This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk, Graeme McMillan and Evan Narcisse talk about Brightest Day Vol. 1 and Bring the Thunder #1.
DOUGLAS: I really wish Brightest Day were better, in much the same way that I wished Blackest Night had been more carefully structured. I love the idea of a fast-paced, multi-threaded, frequently-published serial in practice–obviously I was a big fan of 52. The stumbling block Brightest Day keeps running into is that it’s got too many threads; this is a series with a ton of major characters, only a few of whom interact with each other to any appreciable extent. (There’s the Deadman thread, the Hawkman/Hawkgirl thread, the Firestorm thread, the Aquaman thread, the Martian Manhunter thread…) And even though a lot of the other resurrected characters among the 14 (!) on the front cover of the first collected volume have been offloaded onto other series, they still have to check in with the parent title. Which means that we don’t get much of a sense of what this series is even about–the idea that the “white light” is giving them all missions (from the abstract, “balance the darkness,” to the ridiculously concrete, “eat a cheeseburger”)–until this volume’s almost over.
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GRAEME: This is, I think, a place where the original, serialized run of Brightest Day wins out over the collected edition. The next issue after the last one contained here–for which there was only a two-week gap in original release, not the probably six-month one we’ll have between collections – felt like, if it didn’t explain the missions, then at least let the characters share in the readers’ “What the what?” reactions. I can see the reasoning for ending the collection where it ends – it’s the best cliffhanger in the series to that point, and also a sense that there is SOME point to all the stories that’re unraveling – but I kind of wish they’d included something more from what was to come.
That said, am I the only person who thinks that the scene where the White Lantern Power tells the Reverse Flash “Mission Completed. Life Returned” feels very videogame-ish? It’s as if Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi are already thinking in terms of either ripping off Scott Pilgrim or making multimedia tie-ins already.
DOUGLAS: The whole thing’s videogame-ish. The violence is videogame violence; half the plot-advancing scenes here feel like cut scenes.
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EVAN: I resemble that remark, Douglas! And you, too, Graeme. But I do agree with what you’re getting at. The plot feels objective-driven and not character-driven, and any dialogue just kills time between the set pieces.
What I was hoping for was a fusion of Tomasi’s strong skill with modulating tone to complement Johns’ penchant for finding good angles with DCU characters. Instead, everything feels like it’s being pushed along a roadmap. Of the various character threads, I was really looking forward to the Firestorm one and the Aquaman one, but I feel like they both take such hackneyed turns. Well, of course, Ronnie and Jason don’t get along. And Mera’s an assassin who fell in love with her prey? You don’t say! The characters don’t actually feel like they’re moving forward.
The bigger problem with such plot turns is that it perpetuates this continuity re-invention that’ become such a fetish lately. And when the characters graduate to their next stages–be it in solo books or as part of a cast–the stuff from Brightest Day will just be more baggage for them and other writers to deal with.
DOUGLAS: No getting around that. There are also a lot of cooks in this kitchen: the collection’s credits list 27 artists. That might be okay if Johns and Tomasi gave this series a voice of its own (or let their voices compete, the way it worked in 52), but instead they’re both writing more cautiously and blandly than either one of them has before–it’s like watching two people play the mirror game, trying not to make any sudden motions that will throw the other one off. There’s no depth to Brightest Day, no feeling of play or exploration, no sense that it’s about anything other than its specific story beats–if the pitch was “what would you do if you got a second chance?,” answering that question with “fight flying humanoid tigers” is unsatisfactory.
GRAEME: Spoken like a man who’s never fought a flying tiger in his life. It’s VERY invigorating, don’t you know.
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The problem I had (and, interestingly enough, don’t really have with what follows the issues in here) is that this series isn’t really asking “What would you do if you got a second chance?” but, worryingly transparently, “How do we keep the buzz from Blackest Night going?” I find the callbacks to that series the dullest points of the story here: Aquaman can only mentally control ZOMBIE sealife! Firestorm keeps thinking of his Black Lantern version! Uh… okay? I don’t really care; that series is over, and I find myself wishing that the characters contained in Brightest Day were actually ALLOWED a second chance, without finding themselves forced into this extension of a story that doesn’t need one, if that makes sense?
DOUGLAS: On the other hand: zombie giant squid. I’m fine with that.
GRAEME: As to there being less of a voice to this series than 52 – You’re right, I think, and the problem may be that the core characters here are Big Guns in the DCU; this is pretty much a Justice League of the 1970s book, and it’s possible that that makes Johns and Tomasi feel more respectful and less able to play with the characters than Johns, Rucka, Waid and Morrison did in the earlier series.
DOUGLAS: Also, the cliffhangers are really poorly done. Given that the cliffhanger at the end of #1 was that Black Manta was back, for instance, maybe he could have turned up again sometime before a flashback in the middle of #6. Likewise, at the end of #6, J’onn discovers Miss Martian, apparently brutally murdered. When we see them next, J’onn gets two pages of a white-ring-induced vision, at the end of which Miss Martian is just fine. What?
GRAEME: Well, that last one does get explained later, kind of (You can also pretty much draw the answer out of what you’ve already seen in the book itself – the White Light healed her, as it did with the bird Deadman found in the first chapter). The pacing only gets weirder as the series goes forwards, however. Be warned.
Despite all this griping, I should say: I like Brightest Day. Admittedly, I like it much better in single issues, as a serial where the regular momentum fits the cliffhangers better, but even in this book, I think it’s fine enough, fun if you don’t think too hard about it, even if it’s clearly less of a series and story in its own right than 27 issues of the readers watching a very slow reboot of all of the characters involved so that they can get their own series afterwards. But I have a fondness for the characters involved, so I may be biased.
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DOUGLAS: See, that’s exactly what bugs me about it. There’s going to be a new Aquaman series and it’ll be dead in a year. Ditto the Hawks. We see this over and over: character gets given a prominent supporting role in something as setup for a “Because You Demanded It!” series of his/her own–but there wasn’t actually demand, and nobody ends up caring. (See also: Azrael, the Red Circle titles, Hawkeye and Mockingbird…)
EVAN: Yeah, my biggest gripe with Brightest Day is structure. DC editorial’s trying to meld its crossover strategies into one beast here. Either they have a big event that spins out into a miniseries or they have a miniseries leading into it. Here, the miniseries itself is supposed to be the event, but everything feels so cramped. It leaves me wondering if I’m not liking it because of the plot ideas themeslves or because they don’t have room to breathe.
And I really wanted to like Brightest Day. The promise of more well-adjusted, less grim DCU was appealing but all the plot beats in the various storylines are so grim. For a bunch of resurrected characters, nobody seems happy to be alive.
DOUGLAS: Moving on to Bring the Thunder #1–Can this really be the second-lowest-selling Dynamite book ever, as Bleeding Cool claimed, or is it just the second-lowest-selling Dynamite first issue? In any case, that Alex Ross cover gives the game away: this is yet another movie pitch dressed up as a comic book, and the indicia confirms it (the trademark and copyright are co-owned by something called State Street Films).
You can see Jai Nitz trying to pull out something interesting here–I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a standard-order punch-em-up gussied up with captions about listening to David Bowie and Mothership Connection before–but there’s just no room to do much with this airless, cliché-ridden one-character plot (in some ways, I feel like I read this in significantly better form a few weeks ago as the first issue of Soldier Zero, except for the climactic scene here, which might have been lifted from Watchmen instead). Wilson Tortosa’s artwork is hard for me to swallow, too: it’s very solid storytelling, for what little story there is (lots of big three-and four-panel pages devoted to sequences that don’t need anywhere that much room), but every time we see somebody’s face it looks like the work of a promising high-schooler.
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GRAEME: Yes! Thank you for putting whatever my problem was with the art into words. There’s nothing wrong with Tortosa’s art, per se, but it doesn’t really look… finished, I guess? Or ready for this type of book, perhaps. It’s odd. I like that he’s not an artist who’s trying to follow Alex Ross’s style or whatever the superhero flavor of the month may be, but there are parts in this issue where his pages just don’t really work, and it’s nearly always based around figure work and especially faces.
DOUGLAS: Mostly, though, what I object to about this comic is that it’s being sold on the strength of Alex Ross’s name, and he doesn’t seem to have had much to do with its contents. Character creation is not what’s interesting about Ross’s work, and this seems like it’s one step away from a James Frey/Full Fathom Five situation.
GRAEME: This isn’t necessarily something new for Dynamite. Ross is also the selling point for the Project Superpowers books, and while I believe that he’s very involved with the core series, I don’t really know how much he’s actually providing to the spin-offs, even though he’s listed as co-plotter for all of them.
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DOUGLAS: Speaking of Shakespeare quotes: writers who are sensitive to quotations’ original context might want to avoid having the very first page of their comic book include a caption that reads “Neither one of us is flesh and blood anymore. We’re just sound and fury now.”
EVAN: Douglas, I thought the same thing about the Macbeth reference, and sadly, Bring the Thunder doesn’t wind up signifying very much. I was intrigued to see what Dynamite–that bunch of IP acquisition fetishists–would do with an original idea. This first issue has one of the most off-putting openings I’ve read in ages. The tortured music metaphor did aim at something interesting, but felt really dissonant from the action happening in the scene. It sure wasn’t the tired ol’ typical punch-exposition-punch superhero structure, but the difference didn’t make it appreciably better. And the bridge talk tied in with impenetrable military jargon didn’t help. I appreciate that Nitz did the research, but it’s supposed to disappear into the writing, not hit you over the head.
GRAEME: I agree that the bridge sequence just didn’t work, but I’m clearly the optimist of the group on this one: I liked the fight scene much more than I expected to, and it’s pretty much because of the dissonance between the visuals and the music-based monologue. It was as if someone had given Jonathan Lethem the pages and told him to just come up with whatever he wanted as some captions. Maybe I’m just filled with the holiday spirit, but if you’d removed the flashback sequence/forced military jargon, I’d happily say that I really enjoyed the first issue. I’ll definitely check out the second to see where it’s going, anyway.
EVAN: The one-character thing is a big problem here, because, again, you can tell that Nitz has thought a lot about Wayne Russell and how to give the reader a sense of his facets. But he’s got no one to bounce off of. Russell narrates the whole issue and pretty much dominates all the spoken dialogue, too. The singular focus winds up feeling boring. As I read Bring the Thunder, I (unironically, mind you) was comparing it to DC’s THUNDER Agents reboot. That wasn’t perfect, but Nick Spencer did a great job of establishing tone, juggling multiple characters and pushing along a fast-moving plot. I kept waiting for the twist in this book, but even the surprise ending of BTT just felt like a bad cover version of better stuff done elsewhere.