Bought On Reputation

Pass this up at your peril!

Given that Rapid Reviews don't really lend themselves to an omnibus (or in my case, four) I decided on dedicating a whole post to this wonder of magnificence from Marv Wolfman and George Perez. As the title of this post suggests, this was something I ordered purely based on the reputation that this era of Teen Titans has, then left it on my Read Pile for a few months, followed (some days after starting it, by ordering the second omnibus. Amazon normally charge about $75 USD (currently they've got it vastly reduced - buy it, buy it now). It's only 684 pages, and doesn't take too long to read.

Here's the deal, the opening is fairly weak. Sorry, but even Marv acknowledges it with his tale of sales figures. Robin seems to be time skipping, and there's a NEW Teen Titans he's getting involved with. As someone who's not read anything of the incarnations of the Teen Titans from before this period, that has little value to me as an idea. Especially in an age where teams are disbanded and reformed all the time. Avengers anyone? That said, even in the early issues, the art is beautiful. I do not complain about Perez art. Ever.
Past the first say 5 issues, the quality picks up as we finally start finding out what the deal is with Raven (daughter of the demon Trigon, seem to recall somewhere along the line it was retconned that her mother was raped, seems consensual throughout this omnibus). Then we deal with a fair bit of amazonian whatnot about different eras of Gods. Next up is Beast Boy and the Titans looking for the remaining members of the Doom Patrol. After that are a lot of smaller story arcs (including Starfire falling in love and then having that lover killed), mainly giving us an insight into the characters backgrounds and relationships with their parents and civilian lives. There are a number of fights with the Fearsome Five, Deadshot, and H.I.V.E., none of which truly stand out in my mind.

I know I've said before that recommending older comics can be hard if they don't have any relevance on the current comics, however I also say that a classic story or run is worth reading, not as a primer, but for the enjoyment of it. Sure this omnibus has a few stories that are superfluous, and some that are clearly encumbered by the need for Wolfman and Perez to get things started, but over the duration, it's a quality read. The Trigon material would be enough to make this a classic. Add in that for some of these characters, this was their introduction, and it's obviously interesting to compare where the characters have ended up after many different sets of hands and various Crises have had their way with them.

As someone that hadn't read Titans of any form before, nor watched the animated show, I've got to say that I had no real knowledge of the characters outside of Robin, Donna Troy, and Wally West, but the writing and the art end up pulling you in. Like 70s and 80s Chris Claremont X-Men work. It's good enough that familiarity is not required.

I'd recommend this book to anyone with a budding interest in the DC universe beyond Batman, Superman, and the JLA. Anyone that has an interest in the Titans already, and hasn't read this, should be lining up to spend their money. Anyone that likes Chris Claremont's style should also consider this book. I'm eagerly awaiting the second omnibus from this era.

Next time out: something happened to increase my read pile. Something called Black Friday sales at Things From Another World. Needless to say, it'll be another Rapid Review.

Crisis * INF = INF.

This cover really gives you very little to go on.

This week it's all about Infinite Crisis, the most readable of the three core Crises. It's a reasonable sized 264 pages, going for sub $15 USD at Amazon, which tells you a couple things:

1. it's shorter than the original Crisis on Infinite Earths; and
2. it still sells for resale (meaning it's not so bad it's being offloaded on the cheap, and it's not so good that it's warranted a price bump - though Amazon seem to be on their last couple of copies before restocking).

There's a few other things that are important about Geoff Johns' Crisis though, and they're important to know before you pick this book up. First, it's an "event" book (the comics equivalent of the last part of a movie trilogy in that it's must see/read, wraps up the series thus far, and plants seeds for further movies). Second, it ties in to DC history (though not so much as CoIE, or many other crossover events). Third, it was the centrepiece of the DCU for the time it was being published (including events both before and after), so there are a bucket of lead in books you could choose to read (I read none), books that chronicle events tied to a handful of characters during the Crisis, and books that deal with the ongoing events following the Crisis. Finally, it's now 6 years old, and if you recall what I said about Iron Man Extremis consider what time may have done to this book.

Does NOT happen in Infinite Crisis.

The book itself picks up (20 years of publishing later) where CoIE left off with Superman and Lois of Earth 2, Superboy of Earth Prime and Alex Luthor of Earth 3 trapped in their "paradise" and greatly displeased with what they've seen the superheroes of New Earth doing (eg killing, fighting amongst themselves, turning evil, using bad language, disrespecting people's mothers and the elderly, and behaving like annoyingly sad twits). This combines with the Justice League of America disbanding due to trust issues, and the generally unhealthy events going on (see the lead up series for these). As a result Alex, Superman 2, and Superboy Prime work towards building a tower to recreate the DC Multiverse (collapsed to a single universe during CoIE). What isn't revealed until much later is just how many of the recent events Alex has instigated, and just what Alex is aiming to do. Adding further interest, it's clear that Superman 2 is not as involved in the plan as Alex or Superboy, because while he believes the Earth needs to be replaced, he's also open to the idea of helping make New Earth a better place (although it won't save Lois 2).

If you're confuse, you needn't be. The book explains all this in a much more straightforward manner than I have. What you do need to keep in mind though is that really there's only three other plot elements:

1. the New Earth heroes fight back (predictably) and incur some losses (predictably);
2. Superboy turns evil; and
3. Alex is actually trying to create a perfect Earth by mixing the best of each of the alternate Earths.

And pissing this guy off is never a good
step on the road to getting your own way.

Alex's plan all comes undone when Superman 2 (and to some extent Power Girl) fight back against Alex,  and Superboy Prime becomes obsessed with simply returning Earth Prime as the sole Earth.  Yes, it really is a Pokemon level solution of "team work and friendship wins the day", which really is the basis of an Event book.

Now that's fine, that's dandy, but it took 7 issues to do it, and the major shakeup that could have happened to the DCU with the reinstating of the Multiverse never really seemed to take off. I've never really been that big on DC, and to be honest the reboots have nothing to do with it. See DC could do a reboot whenever they wanted, and they don't need a Crisis to do it, they can simply decide to tell most stories on another reality. It meant that CoIE was unnecessary, and gave reason to Infinite (beyond "it's been 20 years since CoIE"), but then what follows it? Same old, same old? Have we as fans gotten that lazy/stupid/apathetic ? Do we really need the ongoing history to accept comics any more? (Anyone reading Indy comics would likely say no, as would anyone who wishes to delete the late 1990s from their minds as far as comics went.)

The art (from Phil Jimenez, George Perez, Jerry Ordway, Ivan Reis, and Andy Lanning) is wonderful, nay, sensational. It's clear, it's concise, and it captures the chaos brilliantly. My only criticism (and this goes for the writing as well), is that there's so much going on that the magnitude of the struggle is lost in the shots where all and sundry have been injected to keep the fans happy.

Earlier I mentioned the ageing problem that Iron Man Extremis had, and this is a bit similar, in that the status quo going into (and coming out of) Infinite Crisis is so far gone that it's no longer required reading unless you're reading other books of that era. I'd go so far as to suggest that its best function is to establish the starting point of 52, but even then there's a slight gap in time. I'm being harsh here, because unlike Extremis, there's still some meat on the bones of this story (something Extremis never had), but for any Event book there's always a shelf life, unless it is so astoundingly brilliant that it does become a classic. Unfortunately I can't say that's the case for Infinite Crisis.

I'm happy to recommend this book to people, it's good value for money, but to be honest I can't do so with the enthusiasm that might be required for someone to actually spend their money on it.

Next week... I can't commit to picking a book. So until I get home Thursday night (roughly between 5:30 and 6pm Australian Central Time) it's up to the readers to choose from the following. If no-one votes, I'll pick whatever I want.

Seriously, there's one of these I'd want to read.
Let's see how much you want me to suffer.