The OFFICIAL FINAL CRISIS THREAD

[TheCorpulent1]

Brother I has always just been a different name for Brother Eye. It's read as "Brother Mark One."

 

[yahman]

Yeah, the Greek gods are morons.

Ironic seeing as they where some of the most intellectual people to have ever existed.

Solomon wasn't even a God, they might as well have the wisdom of Socrates or something ?

 

[yahman]

Well, it's easier to simply consider the fact that, they're "Gods". What does that entail? They're simply really powerful humanoids? Do they posses the ability to be able to actually be multiple beings at once? Makes about as much sense as them being dreams who've achieved existence due to enough people believing in them, which is what the "Gods" are as stated in Sandman.

I think Alan Moore uses a simillar idea in Promethea, although i haven't read much of it. IMO its a clever twist of Plato's and George Berkleys' Idealism theory, where the physical reality is a disstorted reflection of the true reality, which actually amounts to nothing more than ideas in our head. In other words when we see a glass we only think we are seeing a glass, when we are actually recieving the idea of a glass. In Promethea it is the Immateria where all these ideas come from. Shazam's and Sandmans Gods work in the same way, i suppose.

 

[Anubis]

Yeah, you simply gotta take into account that, this whole thing is based on some metaphysical mumbo jumbo. It's all open to interpretation.

I also read Promethea (the whole thing. Three times.) and I still feel as though i've only grasped a fraction of all the ideas Moore was using. Awesome stuff. I love comics that make me think.

 

[yahman]

What i love about Moores work, is that even his most trivial stories have some sort of philosphical fable esq quality. If you go through the short stories in his D.C. collection, they all manage to touch on something profound, whether its ethics, or epistemology its all clever stuff. The only modern writer who seems to match Moores ethusiam for philosophy is Ellis, and even he seems to have lost the plot recently.

 

[Aristotle]

Yeah, Ellis has fallen off a bit, but frankly, Moore did for awhile there too (and this is coming from a hardcore Moore fan). Lost Girls blew ass. Thankfully, he's back like a maniac with The Black Dossier.

But if you're depressed about Ellis' losing the muse lately, check out Jamie Delano's new Narcopolis from Avatar. Man, it's so much better than his Hellblazer work, and I loved every issue of that.

 

[Aristotle]

Solomon wasn't even a God, they might as well have the wisdom of Socrates or something ?

He wasn't a god, true...but he was pretty much the most badass guy in the whole Bible. That man was SO WISE...he was like Buddha, but for Jews...Jewddha...

Yes, but the "gods of magic" featured in the Trials of Shazam miniseries are literally different people than the classic Olympians featured in the old Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, and current Countdown series. The "gods of magic" deal more exclusively with the rules and enforcements of magic and, again, it's been emphasized in that series that they are not connected to the actual gods that people worshiped, even though they are called by the same names and are associated with the same personas and histories. Atlas holds up the world, Hercules has his labors, Achilles has his heel, etc.

Hokay. I knew I was gonna regret dropping that ****ing book. So there are apparently two sets of gods. One is the Olympian set of gods (which, along with the former Kang-Daddy of the Jews, gives Mary her powers, apparently), and one is the magical set, which apparently now powers Freddie.

Here's my question: Which one used to power the Marvels, back before Infinite Crisis? Was it these magical ****ers? Or the real ones? Also, if these magical ****ers are all about the rules of magic and whatnot, how is that gonna play into what Giffen's doing in that new book about Hell? I thought HE was defining the rules of magic?

Hopefully, the whole Trials book will just be retconned out. It needs to be. I don't say a thing like that often or lightly, but it really needs to be.

I'd like to see them clear this up by someone saying "But that makes no sense!" and Hercules or somebody being like "**** you, we're gods."

Yes, that would be awesome.

 

[Aristotle]

This will certainly never create problems down the line, so sir.

As I read this, knowing an explanation would be forthcoming later down the page, my head began to hurt pre-emptively...

It would have worked so much better as an 80pg monthly, or 32 page bi-weekly.

80-page monthly...now that there's an idea that should happen.

It honestly comes across a bit better in execution than in summary...which is also pretty telling, when you think about it. But it's really not as if you're reading the story and all of a sudden WHAT THERE ARE TWO SETS OF GODS NOTHING MAKES SENSE

So you're saying I should read Trials of Shazam?

...sigh...OK...it better turn out to be a LOT better than the first issue, and the fifth or sixth or whichever other one I picked up for some **** reason.

Hmmmm, this completely contradicts what we just said, but f@#$ it. if magic is good enough for Quesada and marvel its good enough for me! PRINT IT!

Hmm. You know, I think you've hit upon the reason for every poor decision he's made as DC's EIC.

Do they posses the ability to be able to actually be multiple beings at once?

But why would they do that? I'm not arguing here, I just don't see WHY they'd decide to be two completely separate sets of gods, when the old ONE set worked just ****ing fine, and was a lot less confusing.

Anyone else catch in Batman&Outsiders they kept calling Brother Eye "Brother I?" Does DC even have editors?

They've been doing that since The OMAC Project, but now I'm starting to wonder if there are actually two different Brothers now. Because in Countdown, Brother Eye is this really hammed-up, techno-supervillainous, big scary planet-eating badass with big Silver-Agey plans, and his OMACs are too. It's like they're Silver-Age-ified versions of the original Infinite Crisis versions. And then over in BATO, Brother I is secretive, working with a shadowy cabal and a corporation, possibly connected to the Salvation Run prison planet, definitely not planning anything involving Apokolips, or Bludhaven, or Buddy Blank, or Karate Kid.

And by the way, is old man Buddy Blank supposed to be the same as the Buddy Blank used to be the original, real, ass-kicking, Kirby OMAC?

 

[Anubis]

I was watching the History Channel and they had a thing on various books that were left outta the Bible, and there was one that followed Solomon during his Hebrew Dr. Fate days where he had a magic ring and fought and defeated an army of demons, whom he forced to build that big ass temple of his.

 

[Aristotle]

Screw Dr. Fate. Bring on Dr. Solomon. He would *****-slap Eclipso and Mordru and Neron and Brother Eye and whoever the **** else.

 

[Anubis]

Don't f**k with him, he's got the eye of the Jew!!

 

[Aristotle]

He will SO own Dr. Strange.

He should definitely try to hip himself up for the swingin' 2000s, but fail and just kinda look like a faux hip-hop dude from the late 1990s, and call himself Kang-Daddy, mostly because I want a magical mystical badass sorceror called Kang-Daddy Solomon who dresses like Flava Flav, but with more taste.

 

[BrianWilly]

Here's my question: Which one used to power the Marvels, back before Infinite Crisis? Was it these magical ****ers? Or the real ones? Also, if these magical ****ers are all about the rules of magic and whatnot, how is that gonna play into what Giffen's doing in that new book about Hell? I thought HE was defining the rules of magic?

Pre-Crisis, the Marvels and Black Adam got their power from the classic Olympian ones that were the same people across all the books, and even into Vertigo. The Gods of Magic are entirely a new, Winick-made invention which were explained by the whole "Tenth Age of Magic" shenanigans going on in the DCU.

The way it works is..."Zeus" is the top-ranking title for a lord of magic, as is "Achilles" or even "Apollo." The bearers of those titles can change, or even change from person to person. The title comes with traits and obligations and powers and weaknesses and even personalities of those mythological names, though the extent varies. For all intents and purposes they are referred to as "gods," treated as if they are those gods, and behave accordingly. Currently, they have all taken on modern personas and are existing as ordinary-looking people that may or may not resemble their titles. Hercules is a convict in prison, Achilles is a military commander in the Middle East, and Solomon is a female tattoo artist. Yes, you read that right.

No idea how they will tie into Reign in Hell, but Winick hasn't actually gone into any explicit details about what they do, so Giffen is pretty much free to do whatever he wants or to ignore them entirely if he chooses.

So you're saying I should read Trials of Shazam?

Ahh...maybe? If you really disliked the first few issues, I can't imagine the next few are going to that much better. And if you liked the old Captain Marvel stories at all in any way...well, proceed with caution. But you never know. The first TPB volume (out of two) is out already, and I'd say give it a look-through in the store.

If you're just interested in the series just to see what the gods of magic are about, I wouldn't bother. It's too vague, Winick has only developed it about halfway -- the explanation that I just gave up there pretty much sums everything up -- and no other writer has shown even an inkling of interest in it. And with the return of the Olympians in Countdown and Simone's hints that other pantheons are going to be important soon in Wonder Woman, they just don't fit in very well. I really can't imagine that the whole gods of magic concept is going to last past the end of the miniseries.

 

[Aristotle]

Wow. I try to defend a lot of what Winick does...but that's just wholesale, 100%, certified, grade-A, ******ed.

 

[BrianWilly]

Well, it's easier to simply consider the fact that, they're "Gods". What does that entail? They're simply really powerful humanoids? Do they posses the ability to be able to actually be multiple beings at once? Makes about as much sense as them being dreams who've achieved existence due to enough people believing in them, which is what the "Gods" are as stated in Sandman.

I think Alan Moore uses a simillar idea in Promethea, although i haven't read much of it. IMO its a clever twist of Plato's and George Berkleys' Idealism theory, where the physical reality is a disstorted reflection of the true reality, which actually amounts to nothing more than ideas in our head. In other words when we see a glass we only think we are seeing a glass, when we are actually recieving the idea of a glass. In Promethea it is the Immateria where all these ideas come from. Shazam's and Sandmans Gods work in the same way, i suppose.

Yeah, you simply gotta take into account that, this whole thing is based on some metaphysical mumbo jumbo. It's all open to interpretation.

See, I love all that. I love it when stories play with esoteric ideas like that. And Gaiman's American Gods, for one thing, gave a really cool idea for why a god can literally be two gods.

The problem is that all of this simply isn't going to work in the DCU right now, or even anytime soon. A concept like this which deals with such abstract, such "higher" levels of thought is simply not going to work in this shared universe where the gods are actual characters onto themselves making huge impacts on multiple stories and multiple characters and need to have consistency and function. An influential writer needs to sit his/her ass down and say, "Okay, this is how it works, the end." And then many other writers have to be consistent with that rule through enough stories to have it established into as reliable and usable a "rule" in the universe as the Speed Force or, hell, even the multiverse. This cannot be fanwanked. Zeus cannot be "open to interpretation" like that, one person in one story and another person in another story without any real reason, because he's not just a god...he's a character.

Half of the entire problem is that Winick simply hasn't explained his whole gods concept in any functional way that correlates with the DCU in the past. It's literally as if we were taken from "Hellboy" canon into "Harry Potter" canon. And with this series being so frustratingly slow, no one else has been able to build on it. And with Winick leaving the concept behind him after the next issue, it doesn't look like he's going to build on it either. How does he expect any Shazam-writer after him to be able to follow up on a concept that's absurdly experimental and virtually unexplained, and yet is supposed to fit in as a pivotal aspect of this universe as if it's always been that way? Countdown has already ignored it outright to tell their story of Mary, for better or for worse.

The DCU, maybe now moreso than ever before, needs functional magic; magic that may not make sense with anything else, but clearly and reliably makes sense in itself. "It's magic, we don't have to explain it" is unanimously mocked as a storytelling device, and rightly so, because it sucks as a storytelling device and always has.

 

[Anubis]

Well, the good thing is (depending on your preference), it's all pretty much open to whatever now. The next writer can do pretty much whatever they want.

 

[Aristotle]

I think that Winick's attempt at creating rules for magic will actually do the reverse. It will actually make magic LESS functional, as a storytelling device, since it already directly contradicts another Marvel Family member's power, so it will INCREASE the "anything goes, they're gods, it's magic, **** you" mentality.

 

[Arkady Rossovich]

When is this going to start?..and let me guess,there will be more events after this?

 

[Aristotle]

Of course there will be. They've already announced Blackest Night in the GL titles in 2009.

 

[Darthphere]

Communist Dickbag aka Arkady Rossovich loves to state the obvious and ask questions he already knows the answer to.

 

[BrianWilly]

Well, the good thing is (depending on your preference), it's all pretty much open to whatever now. The next writer can do pretty much whatever they want.

Which is basically the opposite of what Trials of Shazam should have done.

 

[Assassin]

cant wait for this.

 

[Darthphere]

You would say that.

 

[Assassin]

i love the word crisis in any 7 issue mini's title

 

[Darthphere]

So you would buy "Adam Beechen's Amazing **** Crisis Seven Issue Adventure."?