One thing I managed to forget was this six minute teaser for the new DC Universe MMO. While nothing really had stood out to me as really epic about this game, things have changed with the debut of this clip. This looks epic.
I’m sure more San Diego news will trickle out in its aftermath. Anything else newsworthy I will throw on here in the next couple days.
Showing posts with label Green Lantern. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Green Lantern. Show all posts
Monday, July 26, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Super-Powered Comics: Return of Superman
Adventures of Superman 400 ended the “Funeral For a Friend” storyline and introduced the four new Supermen that would take over each Superman title for the next several months.
The Return of Superman opens with these four stories followed by the characters’s first issues in chronological order. We meet the Last Son of Krypton, an energy being that is recovering from the loss of his corporeal form, given new form by the Fortress of Solitude’s robots. The Man of Steel is John Henry Irons, an African American engineer in a suit of powered armor that may be a “walk-in spirit” of the original Superman. There is “The Kid” (don’t call him Superboy!), an apparent clone of Superman. And the Man of Tomorrow, a Kryptonian with cybernetic parts.
Lois takes an ongoing supporting role in each story as she struggles to uncover the identities of the mystery Supermen. Each remind her of Clark, and each have a reason for not recalling all their history. The cyborg seems to have a hidden agenda as well, while the Last Son has gained an energy blast he uses for murderous purposes (much to the delight of a guest starring Guy Gardner). The Kid fights a variety of new villains while under the exclusive coverage of WGBS and reporter Tana Moon. And the Man of Steel spends much of his time trying to get an old weapon design off the streets and stop the arms dealer known as the White Rabbit.
The four separate threads do not stay separate long. Within a couple months, Coast City (home of Green Lantern) is destroyed. The disaster slowly brings all the Supermen towards it and the remains of Warworld (now known as Engine City). Mongul stands ready for action in the city, but the true horror is the identity of his ally, none other than the cyborg, secretly a former human, Hank Henshaw.
Henshaw uses his new powers and the Engine City to dupe much of the world in to believing the Last Son of Krypton has gone bad. And while all this is happening, someone else awakes in the Fortress of Solitude....
And we will leave it at that.
“The Reign of the Supermen” does an excellent job of what it sets out to do: expand the city and sphere of Superman. Steel and Superboy would receive spin-offs after its completion. It redefined the level of destruction allowed in a DC comic. It irrevocably changed the life of Green Lantern Hal Jordan (or so we thought before the release of Green Lantern: Rebirth). It even gave Superman longer hair (although it’s hardly the mullet that it gets called quite a lot of the time. Long hair on a men does not equal a mullet, folks.)
And even in all the bad things, the books never fail to be what they should be, a fun superheroic adventure. Something a lot of the modern crossover events could learn a lot from. Recommended.
The Return of Superman opens with these four stories followed by the characters’s first issues in chronological order. We meet the Last Son of Krypton, an energy being that is recovering from the loss of his corporeal form, given new form by the Fortress of Solitude’s robots. The Man of Steel is John Henry Irons, an African American engineer in a suit of powered armor that may be a “walk-in spirit” of the original Superman. There is “The Kid” (don’t call him Superboy!), an apparent clone of Superman. And the Man of Tomorrow, a Kryptonian with cybernetic parts.
Lois takes an ongoing supporting role in each story as she struggles to uncover the identities of the mystery Supermen. Each remind her of Clark, and each have a reason for not recalling all their history. The cyborg seems to have a hidden agenda as well, while the Last Son has gained an energy blast he uses for murderous purposes (much to the delight of a guest starring Guy Gardner). The Kid fights a variety of new villains while under the exclusive coverage of WGBS and reporter Tana Moon. And the Man of Steel spends much of his time trying to get an old weapon design off the streets and stop the arms dealer known as the White Rabbit.
The four separate threads do not stay separate long. Within a couple months, Coast City (home of Green Lantern) is destroyed. The disaster slowly brings all the Supermen towards it and the remains of Warworld (now known as Engine City). Mongul stands ready for action in the city, but the true horror is the identity of his ally, none other than the cyborg, secretly a former human, Hank Henshaw.
Henshaw uses his new powers and the Engine City to dupe much of the world in to believing the Last Son of Krypton has gone bad. And while all this is happening, someone else awakes in the Fortress of Solitude....
And we will leave it at that.
“The Reign of the Supermen” does an excellent job of what it sets out to do: expand the city and sphere of Superman. Steel and Superboy would receive spin-offs after its completion. It redefined the level of destruction allowed in a DC comic. It irrevocably changed the life of Green Lantern Hal Jordan (or so we thought before the release of Green Lantern: Rebirth). It even gave Superman longer hair (although it’s hardly the mullet that it gets called quite a lot of the time. Long hair on a men does not equal a mullet, folks.)
And even in all the bad things, the books never fail to be what they should be, a fun superheroic adventure. Something a lot of the modern crossover events could learn a lot from. Recommended.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Super-Powered Comics: Death of Superman
A note before we get started: Take the Helm’s sister sites are now back online. Sorry for the inconvenience, folks!
The death of Superman goes down in history as one of the greatest marketing events in comic history. At the time, the media didn’t know how to respond to such a story. Despite what just about ever comic fan knew, tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of people thought Superman would soon be gone for good. This drove sales of the Doomsday issues to epic levels. It would be about six months before the one true Superman returned, but in the process the four creative teams of the Superman titles made a unique sprawling epic out of the story.
Sure, the marketing of the comic left a lot of bad taste in a lot of people’s mouth. And subsequent attempts to replicate the concept (Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Spider-Man and the Clone Saga, and even Knightfall/Knightquest) proved to not be as good. But those series failed where Superman’s saga succeeded. Why? You could give any number of reasons, but I will say good planning. Superman’s death and return had a clear beginning, middle, and end. The follow-ups failed (or at least ridiculously delayed) to give the readers the closure they wanted for the concept.
The saga is collected in three trades and I will cover each in turn. It begins with the aptly title The Death of Superman. No title could get more to the point. DC created a character that became synonymous with nineties storytelling in the form of Doomsday. The near-mindless killing machine possessed no origin, no reason for its actions, and no reason to exist beyond being the vehicle of Superman’s demise. Or so it seemed to much later, when his creator Dan Jurgens finally revealed his origins.
But that’s another story. This is about Superman’s death. Over six issues of the Superman titles and one of Justice League America, Superman and his allies in the League battle the oncoming monster. This League, the post-Giffen team, consisted of Guy Gardner, Fire, Ice, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, former Superman villain Maxima, and the exercise in nineties character naming, Bloodwynd (secretly a messed up in the head Martian Manhunter). Despite a decent level of power, the team didn’t work so well together. In the face of Doomsday’s power, they fell with relative ease.
Barring occasional aid by Guardian and Dubbilex of the Cadmus Project, Superman faces the monster alone. And Doomsday seems obsessed with making his way to Metropolis.
This leads to the final few chapters of the story as Superman and Doomsday spar again and again in a cross country battle. The fight ends in a ravaged Metropolis. In the end, Superman barely pulls out a victory over the beast, but at the cost of his own life.
The story is simple and pretty straight forward. At the time, fans hated how Doomsday just appeared to facilitate Superman’s death. I suspect they wanted background on the character and a reason for Superman to die at Doomsday’s hand. But those really aren’t important yet. There would be plenty of time later for long time fans to learn the origins of Doomsday.
The goal was Superman’s death. And in the true tradition of comics, that was just the beginning.
The death of Superman goes down in history as one of the greatest marketing events in comic history. At the time, the media didn’t know how to respond to such a story. Despite what just about ever comic fan knew, tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of people thought Superman would soon be gone for good. This drove sales of the Doomsday issues to epic levels. It would be about six months before the one true Superman returned, but in the process the four creative teams of the Superman titles made a unique sprawling epic out of the story.
Sure, the marketing of the comic left a lot of bad taste in a lot of people’s mouth. And subsequent attempts to replicate the concept (Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Spider-Man and the Clone Saga, and even Knightfall/Knightquest) proved to not be as good. But those series failed where Superman’s saga succeeded. Why? You could give any number of reasons, but I will say good planning. Superman’s death and return had a clear beginning, middle, and end. The follow-ups failed (or at least ridiculously delayed) to give the readers the closure they wanted for the concept.
The saga is collected in three trades and I will cover each in turn. It begins with the aptly title The Death of Superman. No title could get more to the point. DC created a character that became synonymous with nineties storytelling in the form of Doomsday. The near-mindless killing machine possessed no origin, no reason for its actions, and no reason to exist beyond being the vehicle of Superman’s demise. Or so it seemed to much later, when his creator Dan Jurgens finally revealed his origins.
But that’s another story. This is about Superman’s death. Over six issues of the Superman titles and one of Justice League America, Superman and his allies in the League battle the oncoming monster. This League, the post-Giffen team, consisted of Guy Gardner, Fire, Ice, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, former Superman villain Maxima, and the exercise in nineties character naming, Bloodwynd (secretly a messed up in the head Martian Manhunter). Despite a decent level of power, the team didn’t work so well together. In the face of Doomsday’s power, they fell with relative ease.
Barring occasional aid by Guardian and Dubbilex of the Cadmus Project, Superman faces the monster alone. And Doomsday seems obsessed with making his way to Metropolis.
This leads to the final few chapters of the story as Superman and Doomsday spar again and again in a cross country battle. The fight ends in a ravaged Metropolis. In the end, Superman barely pulls out a victory over the beast, but at the cost of his own life.
The story is simple and pretty straight forward. At the time, fans hated how Doomsday just appeared to facilitate Superman’s death. I suspect they wanted background on the character and a reason for Superman to die at Doomsday’s hand. But those really aren’t important yet. There would be plenty of time later for long time fans to learn the origins of Doomsday.
The goal was Superman’s death. And in the true tradition of comics, that was just the beginning.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Super-Powered Comics: DC The New Frontier
I will be 100% honest here: the first time I read DC: The New Frontier I didn’t think much of it. Sure the art was great, but the story just felt a little flat, not quite fully coalesced.
That was a couple years ago.
Something drew me back to the book a few months after that, and on my second read through, I started to dig Darwyn Cooke’s late eighties vibe. The first half came off as a masterpiece, a real build to a guaranteed epic. The second half still was not so great though.
By read number four, I started to get in to the whole heroes coming together to fight the monster island. Cooke is a very subtle writer at times, which makes it easy to miss a lot of the nuances he makes between his story and his art.
I just finished reading the New Frontier for the sixth time. It is quite possibly the best book DC has released in over a decade. Not since Kingdom Come has the company produced anything this epic in scope.
I am not going to say much more about the greatness of this book. You should go read it. Then read it again. Highly Recommended.
That was a couple years ago.
Something drew me back to the book a few months after that, and on my second read through, I started to dig Darwyn Cooke’s late eighties vibe. The first half came off as a masterpiece, a real build to a guaranteed epic. The second half still was not so great though.
By read number four, I started to get in to the whole heroes coming together to fight the monster island. Cooke is a very subtle writer at times, which makes it easy to miss a lot of the nuances he makes between his story and his art.
I just finished reading the New Frontier for the sixth time. It is quite possibly the best book DC has released in over a decade. Not since Kingdom Come has the company produced anything this epic in scope.
I am not going to say much more about the greatness of this book. You should go read it. Then read it again. Highly Recommended.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Super-Powered Web: Linking Up!
Saw Star Trek over the weekend. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with superheroes, but it is one amazing flick. Still haven’t seen X-Men Origins: Wolverine and after Trek I think it may be even more disappointing.
Anyway, here’s a few super-powered links worth checking out:
Got any more quality super-powered links for me? Be sure to post them in the comments!
Anyway, here’s a few super-powered links worth checking out:
- The Source - the DCU’s new blog offers more coolness than I have seen from either of the big two for quite some time!
- X-Men Origins Wolverine: Weapon X - a surprisingly entertaining Facebook flash game. Somewhat limited, but fun for a few minutes a day at least.
- Green Lantern DC - Not Quite Safe For Work... Yeah, DC might want to start registering some domain names before this happens again!
- El Santo Comics at From Parts Unknown - a look at Mexico’s own real life superheroes. Fun article.
Got any more quality super-powered links for me? Be sure to post them in the comments!
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