Earth Two #25 – Review

By: Tom Taylor (story), Nicola Scott (pencils), Trevor Scott (inks), Pete Pantazis (colors)

The Story: If you’re going to break your father’s heart, you might as well kill him.

The Review: As I read through this issue, it suddenly occurred to me that for a big, gushy superhero series that’s been around for over two years, we’ve had surprisingly few displays of superheroic power. A couple come to mind—Alan’s duel with Solomon Grundy, Marella’s airborne whirlpool—but for the most part, it’s the enemy that’s done most of the showboating. No wonder morale has been so low; it’s hard to hold out hope when all the major moves come from the other side.

And no wonder that as our heroes get bolder, more aggressive with their powers, the more you think Earth Two may stand a fighting chance after all. I’m not just talking about the war against Apokolips; I’m talking about the chances of these characters rising to the same level as their peers on Prime Earth. It’s easy to think of Earth-2’s Wonders as cheap riffs and knock-offs of more famous characters, and thus inferior product. The only way to break out of that perception is to stand tall and proud on their own laurels, and they weren’t going to do it by constantly fleeing Darkseid’s forces.

Earth Two #22 – Review

By: Tom Taylor (story), Nicola Scott (pencils), Trevor Scott (inks), Pete Pantazis (colors)

The Story: In this case, Val flies before he runs.

The Review: Look, we all know this endless crisis on Earth-2 will end sometime; it’d be a pretty lousy superhero book if it didn’t. And certainly there’s no time limit on how long Taylor chooses to drag out the grimness. But if he expects us to endure one Apokolips-inflicted atrocity after another, month in and month out, for this long, he’s got to give us hope that when the storm finally passes, the world left behind will be one worth living in.

We’ve had a few sporadic bright spots, but nothing like the sustained luminescence of Lois teaching Val to fly. It is literally uplifting, pure and joyful in ways that the series hasn’t been in a long, long time. After all the death and ruin that’s pervaded every issue since #15, watching the two soar through the blue sky is a terribly welcome relief. The sequence only lasts a few pages, but it restores confidence that not all is lost and the world is not yet doomed.

Earth Two #15 – Review

By: James Robinson (story), Nicola Scott (pencils), Trevor Scott (inks), Pete Pantazis (colors)

The Story: Our heroes get the faintest inkling that they may be wandering into a trap.

The Review: It’s axiomatic that publishers may feign a lot of pride in their critical darlings, but in reality, reviews come a long second to receipts.  Why else would a truly creative and well-crafted series like Dial H fall prematurely to the axe while Earth Two continues to survive?  It’s also obvious that quality has little to do with popularity, otherwise Earth Two would never beat the likes of Hawkeye, Daredevil, Swamp Thing, The Wake, and so many other reputable titles.

What really baffles me is how Earth Two manages to consistently rank higher than series with more overt popular appeal like, say, Wolverine and the X-Men.  Actually, scratch that; I know exactly how.  I know because it’s the same thing that keeps me attached to Earth Two despite being disappointedly monthly by its awkward, heavy, almost embarrassingly simple-minded scripts.  What keeps the Earth Two engine going is the combustion produced by constant new additions to the parallel world and by the revival of fan-favorite characters.

Earth Two #12 – Review

By: James Robinson (story), Nicola Scott (pencils), Trevor Scott (inks), Barbara Ciardo & Pete Pantazis (colors)

The Story: Up in the sky!  It’s a bird—it’s a plane—it’s—a green man in a fur-collared robe!

The Review: If you ever get into this reviewing business, you’re going to learn in a hurry that calling something “good” or “bad” just won’t cut it.  Like almost any other quality in the world, “good” and “bad” come in all kinds of different shades, each with its own unique effect on the person experiencing it.  The hardest part of this gig is trying to figure out how to describe those effects as accurately as possible.  That’s where experience comes in.

In my experience, I’ve read a lot of bad writing (quite as much and even more good writing as well, but that, unfortunately, is not relevant here), so over time, I’ve come to recognize some of the most common types.  Now, I’ve had plenty of complaints about Robinson’s work on this series before, but this issue really takes the cake as it possesses nearly every kind of bad writing I’ve ever run into.

Earth Two #10 – Review

By: James Robinson (story), Nicola Scott (pencils), Trevor Scott (inks), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: Khalid and Jay find their world turned upside down and inside out—literally.

The Review: Robinson may have bitten off more than he can chew.  Earth Two doesn’t simply purport to establish a new super-team, which is already daunting in itself.  This title establishes an entire world, which includes not only the superheroes, but their respective villains, supporting casts, bases of operation, and back stories.  And we haven’t even touched upon Earth Two’s unique qualities that have nothing to do with superheroes.

No wonder, then, that the series has been so uneven and scattered.  Sometime after that first arc, perhaps around the zero issue, we’ve lost quite a bit of focus from the plot.  With every character doing his or her own thing and not in concert with each other, Robinson is forced to jump from one scene to another, often with little transition, either tonally or substantively.  This results in a fairly muddled read overall, but worse still, each plot thread gets cut a little short to make room for the others, leaving you dissatisfied with all of them.

Earth Two #9 – Review

By: James Robinson (story), Nicola Scott (pencils), Trevor Scott (inks), Pete Pantazis & Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: Just because you’re a rambling lunatic doesn’t mean you can’t be a hero.

The Review: Despite my threats last month to Drop this series in a couple issues, if I’m to be perfectly honest with myself (and you), I’ll probably end up sticking with it in the long run just to see how the characters turn out.  Perverse curiosity, not genuine interest, motivates my investment in Earth Two.  If I want to see the Justice Society live again in some form or other, this is the only place I can turn to.

I do recognize of course that there’s little resemblance between the Justice Society of yore and that of the new 52, but I’m actually not sure if all the changes have been for the worse.  Let’s face it: the pre-relaunch JSA was truly a basket of white-bread characters, a reflection of its Golden Age roots.  I’m not really a purist; I don’t mind seeing superheroes reimagined as from different cultures and backgrounds if I didn’t much care for person under the costume anyway.

Earth Two #7 – Review

By: James Robinson (story), Yildiray Cinar (pencils), Trevor Scott (inks), Alex Sinclair, Dave McCaig, Allen Passalaqua, Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: What a waste of a beautiful woman with wings suddenly appearing on the balcony.

The Review: I’ve never understood the superheroes who go out with their heads uncovered or their faces exposed.  It’s just begging to draw the readers’ attention to unexplainable narrative gaps.  Take Alan Scott.  What?  Like no one’s going to get a good look at that lustrous blond hair, the chiseled jaw, and his hoarse whispers of “Sam, oh, my Sam,” and not make the connection?  But this, of course, is one of the basic indulgences we give to comics.

So usually, I would never spend a moment nitpicking at such a contrivance because once you start pulling at that loose thread, suddenly the entire world of the superhero comic starts coming apart at the seams.  That’s why I find it puzzling that Robinson would actually point out how easy it is to figure out the identity of this newest Green Lantern.  It’s not as if it took Kendra a series of mental gymnastics to figure it out:

Earth Two #5 – Review

By: James Robinson (story), Nicola Scott (pencils), Trevor Scott (inks), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: Hiring a perpetrator of genocide as crisis consultant?  Desperate times…

The Review: The more I read this title, the more I admire Robinson’s approach to making Earth Two a true parallel world.  This Earth clearly has elements inspired by the one bearing most of the current DC features, but they don’t have any direct counterparts to each other.  In some cases, Robinson amalgamates concepts together (Alan Scott as both Green Lantern and a Superman-type figure); in others, Robinson puts in so much of his own ideas, they’re only barely familiar.

The Grey and the Green obviously fall in the amalgam category, being fusions of Green Lantern and Animal Man/Swamp Thing mythology.  Coincidentally (or not), the Grey is making a play for the whole planet just as the Rot is doing in “Rotworld.”  The big difference is the Grey isn’t letting the grass grow under its feet—so to speak—in the process; Earth Two faces its demise at the hands of Grundy in less than a day.