owlman makes at the last panel is meme-worthy. Story is…meh.

From Justice League #17, the end of the “Throne of Atlantis” Arc, aka how to make someone turn around and pity-adore the antagonist. I’ve included the “I loved you like any brother should” speech and the panel where Orm fights on his brother’s side after relinquishing rule. But it’s the last two pages that pushed this into “Arthur, that’s your dumb baby brother! I love him; how could you?”

Overall Context: Vulko (the onlooker in the third image with the panel voice-over from Arthur about how alone he is) manipulates current king of Atlantis, Orm, into attacking the surface world as a plan to replace him with the elder half-human illegitimate Arthur – a plan that works out perfectly except for all the collateral Atlantean and human civilian causalities and having to also unleash the Trench (creepy fish monster people).

catching up on more Aquaman comics – Rebirth this time. What can I say, the long recent arc has been Atlantis politics stuff- these comics work best when doing the GoT high fantasy control of the kingdom stories. And for most of the issues it’s been Sejic and then Federici as artist -two different styles but both have been absolutely gorgeous. But now issue 34 switches over to another artist whose style is more Sale/old school with flat colors and more cartoon stylized and just…ugly.

Here’s the amount of downgrade. Went from this

and this

to this:

And these examples are just me picking vaguely similar panels showing the current villain.

Like, the main artists and colorists for Aquaman Rebirth until this Underworld/Arthur Dethroned Arc was not something I got excited for (I tend to think of it the generic in-house comic book art style). See Briones:

(and thus why Sejic was such a delight and relief). And I can deal with comic art that don’t like up to a point, but probably because I wasn’t reading these American comics as a child and teen, so the general conventional look doesn’t appeal to me.

At least the writer has been the same throughout these arcs

comingupforblair:

fortycumber:

Seriously, why are DC fans so hard to please? They never seem to like anything related to DC comic books, even if something turns out to be a little likeable, they still find flaws in it. What’s happening here?

My experience is that they get very attached to one specific version of a character and they demand that any and all other versions of them must be similar to their preferred one. Of course they would prefer that those other versions not exist at all and everyone keep watching the one from their childhood.

I’ve seen it with the Nolan films where they negatively compared them to Tim Burton. I’ve seen it with Zack Snyder’s take on Superman where they kept using Chris Reeve’s films as ammo against them. Now we’re seeing it with Titans where they’re trotting out the animated series.

It doesn’t matter how much time passes or what artistic intentions creators might have or if the newer version is more accurate to the comics. They generally refuse to move past the one they like most and they treat any variations as a personal affront.