Multiversity: Rise of a Nation

When Multiversity: Teen Justice book was announced some people were a bit confused why it is using Multiversity label. At that time I was more surprised that this label is being used only now, after all we had other series and story arcs that tried to deal with Morrison's Multiversity and related concepts. We start this series of posts with Freedom Fighters by Venditti and Barrows.

DC has struggled over the years to find a good place for many of their characters and it has been even bigger problem for characters that were acquired by DC from other companies. Freedom Fighters are no exception here. 

They were introduced to DC by Wein in his JLA run as heroes of a world where Nazis won. Later they were moved to main Earth. Their lineup was changed many times. They went from WW2 to modern team (at some point I'll probably cover Palmiotti/Gray version in a separate post) and there were probably some other variations that I'm forgetting now. What they all had in common? None of them really managed to get a decent following.

You can see many things from Wein's JLA run referenced in one way or another by Morrison. So it is not surprising that in Mastermen one-shot we get an update for Wein's version. Asides of obvious change of there being Nazi Superman main difference is that the entire world is a bit more complicated. Despite being raised by Hitler Superman is morally conflicted character. Freedom Fighters are pretty much depicted as terrorists. Society, to large extent, has "moved on" and it is not clear what good Freedom Fighters victory would do for the world. From overall story of The Multiversity we know that various versions of Sivana are up to no good and one of them is suppling weapons to Freedom Fighters so maybe their victory would actually make things worse? 

I think that Morrison wanted to create a morally complex setting where Freedom Fighters couldn't really outright win like they did in Wein's story and at the same time this setting would give them an unique edge when compared to many other failing DC's team books. Venditti obviously doesn't care about any of that.

Lets start with the positives. I like Barrows on art and he does most of the series, thats good. Like many "sequels" done by different writers it doesn't match 1:1 to earlier version, but I can give props to Venditti for trying to explain various changes and how exactly it fits with Mastermen one-shot. Is it perfect? No, but I can appreciate the effort.

Story itself is not badly written, it reads okay and nothing really pops out as being bad or stupid. Problem is that Venditti removed all the edge (and Nazi Superman) from the premise and it became simple and straightforward story of good guys beating the bad guys and everyone clapping. And well, you can't really do another story in that setting without some retcons or significantly changing the premise.

So at the end problem with this story is that instead of trying to aim for something deeper and more complex it becomes just another story about evil Nazis getting beaten. Nothing wrong with beating Nazis, but we have plenty of those stories and this one doesn't stand out at all.

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