DC These Days

DC is finally unveiling their answer to Marvel's Ultimates line (a line which in my opinion has been pretty good overall, or at least was - some of the titles are starting to lose their blush for me) with All Stars. The first book to come out is Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder this Wednesday, the 13th.

The book is a Robin book, with Bats as a huge supporting character. It is starting from when Dick Grayson is 12 and has been taken in by Batman after Dick's parents have been killed. It is written by Frank Miller, and there is an excellent interview about it here at newsarama.

Given that the createive team (Jim Lee is the artist behind it) are given pretty free reign, this could make for a particularly interesting read. Miller wrote what some consider to be the seminal Batman work, The Dark Knight Returns. He has had great runs on several other books as well, including his own unique creation, Sin City. Of course, he also wrote the sequal to The Dark Knight Returns which was, at least in my opinion, not a great series. Nonetheless, I think this is definitely worth looking in to.

Also, DC is currently building up to a huge even (or so they promise) called Infinite Crisis. There are four limited series building to it, Villains United, which for my money is one of the best books on the stands right now, The Omac Project which is a fairly solid book, although between the Tower of Babel storyline in JLA, the War Games story line that spanned all the Bat titles and this story, I'm getting a little tired of people using Bats' own plans against him, Day of Vengeance, which looks to be DC doing a little house cleaning on the mystical side of things, with the now-hostless (thanks to the return of Hal Jordon to being Green Lantern) Spectre being influenced by Eclipso to destroy all magic, and lastly, though not leastly, The Rann-Thanagar War, which features those two planets splitting the DC Universe down the middle to ally themselves with one of the two sides. This spawned directly from the excellent Adam Strange series, and unfortunately, in my opinion does not hit as strong a note as its predecessor did.

Nonetheless, they are all at least enjoyable, and some have moments of sheer brilliance. The story most talked about now is that after Infinite Crisis, a story so big that there will be a fair amount of time just dealing with the emotional consequences, they are going to jump the DC universe 1 year ahead to show us the long-range impact of the story, rather than have all of their books telling stories about the characters picking up the pieces. If this story is as significant as it promises to be, this should be a pretty exciting time to be reading funnybooks.

If any of this has caught your interest, I encourage you to go down to your local comic shop and look in to it. They even have a kind of "primer" book out now called Prelude to Infinite Crisis. Also, recognizing how huge this event is, DC has created a section of their site called Crisis Counseling which is a weekly roadmap to the events leading up to the Infinite Crisis. They obviously know how big and hard to keep track of this whole thing is, and so are trying to help the reader enjoy the ride.

I know I will.