The Omega Men #12

I haven't been this melancholy about a last issue since...I don't even have an example to give it's been so long.

The Review!
Entertainment in this day and age is bullshit. It doesn't ask anything of its audience. Hell, it doesn't even want its audience asking questions. It just says, "This is the good guy. This is the bad guy. This is the way the world should be, no questions asked." And what boggles my mind is that 21st century people seem to want it that way. They want their no-friction stories of tepid characters who all get along and stick together against the obvious bad people. The tellers of the tale do not want ambiguity. They do not want people making up their own minds. They want to put a finger in the face of the audience and waggle it around a bit. It's all propaganda and we're all blindingly consuming it so that something, anything, can give us a few moments of warm fuzzies in a shitty gray world of gray decisions and moral ambiguities. We ignore the hard conflicts because there are so many easy ones where we can take a side and feel safely righteous in our exuberant patting of our own backs. We express opinions we know have the support of others and secretly, fiercely, guard those opinions that might bring on a mob of holy crusaders. If we take a stand against the easy, popular opinion, we are sure to fall. And we're all too filled with cowardice for that. So instead, we argue about Doctor Who and Sherlock and comic books and Harry Potter. We attack showrunners and writers and artists when their superficial story choices aren't those we would have made. We take our battles to the popular culture because we have no stomach for a real fight. We're all assholes. Every single one of us.

That might not seem like a review of The Omega Men but I assure you it is. It's the highest praise I could give it.

The Commentary!
Today I'm reading the last issues of the best two series of the Prebirth comic books I have left in the stack: The Omega Men and Grayson. I'm still not sure how I'd like this comic book to end. Should it have a happy ending where the terrorists topple the government putting corporate financial matters ahead of the lives of ordinary people? Or should the violent extremists be gunned down by superior forces better at violence than they ever were? Should Kyle Rayner fail to stop tyranny from succeeding because that's a more realistic outcome? My guess is that The Omega Men who are still alive will be driven from the Vega system so that they can have another uncomfortably true story somewhere else in the Rebirth universe later. Oh! I know! Maybe instead of battling the metaphor, they can actually wind up on Earth and go up against the United States itself!

This issue begins with Kyle and the Omega Men closing in on the Viceroy of The Citadel underneath Kyle's memories of first meeting the Viceroy and getting the Viceroy's version of an imperialist's rationalizations. And then...well, I think I'll just finish reading it in silence. You already read my thoughts up there. In fact, right now, as I type this, you know more about my reaction to this comic book than I do. But two pages in and, once again, I just can't make stupid jokes while I read it. I need to immerse myself in this story. I need to be present. It's rare that a writer of comic books cares this much about a story they want to share with others, and I don't want to taint the experience by being distracted.

The Omega Men #11

There are plenty of reasons why this comic book is so much better than most of its competition. Turning the Green Lantern symbol into the Omega symbol is simply not ignoring the balls.

The Review!
Super hero comic books too often wind up not being about anything except super hero comic books. So now we get stories deconstructing the ideals and myths which were commonly excepted tropes for decades. How would people actually react to a world full of super powered people? What if the super heroes weren't infallible and could be corrupted by their own power? What steps would the government take to control the perceived menace? If we're not getting stories about the negative reaction people would have to the super heroes, we constantly get the story where the heroes teach regular people that they're the actual heroes. Everybody is actually Batman! Everyone is actually Superman! We are in control of our own lives and thank you, super heroes, for giving us that message! It's exhausting! Although not in an intellectually exhausting manner! The stories are never subtle about who is in the right and who is totally fucking wrong. Although sometimes I think Superman is being a complete and utter dick but the story is hitting me over the head with some stupid fucking message about how he's doing the right thing even though he obviously isn't. So maybe I'm just tired of writers who can't write complex stories without having to explain them in long-winded narration boxes that often contradict the actions of the character. Maybe I'm just tired of being told, by the writer and the first person narration of the main character, how I'm supposed to feel and the conclusions I'm supposed to draw.

Sometimes I just want to read a book that can't fucking decide if the hero is inspiring or terrible! I want a book that lets me decide who to support! Although, to be fair, putting "The Omega Men" right on the cover kind of makes me think I'm supposed to agree with their view of the universe. And who is actually reading this book and siding with The Citadel anyway (you know, since politicians and CEOs probably aren't reading it)? So maybe this is a bad example of a comic book with an ambiguous message that doesn't offer any easy answers. This book hasn't really tried to be subtle about the black eye it's intending to give America's foreign policy and America's kowtowing to corporate interests. Maybe I should have begun with an off-topic thought like usual.

Is it bad that I drive around in Grand Theft Auto laughing hysterically as I run people over or would it be worse if I were totally stoic and serious about it?!

This month, The Omega Men gather an army and march into the Citadel's headquarters. That's pretty much the summation of the entire issue. Trying to summarize something so well put together and make stupid dick jokes about it would be an insult to the work. The meat of the story is how the characters go about convincing each world to join the war against the Citadel. The actual action, the war, the battles...they're all skimmed past in a few pages detailing half an Earth year's worth of conflict. Some writers would have made a huge mistake and swapped those ratios and concentrated on huge double splash pages of heroic battle and stupid one liners. I don't know if Tom King would have spent longer on the war if given more than twelve issues of The Omega Men. Whatever the case, it's better this way. Sometimes writers are tempted to fill pages with nonsense or simple action because they have no actual deadline for a story. In fact, it's the exact opposite where the writer knows that the comic just keeps going and going, so why not pad the story as much as possible to fill up as many pages as possible to extend one story for as many issues as possible? I really wouldn't mind if all of DC's comics simply became four, six, or twelve issue mini-series! Because then the writer would be forced to pitch an actual story with a beginning, middle, and end with a fucking reason for existing. Until then, we'll just keep getting pitches for stories for things like "Superman battles the most powerful intergalactic monster he's met to date for five issues until he finally wins in the last issue through sheer force of willpower and heart!"