"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.

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.

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. )

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

They most definately do here.

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

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!