The Four Color Media Monitor

UPI's got information on DC's next predictable cheap resort to crossovers, this one serving as an excuse to put substitutes in the place of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman:

DC Comics announced on Thursday a new line-wide event across its comic books, titled Future State, that will give a glimpse into what happens to Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and more characters in the future.

The two-month event will begin in January and will consist of multiple limited series' and one-shot specials that coves what happens in the DC Universe in the near and far future.

Future State happens in the wake of Dark Nights: Death Metal where the fabric of time and space has been shaken loose. DC's stable of heroes will be placed in new roles with new characters taking on iconic mantles.

Batman has been killed in the future as Gotham City is placed under control by the Magistrate, a villainous regime. An all-new Batman will rise along with a new group of Gotham heroes to fight back.

Superman, after being rejected by Earth following an international crisis, has headed off into space where he comes into contact with Warworld and Mongul. Jon, Clark Kent's son, becomes the new Superman of Earth.

Diana Prince's status is unclear, but inside the Amazon rainforest Yara Flor is chosen to be the next Wonder Woman and will eventually join forces with the new Superman.

While Superman seems to be getting replaced by the son created for him a number of years back, what are the chances Batman and WW are going to be replaced by diversity tokens? Well as this IGN report says, WW's substitute will be a Brazilian:

DC fans can expect multiple incarnations of Wonder Woman to take part in Future State, though their respective stories won't all necessarily unfold at the same point in the DC timeline. One of them is a brand new addition to the DCU - a Brazilian heroine named Yara Flor.

"We will eventually discover that there are connections to the other tribes of the Amazons that we have established," said Rich. "Yara does have some connection to the Amazons, and part of what we'll discover in her origin is what activates her position, what makes her Wonder Woman at this time. She's from Brazil, but was an immigrant to America. There's also that element of her story. Even though we'll see her currently active as Wonder Woman, eventually we'll learn what her origin is - partially her figuring out what that means, where she's from, why this is her, how she relates to Diana, how she relates to the other Amazons."

"Joelle was looking at Yara as - she is new to this," continued Rich. "Her humanity is still very much intact and very much important. From a reader standpoint, what does that mean for me when I look at this character? Diana Prince is a goddess, so she's always a bit above us. This is a chance to sort of get back to some of the early roots of Wonder Woman where Diana was trying to be human and trying to learn how to be human. Now we're going the opposite way - how does a human learn how to be a goddess?"

But even as Future State establishes Yara Flor and her relationships with her fellow young heroes, Future State will also spotlight the Amazonian warrior Nubia and even Diana Prince herself. Rich teased that we'll see the original Wonder Woman fighting at the very end of time, quite possibly the last surviving member of Earth's golden age of heroes.

Forget it, the whole premise of the crossover is already laughable. If they had to introduce a new cast member, it was entirely possible to do it in a stand-alone story, and not rely yet again on the cheap excuse of a company wide crossover. The most recent moment I can think of where a similar approach was taken was after Dark Nights: Metal, where at least a few new protagonists were introduced and soon after got their own, untested ongoing series instead of miniseries (Silencer, Sideways, and a new character named Damage, et al). Predictably, they were all cancelled within a year or so. What the writers and editors behind this new crossover are doing is little different. Undoubtably, they're trying to see if they can make certain things stick, even though the way they've long gone about their PC-pandering has been disastrously stilted. Earlier in the article, it says:

"There's so much to do going forward, and so we want to give the readers a couple of months where you will see all these potential possibilities, all of these stories that could evolve out of the current DCU with the familiar characters getting older, finding themselves in new situations or new versions of the same characters as the DC legacy continues to evolve," Rich told IGN. "It's really just two months of us letting our creators go wild and be imaginative, while also laying some seeds and some groundwork for what you're going to see coming."

And what would that be? More sloppy pandering? It's not hard to guess they don't have a clue where they're going, and if they really wanted to let their imaginations go wild, all they had to do was produce a self-contained adventure that didn't interrupt their standard publishing schedules. It's obvious this has publicity stunt written all over it, one of the biggest problems with how it's marketed.

And even if diversity replacement's not the intention, the company wide crossover itself is reprehensible on the grounds that it only takes away the ability to tell a stand alone story with individual characters (not that whatever stories they've published in the past decade have been worth the effort, of course). Worst, as SyFy Wire reports, it's going to involve the usual suspects in scripting:

Current DC Comics storylines will hit the pause button in January to accommodate Future State's massive publishing line-up, which will be split into stories covering the Batman Family, the Superman Family, and the Justice League Family. The talent involved in each Future State book will be a mix of current DC talent — including Brian Michael Bendis, Mariko Tamaki, and Joshua Williamson — and "new voices from the worlds of TV, movies and animation" including John Ridley, Brandon Easton, and Paula Sevenbergen. The DC storylines occupying the current books will pick up again in March.

That's still no excuse for interrupting whatever goes on now, just for the sake of something that could've been written as a stand-alone event unconnected to the ongoing series proper. It brings to mind the overrated Age of Apocalypse storyline in X-Men from 1995, where the present was substituted by an alternate "reality" in which Prof. Xavier was accidentally killed by his son Daniel instead of Magneto, who ends up as a leader instead, until Bishop manages to set things right again. The failure to make most of these stories self-contained in separate specials, if they truly have to be told at all, is exactly why modern superhero comics lack merit.

So, beginning next year DC Comics is launching a massive new effort that hopes to appeal to both new readers and old, something that seems to have grown out of the long-discussed idea to deliver a new generation of heroes and a new DC timeline, but which doesn't make that necessarily permanent. What are the implications of this timeline on the "present" of the DC Universe when it returns in March? How many of these creative teams will stick around in the wake of Future State? Will more Future State-set stories follow? We can only guess for the moment, but strap in, because one thing we know for sure is that this trip to the future will definitely be a wild ride.

Oh no, not with Bendis on board it won't be. Here's another example of something where audiences would do well to vote with their wallets and avoid all parts of the coming crossover entirely, to make clear we don't accept this joke anymore. If they wanted to, they could hire all the staff and talent needed to produce successful ingredients. Instead, they remain affixed on making their comics all stunts all the time, which only enforces the perception they're lacking organism in their storytelling.

Labels: bad editors, Batman, crossoverloading, dc comics, dreadful writers, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, Superman, Wonder Woman