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I've heard the argument that Comic X is a demonstration of the corrupting influence of grim and gritty comics on the bright and colourful world of DC a fair few times, now, and specifically from Identity Crisis on. The idea usually advanced in that Identity Crisis was DC saying to their fans "You want comics to be darker and more realistic? Well, here you are! Doctor Light rapes people! Tim Drake's dad's dead! This supervillain has just been shot a load of times and fallen over. The Elongated Man is clinically depressed. The Atom's wife can't cope with their divorce - so she's killing people. You like that? That's what you wanted!" In effect, that they have caught their readers smoking and are making them smoke the whole pack so that they are sickened and lose the urge for grimngritty. See also brightly-coloured, childlike Superboy in Infinite Crisis being turned into a contender for the Black Adam limb-pulling-off prize.
The problem with this is that a) if it is true, DC was stacking the deck by making the grim and gritty Identity Crisis a pile of shit and b) it's been going on for quite a while to be a short, sharp and shocking illustration of how unfun it all is before restoring the lovely, happy, brightly-coloured DC universe. See World War III, much of 52, a chunk of Countdown and so on - there's only so much you can reasonably take before you start thinking that maybe, just maybe, they aren't making it balls on purpose. Ultimately, perhaps one just has to get the hang of the idea that the Geoff Johns model of what makes a good superhero comic is a) a vigorous attention to the history of the minor characters of the DC universe and their interrelations and b) somebody pulling off the leg of character A and violating character B with it. It may not be nice, but sometimes real life isn't. |
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