And you’re acting so surprised.
Honestly. You people disappoint me. Really disappoint me. You all jump on the CIVIL WAR bandwagon, ride it to the end, bumps and all, and you all have the gall to act surprised when it turns out to be a flabby and unspectacular mess with all the dramatic tension of an episode of TELETUBBIES.
Here’s the fact. Giant, continuity-laden crossover event comics CAN NOT deliver emotional impact. I’m beginning to think that it’s a deficiency of the form, but the truth of it is that it’s a deficiency of the execution. I suppose if you handed the keys to Kurt Busiek or Grant Morrison or Matt Wagner or any other of the exceptional superhero writers, you could get it to work (assuming it wasn’t built as a tentpole event and just asked to do the work of a single story—no more, no less.) But not this time, and not in any of the examples in recent memory that I can think of. SEVEN SOLDIERS doesn’t really count, in my view, primarily because it wasn’t seen as THE BOLD NEW DIRECTION OF DC COMICS for the next year.
If you’re writing a story to sell a line to a frenzied fanbase, you’re starting from the wrong place. You’re trying to build a pyramid on a swamp. The foundation won’t hold and you’ll just end up driving all those slaves to their deaths for no good reason.
CIVIL WAR can’t be good. INFINITE CRISIS can’t be good. COUNTDOWN can’t be good. ZERO HOUR, INFINITY GAUNTLET, ATLANTIS ATTACKS, ONSLAUGHT and a bajillion other titles can’t be good because they’re all predicated on making the characters act out a story instead of having the characters drive a story. More to the point, the characters are all being made to drive an editorial fiat more than a story or even a mere plot. You all know this, down in the recesses of your hearts, but still you hope against hope and pick up the next issue of INFINITE CRISIS and pray that this is the issue where they turn it around and show that the people who put the book together UNDERSTAND the characters and what they stand for.
And, of course, inevitably, it never happens. The endings all read as “Huh, that’s it?” The characters perform baffling backflips of the psyche in order to serve the needs of the plot. The whole exercise comes off as hollow and interesting only in how it reflects the comics market as a whole or somesuch; hanging on the merest glimpse of a subtext to justify the reading of a (chronically late) comics series.
Granted, there’s exceptions. For all of its faults, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS wasn’t hamstrung by these. All of its characters acted the way you’d expect them to, or if they didn’t, you didn’t end up scratching your head and saying “huh?” Is it good writing? Not particularly. Was is constructed in order to serve an editorial need, absolutely. But neither of those diminish its story qualities. Probably because it was the first of its kind and after that, there was an expectation of what these sorts of mini-series crossovers would MEAN and CHANGE in their respective comics universes. Not to mention the dreaded...relevance...that was apparently the aim of the last big miniseries to conclude.
And that’s where things went bad, wouldn’t you think?
So please, enough with the outrage over the conclusion of CIVIL WAR. It was bad. You knew it was going to be bad. It could not, by design, deliver what you were looking for. Okay, that’s done. Instead, go find something, ANYTHING, that does deliver what you’re looking for. And if CIVIL WAR did that, well then, I guess there’s just no help for it, is there?