scans_daily | Justice League Incarnate #4

lordultimus posting in

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From:

thanekos

Hey look, it's good art in superhero comics, illustrating the kind of totalizing hackwork that associates the leverage of continuity with petty pedantry.

Sure hope the former doesn't end up giving the latter more of a reputation than it deserves, again.

From:

scorntx

And there I was half expecting it to be Old White Man.

... instead it's Alan Moore's writing.
So, almost but not quite?
It's... Old White Man's Fan!

This is, what, the... fourth, fifth being that's turned out to be Behind Everything All Along now?
(also, quick question: Who's the shadowy one between SBP and Mister Mind?)

From:

thezmage

I don't recognize it but the shadowy one is in the Final Crisis spot so it would likely be something from there

EDIT: Just found this on the CBR forums: "I believe that that's the sentient form of the Anti-Life Equation that everyone ganged up on in Starlin's Cosmic Odyssey, a series that is mostly notable because it turned John Stewart into an emotional wreck for at least a decade."

Edited Date: 2022-02-02 01:09 am (UTC)

From:

scorntx

Nnnnnope, don't remember any shadowy beings looking like that in Final Crisis.

From:

thezmage

I checked on the information in the edit and, yeah, it's the Anti-Life Entity from Cosmic Odyssey and was likely used for Final Crisis if not Cosmic Odyssey

From:

scorntx

Well, checking the Wikipedia, it says Starlin said in Death of the New Goods that the Source and the Anti-Life Equation / Entity helped cause Infinite Crisis by manipulating Alex Luthor (somehow).

Which I'm guessing is what that up there's going for?

From:

werehawk

Thanks for this info. I came here to ask about that and one other thing.

From:

superfangirl1

Poor Darkseid. He thought he would be the main villain in the new up coming crisis, with controlling the darkness. Then the empty hand shows up and explain to darkseid that he is just a unwilling pawn in it master mind plan. Then proceeded to show Darkseid how insignificant he is compared to the empty hand.

From:

lordy_co

From reading the full issue I got the distinct impression that the Great Darkness is less of a guy and more of a..thing, vaguely sapient but aware enough of Existence that it wants to destroy it. Kinda reminded me of The One Below All from Immortal Hulk, tho with each of its Hands having more agency than The One's hosts.
Way better than Perpetua and her stupid DOOOOOOOOM MARTIAN/HUMAN HYBRID ARMY, one way or another y.y

Edited Date: 2022-02-02 01:04 am (UTC)

From:

thezmage

Oh, yeah, Perpetua. What was her deal? Did that story end or just peter out?

From:

scorntx

She took over the multiverse and resurrected The Batman Who Laughs, and then spent most of Death Metal (or whatever it was called) in the background until BWL clobbered her with a planet.
All entirely offscreen.

From:

thezmage

That sounds like she got the ending she deserved

From:

lizard_of_aus

There was that one scene in Death Metal where the two had a slugfest, and then BWL cocooned her in fragments of the Source Wall and that was the end of that.

From:

lordy_co

IIRC she wanted to destroy the multiverse because reasons but then the Batman who Laughs possessed the body of a Bruce Wayne/Doctor Manhattan merge from the Dark Multiverse and killed her in order to be the sole ruler of the new, corrupted multiverse.
...
Yes, really.

From:

thezmage

Sounds like I completely understood her whole deal already: she was there to fill space and time

From:

cainofdreaming

IIRC she didn't want to destroy it, just corrupt it into her vision of predatory multiverse to use it to attack her fellow creators... and take over the world! Like every night.

From:

bruinsfan

Yeah. I got the distinct impression that it took the form of a hand mainly so there could be that big visual of it and the bright hand reaching out of Heaven clasping and striking a balance.

Well, that and the titanic universe re-creating version of the Spectre wrestling with the thumb only to be crushed by the other fingers clenching around him.

From:

superfangirl1

Isn’t the empty hand us readers. We no longer read the comics (our hands are empty) and the universe dies?

I vaguely remember that in DC The Multiversity Ultra Comics

Edited Date: 2022-02-02 01:17 am (UTC)

From:

lordy_co

Not really, I think it was supposed to be the corporate aspect of comics. He had the Ultra symbol because of course we live in a reality of predatory capitalism and all that.
Still, I guess this is a detour from the route Morrison was taking, unless one tries to tie the Great Darkness to the DC editorial.

From:

beyondthefringe

As an attempt to create a linear narrative out of decades worth of crossovers, retcons, and crisises, this one is pretty clean and easy to work with, as long as the story doesn't do something to invalidate before the conclusion. I mean, played right, it could continue to provide framework for future stories as well.

Who am I kidding, someone will come along to explain that the Great Darkness is but the SHADOW of THEIR new big bad reality-threatening whatsit.

From:

lordultimus

It does kind of ruin the original Alan Moore Swamp Thing story, though. Turns out Swampy only delayed the inevitable.

From:

beyondthefringe

in comics, everything merely delays the inevitable.

From:

werehawk

Is that what that panel was referring to? Alan Moore's run? What issue is that part from (I am digging in my 30 year old memory here...)?

From:

werehawk

Wait, was it the Crisis crossover issue? 46?

From:

bruinsfan

Swamp Thing #50 actually, the grand conclusion to Moore's American Gothic storyline.

From:

werehawk

If nothing else, I really liked how Williamson tied pretty much every Crisis (and most major events) into a logical whole.

From:

werehawk

Including Kingdom Come, 52, and apparently Cosmic Odyssey.

From:

lordultimus

Actually, I think that's Kingdom Come's sequel The Kingdom, which introduced the concept of Hypertime.

From:

scorntx

Yup. That's Gog, not Magog.
Distinguishable by having a non-metal arm and red bits on his outfit.

From:

strejdaking

Okay, this sucks. This just fucking sucks. I'm not usually that type of fan, but Alan Moore's Swamp Thing being one of the first real comics I read, I don't just know, I FEEL just how soulless this garbage is.

No joke, I think Joshua Williamson might be everything that's wrong with modern DC comics? He's not the worst writer certainly, but he has the reduction of all the wildly different styles and settings into generic house style sameness, continuity porn for the sake of it, the constant need to abitrarily raise the stakes that doesn't translate to anything visibly different, focus above all else on cute character interactions at expense of arcs and meaningful development, and the fucking literalism, the inability to understand or even have any metaphor for any of the comics bullshit he's using, the writing having all the meaning and imagination of smashing toys together.

Edited Date: 2022-02-02 08:57 am (UTC)

From:

cainofdreaming

Yeah, I kinda feel like this too. This just doesn't seem to get the whole otherness in how the Great Darkness portrayed as originally. And its motivations, its quest to understand rather than destroy (though it was willing to destroy unless it got its answer).

From:

numeronone

Considering he's also doing a "Batman" run that involves Batman, Inc., but without doing anything meaningful with the characters...it does feel like he's been hired to take Morrison projects and fold them back into the generic DC IP mill.

It doesn't work with Morrison any better than it did with Moore. In fact it comes off as rather cringey and badly-written-fanfic-esque.

From:

deh_tommy

Oh my gosh, I know Death Metal basically ended with them going “screw it, nothing matters, go nuts”, but we just got done with the last big Crisis-explaining event!

From:

numeronone

Sure be nice if there were some new ideas in this book

From:

lbd_nytetrayn

Seriously. I think Into the Spiderverse had less to to with parallel worlds than the ongoing DC narrative (and is better for it).

From:

numeronone

And how ironic, considering it was based on "Spider-Men", itself a story that Joe Quesada once said would only come about if Marvel had truly run out of ideas...

From:

numeronone

Morrison: "The 'Oblivion Machine' is a metaphorical term for corporate-produced entertainment, a soulless machine that distracts people from their life's purpose until they're too old to fight back."

Williamson: "Naw man! I think it'd just be BETTER if it was a literal big old machine to make a huge generic Big Bad that the Empty Hand wants to wake up."

Morrison: "The 'Empty Hand' is meant to be me, and creators like us. His hand is empty because he's only creating to consume. He's a cosmic landlord demanding his rent money from idealistic dreams. That's why his minions are called the Gentry."

Williamson: "NOPE! He's a generic space god and his hand is empty because he's been waiting for a weapon to hold in it! Nothing has any more than surface meaning! COMICS!"

From:

stubbleupdate

Who was the woman in red who appeared in all the #1s of the new 52?

And what was her deal?

From:

lordultimus

Pandora of Pandora's Box fame. She got killed by Dr. Manhatten.

Yes, it was anti-climactic and showed how bad DC was at planning.

From:

strejdaking

Still wanna know what was her plan with merging Wildstorm universe with DCU. Maybe she had foreseen Doomsday Clock and wanted to make Superman and the Authority as an apology?

From:

scorntx

That's a weird apology.

But the reasoning given at the end of Flashpoint way back when was that a mysterious "Them" had separated the Wildstorm and Vertigo lines from the regular DC verse "in preparation for their arrival".

Whoever "They" were and why exactly their plan required this was never said.
(Or if it was, whoever knows is keeping very quiet about it.)

From:

thezmage

Pretty sure it had something to do with Darkseid and/or the Anti-Monitor and/or whatever destroyed the Crime Syndicate's world leading into Forever Evil (I may have repeated myself there) but nobody cared to follow up on it. Maybe in Doomsday Clock? I didn't even pay attention to the scans on that one so I don't know.

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Justice League Incarnate #4

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