Aw, the Eighties solo series is actually adorable in its own right too (and weirdly Silver Age in its sensibilities, for such a "HI I AM A NEW POST-CRISIS CHARACTER" guy), but as *story* the current volume is miles better.
I guess the one caveat I'd give (knowing that you are not a Giffen fan), is that the current issues are ... quite... Giffen-y? For me it works really well here, not least because the two writers - who wrote the entire cracktacular run of JLI - have used this latest arc as a sort of fond obituary to that book, almost all of whose characters fell foul of the Nineties grim n' gritty ethic and died in various crass and horrible ways. This issue makes a corking epitaph for what they've been doing: Blue Beetle II embodied JLI's good-hearted insincerity and his (gratuitous) death (in a SRS BZNS company-wide crossover) was a pretty precise token of the failure of those kinds of comics to survive into the Grant Morrison age. For such a funny book, Booster Gold has been hugely preoccupied with Booster's grief over what happened - he's basically spent five years now failing to come to terms with his best friend's death - and in this issue it just kind of reached a climax. Least funny issue ever, and one of the most powerful. But I think it almost had to be these writers who did it, because Ted was in some measure theirs, and they had to acknowledge it and move on as much as Booster did.
OR POSSIBLY I AM OVERTHINKING THE FUNNY PAGES? IDK.
A book I read recently that I think you'd like is Doctor 13: Architecture and Morality. Have I gone on to you about that yet? A clutch of forgotten and abandoned characters battle the one force that can truly obliterate them: the writers of 52. Heh. And I generally loathe anything meta, or that so much as leans against the fourth wall, so for me to like this is really saying something :)
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Date: 2010-12-09 08:50 pm (UTC)I guess the one caveat I'd give (knowing that you are not a Giffen fan), is that the current issues are ... quite... Giffen-y? For me it works really well here, not least because the two writers - who wrote the entire cracktacular run of JLI - have used this latest arc as a sort of fond obituary to that book, almost all of whose characters fell foul of the Nineties grim n' gritty ethic and died in various crass and horrible ways. This issue makes a corking epitaph for what they've been doing: Blue Beetle II embodied JLI's good-hearted insincerity and his (gratuitous) death (in a SRS BZNS company-wide crossover) was a pretty precise token of the failure of those kinds of comics to survive into the Grant Morrison age. For such a funny book, Booster Gold has been hugely preoccupied with Booster's grief over what happened - he's basically spent five years now failing to come to terms with his best friend's death - and in this issue it just kind of reached a climax. Least funny issue ever, and one of the most powerful. But I think it almost had to be these writers who did it, because Ted was in some measure theirs, and they had to acknowledge it and move on as much as Booster did.
OR POSSIBLY I AM OVERTHINKING THE FUNNY PAGES? IDK.
A book I read recently that I think you'd like is Doctor 13: Architecture and Morality. Have I gone on to you about that yet? A clutch of forgotten and abandoned characters battle the one force that can truly obliterate them: the writers of 52. Heh. And I generally loathe anything meta, or that so much as leans against the fourth wall, so for me to like this is really saying something :)