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DCU Brave Old World Disguised as Brave New World

by Doom

Finally finished! With no a fill-in, because YOU demanded it!

DC loves advertising like Dan Didio loves expensive hookers (long and hard). So the major company not named Marvel packages some cheap 10 page previews of a bunch of miniseries people still won't buy, wraps it around with shitty space opera crap, and prices this abomination of advertising $1. Unlike the last $1 80 pager, Countdown, this does not weave a complete story with a beginning, middle and end (and a few oddly placed advertisements for miniseries). It instead works more like a series of trailers before a movie, only in this case the movie never comes. And it's about as enjoyable as a series of Hollywood trailers, a few snippets of intrigue mixed in with a lot, and I mean a lot, of crap. Judging from the total of one ongoing series out of the six series advertised, DC doesn't expect much of the crop of tangentially connected (about as connected as Marvel's Tsunami line) upcoming series. I, too, have little faith in the quality of the six series with no A-list quality talent (well, John Byrne...if he was himself 25 years ago), but read on anyway to see what I thought of the advertisemen-er, stories comprising Brave New World.

"I want some answers, me!"

MARTIAN MANHUNTER

EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG! THINK YOU KNOW ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT MARTIAN MANHUNTER, THINK AGAIN!!! That was the advertising campaign and the pre-release hype for the new Martian Manhunter miniseries written by A.J. "Gotham Knights was my creative highpoint" Lieberman. Okay, so what do I know about J'onn J'onzz? I know he's the last Martian in existence, he wears a blue cape and no pants, he loves [COPYRIGHTED FOOD STUFFS], and he helped found the Justice League of America. He's very powerful, with powers ranging from telepathy to shapeshifting, and thus doesn't get written into a lot of stories due to his near-omniscience (see Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, everything else). Oh, and J'onn is green. It turns out, the whole 'last son of Mars' stuff isn't entirely true, I guess. Hmm...and I saw the cover for Teen Titans #40...featuring a teenage girl version of J'onn. Meaningless spinoff characters (who are far easier to masturbate to) for a hero defined primarily by the 'son of a dead race' thing? Hm, never heard of one of those 'milking a character dry' occurrences happening at DC before. MM himself learns of the 'not the last son of Mars' factoid by purchasing a special Martian pendent from someone else. Theoretically, since he's the last survivor, and every Martian had one, there should be only one left in existence. So either a) there's another Martian or b) those dastardly bootlegger Koreans are at it again!!! He explains the conundrum through a series of thoroughly confusing flashbacks, where MM beats up a guy for some reason and argues with a cardboard cutout version of himself. No, I'm not joking. J'onn blazes a new path in his real Martian (aka sledgehammer dildo head) form, desperately seeking answers as to whether there's another Martian still alive. I'm betting yes. Not only that, I bet we'll see a Martian dog, a half-Martian/half-Lex Luthor clone, a Martian cat, a Martian horse, AND a Martian monkey. And the shrunken city of Ares, inside a...let's go with bottle. Doesn't sound familiar to me at all!

A.J. Lieberman, known as the fellow who turned Hush from a pathetic enigma of a pastiche of several different Batman villains into a continuity conundrum worse than the Hobgoblin and the Third Summers Brother combined, writes this mess. It may be one of the most incoherent stories I've read in recent memory. I consider myself a rather perceptive reader, but I don't fucking understand it. MM shakes down a skeevy guy for no apparent reason, and then the comic flashes back to six minutes ago, where J'onn apprehends skeevy guy, who's a whispering sniper guy for some reason. Then we flash back again to Martian Manhunter buying the Martian pendent from the STAR Labs guy, containing a flashback to Mars of course, finally cutting back to the present day where J'onn yells at a cardboard cutout of himself who can not only talk, but compose itself as a counterpoint to J'onn's completely uncalled for comments about humans being jerks. Shakespearean monologue or stupid conceit? You decide. Anyway, I don't have a CLUE as to what skeevy guy had to do with ANYTHING. The story doesn't clue me in either, and Al Barrionuevo's art confuses matters even more. The strange perspective shots don't give a sense of anything that's actually going on in the story. For example, the sniper guy doesn't show up in many shots in the 10 pages despite being held by MM throughout the majority of the story. Like every Martian Manhunter project in the past 10 years, this book is destined to fail; no matter the concept or execution. The fact that 'J'onn as a pissed off detective looking for answers' is the 'totally original' concept doled out here makes chances of success even less. Especially when in the Martian Manhunter solo series, he already met and fought another surviving Martian. Whatever, it's New Earth!

His head and Larry Flynt's penis: virtually indistinguishable.

Kinky.

OMAC

A killer sleeper agent robot with no capabilities of speech or personality. Obviously a prime candidate for a lead in a miniseries! Our hero Michael Costner is being chased by a bunch of OMACs along with his girlfriend, and he's supposed to be some sort of OMAC killer even though he doesn't remember anything about himself. Several pages of running and escaping ensue, until he finally gets away from the OMACs and Superman. When he thanks his supposed girlfriend for helping him along the way...SHE TURNS OUT TO BE AN OMAC TOO! What a surprise shocker! Michael wakes up in another room similar to the room in the beginning of the story, only a fat bald guy is there, asking him if he wants some coke. Michael answers in the affirmative. Well, that was certainly a...PIECE OF SHIT! Think The Fugitive combined with a flaming bag of shit, a few cyberpunk novels in a blender, Bruce Jones' patented genius...and a Dan Didio needing to buy a new yacht.

Bruce Jones crafts a story that, true to his style, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Michael can kill OMACs for some reason, yet the solicitations for the mini lead one to believe there being only one OMAC left in the world, what with all the Brother Eye crashing and dying and such. If so, where the fuck is the conflict? Some druggie loser fighting one mohawked Sentinel ripoff? For six issues? I don't even think Bruce Jones can squeeze six issues out of the premise. As a piece of advertisement, the story does an especially poor job as nothing in the preview plays any part in the miniseries. The pursuit by multiple OMACs presumably won't ever happen in the mini, so the point of the preview is to show a bad dream sequence not furthering the plot at all other than perhaps, "Michael takes a lot of LSD before going to sleep and it affects his dreams. Hey, here're some multicolored gnomes!" Renato Guedes's pencils appear muddy and the layouts confusing, with a side of every human character looking rather plastic-y. A cross between Josh Middleton and Tony Harris and bad, jumbled linework. I'm not sure if it's intention or incompetence, but it sucks either way. Bruce Jones, writer of the famed male model Nightwing, started as a good writer on horror titles, yet eventually descended into...this. He gives the story all the excitement, danger and personality of any fucking teenage runaway story/Fugitive ripoff...ever. Maybe the one surviving OMAC has only one arm and framed Michael for the murder of his girlfriend! Nah, too original. A series centering on an unemotional robot creature created to kill superpowered individuals only works if the action centers on an interesting character, such as Sean McKeever's Sentinel. Unfortunately for DC, OMAC will only improve with three simple words: OMAC, male model.

Many people use hard drugs to cope from the pain of a BAD DREAM.

"Specifically, some Iraqi killing work."

UNCLE SAM AND THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS

The new version of Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters picks up where Battle for Bludhaven left off, and I'm not sure where that is because I expunged the first two issues from my memory a long while ago. All I remember is some guy named Father Time helped the government's response to Bludhaven's destruction. Father Time. For fuck's sake. Father Time shows up here and argues to the military-industrial complex and the politicians that they need to do something about metahumans. They decided the best way to do so is create their own team of metahumans, a new version of the Freedom Fighters who will stop superhumans from murdering other superhumans by murdering superhumans. The new Ray, Doll Man and Human Bomb kill some Neo-Nazis on the front lawn of the White House, since of course Neo-Nazis remain a substantial threat in America these days (Gray and Palmiotti confused America and Europe, I think). Meanwhile, the new Firebrand walks for miles and miles until someone picks up the wayward hitchhiker. This trucker is a racist Republican dickbag. He thinks the draft should be reinstated and supports the war in Quarc aka fake Iraq. He even uses a racial epithet to describe that nation's citizens. He doesn't call them sand niggers, he calls them 'sand ninjas'. What? Is Qurac in East Asia and the Midde East simultaneously or something? How the fuck could you even be a sand ninja? The Jawas from Star Wars? For fuck's sake. Throughout, a voice not Firebrand's own rings in his head, telling him what to do. If you guessed it was Uncle Sam, you'd be right, and you'd also prove you had a functioning brain. The end.

Daniel Acuna's art ranges from good to bad, making it very inconsistent as well as confusing. Plus, the coloring is so dark and the inking so muddy even his good art gets plagued with bizarre artistic choices. I had to up the brightness on my monitor just to make out what was happening on some of the pages. Writing team/robot team Gray and Palmiotti I like, but their work here is too goddamn cheesy. The Freedom Fighters worked decently as characters back fighting in World War II, but in present day in a country not ruled by some alternate Nazis the characters ring false and fucking stupid. Certainly these new Doll Man, Human Bomb and Ray people will see the error of their ways and team up with Uncle Sam (who sounds an awful lot like Jonah Hex) and they will stand up for American principles like freedom and liberty, even though the Founding Fathers employed those only when convenient (you never saw them allowing freedom to the Indians). This will surely wind up one of those rah-rah nostalgia pro-American books liberals put out every so often to prove they are patriotic. Fuck that. I hate America.

Left for dead? So was Jonah Hex!

Run! Run and you might regain human limb trajectory!

THE CREEPER

AKA Steve Niles and his edgy, edgy revamp of a D-list Steve Ditko character who's fondly remembered as "Not Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, The Question or that other fucked up Randian hero". Written by Steve "I stole your girlfriend, you fucking faggot" Niles and "drawn" by Justiniano, the revamped Creeper behaves more like a cross between the Joker and any half-baked supernatural-esque anti-hero everyone read and got sick of within two weeks in the 1990's. The plot from what I can discern from the bland, poorly-shaped art, is Jack Ryder leads a double life as The Joker The Creeper, while in his civilian guise he rails against vigilantes like the Creeper on his not-the-left-wing's-version-of-The-O'Reilly-Factor show "You Are Wrong". While he stops an assassination as the Creeper, he derides vigilantes doing shit like that later in the night as Jack Ryder. Wotta pronged, depth-filled character Steve "Faggot Faggot Faggot Faggot" Niles created! If the intention for the story was to evoke a horror film or something, it failed miserably as The Creeper came off as a campy 60's Batman villain instead of a threatening sociopath just barely on the side of vigilantism as the writing apparently wanted him to be. I should note the incredible continuity errors involved in The Creeper's character. In One Year Later, Jack Ryder's been shown working at a Gotham television station and at the Daily Planet. And here he's with a completely different job. So which is it? Thank God Infinite Crisis streamlined everything for better understanding...

The art truly sucks. As one can see in the image above the last paragraph, Justiniano cannot even begin to understand human anatomy and how joints work. The writing ain't much better. Based on the overdone but usable conceit of opposed alter-egos, Steve "I wrote that vampire comic once and I've been riding its coattails ever since" Niles goes nowhere with it, neither adding any layers nor making it very interesting. It's like he wanted to write the Joker, and his Joker pitch didn't work so he flipped around in the DC Archive room until he found a wiry looking freakish guy he could revamp, and then made him Joker as a hero, with Vic Sage as an alter-ego. The only Creeper here is Steve Niles. If it wasn't already a miniseries, I'd say that after The Creeper got cancelled for low sales and general apathy from retailers to consumers, Steve Niles would leave threatening messages on Dan Didio's voicemail, all-time classics like "Why'd you go and cancel The Creeper, you FAGGOT?", "You are in so much fucking trouble, Dan, you fucking pussy", and "I'll steal your wife if I want to because I'm Steve fucking Niles, you mustachioed greasy faggot son of a BITCH." Oh, if only...

John Byrne hates Asian people.

THE ALL-NEW ATOM

You all know how I hate Gail Simone and latter day John Byrne (i.e. when he went crazy and became a Sim-esque hermit in the backwoods of Canada). Well, they're the creative team of the sole ongoing book to come out of this mess, The All-New Atom. How new is this Atom? He's derivative of Ray Palmer...only Asian. That is the key to understanding the diversity behind the new creations at Didio's DC. The same basic character as a cracker, with the stunning artistic change of a different skin color and bigger (or smaller) teeth. Byrne's art always put Ryan Choi in a yelling facial expression which I don't really understand. Maybe he based his drawings off the People's Volunteer Army in the Korean War. The plot for this vignette is minimal; the new Atom explores some tiny environment of evil robot bugs with cannons or something while his nerd friends on the other end of the conversation banter and act like huge nerds. It's basically Numb3rs only with size changing and a bit more virginity. There are also tiny little people fighting the Atom for some reason. The comedic twist at the end has the retarded tiny little people (seriously, they talk like Yoda if he inhaled bug spray) controlling the president's dog and not the president like we would expect. Hahaha, they think the president is servile to his dog! Comedy! Now I know why people love Gail Simone so much: they are functionally retarded.

Her story introduces the characters for the ongoing, yes, but there's nothing to entice, nothing new, nothing original, nothing unique. The characters introduced come from molds previously worn out both in comics and in other mediums. You know, the old crazy guy (who must smoke a pipe or rape young boys, or both), the fat guy with a 'funny' nickname (Panda in this case), the token black guy to show the thing isn't written by a racist, and the bald old guy. Ryan Choi himself, this new Atom, doesn't really have a personality except for the standard uneasiness of being a new superhero. In the ongoing I'm sure he will 'evolve' into a slightly nerdier and slightly more frazzled version of Peter Parker. Gail Simone uses a lot of smart people quotes as asterisks for no real reason. Perhaps to fill time. (She also invokes Groucho. Get it, Groucho alongside Einstein and Hawking!) John Byrne's current art style remains very hideous. Why the fuck does he feel the need to make everything look so scratchy? It's like he's trying to combine Jim Lee and Howard Chaykin into some bizarre, idiotic amalgam. But let me be clear: changing the artist would not make this better. The chief problems lie in the writing. If not for the bad attempt at comedy and the attempt to weave in vague fake science a la Grant Morrison, an Atom book might be tolerable.

YOU ARE WINNER, HA HA HA! YOU ARE WINNER, HA HA HA!

Puberty, the Captain Marvel way!

TRIALS OF SHAZAM

Judd Winick takes on the franchise of Shazam, which no one has seemingly had any idea of what to do with since the 1940s, before DC brought the property. For some fucking reason, they decided now "why not give it to Judd Winick". Yeah, why the fuck not. Out of all the stories in the Brave New World promotional advert, Winick's take on the Shazam franchise is the worst. It's 11 pages of magical people fighting other magical people for no real reason. Iron Goblins, Frost Giants, what the fuck ever else sounds stolen from an old edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Then the story takes a turn when all of the Marvels' powers start fucking up for some reason. I don't know, there might've been a reason, but I don't want to fucking read it over again. Captain Marvel Jr. (worst name ever) and Mary Marvel find their powers unexpectedly shut off during battles and they cannot turn them back on by uttering their respective words (Captain Marvel and Shazam). Handicapped Freddy gets his ass kicked through a window while Mary falls from high in the sky. I like how Freddy probably won't be injured yet Mary will most certainly end up with a broken back, spine, every other bone, if not fucking dead. Women in refrigerators, men in mild peril. Captain Marvel fights something and winds up killing him because his powers increase when Jr. and Mary lose theirs. He doesn't understand what's happening. Yawn, end, die.

The most surprising thing about this thing is Howard Porter draws it and does so in a style I've never seen him use before. Maybe it's the inking and the coloring and the shading, but I'm minimally impressed. His work looks a lot better than his stint on JLA. Otherwise, nothing new or surprising here. The teaser has small a sample size of writing to be able to find any nuggets of Winick inanery and thus the story is just fucking boring and pointless and awful and stupid and why the fuck did I bother to read this stupid, stupid, pointless shit. I'm sure the actual miniseries will up the awful level tenfold, since Winick works best/worst when given a large stretch of comics to flex his terrible writing muscles. I look forward to it in the same way one would look forward to the Rapture or a nuclear holocaust.

Oh, if only she lived in a country where she could call on numerous flying superheroes to save her from becoming roadkill!

Are we really going to differentiate them by their facial hair? Really?

WRAPAROUNDS

On the cover of Brave New World appears a shrouded character. For months, nerds on the Internet speculated who this easily discerned shadowed figure could be. The wraparounds, taking place on the first and last pages of the glorified advert, explain what the shadowed guy's deal is. Not much actually goes on, but here's an attempt at a summary. A guy watches the six advertisements that we read, and then goes on about a new threat looming, also known as a new crossover event looming over the horizon of the DCU. The guy and his buddies must be ready for this villainous crossover event, for they are the Monitors! They're like the Watchers, only with Amish-style beards, I guess. If I didn't know better I'd say this capper for an advertising mag is little more than a teaser for another event, making the entire big reveal process a calculating work of marketing. Dan Didio and the good folks at DC would never stoop to such a low!

DC NATION - DAN DIDIO IS STILL AN ASSHOLE

For the past few months, in the back of every DC Universe comic, the company has run a last page column by Dan Didio called "DC Nation". Even though I don't really enjoy reading much of anything DC puts out at this point, I like reading DC Nation. Why? If I'm ever bored or depressed, DC Nation gives me a focus point for all my anger, the focus point being none other than Dan Didio himself. Joe Quesada comports in such a way that his hucksterism reminds one of Stan Lee, in a good way. Dan Didio on the other hand tries to emulate the plugging and overall positive outlook Stan Lee used to do in his editorials but completely fails in its execution. Instead, Didio comes off as a smug prick as he always does in everything. His column this month centers on Brave New World and the six comics spinning out of it. My question is: Why? Especially when it's in the Brave New World comic, where anyone who got to the last page already fucking knows about the six new series and don't need pretentious descriptions of The Creeper and OMAC and so on. Didio apparently considers Brave New World a thank-you for suffering through Crisis, and let me tell you, if it's an intended thank-you, Didio hates people. Didio goes on to allege the purpose of the recent events as a shake up the status quo and a way to go into new directions. Going back to the Silver Age doesn't count as a shaken up status quo; it counts as an old status quo. Also, Didio, Steve Niles and Bruce Jones don't count as 'top talents of the industry', no matter how you hype them up. I can't really sum up the smugness inherent in Didio's prose, so let me quote a portion:

I don't think bringing back Uncle Sam constitutes "recast[ing] in a style reflecting today's world and audience".

Oh, come on. Even Quesada and Marvel do a better job of obfuscating their advertising-masquerading-as-content. Didio just does it shamelessly, smugly, and badly. In fact, reading a DC Nation column makes me want to buy DC Comics less. Sure, it may not mean much now since I don't buy shit from them anymore, but still, the principle remains.

CONCLUSION

DCU Brave New World never really went anywhere, told no interlocking story (two pages barely even constitute a wraparound) and will certainly not result in any financial success with any of these series. The Countdown to Infinite Crisis crap at least promised some relevance to the upcoming event. A Martian Manhunter mini and an OMAC mini do not, and this new OMAC dude isn't the last ever OMAC anyway. What about the chick robot in the Outsiders? Yeah, exactly. This advert has no point if they advertise shit no one wants to ever buy, and that's exactly what they did. How fucking long before DC gives Dan "Failure" Didio the fucking hook already? Not soon enough.