From Morrison's mind: Freedom Fighters

Mastermen of Earth-10 was not the only revamp of Freedom Fighters that Morrison did. After Infinite Crisis DC (or just Didio?) wanted to launch new FF series set on main Earth. I guess it is a good thing that Multiversity and Morrison's Mastermen series were delayed for years or it would have caused some confusion. So anyway, Morrison came up with some ideas for FF series set on main Earth that were latter used, changed and developed by writing team of Gray and Palmiotti (GP). Was it any good?

The whole thing starts in Infinite Crisis Aftermath: The Battle for Bludhaven mini. It is one of those mini series that try to address some plot points from recent event and set up new plot point for future storylines. It was followed up by Brave New World one-shot that set-up multiple new DC series. In these two books we got a basic set up of Freedom Fighters being in opposition to Father Time and SHADE. 

So Morrison wrote FF proposal and we also got another Morrison's concept in the same story, sounds good? These ideas were explored in Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters mini series and... it wasn't good. 

One of the reasons why I liked Lemire's revamp of SHADE was that Morrison's original version wasn't well defined. And when things are not well defined certain writers, like GP in this case, will just dumb it down to some generic evil government agency. And you can kinda see it in many characters that we see in these series - there is often a hint of something interesting, but it is executed in a very dull manner.

This mini was followed by another volume with the same name and eventually Freedom Fighters ongoing. As things progress you can feel that the amount of more interesting or weird concepts is decreasing and by the end it all starts to feel like a generic superhero story. Well, it is not entirely generic. When writing about Venditti's sequel to Mastermen I mentioned how instead of trying to do something smart Venditti just wrote a story about Nazis getting punched. GP tried to insert some politics and provide more meat.

But if you can't really execute these political themes well... should you really do them? For example, towards the end of the ongoing one character comes out in support for capital punishment and it doesn't really fit his previous characterization. Did he change his views due to personal experiences? Is he a hypocrite? Both options can provide good story moments, but since GP never go below surface level with these political plot points we have no idea which is it. For all we know it is just a case of bad writing and the writing team didn't even notice what they wrote. So maybe in the end Venditti had a better approach.

Another problem I have with these surface level political superhero comics is that they often have limited impact despite big swings. Revamped FF had only few small cameos and no impact on the wider line despite their big story basically being DC's version of superhuman registration act from Marvel. Why is that? Probably because these mini series and ongoing had terrible sales.

After Flashpoint DC stepped back a bit from legacy heroes so there was no obvious slot for Freedom Fighters style team on the main Earth. Yet for some reason we got 3 more miniseries (Ray, Phantom Lady and Human Bomb) by the same writing duo introducing new versions of FF characters without any ties to some older heroes or WW2. And it is more of the same. SHADE again is a generic government agency despite this technically being in New 52 continuity and Lemire's SHADE being well established by this point. In Human Bomb get we get American soldiers kidnapped in Afghanistan and turned into suicide bombers and it is obvious where GP are going with these parallels, but just like before nothing is actually done with it so you wonder whats the point?

And nobody cared about it this time either. It is hard for me to understand why DC did, in total, around 40 issues for an idea that was clearly not working nor connecting with the audience? By comparison Ryan Choi had a bit better sales, much better reception and got only 25 issues before getting killed. Anyway, at this point probably nobody even remembers that this thing existed. And I don't want to be too harsh here, it is not the worst thing that DC has ever published, it is just very mediocre and not memorable at all.

On the visual side we got lots of different artists since in total it was like 7 different series. Some was done by better artists, some by weaker, but at no point did it wow me or made me think that this is worth reading despite subpar writing.

Anyway, since Rebirth (and eventually Infinite Frontier) DC has been slowly moving away from this thing called continuity and at the time of writing some version of classic Freedom Fighters is back in continuity, but it doesn't really look like it has any relation to Morrison's proposal or what GP did with it.

Easy skip.