Really going to talk about the Norse gods in DC and leave out the best parts?

 

Infinite Frontier Brings Back Alan Scott's Daughter Jade

That's a nice surprise.

 

What's surprising is they forgot to even mention her twin brother, Obsidian whose right there next to Jade and their father.

 

I find I like what they're doing with her in the main Batman book. She's effectively been folded into the Bat-family. It's clearly corporately mandated, reminding me of when Marvel turned Venom into a good guy, but for Harley it actually kind of works. They've toned her down from the caricature she's been for the last 15 years, and she actually feels developed. As you say, she's evolving beyond "abused ex-GF", which describes her character from the minute they folded her into the proper DC Universe from the animated series. Never thought I'd say that about a character so co-opted and bastardized over the years for the benefit of Hot Topic.

 

Which is why they've created a replacement character to fill that Joker sidekick role, Punchline.

But it is funny about the folding into the Bat-Family thing. I think DC noticed how well it worked in Injustice the past 6 or 7 years, and decided it was time to try it in the main universe.

 

Harley being on Batman's resistance in the Injustice games/comics was one of the dumber things about that franchise but so long as Harley stays in the Bat-books where she belongs, I can't really care if it happens in the main universe.

 

Apparently in the latest Death Metal one-shot

Spoiler

Superboy Prime is redeemed and gets a happy ending!

 

Good. I hated what they did to him in Infinite Crisis and beyond.

 

Summary of what happened in the issue.

Spoiler

Prime awaits the final battle with the Darkest Knight's "Last 52" multiverse alongside the other heroes and villains. He stands alone on the battlefield, rejected by the Superman Family and their rogues gallery, and reflects on his life and the loss of everyone and everything he cared about, and how he was never able to be a hero. Depressed and nihilistic after the multiple cosmic reboots and retcons he has witnessed, he hurls himself into the fight with an army of alternate Supermen. As he strikes one, he has a vision of that Superman's world changing to reflect Superboy-Prime's own desires. Realising that he is able to tap into Darkest Knight's energy and once again possesses the ability to reshape reality with his blows, he flies away from the battle to confront the Darkest Knight. He proves equal to the Darkest Knight, despite the other's immense power. Superboy-Prime plans to steal Darkest Knight's power, destroy what remains of reality and the people who hate him, and create his own perfect world; however the arrival of Krypto, the only one who showed him any kindness, causes him to stay his hand. The Darkest Knight offers him a world of his own, where he can be the beloved and accepted hero he always wanted to be alongside the characters he loved as a child, if he joins the Darkest Knight's forces. Prime rejects him, and strikes the Darkest Knight with all his power, creating a massive explosion, killing him and injuring the Darknest Knight. He falls from the sky dead as the Last 52 worlds vanish, his sacrifice unnoticed by anyone but Krypto. Clark Kent suddenly finds himself in his bedroom, reading Dark Knights: Death Metal: The Secret Origin #1, looking at his own dead body on the page. Laurie arrives to ask him out to lunch, as they walk down the street, Clark realises that, although the world looks different than he remembers, he knows he is really home. A child chases a ball into the street into the path of a car, Clark runs in after them and lifts the car above his head.

 

I’m glad they turned him around. I liked him as a character and I had hoped he would get a chance to be redeemed.

 

As this was co-written by Johns...

 

Which is really weird as Johns did a lot of the dragging of Prime through the mud.

I generally do not care enough about the character to care if he’s redeemed or not. I’ve never found him particularly interesting or compelling. At least with an ending like this we aren’t likely to see him again so yippee?

 

The problem with Johns and his redemption stories is that the scale of his characters' evil is so ridiculously over the top exaggerated that it's not really possible to redeem them if readers have any memory at all of what Johns previously wrote. Superboy Prime being one example. Black Adam being another.

Black Adam (as Johns had been using him, to be fair) was an extremely interesting antihero/villain on a redemption path, but then Johns wrote him massacring an entire country. Killed every man, woman, slaughtered all the children of an entire nation. Mass murder of millions, and in a sense putting him on a scale beyond people like Stalin, because Black Adam murdered all of these people personally, one by one, not by proxy. Well, that character is done at that point. Unusable. Putting him back on a redemption path after that is just so silly, so divorced from any sense of scale or believability that it becomes impossible to the point of insult to read.

So I'm not sure what excuse Johns concocted for SBP, but if it undoes enough of the character assassination Johns himself perpetrated upon the character that we can move on, then cool. And then put the character behind, never to be revisited again. To be honest, I'd rather leave all pre-Crisis characters out of the hands of modern writers, who have proven again and again they can't be trusted with them. The urge to deconstruct, to completely subvert, or just plain shit on them is too strong, I guess.

 

BA crimes were rectonned after the reboot, same with SBP, so it doesn't matter. Plus both probably killed less people than Megatron in IDW and the fandom still brought into his redemption.

 

At least with Megatron, you are talking about over the course of centuries if not longer. With Black Adam, it was one day.

 

If I remember correctly BA was mentally tortured into insanity.

 

A Third Wave Of Job Cuts In The New Year For DC Comics and Warners

 

Holy fuck, when will it end?!!

 

Either in a very reduced line consisting of mostly Batman comics or being shuttered.

Saw this before. First they fire all the high earners at the company, then they replace them with their assistants and new hires. Then they fire more (Already fired a new hire after 3 months who was their editor for Young reader books) Not a good sign. They they keep letting peole go, if it still doesn't make enough, they declare it unprofitable and close.
The thing is this is just a small part of AT&T time warner, and even if it's making as slight profit, unless it's making what their analysis says it should be, it's just another way they can cut costs and save money, which they owe a lot of. They are betting everything on HBO Max, so they are cutting other studios/businesses just to make it more profitable.

DC may or may not make it out of this. It maybe cheaper for them to just license the characters out to another comic company to make comics than it is to publish them themselves.

 

Superman's Most RIDICULOUS Toy Probably Saved His Life



Cool Supermobile Jon.