The Four Color Media Monitor

It seems DC decided to pull a joke on Batman readers not unlike Marvel's own road to nowhere with two leading X-Men (the marriage of Rogue/Gambit notwithstanding). And they even let it be known just 3 days before the story would go to press in the New York Times:

The answers to the questions are found in letters the couple have written to each other before their wedding day. Mr. Wayne’s correspondence reveals an acceptance of Ms. Kyle, who in her time has been a jewel thief, a villain, an antihero and a mob boss. “You’re not someone who can be figured out. Or solved. And never will be,” he declares. He also writes that he can be “more than a boy whose parents are dead,” that he can be “the man who loves you. Who will always try to love you better.”

Ms. Kyle’s letter lays out the truth as she sees it: “You’re still a child, Bruce. A hurt child.” Their happiness, she speculates, would kill Batman, who rescues everyone and turns pain into hope. “How can I do that,” she writes. “To save the world, heroes make sacrifices.”

In order to keep countless innocents safe, she concludes that she cannot marry Mr. Wayne. “My sacrifice is my life. It’s you.”

In the final moments of their story, the bride and groom end up at different locations in the early morning hours. In a silent page, Ms. Kyle sits on a rooftop, contemplating. She discards her veil and leaps toward the street. At the Finger Tower skyscraper, after an hour of waiting for his bride, Mr. Wayne realizes she is not coming. He throws off his tie and takes a similar leap, but in the opposite direction. Theirs is a story that is forever to be continued.

I still don't see much point to what's been quite a cliche for years. If they don't want Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle to marry, there's little point in even bothering to put together a story involving a wedding. Especially when they go so far as to milk it with a flood of specials:

DC Comics has been highly touting the story line. They’ve even issued Wedding invitations to the story and turned it into a mini-event comic with a number of Wedding prelude issues focusing on a number of characters in the Batman family including Ra’s al Ghul, Batgirl, the Riddler, Joker, Harley Quinn, Anarky, Red Hood, Robin, Hush, and Nightwing.

Oh, well in that case, they're making it potentially worse than Marvel's milking of the X-Men, by trying to encourage everyone to buy more than is needed for a big buildup to nothing. The business/sales side of this whole affair is even more bothersome than the artistic side, because event-marketing is just what's wrong with the Big Two's approach today, conceiving gimmicks all intended to try and fleece the audience of as much money as possible for all the different-but-connected titles they put out, and yes, it includes variant covers. If this is what they intended all along, then it's better to have avoided a wedding tale altogether, if they didn't think they could go to all the trouble to have them divorce later. And the audience would do better to just refrain from buying and reading it, if they don't want to take the route of marrying these twosome.

Events like these that don't follow through are just not worth all the paper going into printing them.

Labels: Batman, dc comics, dreadful writers, msm propaganda, women of dc