The Four Color Media Monitor

DC's still resorting to cheap ideas from the mid-2000s, with the latest being the corruption of an old concept originally conceived by Jack Kirby in the Bronze Age, in Detective Comics #977:

...Having acquired access to archives from the future from the future Tim Drake, Ulysses learned that it was his destiny to become an also-ran in Tim’s rogue gallery and dedicated himself to something much bigger than that. While his sales pitch to Tim is that they can use this information of the future to present the dystopian timeline where Batwoman kills Batman and Tim himself turns Gotham into a police state, in secret he’s been working on a new Brother Eye.

He Ain’t Heavy

Brother Eye was a concept first introduced by Jack Kirby as the artificially intelligent sattelite which granted Buddy Blank his OMAC powers. The idea was re-interpreted for the modern day as an artificial intelligence created by Batman to keep an eye on the world’s superheroes, but hijacked by Maxwell Lord who used it to turn select members of the population into OMACs; unstoppable killing machines with a database of every superhero and how to stop them. Brother Eye and OMACs were a central pillar of the larger story being told through the DC Universe for much of the mid-to-late 2000s and it seems they’ve come back in a big way.

And they're reusing the rendition circa Infinite Crisis again? Wow, am I disappointed. It was so stupid the first time around in the mid-2000s, made worse by changing Max Lord into a villain, and let's not forget the storyline from Superman and Wonder Woman where Max mind controls the Man of Steel to rampage, and WW's convinced the only way to keep Supes from potentially costing innocent lives is to break Max's neck, leading to a contrived, forced scenario where WW's villified for saving Superman from an awful possibility and saving lives in the process. No thanks to Greg Rucka, one of the architects of that monstrosity, of course. I'd like to think they had a better idea in mind how to reuse these old ones, but if time travel mishmash is all they can think of, then I doubt it.

And while it may be a future timeline they're talking about, whatever they're doing with Batwoman, no matter how PC-pandering her development was, it's still tasteless what they've been doing with her lately. Same with Robin.

Labels: Batman, crossoverloading, dc comics, dreadful writers