After the whole "zombie army" thing of Blackest Night, DC did a couple of year-long series spinning out of it. Including this one, where back-from-the-dead Max Lord a) makes everyone forget he existed, b) makes everyone think Ted Kord actually committed suicide, c) kills Magog but pins it on Captain Atom, and d) uses the old JLI cast to cripple most of the major international intelligence agencies (aka, Checkmate) so he can take control of their assets to run back his stupid OMAC plan and make a world run by "regular humans." Or more accurately, run by Max Lord, a guy with mind-control powers.
So Max Lord is full of shit. What else is new in the 21st Century?
It's a frustrating series to read. It's 23 issues of Booster Gold and several of the old JLI crew - Fire, Ice, Captain Atom, a new Rocket Red and Jaime Reyes - trying to bring down Max, only to have Max lead them around by the nose. Every time they think they've got him, ha ha, nope! Max isn't there at all! Or he is, and he just shuts Booster down with the old mind control whammy and gets away again.
When they do finally get him at the end, when Booster kicks his ass and Captain Atom scares Max bad enough he'll undo his memory wipe and remind everyone what he's done, he still gets away to post Youtube videos about how, actually, those memories are lies and he's a swell guy just trying to do the right thing. That's the conclusion to a book that ran for an entire year?
It was going to segue into a new Justice League International book. Too bad DC did the New 52 about three months after this concluded. There was a JLI book in that initial roll out, but it died a swift death and I don't think the Max Lord stuff ever came. And how would it have worked anyway, with all the continuity behind it having been chucked in the trash disposal?
It makes the book sort of a weird artifact. Batman gets involved near the end - both of them, since this is after Bruce Wayne comes back from the time travel thing Darkseid did to him in Final Crisis, but Grayson's still being Batman, too. Max tries to use his Super-Adaptoid rip-off OMAC to kill Wonder Woman, as payback for the neck snapping thing. But it's Wonder Woman during that weird story JMS wrote where everyone forgot she existed, and she was going around in a yoga pants and a denim jacket version of her costume. She doesn't remember any of them, and none of them remember her. Max seems to be the only one who knows why he's doing it.
This is also the book where Judd Winick threw out Ice's long-standing origin as a belonging to a group of Norse deities. Instead, that was all something she made up to run from the memories of her father being some kind of low-level grifter who tried to use her until she lost control and killed him. Also, she was Romany now for some reason. Probably not in the Top 10 most inexplicable writing decision Jud Winick made in comics, but still pretty stupid.
I did find the parts of the story dealing with Captain Atom interesting. He keeps having to absorb massive amounts of energy, and each time it flings him to some point in the far future. He's there for a period of time until he adjusts to the energy and returns home. Winick plays up how Atom feels less and less human all the time, but that he hides it behind the stoic front. It was honestly the most I've ever given a shit about Captain Atom. That's something, at least. Not much, but it's something.
And with that depressing sendoff, we conclude the letter J.
2 comments:
Agree a hundred percent with this - especially about Ice and the retcon of her origins. Around the time, I ranted in several posts on my old blog about it (first one here, I won't bore you with the rest: http://crisisonearthprime.blogspot.com/2010/11/better-off-dead.html) and I am so happy that after the New 52, that hideous retcon was never mentioned again.
I remember when this came out that Sally at Green Lantern Butts Forever was beside herself with the stupidity of that retcon. I guess Guy Gardner had made it a point to learn the language or Tora's people, had met her parents and then Winick comes along and goes, "Nope, none of that happened, somehow."
I haven't seen everything he wrote for DC (thankfully), but I'm struggling to think of anything that was any good.
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