Opinion

DC and The Matter of Crisis, Part I

January 21, 2023 by Ritesh Babu 1 Comment

You’ve heard the word. You know the story.

Crisis.

The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories.

The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly.

And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage. Given that is the case, given it has become ubiquitous, inevitable, and all-pervading with DC itself, it’s worth discussing what has become of it. What has emerged from this focusing and this obsession over Crisis in DC? What has it led to?

The matter of Crisis must be unpacked, and that’s what we’re here to do.

Who Watched the Watchmen? Justice League Unlimited

January 12, 2023 by David Mann 1 Comment

It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

The simple version: our topic series has The Question as one of its main characters exposing an apocalyptic conspiracy aimed at the superhero community, prominently features Captain Atom, partially climaxes in a false flag disaster engineered by the world’s smartest man posing as hero, and ends on the question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (even if the response offers up the fig leaf translation “Who guards the guardians?”). By that metric alone, the widely beloved ‘Cadmus arc’ of Justice League Unlimited is indisputably A Watchmen. Plus Alan Moore liked the one episode. Case closed.

The more significant answer is that to a substantial cross-generational section of the pop culture viewership, the Cadmus arc is Superhero TV Watchmen.

Hear The Doomsayers: Superman, X-Men, Asimov & The Climate Disaster

January 7, 2023 by Dave Leave a Comment

“It’s suicide. No, it’s worse. It’s genocide!” ~ Jor-El (Superman 1978)

“It isn’t that they question your data. The facts are undeniable. It’s your conclusions *we find unsupportable*” Vond-Ah (Superman 1978)

The history of superhero comics, and so much of pop culture as we know it today, is defined by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster’s Action Comics #1. Although it’s retroactively baked into that debut (Krypton is named in Action Comics #1, but Kal-El’s home planet would take a decade to become what we know), the origins of Superman are some of the most well known in all of modern myth. Indeed, Superman’s origins are so ingrained, that it took Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely all of 4 panels and 8 words to summarize on the first page of All-Star Superman #1.

[Some spoilers for X-Men comics since 2019 follow]
[Read more…] about Hear The Doomsayers: Superman, X-Men, Asimov & The Climate Disaster