Review: DC Universe: Rebirth – The Deluxe Edition

Writer: Geoff Johns
Artists: Gary Frank, Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, and Phil Jimenez
Collects: DC Universe: Rebirth Special #1 (2016)
Published: DC, 2016; $17.99

The recent publication of DC Universe: Rebirth – The Deluxe Edition, an eighteen-dollar hardcover version of the three-dollar softcover special issue released in summer 2016 to spearhead the latest relaunch of DC’s superhero line, makes now seem as good a time as any for me to resume posting on this blog. And while I only wish that I could in good conscience make some ham-fisted analogy between the “rebirth” of DC’s publishing line and that of With Great Power, the fact is that I find the Rebirth special off-putting in quite a few respects.

I probably haven’t read as many DC comics as the average DC fan, but I’ve certainly read a lot more than the average person in general. I only mention that because this book left me scratching my head at least once every few pages, and I can’t see it faring much better with the average non-comics reader or even with more seasoned comics readers who may lack an intimate knowledge of DC history. Of course, it would seem that the book was never meant for those audiences. DC president Diane Nelson suggests as much in her introduction to the hardcover edition: “I find it hard to believe that anyone reading this deluxe edition of DC Universe: Rebirth has not yet read it in another form, be it print or digital,” she writes. And while it’s a little sobering to see a major publisher of corporate comics openly admit to repackaging the same material for the same small group of fans over and over again (be it conceptually, as in the intensely nostalgic bent of the entire Rebirth line, or literally, in terms of trade paperback and hardcover collections of single issues), it’s also a little surreal to see that fact so baldly acknowledged by the company’s president in the opening pages of the Rebirth initiative’s flagship book.

The main story of the Rebirth special, which concerns itself primarily with the characters, histories, and interpersonal relationships that were erased from DC continuity as a result of the publisher’s “New 52” relaunch in 2011, is easy enough to follow; it’s the interstitial scenes and cutaways that make the overall book something of a muddle. In between scenes depicting the pre-New 52 character Wally West as he encourages the major characters of the post-New 52 DC Universe to remember his existence, writer Geoff Johns and his team of artists (Gary Frank, Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, and Phil Jimenez) jump around in time and space to tell brief vignettes about various other characters. The trouble is that many of these vignettes come and go without contributing anything to the book’s main story, instead leaving the reader with a handful of apparent revelations that make little sense if you’re not familiar with what, say, Blue Beetle or the Atom have been up to since 2011 (and how that differs from what they were up to before that).

Even a lot of the reveals concerning DC’s more popular characters fall somewhat flat. Among them is Batman’s discovery that there have been three Jokers (rather than just one) running around Gotham City since 2011. This idea might have been interesting as the payoff to some larger ongoing mystery in Batman’s corner of the DC Universe, but instead it just sort of drops into the story with a dull, embarrassing thud: it feels less like a deliberate plot development than it does an officially-sanctioned No-Prize designed to make sense of five years’ worth of conflicting editorial decisions regarding Batman’s nemesis.

The reveal that the pre-New 52 version of Superman has been living in hiding for the last five years is a little more interesting, but like many other sequences in this book it’s undermined by the book’s poor page layout. Superman’s vignette is similar to most of the other vignettes in the Rebirth special in that it runs for two pages; rather than being organized as two-page spreads, though, many of these sequences are instead split in half by a page turn. Not only does this make for some really choppy reading at times, but it robs several of the more potentially impactful moments of their significance. Take the page on which Aquaman proposes to Mera, for example, which arguably would have resonated more strongly had it not been paired with a page depicting the mournful, cordoned-off scene of the New 52 Superman’s death. The page break in the middle of the pre-New 52 Superman’s story fosters something more than just thematic incongruity, though, and I had to flip back and forth between the story’s two pages just to figure out how a particular character could have suddenly appeared in the scene without Superman’s noticing.

In general, these short sequences inflict a sense of bewilderment similar to what one might experience in the final pages of a Marvel crossover event. But whereas a book like Marvel’s Civil War, which bombards the reader with a flurry of short sequences that essentially preview the series and story arcs that follow that series, arguably earns the right to show us where characters like Spider-Man, Luke Cage, and the Punisher stand at the end of the story – that is, by virtue of having just portrayed these characters over the course of its seven issues – the Rebirth special offers no preceding context for the multiple previews it forces readers to endure.

But worst of all is the way the Rebirth special extends DC’s deeply immoral exploitation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, by contending that the most fan-beloved aspects of DC history were erased by Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan. For one thing, this is yet another ad hominem attack by DC on Moore, who Johns effectively blames here for how poorly received the DC’s New 52 initiative was – for having “weakened” the DC Universe by instigating a “war between hope and despair,” “love and apathy,” “faith and disbelief.” What Johns seems to forget is that Moore and Gibbons’ series was in fact a deconstruction of how insipid mainstream superhero comics had become by the late 1980s, not a call for superhero comics to become more dark and cynical. The publisher learned all the wrong lessons from Watchmen, and to call the thirty-year-old series to the carpet for that is both mean-spirited and dumb.

That’s not even what’s most upsetting about this book, though; more importantly, the Rebirth special promises to introduce the characters of Watchmen into the DC Universe for the first time. While this is not strictly illegal – the nature of Moore’s 1985 contract ensured that the rights to Watchmen would revert to him only once the series had gone out of print, and DC has assiduously reprinted it ever since – I have yet to see or hear a convincing argument that the decision is anything less than unethical. Both Moore and DC fully expected that the rights to Watchmen would revert to the authors – that’s how such arrangements had always worked out, and there was nothing unusual about this particular deal at the time – and it was only Watchmen’s tremendous success, ironically, that kept it permanently in print and forever out of Moore’s legal control. So while DC’s inclusion of Moore and Gibbons’ characters in the Rebirth special may be lawful in that regard, it violates the spirit of the initial agreement, which held that Moore and Gibbons were, at the end of the day, the rightful owners of Watchmen.

The widespread apathy of comic book readers toward this outrage has taken a range of disturbing forms, from criticisms of Moore’s physical appearance and religious beliefs to the absurd argument that a corporation such as DC cannot be expected to act against its own interests and should therefore be supported in the exploitative position it has taken against Moore (and other creators) over the years. These same readers valorize characters, like Superman and Batman, that frequently act against their own personal interests for the betterment of society: who fight, among other things, corporate greed (e.g., Lex Luthor) and strive to improve the world by directing the profits of big business toward global welfare (e.g., Batman’s charitable Wayne Foundation).

That fact raises a significant question: while it’s true that most corporations don’t act for the common good, does that really mean that we shouldn’t expect them to? In the cases of DC and Marvel, in particular – companies that generate billions of dollars on the backs of characters that espouse altruism, charity, and moral responsibility – should we not demand even the slightest emulation of the positive qualities they so relentlessly promote? Should we reward and celebrate these companies when, as in DC Universe: Rebirth, their actions represent not only a bullheaded unwillingness to redress past wrongdoing but also a concerted determination to persist in that wrongdoing? These are the moral questions, unwittingly, with which the publishers of contemporary superhero comics force us to contend.

Review: Green Lantern: No Fear

Writers: Geoff Johns and Darwyn Cooke
Artists: Darwyn Cooke, Carlos Pacheco, Ethan Van Sciver, and Simone Bianchi
Collects: Green Lantern Secret Files and Origins 2005 #1, Green Lantern #1-6 (2005)
Published: DC, 2008; $12.99

This first volume collecting Green Lantern’s most recent ongoing series, Green Lantern: No Fear, picks up soon after the events of Green Lantern: Rebirth, beginning with a story from the Green Lantern Secret Files and Origins one-shot. Written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke, this issue is by far the best part of the book. It’s essentially a series of flashbacks framed by a present-day sequence in which Hal Jordan begins to forge a friendship with Kyle Rayner, the man who served as Green Lantern in his stead for several years. In the flashbacks, Cooke explores the complex emotional history of Hal’s relationship with long-time love interest Carol Ferris; it’s a really touching story, and the beautiful colors in these scenes evoke some of Tim Sale’s best work (Superman for All Seasons and Spider-Man: Blue, in particular).

Geoff Johns writes the book from this point forward, and he begins by reworking bits and pieces of Hal’s past in a story set firmly in the post-Rebirth universe. Before long, Hal has rejoined the Air Force as a fighter pilot (restoring one of the character’s Silver Age trappings) and begins fighting the Manhunters, a group of robots constructed in the ancient past by the Guardians of the Universe, before they created the Green Lantern Corps. The new plot elements all feel so natural that I didn’t even realize some of them were new until after I had done a bit of research. Carlos Pacheco’s pencils, in combination with the bright, vivid colors of W. Moose Baumann, are effective at capturing Hal’s joy at being back both as Green Lantern and as a pilot.

Johns follows this story with several issues revolving around the classic Green Lantern villains Shark (a mutated tiger shark who can walk on land) and Hector Hammond (a giant-headed telepath with no physical control of his own body). These issues are drawn by Ethan Van Sciver, whose style marks a drastic change from Pacheco’s. He’s certainly a proficient artist, and his talents are put to use just as well here as they were in Rebirth; but to be quite honest, I’m beginning to feel that the way his work is typically colored is just too dark for the Green Lantern franchise. The character has always been more about “brightest day” than “blackest night” for me, which I understand probably puts me somewhat in the minority given the recent success of DC’s Blackest Night crossover. Even with that being the case, there’s still no denying that the artistic differences between the stories by Pacheco and Van Sciver are pretty difficult to reconcile.

No Fear comes to a grinding halt in the final story, an issue penciled and inked by Simone Bianchi. His artwork tends to be either hit or miss for me, often, ironically, within the same comic – in Wolverine: Evolution, for instance, his characters look stunning on one page, and like amorphous blobs on the next. His character renderings are actually fairly consistent here, but the problem is that he doesn’t seem to have any concept of lighting. Characters and objects are often lit from two or three intense light sources in a single panel, and then from two or three entirely different sources in the next. The art is so disorienting, and the characters’ physical actions match the dialogue so rarely, that it actually makes the story itself seem pretty disjointed at times.

Colorist Nathan Eyring is partly to blame as well, as his tendency towards plain white backgrounds gives the issue an incredibly unfinished feel. This change is probably the most jarring aspect of the story, especially in comparison to the rich blues and blacks, respectively, which serve as a backdrop to the Pacheco and Van Sciver issues. It strikes me as I write this that I’ve talked quite a bit about color in this review, more than I think I ever have previously. I suspect that has to do with the fact that the best superhero comics today strive to maintain at least some sense of visual continuity, even if its various parts are drawn by different artists. Captain America, for example, was drawn until about a year ago primarily by Mike Perkins and Steve Epting, and their styles were largely unified by the consistency of Frank D’Armata’s colors. Even New X-Men, with its infamously huge roster of artists, maintained a fairly consistent color palette until the end, when the story and art both took a darker turn.

So when I read a book like Green Lantern – a comic that people consistently praise as one of the best on the market – and it contains such wildly different-looking art from issue to issue, some of it quite bad, I can’t help but stand up and take notice. It just seems to me that a book that garners as much attention and sells as well as it does would have some level of artistic consistency in common with something like Captain America (again, just as an example), a book that does similarly well in terms of sales and critical response. There are other factors that contribute to how people respond to a comic book, of course, but I think it remains an interesting observation.

Aside from its inconsistent visuals and terrible final issue, I found No Fear disappointing in one other respect: it barely addresses the events of Rebirth – aside from that series’ most overt implication for the franchise, of course, which is that Hal Jordan is back in the role of Green Lantern. I understand that Johns wanted to get away from the damage DC had done to the character over the preceding years as quickly as possible, but I’m not sure ignoring the past completely is the best way of accomplishing that. I’m not terribly interested in seeing writers rehash the same one-dimensional characterizations that have been around since the 1950s, and by the end of this book, I feel like Johns is dangerously close to falling into that trap.

First of all, there are plot details like the fighter pilot plot device which, while interesting for a little while, don’t add anything to the story in the long run aside from the nostalgia factor. Much more troubling, though, is Hal’s flat characterization, which similarly hearkens back to the character’s earliest adventures. There’s a point at which having “no fear,” as the book’s title puts it, simply makes a character un-relatable and uninteresting, and too often while reading this book I felt that Hal was simply stoic to the point of arrogance. Johns seems to have used Rebirth as a vehicle not just for resetting the character’s status quo to one more in line with the character’s Silver Age origins, but for imposing on Hal a more simplistic and less dynamic personality – one that gives him the ability to conveniently ignore the moral quandaries which he should by all rights be dealing with in the wake of what’s happened to him.

Johns’ version of Green Lantern isn’t lacking in so much depth that you should necessarily avoid the series – not yet, at least, and I hope the writer doesn’t allow future stories to reach that point. So while the overall package is somewhat of a mixed bag, I think No Fear is still worthy of a mild recommendation, if mostly for the strength of its first half and the excellent Darwyn Cooke issue, which is a definite must-read for any fan of the character.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Some Final Thoughts on Green Lantern: Rebirth

Looking back at the review of Green Lantern: Rebirth I posted earlier this week, I’ve realized that there are still a few more things I’d like to say about it. The main thing I left out of the review was my opinion of the short story which begins the book, which I think may give a slightly better indication as to why I have a lower opinion of Rebirth than many people do (although, to be clear, I do still like the book – I just don’t think it’s magnificent). The short story was originally published as a preview for Rebirth in the pages of Wizard Magazine, and to the best of my knowledge, it was never published as part of any single comic book issue. It’s only six pages long, and after a few pages telling us that “Parallax is coming,” the rest of the story is devoted to a fight between Parallax and the Spectre over Hal Jordan’s soul.

Quite frankly, I think the story is terrible and that its inclusion in the collected edition is a mistake. As I mentioned before, Rebirth was the first Green Lantern book I read that was published after about 1965. I had been told that it was the perfect jumping-on point, even for people who were completely unfamiliar with the character. But when I read the preview story, I was incredibly confused; in fact, I distinctly remember closing the book afterward, and I came very close to never opening it again. Who were Parallax and the Spectre, and why, in this story that was supposedly new-reader-friendly, was it assumed that I already knew who they were? The main series does a good job of explaining these questions, of course, but this introductory story makes for a baffling start. It’s very clearly written for people who were already following Kyle Rayner’s exploits as Green Lantern prior to Rebirth, and even as someone with a working knowledge of the character and his mythos, I found it completely inaccessible as a new reader.

I would be really curious to hear what other people thought of the story, and if they had as much difficulty with it when they first read it as I did. I would also be interested to hear from people who were already following Green Lantern around the time of Rebirth: Did the story make sense to you? Or, since it was published in Wizard and never released in single issue format, did you skip it completely?

Shifting gears somewhat, as I’m sure many people know by now, Rebirth is soon going to be re-collected in Absolute Green Lantern: Rebirth, an oversized hardcover which will retail for $75. Personally, I think this is a bit silly. A six-issue comic book series does not warrant a collection that expensive, and no amount of extra features could justify a $60 price difference to me. After all, the softcover version already includes Johns’ original proposal for the series, as well as several sketch pages – what more could you really want? The Absolute Edition, according to Amazon, will be 224 pages, whereas the softcover is 176 pages. That isn’t a substantial difference, which leads me to believe that the new material will be limited to some script pages, a few pages of un-inked pencil art, and maybe an interview with Geoff Johns or Ethan Van Sciver.

I might feel differently if the Absolute Edition also included the first ten or twelve issues of the main Green Lantern series, and if it was the first in a series of hardcovers reprinting Johns’ run on that title. At least then you might be paying a reasonable price for the amount of material in the book; as it is now, Absolute Rebirth will essentially be charging you over $12 per issue. This is even more ridiculous when you consider that Absolute Batman: The Long Halloween and Absolute DC: The New Frontier were sold for the same price, but had 400 and 462 pages, respectively – roughly twice as many as Absolute Rebirth.

And with that, I think I’ve said my piece on Green Lantern: Rebirth. If you have a moment or two, feel free to share your thoughts on the Wizard preview story or the Absolute Edition in the comment section. See you on Monday for another review!

Review: Green Lantern: Rebirth

Writer: Geoff Johns
Artist: Ethan Van Sciver
Collects: Green Lantern: Rebirth #1-6 (2004-05)
Published: DC, 2006; $14.99

In Green Lantern: Rebirth, Geoff Johns had the unenviable task of fixing more than a decade’s worth of DC completely mishandling the Green Lantern mythos. He was also tasked with restoring Hal Jordan, the original Green Lantern, to the focal point of the franchise. I can’t imagine this was an easy task for him, and the end product isn’t entirely perfect. With the help of the extraordinarily talented Ethan Van Sciver, though, he manages to pull it off fairly well.

The mess created in the decade prior to Rebirth really can’t be understated. Not only had Hal Jordan become a crazed mass-murderer, but he was now the embodiment of the Spectre (God’s Spirit of Vengeance — whatever that means), and his replacement as Green Lantern was a younger, “hipper” character (Kyle Rayner) who still had yet to be truly accepted by many fans. The Guardians of the Universe and the Green Lantern Corps, intergalactic organizations that had been staples of the Green Lantern universe from the very beginning, had been completely removed from the books. Likewise, Hal’s mortal enemy Sinestro had been rather anticlimactically killed off. Oh, and Guy Gardner (Earth’s Green Lantern in reserve) had become a super-muscled half-alien with the ability to morph his body parts into weapons. God bless the ’90s, right?

From the first issue of Rebirth, Johns does a great job of establishing these characters’ personalities and the current status quo of their collective universe. This makes the book a great place to start for people who aren’t very familiar with Green Lantern. Before I read Rebirth for the first time, my only knowledge of the character came from having read about a dozen issues of the first Green Lantern series (published in the early 1960s), and I felt like I understood the characters in no time at all. But Rebirth also appeals to long-time Green Lantern fans, who I imagine were happy to finally see some justice done to their favorite characters when the series began in 2004.

The main thrust of the story is that the atrocities committed by Hal were actually caused by Parallax, an entity made of pure fear that corrupted his mind and took control of his body. While that may sound like a lazy explanation at first, Johns makes it all work by incorporating Parallax into the pre-established Green Lantern mythos. Hal’s ring has always been powerless over the color yellow, and by establishing Parallax (the embodiment of fear itself) as the ring’s “yellow impurity,” Johns actually gives meaning to a limitation on the character that’s always been somewhat arbitrary.

Considering some of the more clichéd comic book conventions Johns could have used to absolve Hal of his actions (clones, time travel, etc.), this explanation works pretty well. In fact, while I haven’t read many of the stories that were effectively undone by Rebirth, I suspect Johns’ new explanation for the events they portray is actually better than the original ones were. I can’t help but wonder if, by some weird literary retrofitting effect, those stories might actually read a little better now if we keep Parallax and the yellow impurity in mind.

But as Brad Meltzer notes in the book’s introduction, Johns doesn’t stop with simply restoring Hal to his former grace. It would have been easy to kill off Kyle, and maybe even Guy, but Johns breathes new life into them instead. He gives them a purpose again, one that both supplements Hal Jordan’s role in the DC Universe and works in its own, self-contained right. (In fact, the story of Kyle, Guy, and another Green Lantern, Kilowog, actually continues in the miniseries Green Lantern: Recharge, which then becomes the ongoing series Green Lantern Corps.)

However, I do have one major bone to pick with Rebirth, and it’s Johns’ characterization of Batman. Throughout the story, Batman is depicted as a bad guy for being suspicious of Hal and the fact that he has returned to life. Realistically, this makes perfect sense; Batman would have to be pretty ignorant to just blindly accept that a man responsible for so much death and destruction is suddenly one of the good guys again. The worst moment comes toward the end of the book, when Batman demands an explanation and Hal’s response is simply to punch him in the face and fly away. Even if Batman’s suspicions were groundless, Hal has just been “reborn” — shouldn’t he try to take the high road in this new life, and start off on the right foot with his fellow heroes? Shouldn’t he have grown as a character as the result of his rebirth, or should we be content with him being exactly the same character he was before DC editorial decided to make him a murderer all those years ago? If anything, the whole conflict makes Hal look like an even bigger jerk than Johns seems to think Batman is.

I also don’t buy Johns’ attempt to make Batman and Green Lantern into diametrical opposites — as manifestations of fear and hope, respectively. Batman is not a character defined by fear, as GL is by hope; rather, Batman instills fear in his enemies. Green Lantern does the exact same thing (as do most superheroes, for that matter), even if he doesn’t go about it as theatrically as Batman does. The center of Johns’ analogy simply doesn’t hold, and the ending of Rebirth rings hollow as a result.

That said, there’s still a lot to like here, and it’s thanks in large part to Van Sciver’s artwork. I particularly like the way he draws each of the five Green Lanterns in the story (Hal, Kyle, Guy, John Stewart, and Kilowog) as having different ways of handling their powers. Each has a visually distinctive method of flying, and the way energy emanates from their respective power rings in the final battle against Parallax is unique as well. Little touches like these make it clear that Johns and DC intend to treat these characters with the individuality and respect they deserve, and that we don’t have to worry about the mistakes of the ‘90s rearing their ugly heads any time in the near future. Welcome back, Hal.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5