Cry for Justice #7: When Comics Are God-Fucking-Awful
March 4th, 2010 by Esther Inglis-ArkellOh goddamnit. God. Damn. It. Really? THAT was how you resolved this story about how this time a hero might be right to kill someone? That plotline has happened in every third Batman arc and every fifth Green Arrow arc for the last fifteen years. It’s been in at least a few Wonder Woman arcs and even a Superman arc. And Nightwing. Also Robin. The Birds of Prey. It’s hard to get away from that idea in comics these days. And to top it off you did it with a hero who has already killed someone, and already dealt with that fact. What was the point of any of that?
You know, I was going to write a post about how all these dead teens were coming back. I remembered a couple of years when a guy got up at Wonder-Con and asked Dan Didio if he could stop killing off teenagers because it was ‘creepy’. And how Didio actually paused, and looked around uncomfortably. I thought that, what with comics taking a long time to come out and all the teenage heroes springing back to life a year-and-change later, maybe what the guy said was taken to heart. And how I liked how the new DC had more plotlines than just, “Somebody dies.”
Clearly, though, whoever was in charge decided to switch to even younger kids getting killed. I guess if Prometheus doesn’t stab a baby through the eye, we might not understand that he’s a bad guy who needs to be stopped.
Killing off a five-year-old that the readers have read about for over a decade so we can see her father’s agony as entertainment. That’s creepy. That’s disgusting. That’s depressing. That’s stupid. That’s unnecessary. That’s nothing like what I want to read.
Why the hell would you do that?
Okay, I haven’t been reading that series, but I can only think of one five-year-old who’s appeared in comics in any sort of prominent way and especially connected to one character from that series (You can tell I’m trying to avoid spoilers), but if it’s who I think it is… that’s just spectacularly fucking awful.
I’m really waiting for the day when some smart writer will just announce, at some point in a comic they’re writing, “You know all the incredibly stupid ‘Ooo, we’re hardcore’ murders of perfectly fine characters that hack writers at this company have been pulling off? Well, they never happened. They’re all alive and fine. Everything that guy wrote (other than ‘Starman’) is hereby rendered non-continuity, on the ball, no erase-um, no change-um, no nothing.”
@Scott: Yeah, I’m hoping they reverse this and fast. Lazarus Pit. Time punch. Fever dream. Imaginary tale. Clone death. Crisis. Whatever.
I read these characters because I like them. I’m so tired of seeing them get beaten down to the ground.
Without having followed the series (I flipped through the issue yesterday to see the last few pages), two possibilities came to mind, one serious and one not so much:
- Robinson had his fill of killing adults/senior citizens in Starman
- DC just wanted to get rid of Prometheus. It’s kind of a lame argument, given what even some of the weakest characters are capable of, but really, Morrison or no Morrison, a guy who’s debut scheme almost killed the whole JLA shouldn’t go through more than one or two more attempts before he finally succeeds against anybody you care to throw at him.
It does seem like a cheap way of addressing a redundant superhero question (wasn’t Identity Crisis and the dissolving of the JLA before Infinite Crisis all about the same thing?), and it’s disappointing, even as a casual DC fan, that they had to get rid of something that made Roy pretty unique to do so. And last I checked, around the end of the last Green Arrow series, Ollie would have probably been ok with telling the others he offed Prometheus. Same kind of practicality as Diana killing Max Lord, and he probably views it along the same lines. Of course, every situation GA finds himself in seems to be one that just happens to be extreme enough, in his opinion, to step outside his own ethics/politics, but that’s a whole other discussion.
And my bet is the next person who need something for Ollie or Roy to do pulls out the “Prometheus offed a clone, year-long hunt for the original” trick.
THE RETURN OF LIAN HARPER: TIME LOST ARCHER GIRL coming your way, fall 2010.
written by jt krul, drawn by tony daniel, sorry suckers!
I don’t mind the death in and of itself- a story about a kid dying can be as amazing as anything else, as long as it’s appropriate for the audience/story and done with some skill. One of my favorite comic stories is Stray Bullets six or seven, the last story in the first trade. It’s the story of a girl, and her family, and what they do when her father falls sick from cancer and eventually dies. And I mean, it doesn’t really pull punches– there’s a panel that sticks out in my mind of Ginny standing in a hallway watching while her father slowly decays. It ends with Ginny standing in the street as an ambulance takes her dad away, for Pete’s sake. It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever read in a book, and something I’ve read twice, and extraordinarily well done. I mean, I may never read it again because it’s so unbearably sad, but it’s sad in a very deft way. It’s not just “Bam! Dead body. Howsabout them apples, sucker?”
The thing about CfJ is that, to my understanding, it’s been done with typical modern-era DC approach to storytelling: several artists, a few of which are either blind or incompetent, and writing that prizes trauma and talking points (justice, heroes don’t kill, it’s a hard world and i’m a hard man, i’m a warrior, etc etc) over characterization. There’s nothing well done about it– it’d border on parody if it weren’t so obliviously un-self-conscious. Instead, it’s just so earnest and eager to show you how horrible everyone involved is, often at the expense of the characters, that you can’t help but look at it in disgust.
I don’t know if you’ve read Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, Esther, but something very similar happens. He comes home one day and finds his family dead in the kitchen, having been murdered by a villain. What follows is a story that showed how pointless revenge can be, and later, at the end of the series, this happens:
Basically, writers go for the cheap shock to keep things interesting and, unless done very, very well, it’s cruel and stupid and worthless. Morrison revisits this kind of storytelling in Flex Mentallo, when the villain of the book is revealed and in response someone else says, “Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism.”
CfJ, and all books like it, are adolescent. It’s crap.
(also the idea that Green Arrow could be Prometheus is offensive, in a “Who Would Win In A Fight?” dumb fanboy way.)
I recently wrote the following:
After Identity Crisis, we got more and more grim deaths. Blue Beetle, Elongated Man, Martian Manhunter and the list goes on and on. This is the risk of heroism, Didio claims. People need to understand that risk. And that sounds good on paper. Understanding the risks and sacrifices heroes make.
But then you look at their recent decisions. The return of Hal Jordan (Green Lantern). The return of Barry Allen (the Flash). The death and coming resurrection of Batman.
————-
It seems just as applicable even though Cry For Justice was not addressed in the video I am referring to.
I think Robinson wanted to push Ollie to the absolute breaking point. We’ve seen ‘make 9/11 a joke’ type villains, sidekick and children killers but not that often mixed together plus he walked and was unrepentant. By the end I only begin to fathom all the rage that went on
Not to say I condone it, fuck no
@david brothers: saw that as a rib/call-back/whatever to the awful Gotham Knights Hush story where the ‘now fake’ Prometheus was almost killed by Ollie
@david brothers: I like Daniel ;_;
Beyond how stupid and wrong killing Lian is, having Ollie get revenge when her mom is supposedly one of the deadliest fucking assassins in the world, is just the extra cheery of stupid to the whole shit pile…
I’m going to go reread my “Starman” omnibii and “Firearm” back issues and “Leave it to Chance” collections so I can remember Robinson writing stuff that wasn’t crap…
@Esther Inglis-Arkell:
Preferably a Chakan-esque raid on wherever Lian’s waiting for someone to take her home.
I was starting to move back to DC comics (Trinity, Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th grade, JSA on and off, a lot of the animated stuff, promising MMO screen shots)before I saw this. It’s sad that someone who seems to have had a lot of respect felt it necessary (or was forced by editorial mandate) to do something that, to me, is just soul-sickening.
I’ll be in the corner reading PS238.
Yeah.
Morrison got it right.
And we forgot. We let ourselves forget. Not for the first time, but still.
We let ourselves forget this lesson.
@lurkerwithout: Superman stuff is alright, a little dull, but not outright horrible
They killed … WHATTHEJESUSFUCK
I haven’t followed Ollie since he died in the Dixon days, but didn’t they retcon him to only killing one guy on accident during the Hard Traveled Heroes days? I remember Smith making it a point to say the Ollie that came back wasn’t the Ollie we saw during the last ten years.
[...] well, we now know how it ended. Spoiler warning? Nah, who cares, I’m saving you from having to read it for [...]
[...] the conclusion last week of Justice League: Cry for Justice, the widely panned miniseries by James Robinson, Mauro Cascioli and others, Corrina Lawson of GeekDad wonders [...]
@lurkerwithout
Cheshire replaced her kid, remember? During the first Secret Six series?
I think vigilante killings like this are fine in a universe where there appears to be no death penalty for anyone and not guilty for reason of insanity is a valid argument a majority of the times its used.
Of course, the fact they actually had a bunch of random super-villains destroy an entire city and kill a young girl for no discernible reason is somewhat troubling, and it just illustrates that because of the way the DC universe is structured, villains can get away with these atrocities. Did anything happen after they nuked Bludhaven?
I dunno, it seems that if they want to have a universe where the heroes don’t kill (and such actions are seen as abhorrent), and the death penalty doesn’t exist, they should stop having the villains murder thousands of people or invade the United States while decimating and killing most of the army.
[...] I Ever Tell You the One About the One Armed Superhero? Filed under: Comics — Tags: DC Comics, James Robinson, Red Arrow, Superheroes — Chris @ 10:53 pm So, as a man of radically maladjusted priorities considering my age and economic situation, I have recently found myself, as I oftentimes do, thinking about comic books. Most specifically, I’ve been thinking of a little ditty just recently released by DC Comics, and penned by former “Starman” scribe James Robinson, entitled Justice League: Cry for Justice. Now, I should probably point out that I haven’t actually read Cry for Justice. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, even if I were interested in it, I only read my comics in trade paperback, which for those who don’t know, is sort of like only seeing a movie when it comes out on DVD: while the last issue of the series was released earlier this month, the collected edition won’t be out until the beginning of June. Secondly, I haven’t read Cry for Justice simply because I have no interest in reading Cry for Justice, mostly owing to the fact that the comic has been met by those who have read it with all the enthusiasm usually reserved someone taking a dump on your lap, and then charging you $3.99 for the pleasure. [...]