The Four Color Media Monitor

Because if we're going to try and stop the misuse of our favorite comics and their protagonists by the companies that write and publish them, we've got to see what both the printed and online comics news is doing wrong. This blog focuses on both the good and the bad, the newspaper media and the online websites. Unabashedly. Unapologetically. Scanning the media for what's being done right and what's being done wrong.


Zatanna #3's self-criticism would be more convincing if...

Jog's Blog reviews the Grant Morrison penned Zatanna #3, and points out how it seems to be a possible form of criticism of Identity Crisis.

Now that's all fine and well, and the first issue features something like that too, but, when you take into account how Morrison himself did a few of the things that IC advocated when writing New X-Men (which has returned to sans-adjective since), by de-facto killing off Jean Grey in the umpteenth Phoenix regurgitation, it doesn't come off as convincing enough.

That's certainly why, if I am to read this Seven Soldiers miniseries, it's not gonna be because Morrison is the writer, that's for sure.

Update: on a side note, here's an article from Comics Bulletin that gives a roundtable discussion of what women think of comics. I think it's in the latter part though, where the really impressive commentary appears.

Update 2: From the ultra-establishment Fourth Rail website, here's a review of the Mystery in Space special that DC put out last year, following Julius Schwartz's passing. And in it, we get a look at the kind of plot that Grant Morrison, who wrote the second part (Elliot Maggin wrote the first, and even included Elongated Man and Sue Dibny in it too), wrote up that appears to have been meant as an attack on the war in Iraq. And what did the 4th Rail writer have to say about this?
Morrison's script plays off the conflict between the wonder and imagination of yesteryear and the cynicism and complexities of today's storytelling. The notion of soldiers engineering a war for public relations and budget reasons will no doubt spark some readers to think of the the mess the United States has made of its incursion into Iraq; I know it had me thinking that way.
The thing is, from what I can tell from reading any review of his on stuff that mentions Iraq, stories like this almost always have the writer of this review thinking that way.

There's then the question of just what exactly is so wonderous and imaginative about implying that a war to bring down a tyrant is little more than a smokescreen for public relations and profiteering. That, to say the least, is typical of the "right-wing conspiracy" theories often fondly excercised by anti-war and even anti-Americanists/Israelists. And the kind of positions being excercised by Mr. Morrison also had their moments in X-Men when he was the writer, while at the same time wallowing in senseless brutality, like say, when he depicted Magneto as just what some PC advocates would like to see him as: a savage who literally resorts, completely sans the second thoughts he had in Uncanny X-Men #150 in the mid-80s, to cannibalism and enslaving the world, et al. (see the "Planet X" storyline in issues #147-148 of "New X-Men," in example.)

Good gosh, who needs it? Especially when it makes it difficult to buy the special, even for Maggin's own Adam Strange story, and he was the one who ideally featured Ralph and Sue Dibny in his segment as guest stars.

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