Guys, I know I was fairly positive about Convergence last week, but Week 2 is just at best remedial, at worst offensive. It's pretty much everything you hate about the 1990s. Just look at this punch-up:
And if it felt a little forced for everyone to be in Gotham on Week 1, at least the city was primed to be a postapocalyptic hell hole. Metropolis, not so much, and in trying to get all the "replacements" there, they strain willing suspension of disbelief to its limit. And they don't even do it right. Batman may have been back when Zero Hour did its minor retcon, but he needn't have been in Metropolis, leaving the field clear for Azrael; so why are they BOTH here? Conversely, where the hell is Superman? He was also back, but his absence is conspicuous. Superboy should be in Hawaii at this point, etc. There's a definite lack of continuity between Weeks 1 and 2, like the way super-tech is handled (sometimes works, sometimes not), and where Week 1's characters had to walk or fly to the other cities, there's a whole lot of teleportation going on this week. And even within the same city, the continuity is paltry. Catwoman is the queen of Suicide Slum in her series (somehow one of the more upbeat and positive of the batch), but it's also overrun by Tobias Whale's forces in Shadow of the Bat.
Ultimately, the failure is in the writing. The worst books of the lot have characters spending an inordinate amount of time saying what the images clearly tell us, recapping events from a single page ago, or making the characters absolute idiots. Steel pulling his punches against Gen13 because they're just kids, taking way too long to realize they're not just kids, but kids with POWERS, comes to mind. Or how about that horrendous Green Arrow meets Connor Hawke scene? So awful. Even the highlight of the batch, Supergirl Matrix by Keith Giffen is, while humorous, an ANGRY kind of humorous, with people shouting at each other with a rather misogynistic streak.
And I'm not letting the art off the hook either. Behind some rather cool covers lies some pretty dreary art. There are exceptions, like Tom Mandrake, Ron Randall and Timothy Green, but even a charmer like June Brigman gets inked to an inch of her artistic life by smudgy Roy Richardson. It's especially apparent in comics that have the Kingdom Come characters in them. The designs looked gorgeous when Alex Ross created them, but it's always been difficult for standard pencils to capture them. They look so awful in most of these books that it often took me a minute to figure out they weren't some Wildstorm atrocities (and we haven't seen Magog's "Image-ish" heroes). So yeah, pretty bad.
Meanwhile, in the core event book, there are shots of Stan Lee's Just Imaginaverse fighting those ridiculous Futures' End cyborgs and losing... I would have much rather seen the former feature in Week 2 proper.
In the interest of positivity and keeping to the format established last week (spoilers ahead), let me still attempt 5 Favorite Moments from Convergence Week 2:
5. Bruce Wayne and
Comments
Suicide Squad, I only bought to see old fat Amanda Waller. She was great.
But yeah, these books are insanely underwhelming.
This is deliberately a crossover whose chapters will have little impact on anything, and DC suspects that it's going to be kind of crappy. The only meaningful parts, if there are any, will happen in the final issue.
d: Blog fodder. I make way too many decisions based on what I want/need to put on the blog.
Micheal: That's not a problem for me. It's the nature of comics. How WOULD Dick handle the mantle of the Bat? Pretty darn nicely, as it turns out. It's not about making a change that lasts, but about answering a question and perhaps advancing a character to the next step.
Anon: Not much speculation since that's exactly what DC said Convergence was for, technically. It's really only about seeing some old versions of characters in action again, and possibly cause a minor continuity tweak by letting some characters back into the DCU. If it's "meaningful" to anyone, it's the New52 Earth2 characters who are homeless after the events of the last year's E2 books.
It was all magically fixed in the #0 issues, and we later learned that wasn't a metaphor thanks to Zatanna, J'onn, and Perry.
Point is, they missed an opportunity for extra grim if that's not when this was set.
I used to feel the same way, but (as Siskoid says) I don't think the point of those stories is for change. Comics aren't quite like other forms of media. There is never going to be a big change to Batman's status quo, so the point of any story isn't the destination, but the journey. Going into Dick-As-Batman expecting that it's going to be a lasting change will just leave you disappointed. Going into it wondering how Dick will cope with being Batman, and how other characters will react, THAT's the point.
(Obviously this rule is less hard and fast when it comes to less A-list characters. You can make more lasting changes to some of those. But still, people get held up on the wrong things. If all you care about is the big changes, you might as well just rid a list of spoiler articles on-line, or the final page of every book that exists. The fun stuff happens in the middle!)
Liam: You said it even better than I did.