Multiversity: Crime Syndicate

Another mini-series that maybe should have had Multiversity label during Infinite Frontier era was Crime Syndicate. I enjoyed Forever Evil event and CSA characters in it, but unfortunately Johns ended up killing most of them because... Watchmen forced him to I guess. Anyway, since then DC had multiple soft reboots/retcons so I guess someone decided that CSA should get some focus again.

First obvious change is the name, America was dropped. In recent years DC has preferred Justice League name over the classic Justice League of America so I guess it makes sense to drop it for Earth-3 version of the team as well. There were many other changes and sadly this was the only one that I was fine with.

Without going too much into pointless details biggest changes are new Flash and Superwoman. I was not really a fan of Busiek introducing black Power Ring, but at least I could understand the logic behind it. This time Superwoman is... Donna Troy. She pretty much acts same as Lois Lane did so what is the point of doing this? It is not like she adds any diversity to the lineup or anything of the sorts. And same for new Flash whose name I forgot already, he even is friends with Atomica just like the previous one! Whats the point of introducing new characters if they look and act same? 

Anyway, the main goal of this mini was to establish new version of CSA and set them up War for Earth-3 crossover between Suicide Squad, Titans and Flash. And well, crossover usually have problems because different creative teams often don't match very well, things get stretched out to fill the issues and so on. But even taking that in mind... this was terrible. Plot makes little sense, characterizations don't match with what came before, characters appear and disappear, there was little visual consistency or thought put behind various alt-versions of established characters. But biggest problem was that it all led to... nothing.

It looks like idea was that Waller would use Earth-3 (and from other Earths as well) characters to fight against main heroes during Absolute Power event. But multiple writers dropped out till Waid finally agreed to write the event and naturally went with his own ideas. As a result lots of set-up was ignored or greatly downplayed. Waller's CS gets few cameo appearances to basically acknowledge that it was a thing without doing anything significant or getting any resolution.

To make matters worse in Superman books there is that subplot of Ultraman rising Jon for few years. Was that Ultraman from New 52? This new Ultraman that was rebooted in CS? Maybe anti-matter version? Who knows at this point. Then in Infinite Frontier mini-series we also had Lois Lane Superwoman... maybe idea was that she survived multiverse reset somehow and wasn't "fully replaced" by Donna Troy, but it was never given any attention to so I'm just speculating here.

Smaller problem is that in various flashbacks and cameos we kept getting CS/CSA members with different costumes and sometimes different versions of the characters. Sometimes I wondered if the idea was to show old CSA in flashback and new CS in present day because thats how it was published? But that, at least to me, just hurts the reading experience.

But you know what is the most frustrating bit? CSA is not a very popular team and rarely gets to shine. Here DC, in one way or another, dedicated something like 13 issues to them. And asides of nice art here and there (Hitch drew backups in CS mini) it is very badly executed mess. Good creative team with 10 issues could really deliver a solid foundation, but here DC just wasted lots of pages and created new problems.

Oh well, maybe 10 years later we'll get another CSA story. Maybe it even won't be terrible!