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Doomsday!
March 5th, 2007
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But when he comes back from the dead, will he have a mullet?
One of the biggest hype-ups and cop-outs in comics history. Only the Spider-Man Clone Saga was a bigger ripoff, IMHO.
If you want to read a great mainstream DC comics epic, you have at least three choices, all featuring Batman:
Knightfall/Knightquest/Knight’s End (Bruce Wayne is weakened and taken out of action, and a less worthy person becomes Batman)
Cataclysm/No Man’s Land
(Gotham City devastated by earthquake and quarantined from the rest of the country, but a number of die-hards – good and bad – remain)
Hush (New villain that makes the Joker look like Rodney Dangerfield)
All are available as trade paperbacks. I’d love to see HBO do a live-action miniseries on the earthquake saga!
Depends how far into the story they go. My favourite bit is the Funeral for a Friend section, kind of the point of the whole storyline really.
Was the Knigtfall thing the whole bit where Azrael takes over for Bruce Wayne? If so that was horrible. There are elements of Doomsday I didn’t like (if anyone should be Superman’s killer it should be Lex Luthor, not some random guy like Doomsday), but it was till kind of cool.
So true, NG. But once you get into “Reign of the Supermen” you’re sunk, unless they plan to revise that part (Steel – the black pseudo-Superman – has already flopped in both books and the movies).
OW, that was the top half of the second part of the trilogy: Knightquest: The Crusade. A LOT of fans didn’t like that because AzBats was made to do things Wayne wouldn’t do, such as kill an opponent. (Remember the lurid cover that shows Azrael/Batman beating the Jeebus out of somebody with a baseball bat?) The point, I think, was that after Wayne recovered, he had to do battle with an unhinged superhero to recover the mantle of the Bat.
Knightfall’s good, but I skipped over most of Knightquest in the end to the inevitable end.
I don’t envy anyone trying to adapt, or even comprehend, the plotline of Reign of the Supermen. John Henry Irons rules, though. He needs to be included.
YMMV. I’m struggling to think of a mainstream 1990’s superhero epic that was good, whereas I can think of quite a number that make me cringe (Clone Saga, Parallax, Legacy Virus, Onslaught/Heroes Reborn, …).
Not to say there wasn’t some legitimately good indy and creator-owned stuff. Madman, Astro City, Transmet, off the top of my head.
…Thunderbolts. The first 12 issues of Thunderbolts were good. So there’s a mainstream ’90’s arc I liked.
And of course animated Batman was gold.
And given that Bruce Timm’s overseeing all these direct-to-video projects, I expect they’ll be great stuff too, whether or not I like the source material. (But I really am looking forward to New Frontier. And hoping they eventually get back to DCAU stuff — like the Near-Apocalypse of 2009.)