Side note: Anyone else notice how DC’s Battle for Bludhaven and the new Uncle Sam are effectively telling the same story? Whose side are Palmiotti and Gray on?

PS: I’m avoiding reading your Casanova review because when I saw it, I realized Midtown hadn’t pulled it for me and I didn’t notice it on the shelves yesterday when I picked up my haul. I hate when that happens!

I generally avoid doing straight-out reviews of new books because our other guys are better at it, and Burgas is quite a bit funnier than me.

But I did in fact read all those books. Here’s the capsule verdict on them:

Flash suffers from the same thing all the DCU is laboring under — this creeping Didio-ism that nothing can be goofy or fun, and the only way to excuse enjoying a superhero story is to fill it with death and blood and angst. Peter David calls it writing out of self-hatred of one’s own fannish tendencies and I agree. This new series reeks of it. I gave it two issues and I’m done. Jesus H. Christ, if there’s ANY superhero book that should be light, quick, funny escapist fare it’s a Flash book starring Bart Allen. Instead it’s this morbid boo-hooing about how the Speed Force killed muh family and I gotta just hang on and keep fightin’ tuh good fight… it’s a snore. These guys had a lot better sense of humor when they wrote Trancers.

Justice League is all cute self-referential set-up stuff, with an overlay off –again — angst and depression. It SHOULD be about hope and fresh starts, but it all feels very bleak and morbid. “Let’s do the League again, in the hope that maybe we won’t lose any more members to death or insanity.” Like that. If you like your superhero stories to be all about how the League members relate to one another emotionally, and the deep friendship they feel despite their inability to admit it and so on and so on, well, maybe you might like this. I didn’t, really.

Civil War I think is a colossally stupid idea but it’s being executed amazingly well. I just don’t buy that anyone in it is acting the way they are acting. It doesn’t make sense. The writers on the various tie-in books are twisting themselves into knots trying to make sense of an essentially idiotic premise. Having everything tie in to this series is really annoying; there was even a shout-out in ETERNALS for crying out loud. Okay, it was funny, but I still hated Gaiman feeling like he had to put his story in the MU at large. This almost never helps a superhero story because it immediately ramps up the implausibility of the whole thing. But that’s a whole column by itself. I admit that Mark Millar is doing as good a job as is possible with Civil War but… it’s just too stupid a premise, I can’t get past it. Nobody in this story is acting like forty years of publication history have led us to believe they would act. When fans talk about continuity being violated, THIS is the kind of thing they SHOULD mean.

So there’s a semi-official set of reviews.

But don’t feel obligated to buy the mini, or even read it. I think Brubaker is providing enough background to make the current story accessible, and I think the mini will just annoy you.

I would kill for Marvel Girl/Rachel Grey/Phoenix XVI to get a new costume, though. (Well, maim. The current one really does blow)

That said, I have no interest in the new, darker, youth appeal Flash — it just doesn’t look fun, and the whole “writers of the mediocre Flash TV show” thing is like anti-hype for me. Just getting a TV or novel writer isn’t meaningful; they need to be good TV or prose writers. (Ditto, re: Meltzer)

And yes, Dixon did invent Gearhead, though he wrote him in as a presumed-dead criminal thwarted by Batman around the Year One era who’d been revived as a cyborg. The first Gearhead story was moderately OK, since Dixon played with some of the less obvious implications of a cyborg villain with interchangeable parts. (He ducked a scan of surveillance cameras by continually “adjusting” his height and girth.) It was also suggested that he was even less organically human than he looked.

And then in his second arc appearance, he turned into a giant car-spider-thingus with a human torso sticking out of it, and things kept going downhill from there. Apparently he was alsop adapted for the (IMHO, rather crap) The Batman cartoon series currently on WB.

I hated Meltzer’s writing thus far, but even I must admit that JLA #0 was okay. Then again, my expectations might have just been that low.

Civil War, T.? What the heck is that? You should know by now that I am avoiding “event” comics like the plague itself, no matter their quality (and yes, I’ve heard that it’s better than most). Plus, it falls directly into my Mark Millar boycott, so that’s two strikes! And Brad Meltzer has not earned back any goodwill from the abomination that was Identity Crisis, so I’ll be passing on JLA. And I’ve never been a Flash guy. Even when (gasp!) Morrison wrote those issues a while back, I read them but was kind of unimpressed.

I didn’t like it either.

I don’t believe Greg reads Civil War, T. I’ll probably have a bit on it tomorrow.

I don’t get all continuity obsessed (though I think it’s good to respect it use it in a book like X-Men), but I do find major retcons to be a bad idea. Whenever someone does a big “everything you know is wrong!” type of story like this, they almost invariably leave tons of questions unanswered for the people who do know the history, and the people who don’t are usually left wondering why they should care about any of it.

I was just wondering, Oh Great Lord and Master! Remember, some of us have to buy comics because we don’t have their vast knowledge downloaded into our brains! I was wondering because when Dixon wrote Detective and Gearhead showed up, it seemed like he had been around before. Did Dixon invent him prior to that (this was around #710-720, back in 1996 or so), or did he just write him as if he had been around before?