Oh joy! A comic book series based on the worst summer annual crossover of DC's history and written by one of my least favorite comic book writers!
Bloodlines wants to be Teen Titans and fails miserably. Mostly because Teen Titans uses established characters that people care about and completely fucking ruins them. This book uses new characters that nobody cares about yet and begins building something that might actually work for some readers. I can't totally put aside my bias of J.T. Krul but I'll try to be fair and diplomatic and simply rate this book on its own merits and not on my memories of New 52 Green Arrow #1-3 and New 52 Captain Atom. I'll try but it's as difficult as stretching a limb ravaged by scar tissue. The best thing I can say about this book is that it might be worth investing in the first one or two issues to see if at least one of the characters does something for you. I felt most of them were formulaic and cliche relying on common tropes in place of real characterization. The reason for this is that there are a lot of characters to introduce in a short amount of time and Krul just doesn't have the space to elaborate on their personalities. So he throws out a few recognizable traits on each character so the reader feels like they're left with an understanding of each one. If he develops them further in the subsequent issues and turns them into complex personalities rather than shallow stereotypes, maybe he'll be able to create the next X-men or Teen Titans. Probably not but I said I was going to try to be fair. And that seems like a fair, if improbable, statement!
The Commentary
The people at my local comic book shop apparently don't read my blog because they stuck this book by J.T. Krul in my pull box. Or they do read my blog and they're huge assholes who think they're hilarious. Whatever the case, I paid for this comic book so I guess I'm going to read it. I guess.
Forget about J.T. Krul authoring this book. The title itself, Bloodlines, doesn't inspire any kind of confidence in the material. When people think of 90s comic books, they can't help but think of mega-violence, pouches, women with completely (as opposed to the normal 'just partially') distorted bodies, Image comics, poor writing, and the speculative market. But one thing that doesn't get discussed quite as much is how publishers were rushing to grab copyrights and licensing of as many characters as they could due to the rise of Image's push towards creator owned characters. Marvel and DC seemed to think if they could think up and trademark every potential hero name, creators would be forced to use their characters. DC and Marvel would make all the money from licensing that the characters would eventually make in the future when they inevitably became super popular. This was the basic reason behind Bloodlines. It was a summer annual crossover event where dozens of new superheroes were created because an alien race activated all of the metagenes on the planet (or something. I can't be bothered to remember the particulars). Eventually only Hitman and possibly one or two others would become popular enough to enter the legion of DC's heroes. Most of them were horrible garbage. But that's what happens when you create a bunch of heroic names with no tie to any kind of backstory or personality in a corporate brainstorming meeting. I suppose the writers and artists were allowed to come up with their concepts on their own and I'm just being cynical. How else would you explain Garth Ennis coming up with Hitman, a guy who doesn't really give a shit about his new powers except that they now allow him the added ability to murder other people with super powers. So Ennis!
This whole explosion of new characters being created and trademarked by the corporations was spoofed by Dave Sim in Cerebus when he had Spore (the Cockroach's then current incarnation) explode into a bunch of different Roaches with little trademark symbols next to their names. At the end of Grant Morrison's Doom Force, a parody of nineties comics, he had two or three pages where he just listed names of new potential heroes. It was a sad state of affairs. It's no wonder comic book companies like to blame speculation for the downfall of comics in the nineties instead of looking inward at the things they did to cause the crash. DC and Marvel became so frightened of what Image represented that they threw out every model of making comics that had worked up until that point and decided to follow Image's lead. The only problem was most of the guys at Image had no fucking clue what they were doing. A high majority of the art and writing sucked and they were stumbling about on the business end (although, admittedly, some of them spent the necessary time to work through the business aspect even if it was at the expense of their comic books. People like Jim Lee who just put their shoulders to the grindstone and figured it the fuck out). None of that mattered though. Image was paving a new way that simply caused DC and Marvel to lose their senses and their shit. I never bought an Image book back in the nineties because none of art ever appealed to me. They were a young company that didn't totally know what they were doing and they made a lot of mistakes. But they laid the foundation for the Image of today which publishes the best books on the shelves because they're creator controlled. Image publishes the best ideas of comic book writers and artists because why would any writer or artist waste their best ideas on work for hire when Image will let you retain ownership and control? That seems like a better deal than a "created by" line that might pay a pittance in royalties.
I don't know how much of the previous is preamble to the plot of this new Bloodlines book and how much is just stalling so I don't have to read it. Oh geez. Well, here I go!
It begins promising enough with no Narration Boxes instantly over-explaining everything as something from space crashes to Earth.
Although, let's face the facts, prey animals would not be coming up to investigate this disaster. What prey animals do when there is a loud noise and light is try to hide behind or run faster than other prey animals because the only way they live is for one of their loved ones to die.
On page three, the Narration Boxing begins. Whew. I thought I was going to have to figure out the character's motivations without any help.
The first character we meet is the guy who will soon become the big muscular blue guy on the cover. You can tell because they share the same hair style. But right now, he's not big or blue or muscular. He's just a skinny kid with some kind of physical disability affecting his legs. What I find truly unbelievable about this character already is that, before his leg muscles atrophied, he was both a skater and a morning person. Bullshit!
The destruction of his skating career by the betrayal of Eddie's legs isn't his only problem. He's also got a caretaker mother that doesn't seem to give a shit about him. She's too busy telling him not to eat the sugared cereal she bought for him! And getting ready for work! And probably being super hot underneath that cardigan and long skirt!
So Eddie goes to school to run into some more kids who will be part of his Bloodlines crew. One of them is Albert who is the smartest person at his school. Every good team needs "the smartest genius who ever geniused" on their team! It's a good thing Narration Boxes exist because it's easier to just tell the readers that a character is the biggest genius in the world than to have to portray them that way. It's hard to write smart characters when you're just a writer of average intelligence or worse. Believe me, I know!
Nobody fucking cares about your blogapalooza. And how dare you remind me of J.T. Krul's abysmal Green Arrow run!
Meanwhile at a gas station, another member of the Bloodlines group, Faith, is about to star in the obligatory "creepy guys being creepy who need to have extreme violence perpetrated on them" scene. It's become status quo for a writer to write a scene that says, "Hey, women. I'm on your side. See how this guy told a woman to smile and then got his teeth knocked out? Or this other guy got too touchy on the dance floor at the club and had to have his arm broken? How about the guy who said something disgusting who needed to learn what a concussion felt like?" Although the scene simply ends with the guy checking out Faith's mom's ass. So it's possible the guy is actually a maniac who is going to kidnap Faith and her mom only to wind up being one of the Bloodlines' crew's first victims.
I don't mind stories having moments that are basically just messages saying, "Hey, guys. Stop being creepy fucks." But as a pacifist, I feel some of these scenes go way overboard just to get a certain audience on board. The violent punishment meted out to a guy who asks a woman to smile doesn't seem justified. I get that it's a fantasy moment but it doesn't really work for me when it's repeated in every fucking comic book I read and every goddamned super hero show on television. But then again, I'm just a guy who previously mentioned how all I could think about was how naked one of the female characters got on her blog. So I have selfish reasons for not wanting guys to get the shit kicked out of them for being pigs.
Next up, the readers need to be introduced to Haley!
Oh look! You thought it was going to be man, didn't you, you sexist! Nope! She's a woman that isn't like other women!
Reading J.T. Krul's "writing" has made me so cynical that I've become an insensitive bastard! Normally I'm like, "Women are...". Hmm. Maybe I'm normally not like anything because I can't think of something romantic and not creepy to call women that wouldn't also sound like I'm objectifying them and merely saying things I think they'd want to hear so that they'd think I want to get to know them for more than their bodies. Which I totally do! I mean, as much as I want to get to know men for more than their bodies. Which is basically not at all. Maybe I should just say "Women are women are women are women." Gertrude Stein probably would have said that!
The next character we need to meet is Blake! Blake is the guy on the cover holding the flaming gun. He's a man so I won't judge his character according to his gender like I did with Dana and Haley. To be fair, I wasn't so much judging them on their gender as judging the way J.T. Krul was introducing them as female characters. This is all part of that "subtle" thing I was referring to back in my commentary on The Darkseid War Special #1! Blake is a black man which I'm only mentioning because it would be odd for me to not mention it. Although I didn't mention that Eddie was originally white before he turns blue. So now I've got an old man fishing in a boat's voice in the back of my head telling me I'm prejudiced. Fuck you, old man! I'll drown you!
Blake and Haley have had sex. I wish they'd had sex within the pages of this comic book and not in the past. Why do writers always leave out the best parts of their story? Since Blake probably won't be having sex with Haley ever again, he and his buddy Ricky are going to go beat up some local druggies. So I guess Blake is an asshole.
Now that all of the main characters have been introduced, it's time for the late night party where everything goes wrong! The party is out in a field near the woods which means it's going to be interrupted by Superfawn™!
Yeesh. I can't think of a worse way to go than being rutted by Superfawn™.
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