The DCU in its current deplorable state takes itself way too seriously. Heroes and villains dying for absolutely no reason save titillation and sales. The revamps of characters just for the sake of change with no discernible purpose. This whole mess started before Infinite Crisis and falls squarely at the feet of Brad Meltzer and Identity Crisis . Talk about your retcons. [SPOILERS BEGIN] Suddenly the moralistic Zatanna alters memories. Sue Dibny dies for no reason least of all as a hero. The mental breakdown of Jean Loring serves no purpose but to create a new supervillain. [SPOILERS END]
Since the murky events of the recent Crisis, we’ve seen the rise of the dark Mary Marvel (an unforgivable sin in my book), a new Atom, loads of confusion surrounding Wonder Woman, and the death of the Ted Kord Blue Beetle who was immediately replaced by a new Blue Beetle. Not only was Kord, a perfectly fine and under utilized character, killed, but his buddy Booster Gold, an inane concept from the start, was thrust back into the limelight. The whole purpose of these revamps and restarts was to attract new readers to the confusing DC Universe. The project failed. The new series are either poorly crafted or so involved in current DCU wide plotlines to be unintelligible to all but the most versed fan. And sometimes both. After reading Countdown to Mystery #1, I found myself surfing the net trying to catch up on the storylines. In the Dr. Fate segment, the vagueness was a storytelling device, but with all the recent confusion, I could not be sure until after I did some checking. The research did help with the Eclipso tale. That’s way too much work to enjoy a comic.
I’m just barely touching on the problems. I haven’t even mentioned The Legion of Super-Heroes, Uncle Sam (and the other Quality characters), and many others. The biggest issue is that DC forgot how to have fun. Or so I thought until I picked up this intriguing piece of metafiction: Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality.
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From Wiktionary:
Noun metafiction |
Using Doctor Thirteen, the world’s foremost skeptic who denies that anything supernatural or unexplainable exists, as the centerpiece of a quasi-team of truly forgotten and often forgettable DC characters, Brian Azzarello scripts a surprisingly amusing and insightful treatise into the world of contemporary comics. Genius Jones (created by Alfred Bester!), I…Vampire, Anthro, the Primate Patrol (a team of intelligent Nazi gorillas!), Infectious Lass (of Legion of Substitute Heroes fame), the ghost of 19th-century Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart (from The Haunted Tank), and Thirteen’s magic-wielding daughter Traci join Thirteen as he challenges the mysterious Architects–the shapers of the universe–, who wish to retcon him and the others out of existence. Azzarello employs no subtlety or diversion here as events unfold quickly.
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| J.E.B. Stuart: Who are The Architects? Genius Jones: The ones who decide who’s who and who isn’t. The are the official guides to the universe. When it was decided that the one fashioned by The Architects that preceded them didn’t make cents they knocked the old one down and built a new one. This is the fourth time it’s happened– in this universe. Traci Thirteen: "This universe?" Genius Jones: There’s another universe that these Architects are at war with. One that reinvents itself every summer— So "things will never be the same again," it claims. |
Artist Cliff Chiang’s clean lines and emoting faces further enhance the story. Chang clearly had fun here. What artist would not when drawing yetis, pirates, and apes? I’d have fun and I can’t draw a lick.
Thanks to Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang, and editor Bob Schreck for putting some fun back into the moribund DCU. Maybe there is hope.
