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A review by thecommonswings
DC Universe: Legacies by Len Wein
3.0
Huh
Well it’s an admirable attempt to make the DC Universe a sort of coherent historical world, but there’s an inherent problem when Wein has his hero ageing as he goes along but loads of the superheroes and villains just stay resolutely at one age. The effect gets ever weirder once Wein starts understandably editorialising: as things get more absurd and miserable and “edgy”, his policeman everyman hero starts wanging on about how the universe was getting darker on almost every fifth page. And yeah, it really did and horribly so, but Wein can’t quite find a way to synthesise that with the whimsical stuff so when, for no apparent reason, his detectives start prefacing their every utterance with “Jesus” it really jars with his attempt to keep things light and instead just sounds like a way to articulate how Wein must have felt as he wrote passages of this: “Jesus Christ so Superman dies after being punched to death by a big monster man and then a cyborg, a kid, a robot and a weird bloke in some weird fucking costume all turn up and fight until the real one comes back all in black, with no cape and a stupid haircut. Jesus. Why did I take on this thankless task?”
I mean I kind of admire Wein for trying but the ludicrousness of nineties DC just ends up overwhelming the attempt. A nice effort but a somewhat ridiculous one
Well it’s an admirable attempt to make the DC Universe a sort of coherent historical world, but there’s an inherent problem when Wein has his hero ageing as he goes along but loads of the superheroes and villains just stay resolutely at one age. The effect gets ever weirder once Wein starts understandably editorialising: as things get more absurd and miserable and “edgy”, his policeman everyman hero starts wanging on about how the universe was getting darker on almost every fifth page. And yeah, it really did and horribly so, but Wein can’t quite find a way to synthesise that with the whimsical stuff so when, for no apparent reason, his detectives start prefacing their every utterance with “Jesus” it really jars with his attempt to keep things light and instead just sounds like a way to articulate how Wein must have felt as he wrote passages of this: “Jesus Christ so Superman dies after being punched to death by a big monster man and then a cyborg, a kid, a robot and a weird bloke in some weird fucking costume all turn up and fight until the real one comes back all in black, with no cape and a stupid haircut. Jesus. Why did I take on this thankless task?”
I mean I kind of admire Wein for trying but the ludicrousness of nineties DC just ends up overwhelming the attempt. A nice effort but a somewhat ridiculous one