Private Time

With the conference and my busy work schedule, this weekend was the first chance I’ve had to read my weekly comics and I wanted a pristine experience.

Overall, I like The New 52, but find it doesn’t work that well as complete relaunch. Of the books that I pulled and read, only Grifter and Animal Man felt like they were completely accessible to someone who knows nothing about the characters previously. Since this Grifter is a complete rewrite of the original character, it was easy to do since he was new to everybody regardless of whether you read the old Wildstorms books or not. The “article interview” on the first page of Animal Man told you everything you needed to know up to that point. Once everybody was on the same page, the story took off.

Everything else I read felt like you (a) needed to have read the previous stories to get it or (b) had enough inside jokes that it wasn’t as enjoyable if you hadn’t read anything else. Batgirl and Red Lantern Corps fall into that first category since they officially are carrying on the same continuities. Justice League International and Swamp Thing were the worse culprits of the latter philosophy. JLI did almost nothing to explain who these people were that were being assembled together or the fact that they all clearly knew each other from some previous events. The whole subplot about the Hall of Justice was extremely haphazard considering that for any of it to matter you need to assume that (a) the characters from Justice League #1 will form the Justice League together (minor assumption, but still) (b) will build themselves a headquarters called the Hall of Justice, and (c) later abandon that headquarters to go somewhere else, leaving it completely open for the UN to just move in. Those are a lot of assumptions for the readers to make and something that would be hard to do if the readers had no prior knowledge of the Justice League. In the same vein, Swamp Thing makes more sense if you’ve read Brightest Day Aftermath, since that’s where DC really introduced this version of Alec Holland and explains why Superman would care about him.

Animal Man was very good and intriguing and I’m definitely going to continue to pull it. Grifter has also made the list of things I’ll definitely keep pulling. Frankenstein wasn’t great, but I’m willing to give it another couple of issues at least. I really liked the version of the Creature Commandos from Flashpoint compared to these guys, but maybe they’ll grow on me. I’m on the fence with both Justice League International and Red Lantern Corps. If the next issue doesn’t really hook me, then it’s up to the Gnome on whether we keep pulling them. Suicide Squad wasn’t as awful as I thought it would be, but that could definitely change after a second issue. Resurrection Man had to blow me away to stay on the pull list, which it did not.

My biggest surprise was how much I didn’t like Batgirl and how I definitely am not interested in pulling it. The Gnome loves the classic Babs Batgirl and I’ve been a huge fan of Oracle. We’ve read classic Batgirl stories, the modern day Babs Batgirl in Dixon’s Batgirl: Year One, and both runs of Birds of Prey. In all of these incarnations, they felt like the same character. This new Batgirl incarnation doesn’t. Not only that, but one of the whole points of Oracle is Babs wasn’t a victim. As the Gnome put it, “she got in her chair, got her sticks, and started beating on people.” This time around the whole point is Babs is a victim. She didn’t have the strength of the previous incarnations, her banter seemed extremely forced, and overall she wasn’t a fun read.