Saturday, February 10, 2007

Don't Look Now, Brad Meltzer!








From Batman: Gotham County Line by Steve Niles, Scott Hampton and Jose Villarrubia (DC Comics; 2005)
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Caleb,

I know you don't like Brad Meltzer.
And I will admit that I do like him.

He's a hip guy if you ever meet him, and I think his stories are very entertaining.

I'm familiar with all of your IC criticisms and I see your point on them, but i don't feel as if they make the story any less intresting.

However,
My largets problem with IC was the total and complete lack of respect for secret identies.
I admit that Supes and maybe some of the other leaguers know that Batman is Bruce.
I could accept that maybe the Atom knows that Batman is Bruce. But there is no freakign way that the league would so stupid and unprotective of identities that The freaking Atom's wife would also konw that Batman is Bruce.
That was freaking silly.

I don't like it when Lois Lane knows either.

The DC editorial staff does need to clarify who konws and who doesn't.

Sometimes Lois knows about Bruce, sometimes she doesn't.

I like Batman better when the league isn't on a personal basis with him.

8:25 AM
Caleb said...

Hey Michael, have I been bitching aobut Brad Meltzer too much again, lately? (I was actually going to post the scene from this same comic with a zombified Jason Todd coming back from the dead too, but I thought I'd been picking on Winick too much lately).

To be fair to IC, it has gotten a lot more attention than most similar comics, and the longer you look at it the more you see flaws in it. I find more wrong with it, but that might be because I've spent so much time reading about it online, you know?

(And I think Meltzer is a pretty decent writer--I really loved "Archer's Quest"--but he really needs more forceful editing; I think his celebrity makes it so editors don't step in and say, "Actually Mr. Meltzer, sir, Jean Loring has no idea who Robin is, sir" or whatever. And I find his JLoA too slowly paced for a title like that...I think that story would have been a fine original graphic novel, but it's kind of a lousy monthly, given how often the JLA is needed to appear all over the DCU)

You're right though, my initial biggest problem with it was that it seemed like a big cheat at the end. Of course no one thought it would be Jean Loring, because everybody knew she couldn't possibly know who Superman and Batman really were.

I know pre-Crisis all the Leaguers knew each other's identities, but just about every JLA story since Crisis made it very clear that was no longer the case. So even if The Atom somehow knew, certainly he wouldn't tell his estranged ex-wife.

And also to be fair to Brad Meltzer, this Batman story above is just as inaccurate as Meltzer having everyone who's ever been a Leaguer, Outsider or Titan being on a firstname basis with Batman and Superman.

I mean, even if Deadman didn't mention the Bat villains, sidekicks and supporting characters who know he's really Bruce, the whole "Big Eight" line-up of Leaguers exchanged identites during Mark Waid's run (the arc with the Sixth-Dimensional guys).

10:50 AM

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