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COUNTDOWN TO INFINITE CRISIS
Rob: I liked it a lot. If that is the last Ted Kord story, then it was a good way to go out. I just hope that whatever he did to Max's files was important and he didn't just go down for no reason other than to explain Max's plot to the readers.
John: I thought that was the best Blue Beetle solo story I’ve ever read. Giffen and DeMatteis had written some great ones with Beetle and Booster in the JLI, but Countdown did a good job bringing out the best in a character that has been mishandled for several years. Figures that the one time they give show him some respect, it’s to make non-Beetle fans care about him before they put a bullet in his head. THE CRISES KEEP ON COMING
John: Beetle had his hands full. Someone was stealing money from Kord Omniversal and bankrupting him, someone besides Booster Gold. Then, someone stole 100 pounds of Kryptonite from a Kord warehouse.
Superman: Great Krypton!
John: Yeah, you’d better get the fuck out of dodge, Clark. Booster almost got killed by a bolt of lightning meant for Beetle. And one of his Bugs was blown up. Beetle’s investigation into whatever Project: OMAC is brought him into a business lunch with that two-faced scumbag Maxwell Lord and afternoon tea in the Batcave. At least he got some free meals out of it. Then he ended up in some strange detours. As if visiting one cave wasn’t enough, Beetle sure wasn’t expecting to get a chance to hang out in the cave of the wizard SHAZAM (who didn't offer him any refreshments) and find out that the Spectre has gone crazy and is trying to wipe out all the magic in the universe.
Blue Beetle: Eh.
John: And he spent some time getting nursemaided by Wonder Woman on the moon, where he found out that there is gonna be interstellar war between the planets Rann and Thanagar.
Blue Beetle: Not my problem.
John: To his credit, Beetle shrugged off and ignored all the stuff that had nothing to do with him. Beetle might be shocked to learn that Lex Luthor had formed a new Secret Society and they are just as confused as Beetle is over who stole the 100 pounds of Kryptonite.
Superman: It wasn’t Luthor? Damn, he was my only suspect.
SOMETHING’S BEEN BUGGING ME
John: Beetle discovered the secret of OMAC, that it stands for One Man Army Corps. Also, it’s a satellite information system with data on every metahuman in the DC Universe. The man responsible is Maxwell Lord, the new King of Checkmate. And then Max shot him in the head. What the fuck?
Rob: I like what they did with Beetle. They made him thoroughly human. He can't get the girl, he has trouble with his friends, his finances are in the shitter, his colleagues don't take him seriously, and he's completely vulnerable. In the end, he was a lot more human than Max, sitting in his mountain fortress surrounded by super-soldiers. At the same time, he was still heroic, and he figured out something that the first-stringers couldn't have. He started seeing himself as an outsider among the other heroes, but he still was a hero regardless. He never quit, he never backed down, he never lost the mission. See, he's a champion, he lives as if the world was the way it should be...
John: In a way, Max killed Beetle almost as a sign of respect. Beetle was always smarter and more resourceful than anyone gave him credit for, including himself. When you look at the Giffen and DeMatteis JLI, Beetle was the only non-powered human in the group besides Batman and in the early issues before he settled into being a fat, lazy clown, Beetle was fairly respected. Max even expected Beetle to figure his plan out, knowing Beetle is better than people think. When the Queen Bee needed someone to murder Max, she implanted the mental command in Beetle, not Booster, because Beetle was the more dangerous one.
Rob: Max thought it would be either Batman or Beetle, but it looks like it was both, with Batman beating Beetle to it. That's what I hate about the way they write Batman. Batman all of sudden just appears with the satellite network up on the Batcomputer. How did he figure it all out? By being Batman. Lame.
John: That’s one of the biggest problems with how Batman is presented nowadays. He’s not a character anymore; he’s a plot convention. He can do anything, beat anyone, without much effort, just because “he’s Batman, he has it figured out.”
Rob: We saw Beetle sweat and suffer to finally get to the bottom of Max's maneuvers against him. To me, that makes Beetle fucking cool. I can relate to that, as much as I can relate to any millionaire inventor who dresses like a bug and invades secret mountain strongholds. I don't think you're doing Batman a service by making things look too easy for him though. When Batman gives it all he's got to stop the Joker's killing sprees, that's cool. When he instantly deducts every part of a global threat to meta-humanity, not so cool.
John: That’s the other problem, the paranoid monomaniac Batman’s been turned into. What part of globally monitoring and hatching intricate battle scenarios for defeating every known metahuman on the planet fits into his vow to his parents to wage a holy war on criminals? TO THE MAX
Rob: I don't have a problem with Max being behind Checkmate and even killing Beetle. Yeah, that's not the Max we knew from JLI, but characters change and everyone has a different interpretation. Heel turns are fine too. Max makes sense in the role of kind of Checkmate. That's sort of what he was in the JLI, the guy pulling the strings. I buy it. What I don't buy is that he "always kept the League ineffectual." Nonsense. Obviously that wasn't what the character was doing at the time, and clearly that's not what Giffen and DeMatteis had in mind. If it really fits their purposes for this story, fine, I'll go with it, but I'm definitely not going to read old JLI's and think that Max was keeping them ineffectual the whole time. I think they could've done better, but it was probably just a throwaway line the writer didn't think more than twice about, so whatever.
John: The idea that Checkmate is what Max was up to all those years ago up today just doesn’t wash. It works if you know nothing about the character, but it’s right there, in print, in 60 issues of JLI and JLA who Maxwell Lord is. Why contradict that with a whole new unfounded motivation even if it expediently serves your story? It would be better if something happened that caused Max to decide that he needs to keep tabs on every metahuman on the planet. Maybe something did, I don’t know, I haven’t been reading. But Max kept the League ineffectual? That really gets my goat. My one major complaint against DC’s worldview, so to speak, is the sweeping perception that the Justice League International was a disgrace. It wasn’t. The JLI was great and the Max I knew was proud of his team and wanted to be more heroic like them, although he wanted to fire them all the other half of the time.
Rob: That's what was good about this story, I think they redeemed the old JLI a little through Beetle. Yeah, they ran it down a little and called it ineffectual, but Beetle, and to a lesser extent Booster, got his props here. The JLI is an easy target though. I don't think there are too many big JLI fans out there, so no one really cares if they shit on it. It's too bad, because in between the Kooey Kooey Kooey and Manga Khan stories, which were good in their own right, there were some good serious stories. They fought Despero, Queen Bee and the Extremists. They were pretty bad ass. But they weren't the big guns, and they were goofy, so no one cares.
John: I care. To me, the JLA Grant Morrison created that lasted through today doesn’t make sense. On paper, the most powerful heroes banded together sounds great, especially if you’re a kid and you think more power solves all problems. But as a day to day thing, the iconic JLA doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The JLI made perfect sense because they were people who lived together and were a family with personalities, issues, and quirks. Their lives were the Justice League and they are part of the world they protected, not demi-gods hanging out on the moon.
OLD FRIENDS
Rob: The Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman bits was real mark-out stuff. I got a chill when he clicked on Superman's file. Good shit. I liked that this was about superheroes too. They managed to make this about wish-fulfillment, alienation, identity, all that good Stan Lee stuff, and just about the genre too. Not bad for 80 pages.
John: The part that bothered me, or made me sad, whatever, was when Beetle ran into J’Onn in the Watchtower. Again, I haven’t been reading, but what happened to J’Onn? He was always aloof, but he used to be kindly and he had a wry sense of humor. The callous disregard for Beetle was upsetting, especially since we’re seeing the story from Beetle’s point of view, and J’Onn was his teammate and his friend once. Actually, on the whole I don’t like the smugness and haughtiness with which the DC superheroes in general carry themselves. I liked the reverential awe with which Beetle everyone regarded Superman, but I always saw Superman as someone you could approach, someone who would give you the time of day. I’m glad they showed that aspect of Wonder Woman, that’s she’s gentle and compassionate.
Rob: You know, if you want to, you can read the coldness of the A-Listers as sort of a commentary on how the JLI is remembered. No one cares about them because they weren't the big guns. I agree, Superman shouldn't be so dismissive. There was a line in the book that suggested that Superman could make you feel important, but that definitely didn't come across. The way I see, that wasn't really Superman's treatment of Beetle, but Superman's fans' treatment of the memory of the League. Of course, that may be considered a reach. After all, Superman is a dick. Wonder Woman was done well, no complaints there. She certainly wasn't the Alex Ross Wonder Woman who would just as soon run Beetle through with her sword as look at him. I'm not sure what to make of J'Onn. I loved him in JLI, but while I haven't read much else with him, it seems like what we saw in Countdown is closer to the conventional portrayal of the Martian Manhunter. Still, it was pretty jarring to see him dis Beetle like that. Even if you don't want to write him as an Oreo-loving Gumby, you could at least give a nod to the fact that when he and Beetle knew each other, J'Onn was a very different kind of person. Or Martian, whatever.
PULLED BACK IN
Rob: Good, intelligent story. Fun to read. Made me feel something. Reminded me of why I used to love reading comics. I'm pretty happy with it.
John: If all their comics were like that, I’d buy them all. By 'were like that', I mean 'cost a dollar.'
Rob: Well, they've sucked us in for the next six months anyway. Wouldn't it be a kick in the nuts if OMAC, Villains United, Day of Vengeance, and the Rann/Thanagar War all sucked? |
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