The Book of Hsssh

Multiverse was back after Infinite Crisis and 52 weekly. Supposedly the idea was to follow it up with various multiverse based books by the writers of 52 weekly. For one reason or another this never materialized and instead multiverse was heavily used in Countdown to Final Crisis weekly. Countdown, at this point, is regarded as one of the worst things that DC has ever published, but maybe multiverse related bits in it were decent? Lets find out. When I first started thinking about this post I figured I'd cover all the different Earths showcased and what was cool or bad about them, but at some point I realized that it would just be a waste of words. Instead I'll just cover things that aren't terrible or are somehow related to Morrison's work. If something is not mentioned in this post then assume that it is real bad. Thank god that Flashpoint erased all of it since with Morrison being Morrison it is probably safe guess that most of the bad and stupid stuff that happened ...

So what happened with our new Atom after Simone's run ended? Looking at the title of this post we can already see that fate wasn't kind to Ryan. But before we get to that we have to cover few other things. Simone's run had two fill-ins and they were good fill-ins. Good in a sense that they advanced the main plot of the series and their one and done stories weren't bad. But I didn't find the main plot well executed even before Countdown derailed everything. If you liked what Simone was doing then they are worth checking out, otherwise? Not really. After Simone left we got a new writer - Rick Remender, and I'm not sure what DC was really thinking here. Simone's run didn't end with good sales numbers so were they really expecting that Remender, who wasn't well known at the time, was going to turn the ship around in couple of issues? So what happened is that the title got canceled after 5 issues. But were those issues good? It is hard to judge them since...

Batwing, David Zavimbe, was basically African Batman that Morrison created during Batman Inc. Not much was done with him there, but as is usual with Morrison's work there were enough bits and pieces that could be explored and built upon to something interesting. So New 52 happens in the middle of the Batman Inc. run and DC felt like it was a good opportunity to try him out as a solo hero. Did it work? First red flag for me was that Winnick got to write this ongoing. I know that he has his fans and some of his stuff like Red Hood turned out to be big commercial hits, but his work really never clicked for me. On the positive he got Ben Oliver on the art who I tend to enjoy. So yeah, I wasn't very thrilled with the creative team, but I was interested enough to try it. Unfortunately, while he still has the same name and is based in Africa it does feel like this is entirely different character. Maybe editors wanted this, maybe Winnick wanted it. Who knows, who cares. At the end of t...

This mini was main motivation for me to start these Multiversity posts, yet I'm getting to it only now, why? Well the main reason is that I'm not very familiar with Titans and Young Justice franchises (I guess they are one franchise by this point?) and I never found them very interesting. So I figured that I might talk a bit about E-11 in general as well. I'm sure that there are some old stories where gender flips where first used (after all, what is Supergirl if not a gender flipped Superman?), but it is generally considered that the roots of E-11 are in Loeb's Superman/Batman run, issues #23-24 to be more precise. Loeb doesn't do much really with it there, just shows us few gender flipped characters and writes some things that don't really make much sense if you spend 5 minutes thinking about it. But to be fair Loeb never intended for it to matter, it was just a silly idea to fill some pages. After that we got an expansion on this idea with Search for Ray Palm...

After I finished writing about Busiek's Trinity work I figured that I might as well cover the remaining Morrison's CSA appearances. After all, there aren't that many left. We probably should start with some trivia. First time Antimatter CSA was mentioned was in 1992's Double Trouble (Justice League Quarterly #8) story by Mark Waid. That is some years before JLA: Earth-2, so were they actually created by Waid and not Morrison? Not really. CSA gets only one panel cameo and they look nothing like Morrison's version, their looks are closer to classic version of CSA. Anyway, the point of the story was to introduce Conglomerate team from Antimatter world. I guess idea here was that new version of Justice League could use their own version of CSA? In the end it doesn't matter since they never appeared again. Before I started writing about CSA in my mind I had Syndicate Rules as #2 and Casey's "Mirror, Mirror" as #3, both after JLA: Earth-2. But cool thin...

Once upon a time Morrison gave to DC some ideas on how to update some of their old properties. These ideas would then be developed by other writers. One such case was the ongoing series about new Atom, Ryan Choi, written by Gail Simone. Compared to other Morrison's ideas All-New Atom made the most impact and this led to a somewhat divisive question, who created Ryan Choi? Simone has basically said that she had read only parts of Morrison's proposal and he was mostly created by her. How much can you read for it to still be your creation? Who knows. So anyway, how was Simone's run? It was very Gail Simone. Some weirdness, comedy and characters being horny. Since Ryan ends up dating Giganta we also got some borderline fetish stuff with small guy, big girl panels. I remember back in the day Simone's Secret Six was one of my favorite ongoings, easily sitting next to GL by Johns and Morrison's Batman. But since those years I never really revisited it. And well, this year ...

Second of the new series to have Multiversity branding focused on Harley. Not the character that would come to mind when thinking about multiverse, but thinking outside of the box sometimes leads to interesting results. So, what about this one? The story goes that sometime during New 52 Dan DiDio looked at how well Deadpool was selling at Marvel and decided to replicate that success with Harley. The job was given to Conner/Palmiotti duo and they ran away with it. They revamped the character, made her a bit more similar to Deadpool than she was before and you could argue that they removed some complexity from her as well. Some fans have even argued that they destroyed the character, but since it was a massive sales hit... DC probably doesn't care about that at all. Once Conner/Palmiotti ended their run other writers tried to leave their own mark on the character and while the difference is not obvious I'd say that she is not the same as she was during Conner/Palmiotti run. Anywa...