The Four Color Media Monitor

They're conceiving two books, one that's combined with elements of an old Bronze Age story they once wrote called the Green Team, only here they're morphing it into something more along the lines of the "one percent", while another team is introduced called The Movement, representing the 99 percent. Obviously, they're going to try and use the former as the oldest trick in the book - serving as an offset for any criticism of the latter, but I wouldn't be fooled. The writer for the latter is none other than Gail Simone, who told Big Shiny Robot:

The Movement is an idea I've had for some time. It's a book about power -- who owns it, who uses it, who suffers from its abuse. As we increasingly move to an age where information is currency, you get these situations where a single viral video can cost a previously unassailable corporation billions, or can upset the power balance of entire governments. And because the sources of that information are so dispersed and nameless, it's nearly impossible to shut it all down.

I'll bet Time Warner, owner of DC and maker of billions every year, isn't the source she's being critical of. She also said:

The previous generations of superheroes were not created to address this, it's a legitimately new frontier, both for the real world and for storytellers. It's an adventure story, but it really isn't about mad scientists and jewel heists, it's more about the injustices that can affect real people's lives, just tarted up in costumes and superpowers.

That sounds close to an insult of both costumes and powers. It's also a prime example of how the whole superhero genre is being run into the ground all over oh-so precious politics.

Also on Big Shiny Robot, the interviewer spoke with Art Baltazar and Franco, the writers/artists of the other title, The Green Team, who said:

BY: It sounds like this book is going to have some socially redeeming qualities, can you tell me more about that?

FRANCO: What comes to mind is: Can money make you happy?

ART: The real question is: Can money buy you anything in the DC universe? Would it make you powerful? Can it make you a hero? Can money make you…Super?

FRANCO: If you had unlimited wealth, could you use that to make the lives of people better? Would you help your fellow man? Would you buy powers? You need to read this and find out.

Somehow, this doesn't sound very promising either. Of course money can't do everything. Just ask Bruce Wayne, whose parents won't be resurrected even with money. I'm sure we won't need to read this new book and find out what it's like.

Wired (via Liberty Unyielding and Hot Air), which sounds quite approving of this so-called project, said:

While the concept is ambitious, the idea that a comic capable of living up to the book’s populist inspiration could come from DC Entertainment still strikes some as unlikely. Matt Pizzolo, the editor of the Occupy Comics anthology, told Wired that “though DC Comics did help launch Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s seminal anarchist epic V For Vendetta over two decades ago, it’s unlikely they would do so today. Between dismantling Vertigo and frankensteining Watchmen, the past year has demonstrated DC isn’t a safe place for bold creators who want to tell the kinds of stories that would inspire things like Occupy, rather than just cash in on them.”

Bold is a laugh, and besides, DC does condone their dreadful visions, and cashing in on them is just as bad.

Still, Simone says that the use of the iconography and language of a real-world populist movement is deliberate, promising that the book will reflect today’s decentralized political world and offer ”a slice of rarity that we’re unlikely to see in most superhero books.”

I'm betting that rarity won't be a genuinely convincing conservative viewpoint.

This wouldn’t the first time that DC has attempted to offer pre-packaged populist rebellion, of course; in addition to the aforementioned publication of the anti-establishment V For Vendetta, the company’s Vertigo imprint also published Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, a series centering around an international organization struggling against forces of authority and repression that included anti-corporate themes.

That was probably one of the earliest of the modern day leftist visions DC ever published through their company, and it's best left unseen by anybody with common sense.

As much as some might wish that DC really would rather avoid the kind of ultra-leftist viewpoints they've been wallowing in these past years, it'd be foolish to think they're willing to avoid them. Otherwise, these 2 new books would never have been approved. In reality, they're merely trying to ape some of the worst leftist positions Marvel's ever taken up, and it's only hurt them.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful writers, msm propaganda, politics