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Thursday, January 10, 2008

A brief review of DC COMICS'
Countdown Arena #3
drawn by Scott McDaniel, and the problems with the mini-series concept as a marketing tool that ultimately frustrates the reader

Scott McDaniel Art of Wonder Woman from DC Comics Countdown Arena #3

Scott McDaniel Artwork from DC Comics
COUNTDOWN ARENA #3
I really like McDaniel's quasi-minimalist styling. (I noticed, however that the inking job in the four-issue DC Comics Countdown Arena has sometimes aped Frank Miller rather closely in some of the line effects). McDaniel uses distortion and hyper-action to good uses, and many, many of these pages are just a joy for me to look at. The only weakness that bugs me is a tendency to re-use certain stock "hero poses," but considering that is a problem that plagues most super-team books, I think McDaniel does a nice job pulling off the hard task of making this avalanche of super-characters stand-apart from one another in some way that the reader can tell who is who.

The story (by Keith Champagne), despite some really interesting sections, ends up being just a big tease to require the reader to purchase another series from DC Comics, "Countdown to Final Crisis."

The story in Countdown Arena tells of the dangerous playpen put together by a superbadman named "Monarch" who kidnaps multiple copies of Batman, Superman, etc., from various DCU earths and then pits them against one another to determine which version is the best and thus suitable for some cockamamie army he is building. He proves to be indestructible (for now), though three various forms of Superman try to outfight him simultaneously, and various Batmen try to outsmart him.

Mini-Series
DC Comics has been pulling this more and more often, i.e., the contained "mini-series" you are buying a four issue run of has no actual ending. I know the stories are often junk, but now they can't even follow simple and basic story plot lines of beginning-middle-end? Fundamentals of story-writing is hijacked by DC Comics marketing, leaving the reader frustrated. Shouldn't these tales at least function as self-contained stories, though they also link to another story 'arc' somewhere else in the DC publishing scheme of things? Are they deliberately rigged this way to prevent any "closure" for the reader?

My other complaint is that everything covered in Countdown Arena could've been crammed into a single issue of the series, or at most two issues. Instead you have endless failed jail breaks from issue to issue that only differ according to which group of superpeople are attempting it, and the main character of "Monarch" is a jumping jack that pops in and out of the tale with no distinction of character or personality.

Does DC Comics no longer understand that the strength (and popularity) of their properties derives from the personalities and handling of the characters, not the creation of an over-arching concept which thus far, from what I have seen, reduces all the characters into little cogs and wheels of a predictable story cycle. I realize the cycle is mammoth in size, and maybe that's unique and interesting in some detached way, but reading the individual books demonstrates it makes for a whole lot of crap and wheel-spinning. (Update: There is a whole page at wikipediea covering the 'crisis' storyline here.)

In the days of yore, the problem confronting a comic book writer was how to cram a complete story into 22 pages (or less - - even much less, consider that for awhile during the 1970s, the 'lead' superhero story in a DC Comics "100 Page Super Spectacular" would be given only 12 pages to get the whole tale across).

Because these series are now blown up to require enough pages to fill a trade collection, the writer (or writers) must flesh out something to fill all those hungry blank pages, but it seems to be making for an endless amount of filler material that dilutes the actual quality of a tale that cannot bear being drawn out into so many repetitious pages.

But it does give the chance for artists like Scott McDaniel to draw a lot of terrific fight scenes.

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