Let me try to summarize what I spent two hours (total) writing twice, and see if the universe (NASTY BEAST!) lets this through

IDENTITY CRISIS #3: Extremely powerfully skillfully done. This comes from affection, rather than cynicism, and it's a great piece of craft.

BUT, you can't ask the audience to take Justice League of America #166-168 to its logical extreme AT THE SAME TIME as saying that they guy named "Deathstroke, the Terminator" doesn't actually wax the JLA when he could do so effortlessly.

Don't bring the "real world" into the ACTUAL comics. These aren't characters for today, these are characters for forever.

Grant Morrison is right: the DCU is shiny hope-filled place or it should be, at least.

I don't want to see Myrna Loy raped and murdered. No matter how compelling the story is.

Do it as an Elseworlds, or an analogue, or a cautionary tale (Supreme Power, Kingdom Come, Watchmen, whatever), but, please, for the love of fucking god, please please please don't do it to the "real" characters.

It's a perfect, logical and seamless continutity implant for the "real reason" that Ollie and Carter were always fighting... but it makes me deeply sick in my heart.

Bottom line: would Watchmen have been better or worse if it had turned out that Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt was the one who had murdered The Peacemaker, in his bid to cover his monstrous plot?

Exactly.

Execution, skill, craft, passion, this is clearly Very Good, but because the absolutely wrong set of characters were picked to tell this story, I also think it's Awful. I think both things at once.

-B

(It was much funnier and much more poetic the first two times, damnit -- this would have set link-blogs off across the country. Now it's just there. Foo.)