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A review by trike
Earth 2, Vol. 1: The Gathering by James Robinson
2.0
I don't know what to make of this.
This is about an alternate Earth, where Apokolips has gone and done an old fashioned Apocalypse and killed all the "wonders".
In the beginning of the story, all of the characters speak with the same odd cadence, so it's impossible to differentiate one from the other. There are odd skips in the dialogue for some reason. If it were an affection of one character, that would be fine, but they all do it. Which makes it a failure on the part of the author. By the end it's a bit better, but while the stylized weirdness goes away, all the characters still sound the same.
Wonder Woman in this instance is nearly monosyllabic. Thankfully she dies within a couple pages. (That's not a spoiler, it's on the cover.)
The art is good. A bit confusing in a couple places, but no big deal.
For some reason Mister Terrific shows up for two pages then gets killed by the Smartest Man in the World. It's the same problem I had with the Batman New 52 story -- although this is a reboot of the DC universe, there are holdovers from earlier stories for some reason, and I have no idea why they're used, because without context they make no sense. So Mister Terrific shows up from somewhere else, and the Smartest Man in the World knows this somehow (reason not given except that he's smart) and then kills him. I guess to establish the SMinW as a bad guy or something, I don't know, because I have no idea if rebooted Mister Terrific is supposed to be good on Earth 2 or not.
This is a different Earth 2 from the superb Grant Morrison invention from a decade ago, by the way. There are the heroes Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman instead of the villains Ultraman, Superwoman and Owlman. Not sure what's going on here.
...okay, looked up the Wikipedia article on this. Apparently the multi-comic epic saga from the 1980s called "Crisis on Infinite Earths", which wiped out the DC multiverse, no longer happened or was otherwise retconned, because alternate Earth stories are fun.
So apparently this Earth 2 is the original Earth 2 from back in the day, before the Morrison post-Crisis mirror-universe version. I think that should have been made more clear in the intro or something, because I was floundering about, not having followed DC comics continuity in decades.
This is down to bad writing, because there are a lot of assumptions being carried into this book that I couldn't follow. Why did Mister Terrific show up just to get killed? Is he a rebooted one or an original one? No idea. Seems like a cheap way just to intro your bad guy.
Eh, whatever. This "New 52" is just as lame as the old DC comics. No wonder Marvel is eating DC's lunch and asking for seconds.
This is about an alternate Earth, where Apokolips has gone and done an old fashioned Apocalypse and killed all the "wonders".
In the beginning of the story, all of the characters speak with the same odd cadence, so it's impossible to differentiate one from the other. There are odd skips in the dialogue for some reason. If it were an affection of one character, that would be fine, but they all do it. Which makes it a failure on the part of the author. By the end it's a bit better, but while the stylized weirdness goes away, all the characters still sound the same.
Wonder Woman in this instance is nearly monosyllabic. Thankfully she dies within a couple pages. (That's not a spoiler, it's on the cover.)
The art is good. A bit confusing in a couple places, but no big deal.
For some reason Mister Terrific shows up for two pages then gets killed by the Smartest Man in the World. It's the same problem I had with the Batman New 52 story -- although this is a reboot of the DC universe, there are holdovers from earlier stories for some reason, and I have no idea why they're used, because without context they make no sense. So Mister Terrific shows up from somewhere else, and the Smartest Man in the World knows this somehow (reason not given except that he's smart) and then kills him. I guess to establish the SMinW as a bad guy or something, I don't know, because I have no idea if rebooted Mister Terrific is supposed to be good on Earth 2 or not.
This is a different Earth 2 from the superb Grant Morrison invention from a decade ago, by the way. There are the heroes Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman instead of the villains Ultraman, Superwoman and Owlman. Not sure what's going on here.
...okay, looked up the Wikipedia article on this. Apparently the multi-comic epic saga from the 1980s called "Crisis on Infinite Earths", which wiped out the DC multiverse, no longer happened or was otherwise retconned, because alternate Earth stories are fun.
So apparently this Earth 2 is the original Earth 2 from back in the day, before the Morrison post-Crisis mirror-universe version. I think that should have been made more clear in the intro or something, because I was floundering about, not having followed DC comics continuity in decades.
This is down to bad writing, because there are a lot of assumptions being carried into this book that I couldn't follow. Why did Mister Terrific show up just to get killed? Is he a rebooted one or an original one? No idea. Seems like a cheap way just to intro your bad guy.
Eh, whatever. This "New 52" is just as lame as the old DC comics. No wonder Marvel is eating DC's lunch and asking for seconds.