Longer than intended

[kingandy]

I haven't read Countdown to Infinite Crisis yet (which is a title I rather liked until I found out it was supposed to be serious - I thought it was a self-parody riffing on previous crossover titles, like Secret Crisis on Infinity Hour II or something), but judging by the part of it that's crossed over into Wonder Woman (which batelfpicked up by virtue of the BIG and IMPORTANT events therein) the following paragraph from this review is wholly accurate:

"It also pisses on the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League run, by retconning Maxwell Lord into an evil manipulator who deliberately set out to keep the Justice League ineffectual.  Of course, a large part of the original stories was Lord's redemption arc, which isn't consistent with this interpretation at all.  This is pick-and-mix continuity, where a whole swathe of stories are invoked, an ill-fitting explanation is shoved on top of them, and we're expected to politely ignore the fact that it doesn't bloody fit the very stories which we've just been expressly directed to.  It's one thing to quietly ignore earlier stories; it's quite another to deliberately refer to them for the sole purpose of contradicting them."

Absolutely true.  At the start of the Giffen/DeMatteis run Lord was a manipulator - he actually volunteered to run the League because he loved power, and with the help of an advanced computer he found buried in a mountainside (seriously) he even created adversaries that nobody on the current team could defeat because he wanted to recruit Booster Gold.  And as far as that goes, yes, he was manipulating the League's roster, and if you don't like Booster Gold you could consider that he was creating a bad roster.  But beyond the lust for power (which of course doesn't mesh with the purported desire to weaken the league, nor did his actions at the time) I think he genuinely thought it was for the best - and certainly as soon as he found out the underground computer was manufacturing robot doubles of world leaders in order to better influence events, he pulled the plug (at the cost of his own internal cybernetics, and great risk to his own life).  This is the redemption arc mentioned above, and Max's "last words" - slumping to the ground covered in his own blood, organs rupturing from the inside, sure of his own demise - still stick in my mind all these years later.  It's one of those phrases that I try to use where possible.  "And so we write finis ... to a very ... ugly ... story..."  Those are not the words of a man who plans to continue his reign of terror.

That's exactly what I loved about the G/dM era.  Yes, the stories were light-hearted.  But they were still told with an integrity of character - and at any moment things could take a sharp left turn into deadly earnest.  It wasn't funny because the writers didn't take it seriously, it was funny because the characters had a sense of humour.  And above all because they were real people dealing with unusual situations.  (Well, for the most part.)

(On a side note, all of this ignores the Gerard Jones era, in which Max's brain was wiped clean by the Kil%gre and transferred into a fully robotic body, took the name Lord Havok and set himself up as a full-on JLA nemesis.  This is something that I would consider a major event for the character, and it annoys me that it's been - apparently intentionally - ignored.  Plus, as noted in the Wikipedia, by that time he'd already lost the mental powers he seems to have been using to control Superman.  But hey, nobody read those comics, so who cares?)

And then there's the whole Wonder Woman thing.  Yeah, so Max Lord genuinely believed that the only way to stop him influencing Superman was to kill him.  I actually don't buy that.  Previously, the League have been faced with an entire spaceship full of 200-plus White Martians, each with super-speed, super-strength, flight, shapechanging, invisibility and telepathy.  Yes, two hundred invisible Supermen who can rape your mind before you even know they're there.  Did they kill them?  No.  They brainwashed them into thinking they were normal people and set them up with civilian identities.  (Okay, so it didn't last.  But now I come to think of it that puts a bit of a damper on the whole Identity Crisis "Oh no we have brainwashed people with magic" thing - like, duh, we did that last week.  What's new?)  Even if he was right, she still should have knocked him out and had J'onn look him over before deciding on something irreversible like execution.  It's not that murder is entirely out of Wonder Woman's background - she has always been a warrior, even if she's never killed before - it's that it didn't actually make sense at that point.  She's always found another way in the past.  Why not now?  Well ... because the editors decreed it had to happen, of course.  They want dark and serious.  According to the laws of Drama, death is the only way to be serious.  See modern movies.  Serious films contain at least one major character death.  Non-serious ones do not.  It's what tells you how to feel!

Justice League Unlimited did the whole "humans out to stop the League becoming too powerful" last year, and IMO they did it a whole lot better.

Okay, rant over.  Move along, nothing to see here.

Comments

[pit-fishes.livejournal.com]

Point on WW/Max Lord, Max was tied up with the Lasso of Truth at the time that WW asked him how to Free Superman, Ergo - It must be the Truth (WW's been serverly punished for not believing the lasso before. JJ already mentioned in Sacrifice part 3 that it can't be undone at Sup's end.

[kingandy]

"Yeah, so Max Lord genuinely believed that the only way to stop him influencing Superman was to kill him." As noted.

There has always been an issue regarding the Lasso's regard for absolute and subjective truth. As an extreme example, one could not tie a random person up and ask "How far away is the moon?" or "What is Batman's secret identity?" - because that person would not necessarily know the answer to these things. (As I recall the problem in Golden Perfect was one of differing viewpoints; the mother of the child knew that the child belonged with its mother, whereas the Rama Kahn knew that the child belonged in Jarhanpur. Diana's fault lay in blaming the Lasso rather than trying to reconcile the two viewpoints.) It logically follows that if Max believes that he is utterly unstoppable, asking him how he may be stopped while wearing the lasso would prompt that reply.

On a related note, having set Max up as a Master Planner it makes no sense for him to simply gloat and reveal his plans. Never mind the lasso - he was saying "You're going to have to kill me!" right the way through that battle. I half suspect that this Max Lord is going to turn out to be a meat puppet of some sort, and it was always the plan to trick somebody into killing him. Though given the general mood of the piece, probably not.

[kingandy]

Come to think of it, in "The Kingdom" (the sequel-of-sorts to Kingdom Come) Mark Waid invented some guff about time being more fluid than has been previously thought - not only does it diverge at key points (causing alternate realities), but divergent streams can also re-converge, often without people realising. This was, essentially, an "in-character" explanation for inconsistencies and forgotten events, with a general message of "take what continuity you like, use what you think makes for a good story and leave out the chaff". Which is all very well for writers (telling an entertaining yarn really is more important than what Star Boy said to Element Lad in the November 1978 issue of Star Spangled Monthly), but when it's a major event like death that gets swept under the carpet it can aggravate.

I could take Max Lord being evil. They could have tied it in to his "death" in the nineties - he was basically resurrected as a villain, after all. That would have been cool. It's just saying he was always evil, and deciding that he never died in the first place and oh yeah he still has his powers, that grates.