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I agree with all of this, except for one major difference of opinion on Captain Marvel. I'm a big fan of the original character in his original comics, so take the following with as much salt as necessary: those Fawcett comics of the 1940s and 1950s were no more silly or naive than Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman stories of the same era. My honest opinion is that those old Fawcett Marvel Family stories were actually more sophisticated and intelligent than most of what DC was publishing at the same time, and the early art was way ahead of other publishers. Looking back at those comics out of historical context and measuring them against far more recent DC fare has always created a false impression of irredeemable silliness that has tainted any attempt to work with the character...most especially, as you point out, when clueless writers try to make him extra dark and portentious in overcompensation for this perceived flaw.

That said, you're absolutely right in saying that Cap et al should have been kept on their own and never merged into the DC mainstream. I get the impression that what DC talent was really after was Black Adam...not because a character who only appeared once in the Fawcett comics was so desperately needed in their continuity, but solely because they really, really loved Kid Miracleman's murderous rampage in Alan Moore's Miracleman and just wanted the closest thing they could find to let them do that scene over and over again. Which is a complete travesty on a dozen different levels at once!

Teenage girls don't wear slutty outfits? Especially goth girls?!

They most definately do here.

Not *all* of them and not *all them time*, perhaps, but overall: The most scantilly clad age group.

Hm. I graduated in '02, from a fairly large school (about 400 kids in my graduating class, 2600 altogether), and Black Alice's costume, from my experience, really isn't that slutty, let alone sexual. She looks like a kid coming home from school.

Agreed with the others about the clothes - they're pretty normal...
But the point about the second issue - all that stuff was flashback, seen by Enchantress when she read Eclipso's mind. Not that it was made very clear...

Your experience with teenaged girls may vary. In my experience, girls who wear those kind of pants (the big, baggy kind with lots of zippers) are wearing Smiths T-shirts. And even the slutty ones I taught didn't wear what is basically a sports bra. But I still think it's icky because of how old she is.

Yeah, I didn't get that it was a flashback. I read it a couple of times, but it was really unclear.

As for Captain Marvel, I'm certainly not saying that DC comics of the 1950s weren't silly - they were. It seems like DC wants to keep Captain Marvel stories that way, which is fine, but if they do, interacting with the regular DC Universe is weird. If they want Billy Batson to grow up and little and become more like the youth of today, that's fine and dandy, but they want to have their cake and eat it too. Which isn't surprising.

I don't see why Captain Marvel can't be a little silly. But the same goes for any superhero. It seems that they still "silly" = "childish" = "bad," but what they've really decided is that "optimism" = "bad." And that's a shame.

I cannot fathom the impulse to make Captain Marvel "realistic." We already had a realistic Captain Marvel; he's called Miracleman. Captain Marvel is supposed to be silly and his supporting cast and villains are likewise meant to be silly. I mean, what is Captain Marvel about if he's not about escapism? He's a kid who turns straight into a superhero! That's the elemental fantasy appeal of reading a superhero comic right there. So of course he should be fighting goofy mad scientists and evil little talking worms from space and bickering with his superpowered kid sister and hanging out with his talking tiger pal.

I agree with Greg that this would be best done if Billy Batson and company are kept away from the rest of the DCU, but then again I'm a habitual opponent of strict continuity and tightly-knit shared universes in general. I don't like powered superheroes showing up in Batbooks (although an occasional appearance by Superman is alright), or non-mutant superheroes showing up in X-Men, and I generally liked the loose continuity approach Marvel took under the Bob Jemas era, where at least it felt like most comics could stay true to their core themes without having to warp their internal logic to allow for whatever the guest star was doing in their own book that month.

Oh, and I've known plenty of 16 or 17 year old girls who wore clothes comparable to Black Alice in that panel and were far from "slutty." And can we please not call sexually active women "sluts"? That's one of those terms that pretty much exists only to stigmatize female sexuality while reinforcing a cultural double-standard (i.e., that sexually active/aggressive women are derided while sexually active/aggressive men are praised).

I agree with moose n squirrel about the word "slut." My experience with goths aligns with Greg's, however - though I'm sure there are goth girls somewhere who dress in lace-up sports bras, I haven't met any.

And more generally, reading these posts makes me glad that the only "event" I've bought in the last year is Seven Soldiers.

I dunno--I agreed with you about 'Countdown', but it really feels like you walked into this one with a chip on your shoulder. (Which, to be fair, we all do at times...ask me sometime about 'Zero Hour', you'll get a fun response.) I think there's a lot of ammo in the whole "Countdown to Infinite Crisis" mentality, but I do think you're shooting it at the wrong targets.

For starters, I profoundly disagree with your claim that the series gives "no introduction" to its characters--I knew nothing more than the name of any of these characters going into the series, and I got a reasonably good idea of who they were and what they were about by the time the series ended. I thought the series also made the struggle against the Spectre fairly exciting--they actually held their own, which was pretty impressive. (And as for the "God wouldn't let that happen"...go read 'Good Omens', then come back and we'll talk some more. A berserk Spectre might very well have been fulfilling some portion of God's plan, bringing about the next age of magic without causing worldwide cataclysm or somesuch.)

The "Jean becomes Eclipso" thing was clearly flashback, and I don't think s/he's a villain so obscure that nobody should be expected to know who s/he is...after all, it was only ten years or so ago that Eclipso was the lead villain of a major crossover and got his own series. Have so many readers flowed into the industry in that time without picking up back issues that you really need to offer a detailed explanation of who the character is? Black diamond, rage, evil and making the Spectre do bad things. Not too hard to pick up on. (And at this point, I can't feel too much for Jean. Yes, if you were a big fan of the character, you could reasonably feel that she's gotten a raw deal and is being written out of character, possibly. But to be honest, the "possibly" is there because I think you can also reasonably feel that she's such a minor character that the hard-core Jean Loring fanbase is pretty miniscule, and the average comics fan knows her mostly from her appearance as Crazy Lady in Identity Crisis. At least she's out of Arkham now.)

And what do you mean, the Shadowpact acted "unheroically" by putting Jean in orbit around the sun? Putting supervillains in perpetual confinement in a place where they can't use their powers is practically a staple of superheroism, from the Golden Age (Alan Scott puts Solomon Grundy in an unbreakable power sphere and chucks him into space) to the Modern Age (Superman chucks Doomsday into space where he won't intersect any planet or sun.) It's what they do all the time; all we're waiting on is her inevitable escape when something moves between her and the sun, "eclipsing" her and bringing back her powers. (Which is a clever return to the Silver Age, Eclipso once more needing an eclipse to come out to play.)

I won't bother to comment on Black Alice, since many have already done so, but I don't doubt that in addition to her outfits, she also listens to the rock music instead of something nice by Sinatra and plays those darned videogames instead of getting out into the fresh air.

Ultimately, the only real complaint I think you and I share is that the higher-ups really shouldn't have mandated the death of the wizard Shazam, although my real complaint is more that it gets lost in the shuffle when you decide to bump off some thirty or forty characters right alongside him...and that all crossovers feel the need to have a few major deaths in them, just to keep readers from feeling like they've read something inconsequential. Deaths for shock value=bad. But for the most part, I do think that 'Day of Vengeance' achieved its goals in a readable fashion, and will probably be better remembered than the series it led into. (Then again, so will 'Street Poet Ray'. )

As always, YMMV, and I look forward to you teeing off on 'The OMAC Project', which certainly does deserve everything it gets.

it's probably the "witchblade" underwear that's the most distressing. saw it on a real person once, what a whooore.

i have yet to see a goth with muffin top on a comic (mainstream) (SLG comics don't count)

John: Uh-oh. I kind of liked OMAC, or at least I liked it better than this, even though I shall savage it where and when it deserves!

To address your points, because they were well made: as far as introducing the characters, I thought Willingham did okay, except that we didn't get much of a sense of some of them. He obviously likes Detective Chimp, but Rory's powers were ill defined, and I still don't know why Jim Rook carries that sword around (Millar, shockingly enough, did better with him in Swamp Thing). So it was just a minor annoyance, especially because he did a decent job with the other characters. I just thought they were all so obscure they warranted a bit more. The fight with the Spectre WAS one of the highlights of the series - it was impressive to see.

As for Eclipso, I know what he (it?) is all about, but his powers were still vague. Sure, I mentioned that this series is for DC supergeeks, but one or two lines about what the black diamond is all about would have been nice. Not a whole origin issue, just a little something. As for Jean, you're right - I am one of those sad people who had a life back in the 1970s and 1980s and had no idea who she was before Identity Crisis. It just seems strange that DC suddenly wants to dump on her every chance they get. And there's a big difference between chucking Doomsday into space and putting Jean in orbit around the sun. Doomsday was evil; Jean is possessed. You would think the Shadowpact would have tried to get Eclipso out of her before they did that. I don't have a problem with extreme solutions for really bad guys, but Jean is just a puppet, and to treat her like that seems strange.

In response to you and Moose N. Squirrel, I have no idea if Alice (or Lori, I suppose) is sexually aggressive or not. As the father of two small daughters, I will be one of those guys with their heads in the sand who never wants to know about it, but whether she's boinking the football team or not is really beside the point. I don't even have that big an issue with how she's dressed. I have a bigger issue with how she's dressed and how old she's supposed to be. In the real world, girls dress like that a lot - I understand that. But my point is - Lori is drawn by presumably a man who is well over 21. Does he have to draw her like a creepy dream girl - she's Goth, but hot! She'll play Dungeons and Dragons with you but she'll also have crazy sex with you! And she's only 17, just like Kip Winger likes 'em! That's my objection to it, not necessarily the clothing. And she can listen to that new fangled rock music all she wants, although some Herb Alpert would do her good!

Finally, I don't have a huge problem with the death of Shazam - I don't agree with it, but whatever - but I do have a big problem with writing a six-issue mini-series specifically to kill him, which is what this feels like. That's just overkill.

A Bill Willingham comic where the women aren't treated well?? I'm shocked, I am SHOCKED!!!

I suppose I didn't think of Jean as being "possessed" in that sense because she really does accept Eclipso willingly (I suppose you could argue that she's being tricked, since we don't hear Eclipso's side of the conversation and don't know what she's being promised, but it does seem very much like she knows she's going to do something bad, but accepts it willingly for the chance to get out of Arkham, get a little revenge, and cause a little mayhem.) It's not like 'Eclipso: The Darkness Within', where if you hit her with sunlight, she'll suddenly turn into a wonderful human being. She will, instead, turn into a woman who had a psychotic break and got two people killed as a result.

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on the "writing the series just to kill Shazam"; I felt like this had a strong premise on its own, and was a solid story. I'm sure that they said, "We've got to have CONSEQUENCES! Kill Shazam! Kill Blackbriar Thorn! Kill kill killykill killity-kill-kill! DC has too many characters KILL!" (Or words to that effect. I'm getting disturbingly cynical about the DC editors these days...) But I do think it feels like more than just telling Bill Willingham, "Point Z is the death of Shazam. Come up with Points A through Y, will ya?" You didn't. What a boring world it'd be if we were all the same, right?

(And part of why I might hate OMAC so much is that I bought the trade, which included 'Countdown' right at the beginning, just to get the hate flowing. )

But I do think it feels like more than just telling Bill Willingham, “Point Z is the death of Shazam. Come up with Points A through Y, will ya?”

Umm that's pretty much EXACTLY how it came about according to Willingham.
I dunno if Shazam was the main target, since Dr. Fate's getting yet another reimagining soon as well, but Winick has very well implied such in his recent interviews stating that killing off Shazam was his idea to get Captain Marvel to the status quo he wants.

But it feels like more than that, is what I'm saying. (Or it did to me--as previously stated, YMMV.) I thought Willingham did a good job of making the story feel like it was more than just a checklist, even if he was given a checklist to work from. Writing to a brief is a skill like any other.

I recently picked up the "Day of Vengeance" trade from my local library and I couldn't dissagree more with the review. I found story to be engaging, with entertaining characters and a compelling premise. I didn't find it padded at all. I didn't feel lost when it comes to characters and their powers. Everything we need to know was explained in the story. If you're still confused, the trade has fairly detailed profiles up in the front (which I made a point not to read until I finished the story). As for Black Alice's outfit, I must join the chorus of people who said that there is nothing slutty about it. Heck, my girlfriend dresses in outfits not that different from the one depicted here. And, since I am alot closer to Black Alice's age then to the age of most posters here, I didn't find anything particularly sleezy or wrong about it.

"But my point is - Lori is drawn by presumably a man who is well over 21. Does he have to draw her like a creepy dream girl - she’s Goth, but hot! She’ll play Dungeons and Dragons with you but she’ll also have crazy sex with you! And she’s only 17, just like Kip Winger likes ‘em! That’s my objection to it, not necessarily the clothing. And she can listen to that new fangled rock music all she wants, although some Herb Alpert would do her good!"

Well, that was the way the character was depicted in her original apperance in Birds of Prey, so... yes. Besides, what's wrong with sexy geeky goth-girls. My girlfriend is one (though she's been trying to distance herself from the Goth part, which, all things considering, might not be a bad thing. But I digress).

Finally, I do think that this reviewer approached the mini with a chip in his shoulder, which, unfortunately, may have dampened his enjoyment of the series. Rather unfortunate, but what can I do.

I've seen plenty of women who look like this Black Alice character. The thing is, they are in their twenties and thirties, and they dress like that when they go out clubbing. Most goth girls I know dress more demurely during the day, and save the sexy, fetishistic outfits for when the go out at night. So the artist did *sorta* get the right look for a goth girl, only he was off by about a decade or so in the age department, and he had the girl wearing that outfit in the wrong setting :p