Can the Rogues still be called "beloved"?
I looked at this interview with Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins on Newsarama, which talks about Rogues' Revenge's ties to Final Crisis, and features this question:
Thanks to all these contrived, forced circumstances, it's become harder to like the Flash's Rogues Gallery, if at all. If they would fix the errors they made, the Rogues might become lovable again. But for now, they are not.
Here's something else to note:
Can readers still expect a story about the beloved Rogues from the Johns/Kolins Flash run?Better yet, can they expect the Rogues to become likable again? At the end of Johns' run on the book, he did one of the most ludicrous take-aparts I've ever seen, when he implied that the Rogues were supposedly brainwashed by the Top to become honest and supposedly never made the choice to drop their crooked ways by themselves. This was an outgrowth from Identity Crisis, one more reason why it came off as dismaying. Of course, the Top's ditherings could all be dismissed as his own insanity, but even so, to go and turn the Rogues' into a nasty, unpleasant bunch in Johns' last story was uncalled for and another post-Identity Crisis mistake. For look what it led to: they killed Bart Allen (or may have, but it's still tasteless).
Thanks to all these contrived, forced circumstances, it's become harder to like the Flash's Rogues Gallery, if at all. If they would fix the errors they made, the Rogues might become lovable again. But for now, they are not.
Here's something else to note:
NRAMA: But they still have rules?The part about Even McCullogh, the new Mirror Master, being a junkie, has always troubled me since it was published, because it does not sound plausible for a costumed villain to become a drug addict like he became 4 years ago. For a non-costumed crook, it would be more believable, and there'd probably be some human interest story value to get out of a story like that. But for a costumed crook, it's just unimaginative and unsuitable.
GJ: Well, they're bad guys. They've killed before. But they do have rules about this that they try to follow. And when they don't follow the rules, that's when things go wrong. When Mirror Master steps out of line and goes anywhere near drugs, Captain Cold has to yank him back. When Heat Wave loses control of his pyromania, Captain Cold's got to yank him back. These guys have had their lives ripped apart in numerous ways.
