The Four Color Media Monitor

USA Today has written a sugarcoated take on this soon to be past year's products, and it includes a gushy claim that Flashpoint was a great crossover:

Best event:Flashpoint. Comic-book companies have flirted with different realities, dimensions and the like, but writer Geoff Johns and artist Andy Kubert did it right, sending the Flash into a place where a war between Aquaman and Wonder Woman is razing the Earth one continent at a time, Cyborg is Superman, Superman isn't exactly super and Bruce Wayne's dad is Batman. But the truly spectacular aspect was the emotional story and its quieter moments, including one involving the Caped Crusader that'll make even the most jaded fanboy a little verklempt.

Please, spare us the sensationalism. What's so wonderful about a story whose true purpose was to erase a lot of what better writers came up with over past decades, and end sadly with Eobard Thawne causing disaster for Barry Allen? That's not exactly what I'd call a great show of emotion.

Best tweeter: Matt Fraction. A shining example from the writer's Twitter feed (@mattfraction): "dont care what her personalized license plate said im pretty sure that old lady wasnt a real druid. like a lady-druid would drive a festiva." Another: " "Pancakes and Suicide" is the name of my Crab Apple Cove-themed M*A*S*H b&b."

That awful writer is their choice for a tweeter? Oh for heaven's sake. His tweets are mere babble, though nothing compared to his awful comics writing.

Best decision: DC's "The New 52" relaunch. With decades of muddled continuity, DC Comics had a crisis — and not one of the infinite-earths kind. Want to start reading Batman? Good luck trying to figure out where to even begin. So the company made a gutsy move and relaunched every single one of its superhero books in September, starting again with 52 No. 1s. Not all of them were gold but a good number of them were, and as a whole they built a solid foundation to foster new fanboys and fangirls in the future.

This too is simply galling, and ignores how Batman was among a couple titles that weren't actually rebooted (so good luck indeed trying to figure out where to start), and pretty quickly degenerated into still more of the violence that's become a staple of their whole approach over the past decade. And what solid foundation for new audience are they talking about? The sales figures are far from suggesting they've made any progress on that front, and the next crossovers they're coming up with won't help matters either.

Best use of bad guys:Fear Itself. Matt Fraction put mystical hammers in the hands of Attuma, Titania, Absorbing Man, Grey Gargoyle, Juggernaut and others of the Marvel Universe's heaviest hitters in his event series. Even worse for the do-gooders: A possessed Hulk and Thing joining them to pummel the world just when it needed them the most.

That only tells more about why the crossover was better avoided.

Best death:Johnny Storm. OK, so he was only actually "dead" for a matter of months and we never actually saw the body when the Human Torch sacrificed himself to keep the Negative Zone shut in Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four. He perished the way a good hero should, and — even better — returned in the landmark 600th issue of the long-running series. Flame on, indeed.

Best dead character who actually stayed dead:Gwen Stacy. College students could write treatises on the number of comic-book folks that just can't stay dearly departed — the zombies from The Walking Dead notwithstanding. A former flame of Peter Parker, Gwen has remained 6 feet under — through many Spider-Man reboots — since 1973, when she died after getting tossed off a bridge by the Green Goblin and having her neck snapped. Ouch. However, if next year's movie The Amazing Spider-Man— featuring Emma Stone as Gwen — proves ridiculously popular, maybe the thought of Gwen 2.0 won't be such a crazy possibility.

Besides fawning over yet another publicity stunt with the Human Torch, we can only wonder what they think of J. Michael Stracynski's defamatory story about Gwen in Sins Past in Spider-Man, which tragically may still be holding in their current continuity muddle. It's an utter embarrassment that for all we know, could take centuries to repair.

Labels: crossoverloading, dc comics, dreadful writers, marvel comics, msm propaganda