- Joined
- Aug 7, 2018
Seriously? Are they missing the whooe point of fucking Apokolips?
One of the most powerful Apokilips stories to me is in Superman: TAS. Clark defeats Darkseid in front of the people of Apokolips, and tells them they’re finally free of the overlord that’s been oppressing them for so many years? And what do the people do? They cry out and carry Darkseid off so they can nurse him back to full health.
The scary thing about Darkseid is that he’s bent a whole civilization around his will. The Female Furies aren’t 2nd-citizens; everybody but Darkseid is. It’s a whole planet jockeying for rank so they can be in the favor of this one guy. It’s scary to the reader because to them, the idea of any other kind of life is unimaginable. It’s scary because it’s so foreign to the way we think, and because this guy, this symbol of ever-present lurking evil can and will do this to the rest of the universe if he’s unopposed.
I can already tell you this is bullshit. The whole narrative of Apokolips is nothing but oppression, so you can’t really cast the Female Furies as more oppressed than everybody else without changing what made the story good in the first place.
It should also be noted that the Female Furies also share "pampered pet" status of sorts; they basically get cushy assignments and out of all of the Court of Darkseid, they tend to be the ones who are least likely to get Omega Effect killed by Darkseid. But that's mainly due to them being the Navy Seals of Darkseid's elite and the fact that they pretty much report to Granny Goodness, who's entire claim to fame is that Darkseid lets her run most of the planet for him, because she's even eviler than he is since she's the fucking GOD OF CHILD ABUSE.
Hell, if you want to do a Female Furies comic, you should base it upon Granny staging a coup against Darkseid and having it end in graphic failure and Granny getting Omega Beam killed, due to the Furies basically turning on each other (as Ostrander's Suicide Squad established internal division between Lashina/Dutchess and Bernadeth) and then use said mini-series to explain WHY Granny Goodness was MIA for the entire five year period that was the New 52 and why Big Barda ultimately quit the Furies (as she believed Darkseid respected Granny more than anyone else and would never Omega Effect kill her) and helped Mr Miracle escape.
Why Ms. Marvel looks like she is a granny in her mid-late 60's ?
Frank Miller in his book with Will Eisner says that the rules of the Code were writter with the clear intent to bring EC down,since the EC standard was way higher than the one the other comics label like DC or Charlton had at the time
Eisner says instead that the Code was a rush job to avoid a goverment intervention and EC was caught in the crossfire because it was an easy target
Marvel and DC were not involved in the Comic Code, but Archie Comics was. Archie explicitly marketed itself as "wholesome" comics during the early 50s moral panic and most conspiracy folk tend to put credence on them being the ones who pushed the CCA to adopt rules explicitly to kill the EC horror line (and horror comics in general.
Marvel at the time was a fifth string company who in the early 50s mainly put out romance comics and cowboy books (and the occasional horror book). DC still had the big three (Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman) and their back-ups (Aquaman, Green Arrow, Superboy), but by this point had retired most of their super-hero characters in favor of western books and had already begun retooling their horror books (which were always super tamed compared to their competition) into sci-fi driven books.
Archie was the one who had the most to gain by killing EC, hence why many blame them for the specifics in the comic code that went after EC's horror line.
That’s been DC’s curse for years. Each “streamlining” continuity change just ends up creating more continuity hiccups in the long run. Legion may be the perfect example of that (the fucking pocket universe) but it’s far from the biggest one.
Crisis didn't kill Legion, but a serious of fuck-ups killed the title's commercial viability:
1. They took Legion off the newstands and made it a direct market book
2. They let Keith Giffen give the team a huge make-over which included some really god-awful new costumes
3. Levitz writing some really bad storylines (shoving Atmos down peoples throats, breaking up Dream Girl/Star Boy and writing out Star Boy, the new Starfinger, and pretty much the last year of the book's third volume sans the final six issues, when Levitz got word he was being kicked upstairs and would have to leave the book)
4. The disastrous V4/TMK run, which among many many sins, explicitly alienated huge chunk of the audience that came into the book in the mid-70s (writing out, depowering, doing horrible things to fan favorites like Dawnstar, Wildfire, Timber Wolf) and featured Keith Giffen trying his best to rip off Watchmen, right down to the nine panel grid format.
Mark Waid being an asshole didn't help; Waid explicitly cheered the V4/TMK run at the start as "the Legion being made pure" due to Waid explicitly hating all post-Adventure Comics era Legion stories/members. And the TMK using the book to canonize some of the worst god-awful fanon, further alienated the fanbase of the book and killed it deader than disco as the franchise was stuck in the hands of jerks who thought the Silver Age of Comics was perfection and anything after 1969 as blasphemous heresy that needed to be purged (hence Waid constantly rebooting the Legion every chance he gets his hands on it, damn the fans).
It would depend on the contract he signed with DC. Bendis went over to DC specifically to "write" Superman and publish his own shitty line of books. It wouldn't surprise me if he had some guarantees in his contract that locked him on those titles for a set amount of time. If that's the case--and I'm just speculating here--DC really can't do much except maybe cut costs by giving him a cheaper artist and less promotion.
As far as I can tell, Bendis seems to be suffering from the same writing crutch as Tom King. Neither author is writing the characters, but writing about the characters with the metatextual subtlety of a brick to the face. Its that weirdly passive 3rd person tone to everything that's really off-putting. They spend so much time having the characters talk (or think) about what they're doing that it ends up undercutting the drama and stakes of what's actually taking place. The comics Bendis and King write aren't exciting. They don't tickle that adventurous spirit that we all have. They are, instead, dull exercises in navel-gazing by a bunch of middle aged men who are trying to ape Alan Moore, but have no idea why Alan Moore's metatextual stories actually work.
It's been rumored that Bendis has been promised an "omnibus" collection of his run. Omnibuses are huge volumes (usually 20-50 issues). Also, it's been rumored that DiDio knows Bendis is a lost cause monthly-wise (hence why they stopped double-shipping the Superman books) and is now justifying Bendis on Superman by holding out desperate hope that Bendis/Superman gives DiDio the "evergreen" Superman run he can sell to normies as trades the same way that Snyder's Batman run is treated (due to Snyder being in the right place at the right time).
It's also been speculated, especially in light of DC forcing Bendis to bring Lois back after writing her out, that DC has resigned themselves to low sales on Superman and are just waiting for Doomsday Clock to end; the idea being that Geoff Johns will solve all of their problems by erasing Bendis' run from canon at the end of Doomsday Clock and they can simply move Bendis over to Young Justice full time until his contract expires and they can be rid of him.
Well, that was when he was still partnered with Andy Lanning, but I look at that run as one of the best Legion runs of all time. Hell, I have three copies of "Legion of the Damned," both floppies and a trade paperback, because I needed to complete their run.
It gets depressing when you learn that Gail Simone immediately followed their run and there was Waid's "Threeboot" after that. Annett (and Lanning) made the Legion an excellent read and that all got fucked up because Waid wanted another reboot. Hasn't the Legion suffered enough?
The DnL Legion was far from universally loved. Legion of the Damn was considered pointless grimdark. Legion Lost was widely reviled, they crapped over Dawnstar and replaced her with an OC character (and further crapped on Wildfire after the previous creative team raped him), and killed off several characters and derailed others.
Their run didn't become tolerable until Legion Words (which was more worldbuilding and them not crapping on the characters) and even then, their ongoing "The Legion" had them use Batvillain Ra's Al Ghul as the big bad and further fucked up Projectra, and ended with a convoluted rip-off of the Great Darkness Saga and saw the introduction of another Superboy to the roster as a failed sales boost gimmick.
Gail's four issue filler run that followed the end of the DnA run was praised, but only because it actually felt like a Legion story from the late 70s.
And the DnA run itself got screwed over by politics collection-wise: Oliver Coipel left the book to go to work for Marvel and Levitz, in a pique, declared he'd never collect any of his Legion work due to Coipel being someone DC had cultivated with an eye towards making him a lifer at DC. It wasn't until Levitz stepped down from his position of authority that the DnA run started getting collected in any shape or form.
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