52 – Week 28
Writer: Johns, Morrison, Rucka, Waid
Breakdowns: Keith Giffen
Pencils: Drew Johnson
Cover: JG Jones & Alex Sinclair
Inks: Jack Jadson, Rodney Ramos & Ruy Jośe
Colours: David Baron
Letters: Rob Leigh
The Long of It
“Look, this is a long an’ borin’ story” said Lobo. And so it came to pass.
This is the problem with a project of this scale. If you try and publish a book every week, with about seven or eight concurrently running stories, written by four different people, with a different person doing breakdowns from the person doing pencils, and you have three different people inking that art, then what you can be left with is a clusterf*ck.
The art is confused, and comes off looking cheap and thrown together. I actually hate myself for criticizing anything that Giffen is involved with, but five guys doing the work of two (even ignoring the different cover artists) just doesn’t work.
You get good stories intermingled with crappy ones. You get stories that last for one or two issues and then become obsolete and are clearly pointless filler dross (see Super Chief). And you get huge seemingly ridiculous gaps between developments in the stories you are interested in. Plus, something big has to happen in every story so that it seems significant. Sometimes you just have to think “less is more”.
Now don’t assume for a minute that there was nothing to like in this issue. There was. The interchanges between Questions present and future were often excellent, and interspersed with other characters chirping in. “Oh, bite me.” “He can’t”¦.He doesn’t have a mouth.” is an obvious gag, but still nicely used. I respect the work of all four writers individually, but they write differently. And sometimes things just don’t mesh together.
This issue, as well as the Questions trying to prevent the sacrifice of Batwoman, we have a strange interlude with Red Tornado; who seems mysteriously to have either read the comic already, or just made a mathematical mistake in his quest for the answer to life, the universe and everything, as he keeps repeating “52” or “Rosebud” or something equally inane. If there’s a point to this, please get to it quickly.
And then we have the most surreal and yet shitty story of the lot. What the f*ck is this space story all about? You have Starfire (who I could care less about), Adam Strange (who has actually become less interesting since being blinded), Animal Man (who I do actually give a shit about, but who is doing pretty much bugger all), Lobo (who is suffering the worst reinvention of an already shitty character ever) and a flying space dolphin (I’m not even going to go there). And having defeated the flying green space-head whose eye Lobo stole (yes, it really is this shit), they now have to go and tackle something called The Stygian Passover. So these aliens are now naming their catastrophes after an Ancient Greek word pertaining to the Underworld and a Jewish religious event, are they? Riiiiiiiiight.
Oh, and then we get the origin of Catman. He was bored so he hunted Batman. He got fat and shitty. He stopped being fat and shitty. We get it. That’s not an origin story.
Screw this guys, you broke my brain. I’m going home.
The Short of It
I know you’ll buy it, just like I did. And just like we’ll all buy next issue. We’re going to get the set. But unless there’s some major progress in the next 24 issues, this is one experiment that will largely have failed. And by major progress, I don’t mean more Earth-shattering events. I mean progress in the storytelling. Because at the moment we’re wading in shit. I nearly said Waiding, but it’s not fair to single Mark out, because I haven’t a clue which one of them is f*cking this up at the moment. And the sad thing is, I don’t think they have either.
Grade: D I don’t score things well that require me to take prescription medication afterwards.
