All posts by Schroeswald

I am not even a little bit surprised. I have eyes and have read the released issues of Superman: Son of Kal-El, it was incredibly obvious that Jon and Jay liked each other, within literal pages I thought “oh. They gay.” (This is also completely realistic and how like, some relationships work, not everything is a big epic slow burn).

I would’ve liked more character development, Ralph was too goofy.

I think it’s perfectly valid to call a movie bad without having to constantly have to preface it with in my opinion. Statements of quality about a movie should be assumed to be statements of opinion, because it’s impossible for them not to be. Also what’s wrong with saying that you hate BvS and don’t want to watch the Ultimate edition? I have a bad time watching BvS, why would I want to watch it again but with more?

Especially for the dc universe trying to enforce a singular tone or vision is doomed to failure. Part of what makes the dc universe so special is that you can get vastly different types of stories under one umbrella, Batman’s and Superman coexist, and those stories shouldn’t feel all that similar. Yes I do have certain tastes that favor certain characters but I wouldn’t want a Renee Montoya story to feel anything like a Captain Marvel story, but the dc universe is cool because it’s so different. Batman and Superman can be friends and coexist, the internal logics of their stories balance each other out and compliment each other instead of clashing like by all logic they should, Snyder’s vision also doesn’t respect that, his Batman and Superman have the same tone and they are under the same vision.

I just think the movies are bad, they aren’t good and I don’t like watching them (yes the snyder cut too that movie was way too long for me to ever enjoy). I don’t necessarily think you can’t change massive parts of these iconic characters, I think those versions are less interesting but if you wanna make elseworlds murder Batman then fine I guess, I’m not gonna watch/read that because I think that’s a boring character but whatever, you do you. My biggest problem with Snyder’s DCEU is that it poisons the possibility of making other stuff that interests me. My favorite DC products are Nightwing, the Justice Society, Captain Marvel, the Justice League International and the Renee Montoya Question (the best things to be fans of if you want stuff from DC I know). Those things as I enjoy them don’t fit in Snyder’s DC, I don’t get to see a DC that’s at all similar to how I want DC to look if Snyder and works like Snyder is in charge of the company. I want to see more works that I’m going to like, so I don’t want Snyder to keep doing DC stuff cause that means I get less. Also, and this is pretty petty, when I say I prefer DC to Marvel people assume I mean very different things from what I do and a lot of that is the fault of Snyder’s DCEU.

Wally west listens to music from the 90s and is offended when the music is called old (see latest issue of the flash) so I’m assuming the original Titans are currently late 20s/early 30s.

@MoviesGames&OtherStuff they aren’t the same continuity though, they are separate universes, earth two and earth one were coexisting universes, new earth was formed by the birth of a new continuity, for most titles the new 52 caused a complete reboot, they aren’t the same universe, they are seperate universes with overlapping stories and characters.

@Thegreatness05 Earth 0 is another name for New and Prime Earth. Post Death Metal Prime Earth has been called Earth 0 exclusively because due to multiversal changes it is no longer the prime earth but currently it appears to be the same earth but with major continuity changes and a new name. To me this restructuring is in between stuff like Zero Hour/Infinite Crisis and CoIE/Flashpoint, it is not quite reboot level changes but it’s more than just a lot of retcons bundled together at once, time will tell whether this new Earth 0 ends up closer to Infinite Crisis or Flashpoint, from where I stand it looks closer to the former but we have a big event storyline upcoming and we just have to spend more time in this universe before we can judge (and we don’t know current continuity well enough to have any concrete opinions on whether it’s the best anyways).

There isn't even an agreed upon divide between the ages, just like, around 1970, and every single dividing line is a change to a darker tone, nothing that effects DC comics continuity.

DC has four main continuities tho, Earth Two, Earth One, New Earth and Prime Earth.

My favorite comics continuity is probably somewhere in the time period from 1986-2011 but a lot more changed in New Earth's 25 year history than in Earth One's 29 years, the difference between Silver and Bronze Age is a tonal change not a continuity one. Meanwhile grouping the modern age together doesn't really make sense, New Earth and Prime Earth are two completely different continuities, my favorite continuity is New Earth but my least favorite is probably Prime Earth (or, at least pre Infinite Frontier, almost certainly pre Rebirth)

I think Harley Quinn does make sense on the squad… for a couple missions, at the start of the new 52 before she solidified as an a list character. The Squad should be a group of screwed up people who aren’t important to the dc universe. Harley was way too big of a character to be on the squad when she was finally released and her having a solo series while being on the squad never made sense. Harleys a great character but she matters too much to be on the team.

Now after recently reading the original Suicide Squad series I do have my own problems with the current squad (namely the characterization changes that Waller and Flag have gone through since that series ended and just how badly it misunderstood what they were like during the series in the annual) but one thing that they are doing right is that no one on the team is too big to die, and with the exception of Waller, Flag and Peacemaker all the main characters belong to the writer, they have personalities that the current writer is allowed to define without contradicting anything or making fans mad.

I liked the series overall, I liked that they didn’t make the focus characters just the Trinity or the seven or a listers or whatever, Calvin Ellis, Alan Scott, Jade, Obsidian, Thomas Wayne, Barry Allen, Cameron Chase and Roy Harper is a weird group of protagonists for sure but it mostly works. I’m very excited for Roy’s return to the Titans, I wanna see whats going on with Pariah and Darkseid and the Psycho Pirate, I’ve been excited for the Justice Society series for forever so maybe they’ll finally launch that, and it kinda looks like Chase has an important future in the dc universe so that’s cool. Thomas Wayne Batman is still an overused character and I really hope they get rid of him eventually but he isn’t terrible here and he has at least one nice moment. Outside of the protagonists I think that the other heroic characters actually in the book were underused, Mary Marvel, Aquawoman and Captain Carrot were in every issue and I’m not sure they had five lines between them, I’m not certain Mary and Aquawoman actually spoke in fact. Overall it’s an interesting and fun read that I hope guides the dc universe through its new direction (and then eventually this storyline ends to give people room to breathe).

The thing about Superboy Prime is that he thematically represents a mindset that is criticized in him and was reinforced by DC for the next decade. He wants the world to be as it was pre crisis (or how he remembers pre crisis), these big heroic heroes being heroic and not dealing with having to be wrong, they need to just be heroes goddamnit stop moping around. And to an extent, he’s right. Identity Crisis included Sue Dibny’s rape and death. Zatanna, Ollie, Dinah, Barry, Ralph, Hal, J’onn and Hawkman allowed for the lobotomy of Dr Light and mindwipe of Batman. Countdown to Infinite Crisis included the murder of one member of the comedic JLI and the transformation of another into a psychopathic mass murderer. Wonder Woman has killed a man on live television. Batman created a super spy satellite trying to take over the earth. There’s a lot of bad storytelling here, needless violence and character assassination. Infinite Crisis recognizes how far at least the Trinity have strayed and puts them back on a better more moral path. On the other hand, he’s wrong in a lot of ways, he can’t understand the narrative complexity of Kon-El’s retirement, he can’t see the grey morality that does really exist and can be explored in heroes. That’s what makes him wrong. But the other thing that makes him wrong is the murder of a bunch of Titans, attempted murder of the Flash’s and more. While critiquing the changes post crisis he revels in the darkness and the gore. This is all very similar to Geoff Johns (and the other driver of the event, Dan DiDio). Geoff made his career by revitalizing classic golden and silver age franchises, returning them to popularity, and returning the old characters to popularity, often in the process pushing the new characters to the side, something that gets worse as time goes on and DiDio gets to undo the legacy characters he despises. Geoff Johns gives critiques of the darkening of DC Comics, but he wrote Infinite Crisis. Most of those events I just listed were things he was heavily involved in the planning and execution of, he decided to throw Titans upon Titans onto the funeral pire, he wrote Maxwell Lord is evil now and he murdered Ted Kord. His work is infamously bloody and violent, a trend that continues on post infinite crisis. He then wrote some of the biggest titles of the new 52, which removed that legacy and hope in favor of angst (and Dan DiDio of course approved and came up with so much of this). Then Geoff Johns comes along in Rebirth and says that all of this is the fault of Dr. Manhattan, he screwed with the universe to create this. Dr. Manhattan here represents Watchmen, commonly considered the start of the Dark Age of Comics. Whether you really can blame Watchmen for that is another rant entirely, but the dark age of comics had been over for years by Infinite Crisis. Kingdom Come, the Death of Superman, Knightfall, Emerald Twilight, JLA and more all were critiques of that era and a moving forward to less grittiness than before. By the time of DC Rebirth the dark age was two decades in the past, the rejection of Legacy and restoration of Silver Age identities began in Green Lantern: Rebirth (which yes, worked hard to keep the other lanterns around and is well received, but it was the blueprint for the complete removal of the Flash family and other legacy figures) and excessive modern grittiness started with Identity Crisis and became reinforced with Infinite Crisis and the New 52. Superboy Prime was a victim of this grittiness and at the same time represents the mindset of the flaws Rebirth attempted to fix, Dr. Manhattan is just a character from a great dark deconstruction of comics that DC wanted to integrate into the main line logic be damned.

I think it’s just in the way like Tim would be his son, not biologically or legally (or maybe legally? Did that happen after Jack Drake died I kinda remembering hearing about that but idk, let’s say Jason if he did actually adopt) but emotionally they would think of each other as parent and child, which I doubt they would do because as far as I know they’ve never lived together and haven’t had the emotional bonding that Dick, Jason and Tim had with him that made the relationship that of a father of son, but maybe some section of Duke Thomas fans think that they do? I don’t really know I haven’t spent enough time with him.

I should note that Grant Morrison is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns because multiple people have misgendered them.

Now unpopular opinion (I think, honestly maybe this is popular I can’t tell):

DC Rebirth rings incredibly hollow because it was spearheaded by the guy who wrote almost all of the most significant stories that got the DC universe to the point where it was necessary, especially since he then proceeded to blame it on watchmen as opposed to the main universe dc stories that actually were the blueprints for (most of) the problems to come, Identity and Infinite Crisis (also Superboy Prime perfectly works as a representation for almost every one of DC’s problems pre Rebirth, which is hilarious because he was mostly used by Geoff Johns to make fun of fans who aren’t him).

That’s absolutely not the thing you should learn from Roy Thomas. Roy Thomas was dealing with one continuity with contradictory details and a somewhat confusing timeline, he managed to fit (almost) everything together but there were holes. The transition to Earth-One never was completely defined for example. But since then in varying attempts to improve continuity and characters fitting everything in becomes more and more complex. Wonder Woman is a good example, at first the question of when Diana showed up was World War 2, then that was Earth-Two and it was just several years ago. Then neither were true and she just showed up right after the Crisis that featured the death of Barry Allen. That led to a billion problems eventually solved by shoving Hippolyta in her spot during World War 2 and pushing her post crisis origin to before the formation of the Justice League. That was a good fix, but then the new 52 came. It had a whole new backstory unrelated to World War Two that removed several major characters and events from the modern day stories. This was not popular for Wonder Woman fans so in Rebirth all of this was revealed as a lie. This lie reveal however didn’t restore her old backstory but created a new one, a popular one, but a new one, which makes the Hippolyta fix impossible and contradicts countless stories that featured the Amazons from every single former continuity. And now Diana herself was active during World War Two again, what this means continuity wise is unclear. Perhaps you can stitch it all together, I’m not gonna try but maybe you can. However I’m not convinced you can do that while staring the adjacent continuity snarl of Donna Troy in the face. I’m sure you can’t stitch it together while you deal with her teammate Hawkman’s even bigger continuity snarl. I’m even more sure you can’t deal with while also making Superman’s early years fit together.

@FraBig It’s not that simple to just institute a sliding timescale, because dc already has that. The problem is that they’ve gone through enough retcons that it’s impossible to just declare that the entire history’s happened in about 15 years and call it a day. The question is which histories, which backstories are canon, can’t be the most recent ones, people hate those, they don’t fit with decades of history. How do you deal with the golden age heroes still set in world war 2 aging into oblivion as time moves on? How do you deal with the Earth-S, 4, Wildstorm, Vertigo and Milestone stories that existed before, during and after being merged into the main continuity? How old are the characters right now? Are they the age Dan Didio put them as? Are they nice and young because we like young heroes? How the hell did Jon get to age ten? Not everything can be canon, fundamentally there are contradictions, here’s one fun one:

Ma and Pa Kent, what they doing?

On earth two they are dead presumably, died before Clark became Superman.

On Earth one they died during Clark’s adolescence, during his career as Superboy.

On New Earth they lived a very long time until Pa Kent died during an adventure post final crisis.

In Prime Earth they died right before Clark left for Metropolis.

Post rebirth I’m pretty sure they are both alive but honestly idk.

No matter the age and timescale of Superman this is a continuity problem, which of these happened, and what does that mean for every Superman story that contradicts it? There is no right answer here, no matter what’s canon someone will be mad, I have a preferred way for it to work (they’re alive) but I’m not going to claim that’s the one true way for it to be. A canon will need to incorporate aspects of like ten different continuities and smoosh them together, that leaves holes, big ones, ones that you cannot fix with a sliding timescale, because they don’t come from character aging. I personally think what they’re trying to do is for the best, bits and pieces of various backstories revealed as writers need them but with a general idea that Superman has experienced most of the events that happened from action comics 1 until today, over the course of like, 15+ years (but y’know, eventually they do need to tell us if his parents are alive and if he was Superboy).

I think it’s probably better to just stick with Prime Earth because it’s simpler to follow than moving back to new earth or making a bunch of brand new pages on “earth 0” or whatever they’re calling it, but really this is merging different aspects of the like ten previous earths that have all blended together over dc’s 80+ year history in addition to all that bleed over from adaptations.

1. Kick Geoff Johns until he actually makes those Stargirl and JSA series he promised in May or agrees to let someone else write the JSA.

2. Get that Batgirls series that they’ve been teasing since April.

3. Revive the Legion of Super-Heroes under literally any continuity, Pre-Crisis, Pre-5YL, Pre-Zero-Hour, Reboot, Threeboot, Retroboot, Bendisboot or even another one just for extra confusion.

4. Shazam! Ongoing series with Billy, Freddy and Mary as the main characters.

5. JLI revival, preferably with a redemption of classic Maxwell Lord.

6. Sensation Comics revival as a second Wonder Woman series

7. Revive Adventure (or More Fun, maybe both!) Comics as an anthology book with a few rotating features to introduce new characters, give writers the ability to test out and refine old b and c list ones and maybe serve as a launchpad for future books.

Marvel is currently way more popular than DC, like always, and DC has always replaced its older characters with new versions, the core of DC comics is built upon new characters taking the titles of old ones. Future State is more extreme than others, but it’s a testing ground, it shows possible new iterations to see how they work as characters. Not all of them will succeed, but I really like Superman: Son of Kal-El and I love Yara, I’m not a big fan of Jace’s series but he’s fine as a character. No they won’t replace the Trinity permanently, but they can be used to explore new angles. DC has been rolling back it’s evolution and growth for years, it’s time to push forward and change, because that change is what makes DC’s best characters great.