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DC: The New Frontier

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

17:05 / 13.04.05

Finished reading the second trade yesterday. I was floored. The first trade had some good stuff in it, but I kept waiting for Hal to get the ring. Having also just read "Emerald Dawn", I now appreciate the decision to hold off on it for a while.

I really enjoyed Cooke's ability to portray Superman as something other than a muscle-bound simpleton with a preposterous secret identity (as he was done back in the 50s and 60s...ok, well, for most of his run), and instead as a patriot who sees the problems with his own government and sets out to change them from the inside.

Similarly, I think it had some of the best Batman dialogue when dealing with the League in years. Becuase he didn't go over the top. He kept it low, menacing, creepy, and perhaps just a bit over the edge.

Has anyone else read this? What are their thoughts?

Spyder Todd 2008

18:47 / 13.04.05

New Frontier rocks. Totally cool, and it totally gets it. The whole feel of the story is brilliant. Most excellent, the whole thing.

00:47 / 14.04.05

Yeah, there's a lovely feel to the whole series. I'm really liking Cooke's art, too. Though I can imagine now that he's kicking in as a fan-fave, we'll be seeing a lot of it and it could get old fairly quickly. I'm going to pick up his SOLO book when it comes out, though.

I wasn't so sure about the whole badmonster psychedelia sequence, though. Sometimes I get frustrated by these lovely reinterpretations of the superheroes that end up with a big fight scene at the end no matter what. I suppose its superheroes, which means there has to be a fight scene, but sometimes for me it jars with the way the rest of the story is handled. The Golden Age, the 1950s remake of the justice society et al, had a similar thing - I mean, Hitler's plan to take over the world is to beat up and murder all the superheroes and declare himself emperor of the world? Hardly a sophisticated understanding of the furher's political capabilities, which is suprising when compared to Robinson's detailed and insightful look at commie-hating HUAC America.

But I digress. New Frontier is a sweet sweet bundle of comics joy. Even though I have reservations about the 'everyone get together to beat the baddie' conclusion from a plot perspective, things like the flash using the Atom's broken shrinkray prototype to kill the monster was genius.

m.

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

05:25 / 14.04.05

Matsya, Warren Ellis made a comment a while back, IIRC, about the majority of superhero books being "fight comics". The superhero genre in and of itself focuses on the act of battle, which all boils down to all the crap about archetypes and epic crap that we hear every few days.

The end fight was...meh. There were some nice parts (The Flash and the Atom, Hal discovering the true power of the ring and the appearence of the Guardians), and there were some not so nice parts (Superman's rather anticlimactic defeat was the big one). But overall I thought it was relativly well handled, especially considering some of the typical clusterfuck superhero fight scenes we're seeing nowadays with the Ultimates, the post-Ellis Authority, and the JLA.

But yeah...its very much out of character with the rest of the book. The other fights were relativly small, or very personal. They were vehicles for personifcation and demonstration of what it means to be a hero...rather than just hitting things. I think the end fight with the Centre may have had something to do with the sacrifical nature of heroism (didn't the Black Hawks basically martyr themselves against the thing?), and the fact that a heroic struggle is all the more heroic against a foe that no one man can defeat.

06:44 / 14.04.05

Yeah, I'm on the bad signal and have been thinking about warren's fight comics/gang comics comments re: superheroes. I want to have a go at writing superstuff myself, and am doing some reading/thinking on the subject - my first intent was to take the fights out, since they're my least favourite part of superhero comics, but of course that's counterproductive in the long run. Yesterday I read an interview with Ann Nocenti where she called fights "tumours in the story", but she also acknowledges the need for them in what is essentially an action genre (note this is Superhero comics, not comics in general).

m.

11:34 / 14.04.05

this will make this week's trip to the shop expensive, but o so fun. and it ends with a big fight? good, that's how all superhero comics should be, how else are they to describe political reality? the one in charge is the one with the biggest superpowers, the one who'll win should it come to a tussle. having killed all the superheroes, who could resist the ultra-hitlerite?

i'm (spoilie) guessing from the first trade that the 'monster' is starro? topsmart.

14:01 / 14.04.05

I thought it was less Starro and more of a Lovecraft monster.

There's a thread already about this one too, I think. I really liked this book a lot, Darwyn Cooke's got a real nice flavor to his work.

23:22 / 14.04.05

It ain't starro. Starro makes an appearance on the last three pages, but the Centre is not Starro. I thought that at one stage, too.

Thought of another big fight comic - Millar's first Authority storyline, where it's all "look we can actually write stories that address current political reality" - as far as dropping the Indonesian President into a mob of murderous Timorese goes, anyway - and then ends up in a traditional Millar superfreeforall with splatty brains and everythin'.

I think the key is finding a way to make the fight somehow unique, or different from the standard rumbles, by tweaking the archetype of the fight somehow. I'm sure there are examples of this out there, can't think of any right now.

m.

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

05:55 / 15.04.05

I don't really think political assasination is solving current world problems, but I have so many issues with the post-Ellis authority it ain't even funny. It is my personal wish that Ellis should write a single, final, closing, end-of-the-line issue where Jenny comes back for five minutes to kill everyone involved with the Authority and let them know that they are the exact opposite of what she wanted. They stopped being a force for change and instead became a bunch of degenerate despots who make outrageous demands and expect the world to change immediatly to suit their whims.

...ahem. Sorry, I'll shut up on that subject now.

I found that the Centre bore striking similarities to the Swarm in the second Wild Cards novel, "Aces High". Complete with ancient evil fortold by weird cults, weird swarm monsters that rampage around until the heroes stop them, that sort of thing.

14:06 / 22.06.06

Wow -- Aint It Cool News reports a possible adaptation of this as a direct-to-video animated DCU project by none other than Bruce Timm! (And this would confirm the mention in a recent Newsarama article that Bruce Timm was working on a new animated DCU-related project, not Legion.)

The story is here. here Warner Bros. had the site that originally reported this take it down.

Spyder Todd 2008

19:48 / 01.07.06

... That would be super cool, if it happened...

14:51 / 12.07.07

The DVD cast of New Frontier shall include... (so Comic Book Resources/comics 2 film reports) Kyle Maclachlan as Superman, Lucy Lawless as Wonder Woman, Brooke Shields as Carol Farris, Phil Morris as King Faraday, David Boreanaz as Hal Jordan and Neil Patrick Harris as the Flash.

Kinda cool.

14:34 / 07.08.07

check out this pretty-damn-cool preview (with footage and interviews from the upcoming DVD) of the animated NEW FRONTIER:

you won't be sorry.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

14:43 / 07.08.07

Yeah, that's exciting. Looking forward to that.

Haus of Mystery

10:23 / 14.12.07

WOOT!

And DC turned down Cooke's proposals?

What is fucking wrong with these people?

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

16:35 / 14.12.07

Wow -- I'm looking forward to that, all right. More New Frontier stories! Not entirely excited about the Batman/Superman fight, even if it does fill in some backstory -- but the Kid Flash / Robin team-up, and the hints of an original Teen Titans of the New Frontier? Sign me up.

14:20 / 21.12.07

NEW TRAILER...looks pretty great.

17:34 / 21.12.07

It looks good, and I liked the Kennedy speech, but whoever is responsible for the title cards should be taken out behind the barn and shot. They're boring and cheesy, but did they really have to include a typo? "Comes the next big animated movie from DC Universe." Also, nice how they've put the little trademark "TM" next to "Superheroes." There's something Grinch-like and coal-hearted about reasserting your dubious copyright on a word that has entered the public domain so thoroughly in an animated teaser for a children's film about men and women taking a stand to defend all that is good and right in the world.

01:49 / 28.12.07

yeah - DC and Marvel co-own the term 'superheroes'. It is indeed a weird thing.

08:07 / 28.12.07

is that why alan moore uses the term 'science heroes' in most of his work over the past 10 years or so? i thought it was just a stylistic quirk.

11:20 / 28.12.07

well, Moore was doing that in his ABC Comics for WildStorm, which is owned by DC, so I think it was just a new spin on the phrase he wanted to do, for creative reasons. But I could certainly be wrong in that.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

23:05 / 05.03.08

The New Frontier special is out today, and it was actually a nice bit of fun, even though the advert aspect was so clear and obvious. I would have liked more stories, you know, I was expecting (hoping) for a big 64-page job with lots of completely random adventure. But it succeeded in doing what it was supposed to do, which was give Cooke a change to add some supplementary material to his original New Frontier series and some fun retro super-hero bang stories.

The introduction by Rip Hunter was simultaneously cute and irritating, mostly because I didn't really want to be reminded right off the bat that DC expects us to fit NF into the 52 Earths and all of that bunk. Rip -- I mean, Cooke -- successfully undermines the idea, but it still felt a little jarring.

The Batman/Superman story was so much better than I was expecting it to be, honestly -- it was the bit I was looking forward to the least, but it managed to set up some of the story's background details and I think I just loved it for the take on Wonder Woman. Cooke's view of Wonder Woman feels solid, motherly, powerful, mighty and heroic. She's sexual without feeling like cheesecake.

The Kid Flash / Robin story was fun! It felt like a Haney Titans story mashed up with Rebel Without A Cause. I could have done without the reference to the Titans, though, which felt like a misstep.

The team-up between Wonder Woman and Black Canary was just a bit of a goof, really, though the cameo was cute.

Some beautiful faux-vintage house ads inside.

All in all it was a pretty light read but that didn't surprise me given what it was setting out to do. There were fun bits and it looks swell, really swell, so it's worth at least Byrne-stealing.