Countdown to INfinite Crisis #1
by: the Committee to Create This Comic.
i really do look at this as $1 to just fucking flat out laugh at a overhyped piece of shit. like, going in, my expectations are so fucking low cause... it really does feel like the sequel to identity crisis, so...
i mean, its a crossover starting with a "tragic death" of a superhero. which was a fucking cliche in 1994. now, its not even a cliche, its just ... its like the next time there's a boy band? after new kids and then backstreet boys and n'sync, then next time you live through a boy band fad of that magnitude, it'll be ... so beneath you that it'll be fun to watch the way an ant farm is fun to watch, you know?
$1 well spent...
i mean, did you read any of the interviews? how seriously are they taking this piece of shit??? anyway, i already spoiled the last page for myself in the store, so...
i'm going to start reading now:
Cover: yuck. i just don't like the composition at all-- too many elements, placed seemingly at random. wildly dull color. i like that superman's staring at the dead body, but wonder woman's just staring off into space, thinking about makeup. i mean, TWO artists combined couldn't come up with one genuinely interesting facial expression??? i like jim lee, but when i see his stuff, i want to see it in pen and ink... alex ross: what more can be said? i love this tragic event happens with BRIGHT BLUE SKIES!! its the happiest death image i've ever seen. also: don't look at wonder woman's neck too long-- it's waaaay fucked up...
they should give the accounting software that generated that hackneyed logo a debugging.
sad... sad this is how i enjoy myself... so sad...
Page 1: oooh, this all happened TWENTY MINUTES AGO. i was wondering when the events of this comic happened. but wait, i bought it at noon, on my lunchbreak. so did it happen 20 minute before then or 20 minutes before now? or 20 minutes before it was drawn or inked or colored? this comic just started and there are already so many mysteries to unravel! make mine dc!! excelsior!
also i'm already confused how a character that's been around since the 60's? 70's? how he grew up with laptops... is blue beetle a teenager now? did they reverse age him like they did with iron man? oh, right, we're still all pretending kids read comics. right. nudge nudge.
"They came smashing into our room, staring at us with these big glowing GOGGLES." oooh, goggles. what the fuck? big glowing goggles? fucking lousy prose. "it turns out it wasn't the army; it was an irradiated hydrocephalic swim team." ...??? oh, because he wears big glowing goggles, like in the art, so... the u.s. military who harassed him when he was a teenage hacker inspired him to also wear... glowing goggles...? is that what's being conveyed? uh:
what?
page 3: whoever they got to draw this thing can't draw bruce wayne. i think that's what you'd call an omen...
update: okay, at a dinner scene with maxwell lord and yep: i'm already at disgusted with my fellow man. what an unbelievable piece of shit this is.
you ever read any interviews or anything with c.c. beck? the captain marvel guy? kinda reminds me of that where... its just funny how things that are charming and funny, people in comics hate and apologize for and then they hold up this soulless personality free hackery like it was a fucking trophy.
man, that was fast. i thought i'd get a little further in before i lost my initial intended tone of snarky bemusement...
when did comics become so concerned with who's a first stringer and who's a "second-stringer?" have you noticed that's just a concept that's snuck into all of these comics where everyone just sits around and worries about where they are in the superhero hierarchy? its like the writers are anxious about their royalties and its bleeding through to the characters... "if only i was writing batman, i'd be getting higher residuals..."
hahahahaha: truly the best moment in this comic so far is they gave a reaction shot to this artist. a shot of blue beetle acting... dissapointed? i don't know-- the artist can't draw RECOGNIZABLE HUMAN EMOTIONS on a face. so its just this panel of a face with... like.. is that a frown? i dont even know... oh man, i gotta scan this shit this is hilarious...
[image]
(server just went under maintenance so if you don't see the image, sorry...)
what is he trying to draw??? is he sad? angry?
the dialogue: "Take Care of Yourself, Booster... its what you do best." how many comics has had that line or a variation of that line in it between this moment that we're sharing here and... let's say... 1971? i would argue about two quadrillion.
it took three guys to write that line! three guys!!! what a fucking brilliant cutting edge bit of dialogue...
do you think booster gold might show up later on and redeem himself by reaffirming that their friendship matters more to him than immediate financial gain? i wonder if that sprung like minerva out of one of the three guys who wrote this comic's head, or if they just ripped off star wars and/or a billion other things that've used that cliche...
hacks.
Batman: apparently is a HUUUUUUGE asshole who doesn't like hearing facts about crimes anymore-- what an awesome detective!!! he's such a good detective that he doesn't even let people tell him about crimes!
the colors are also hackwork. could they pick a less fun palette, please? watching them try to do lighting effects is just... did they fire everyone who colored good to save money or something? is that why it only cost a $1?
batman says some stuff i don't understand because i didn't read some earlier comic (accessible!) and then "chapter 1" ends. which is interesting because they never setup that i was READING chapter one... its like there's just this random panel saying "end of chapter one." oh, okay. the Committee to Create This Comic needs to work a little more on transitions, i think. oh, and it really bears repeating: the Committee to Create This Comic needs to do something about these horrendous colors... muddy, nothing pops, they're not tuned into the emotional mood of the scene at all, i mean-- he's got blue beetle standing in front of dark green batcave... you know, like all those other dark green caves you've seen in your life.
am i supposed to like blue beetle? the whole comic's theme so far is "this guy is a loser-- a girl won't fuck him." aaah, see how far the v-word goes into the comic psyche-- that's how they convey that blue beetle is wretched-- cause they show a girl who doesn't want to fuck him...
so far the theme of the comic is (a) blue beetle sucks, and (b) batman is an asshole...
Chapter... 2?: Fifteen minutes ago. So, wait, is that fifteen minutes before ten days ago, or fifteen minutes before me now reading it or... i guess the latter... oh, wait, we're back in the original scene... okay...
okay, wait... wait: the art has gotten worse somehow. different penciller, i think. i just turned the page and its a shot of all these superheros standing around and ... well, they're mostly just standing around. i think its a crime scene. power girl is being helpful and checking a dumpster...?
the colorist has at least cheered up...
awesome dialogue #a million: "green arrow and hawkman steer clear of one another. like two dogs marking out their territory." uh: dogs do that with URINE!!! unless this turns into the BEST COMIC EVER and we get to finally see some superhero urination action... i think that's ... pretty fucking ridiculous.
i bet green arrow pees awesome.
okay, different writer too because this narration just got fucking WRETCHED. "nightwing called in some of the titans, including starfire. everyone she flies past can't help but stare. it's like she's carved out of glowing gold." what is glowing gold??? see, the way a simile works is you compare x to Y so that the person reading who is aware of Y and knows why can go, "Aah, x is like y." but when y= GLOWING GOLD... IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK...
and why would superheros gawk at starfire when the artist has drawn the thin bit of fabric that barely covers power girl's labia gently crawling up her ass? is that not like vibrating platinum???
i like that they make the flash photoshop-blurry. that's kinda cool. do they do that in his comics now?
this first panel is so fucking awful-- nightwing was trained by the master detective who doesn't bother asking questions about crimes, right? so how does nightwing investigate the warehouse robbery? they show him standing on boxes looking through a window into the warehouse. uh: what the fuck??? "yep... its empty." no shit-- there's a giant opening about one foot away from you-- you can actually go inside!!
and why isn't this comic over-- doctor fate can't cast a magic spell that'll show what happened? of course he can! he's doctor fate. lame...
ughhhh, i mean, i really can't even read this anymore because of how awful this narration is. "Green Lantern shows up. i want to rub my penis its so hard because i think he's so cool and i hope he likes me. i'm a fanboy just like you are, i don't get laid, noone likes me-- so if green lantern likes me, he'll like you, and ... oh, god, i wish i could just put myself into his mouth just for a second. just the tip." that's how dc comics read to me now... when did heroic fiction comic books become so explicitely about hero worship??? what the fuck is that???
oh man, the art... there's a shot of superman-- what the fuck is wrong with his arms... superman looks like that steroid arm guy that they always show on the daily show...
the Committee to Create This Comic really needs to think about what they're doing with their careers, man because they are just not very talented...
superman: "he makes you feel useless and important at the same time." okay, you won't believe me but actual bit of narration: "it doesn't matter how many times i've met him. it's always like the first."
you know what madonna's like a virgin's about? It's all about this cooze who's a regular fuck machine, I'm talking morning, day, night, afternoon, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick. Then one day she meets this John Holmes motherfucker and it's like, whoa baby, I mean this cat is like Charles Bronson in the Great Escape, he's digging tunnels. Now, she's gettin' the serious dick action and she's feeling something she ain't felt since forever. Pain. Pain. It hurts her. It shouldn't hurt her, you know her pussy should be Bubble Yum by now, but when this cat fucks her it hurts. It hurts just like it did the first time. You see the pain is reminding a fuck machine what it once was like to be a virgin. Hence, "Like a virgin."
that's what this scene with superman is like...
haha, "what's in the warehouse?" "my kryptonite collection. sometimes i come in on a rainy day and like to shower myself in kryptonite, rub it in and out of my bellybutton." is this seroiusly the plot of this comic???
ugggggggggggggggggh: "i've been alone for over an hour. but i can still hear them.... my father lecturing me about the value of the kord name...." blah blah blah "and my brother as i head off to the prom. without a date."
the Committee to Create This Comic just fucking radiates contempt for their audience, don't they? do the fans who read this get that they're so plainly pandering to them, and they're pandering by making the viewpoint character the biggest fucking REJECT they can? i mean, do they even realize they're being fucking insulted? like the Committee to Create This Comic was so cool in high school...
(and for the record i had dates to both, even though ... let's just say that they weren't the greatest dates i've ever been on...)
oh good, an action scene. i was worried the bad art wouldn't ever be incoherent.
ugh... the "han solo" scene with booster gold happens and it SUUUUUUCKS.
here's the best part: "hey those bad guys plainly know stuff that'd help us solve the mystery of what's happening. i know-- i'll blast at them with my ray hand and then let them run away! yay!" fucking ... dc has the best detectives...
playing lex luthor tonight will be professor x.
end of chapter 2... i guess you had to read identity crisis to understand this. why...
the Committee to Create This Comic made a $1 comic that was inaccessible to new readers. why am i even surprised? the Committee to Create This Comic really shouldn't surprise me at this point, and yet... i mean, they do anyway...
god, god, god, these colors... fuck, this is an ugly book...
Chapter 3: the drawings have gotten a little better so now the colors have gotten ten times worse in order to compensate and not make the other pencillers feel bad. the Committee to Create This Comic is such a team that way...
they're setting up the Next Blue Beetle? i think dc fans like that-- the legacy heroes? i remember liking that a lot when i'd read this stuff...
you know what crossover i liked? that one where the sun went out. i think stuart immomen did that one. i thought that was fun. i think one of the kesel's wrote it... my favorite of all time's invasion... this? this isn't underworld unleashed bad (christ, that was fucking amazing bad) but its bad.... i'm very bored...
... he had an exploding mouse? wait-- did ... did blue beetle's mouse not explode until then or does the comic expect me to believe that blue beetle was on the computer that whole time and never clicked the mouse until that moment or...?
lame.
explosion sound effect? "Ca-Koom." the Committee to Create This Comic can't even come up with a good sound effect?
i wish i'd called the Committee to Create This Comic the Executive Committee to Create This Comic, instead. i think that'd have been more funny... ah well...
wait wait wait-- it wasn't a ... it wasn't an exploding mouse-- it was a BOLT OF LIGHTNING. A YELLOW i shit you not YELLOW bolt of lightning. oh, ca-koom= lightning sound, or... well, that would be thunder, but...
why is the lightning yellow?
haha, i love that in superhero comics where regular people act totally unrealistically? there's a fireman who tells blue beetle that he can't ride in the ambulance because they only family. yeah, cause (a) firemen care who rides in ambulances...?, and (b) NOONE WOULD CARE IF A SUPERHERO ASKED FOR A FAVOR BECAUSE THEIR BEST FRIEND GOT HIT BY AN INEXPLICABLY YELLOW LIGHTNING BOLT.
three guys it took to write this shit... the Committee to Create This Comic maybe should've hired a fourth writer, is all i'm saying...
description of fawcett city: "it's so clean. old fashioned. a shiny dime. sort of like the hero that protects it." ... a shiny dime? have you ever in your life either (a) described a city or (b) heard anyone else describe a city using the phrase "a shiny dime?" cause... that's a new one on me...
what the fuck? the wizard shazam shows up: "you could not comprehend the answers. except to say that the lightning that struck out at you was not a vessel of magic. it merely laid claim to be. goodbye." WHAT THE FUCK?? uh, that guy's right: i DON'T comprehend the answers. oh, the Committee to Create This Comic... what the fuck are you even talking about???
what the hell is the plot of this fucking comic??? there's no plot to this thing. what a piece of shit...
Chapter 4: oh good, we're back to someone who can't draw at all. the guy who could almost good had my hopes up but he couldn't deliver from being almost good to actually being good, sort of depressingly mediocre... i'm happier being back in the warm embrace of ugly yuck-work.
who needs lines with halfway decent line-weights? not the Committee to Create This Comic!!! take that, people who like good inking!
fuck, this is fucking ugly...
and the writing rises to new badness to celebrate the bad art: "i'm a bug. like i said. but i'm also a man. a man of SCIENCE. a man with skills and smarts-- more skills and smarts than the average bear-- but a man all the same. i'm not like marvel or superman-- or her. hell, no one is like her. the most powerful, most beautiful woman in the world."
that is just stunning in how bad it is. what a rambling nonsensical-- what the ... what the fuck is he talking about? "i'm a bug. i'm also a man. i got needs like a man. i am smart, smart like a college professor. but i'm not like a woman. i'm like a man. i wish i had a vagina like her, though. sometimes, i like to drink coffee. it makes me feel awake. bears will smell her period. i am smart. i am a man." just-- that's not writing, it's typing. it's just incoherent babble...
you can't be a man with "smarts" and refer to yourself as a man of "smarts." for starters. and ... i can't even follow the logic of it... " i'm a man. not a girl." o...okay?
update: okay, first martian manhunter joined the "All DC characters are assholes now" club, then the comic totally turned into some incoherent space opera for a second to advertise an unrelated miniseries...? then it became this "i am tired of my life just like you are tired of reading this comic about Superloser, as above so below" moment. then blue beetle went to see booster gold so they could babble incoherently about a ... robot named Skeets from the future who has not appeared in this or any other comic i've ever read in my whole life.
awesome.
Chapter 5: where do they find these artists? and can they put them back there now, please?
okay, so now the whole comic is predicated on blue beetle trying to call varoius superheros and them not returning his calls or answering the phone. because he fucking sucks (good choice to create 80 pages about a character who sucks-- that really got me energized to read more about your other characters that suck, Committee to Create This Comic! what's more exciting than overwrought self-loathing???).
so, do you see what i see?
The whole comic is predicated on noone in the DC Universe ever having heard of e-mail.
three guys it took to write this and none of them say to themselves, "why doesn't he send anyone an email?" not one?
oh, Committee to Create This Comic ... you need to hold more meetings. i know you probably held a bunch and charged a lot to the company card, but you needed to hold one more...
awesome fun-fact? chapters 1-4 had no indication on their first pages that they were in fact the first pages of chapters 1-4. you just get to the end and it says "end of chapter." but chapter 5? they just decided "now's a good time to start saying chapter 5."
the Committee to Create This Comic doesn't sweat the details, i guess...
can i just stop a moment and say people who whine about bendis's avengers: please stop. cause i've read that and its not great or anything, its nothing i'd want to read, but ... its readable. while this thing-- its unreadable tripe. this is fucking incompetent. bendis's avengers-- it's just not very fun. this: its seriously nonsensical...
...
oh, man, i have not laughed as hard in a long time-- i mean, i have just been belly-laughing for about two minutes at something and i can't tell if its intentionally funny or not-- you decide:
(okay, keep in mind: this is during the exciting "Blue Beetle infiltrates the enemy fortress sequence")
(okay, i'm having problems uploading the image but i'll post it later if i have to otherwise i'll replace this text)(dang)
ooh neat opening for this episode of lost-- what the fuck was the deal with that dream sequence? fuck, this episode is fucked up... i like this.
oooh, they're ripping off the matrix for the bad guys. how 2003 in comics!!!
and then ... there's the moneyshot. blue beetle's brains getting splattered on the last page. that's fun for people? why is that fun for people? i don't know. not fun for me...i don't get it. do you get it? i don't get it. i just plain don't get it...
listen to the Committee to Create This Comic's self-delusion: "Consider this comic a throwback to yesterday(when was the last time you bought an original 80-page comic for a buck?) but more important, a herald of things to come. While we can't sell comics at the prices they once were, we can renew our committment to telling the types of stories that make comics great."
he sounds like the salesman in mr. mom. remember mr. mom how there was that guy blathering that nonsense teri garr wrote for him about america and whatever the fuck? was that mr. mom???
wow...
how staggeringly awful. i haven't even spoiled the bad guy and just how plain stupid that is. or just how INSULAR this all is... just stunningly insular... i only get this cause i read a particular comic, what, 10 years ago??? more? more than 10 years actually-- like 12 or 13... that's the only way to understand this comic is to have read a comic 13 years ago.
which-- if you read it? you'd HATE this. cause it just shits all over it. its a comic that hardcore nerds hated because it didn't wank over the characters like these talentless assholes pretend to in order to ingratiate themselves with fans they just radiate contempt for in the actual comics themselves...
what's wrong with wit? what's wrong with fun?
i got the new giffen-demattheis issue this week too and i can guarantee i'll laugh my ass off and have a good time and put it away and forget it. what's wrong with that? why don't people think that's a worthwhile thing? i think that's a terrific thing...
god, that's phil jiminez's art? what happened to him? ugly... bad colors... was it the printing? i mean, phil jiminez can draw so...???
Summary:
well: everyone involved did an awful job. especially the colorists-- lets list them off: moose baumann, hi-fi, paul mounts, guy major, steve firchow. for taking a really bad comic and just making it all the worse-- muddy, gloomy, joyless, overrendered and SOULLESS.
its funny-- i picked up batman year one today. i haven't read it since i was 13. i was at camp. i borrowed a friend's copy. it fucking ROCKED harder than anything. i'd already read dark knight returns, but year one was BETTER. the art was awesome. i never read it again-- until tonight or tomorrow or whenever i get to it.
these people read the same comics i did, must've liked them-- why would they work so hard to get into comics, suck up to editors, work for years... just so they can do the Blue Beetle Snuff Comic Crossover Experience? i guess when you get older you forget that feeling you had originally...
its such a sad hobby in so many ways...
oh well, everyone's got to make a buck, i guess...
"We are counting down to INFINITE CRISIS, the sequel to CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, one of the greatest comic stories ever told. Its changes will be far-reaching and its effects, everlasting. Promise."
i gotta post that bit of art i liked so much separately-- i can't connect on my ftp for some reason... dammit
-abhay
good episode of lost...
