Hosive

one of the casualties post zoe has been this column on my blog…i haven’t talked about comics in a long, long time. here’s to the new year and a new start…..

in this segment, i’ll detail my amore for the art and medium of comics. the title comes from a comic shop i frequented as a kid and a nod to my boy q and his blog.

my mom let me read anything and everything when i was a kid. and with nearly weekly visits to forbidden planet on the weekends, i picked up all sorts of titles that became my “friends” during the summers; part of the comic reader childhood experience where imagination, superheroes and pulp literature intersected with long evenings during june, july and august.

and some of those friends in the 80’s were the earth 2/justice society/all star squadron characters. many of these guys are the original versions of familiar characters before the newer modern versions  came; making this batch the senior citizen characters of the universe…old fogies kept alive by writers and readers who are nostalgic for the old days.

but who else would care?

dc would try anyway and there were enough old farts like me buying the stuff to keep the  lines afloat. the trick is bringing in a new audience….the next generations to care.

the dc universe prides itself on being founded on legacies….characters with lineage and histories…with each generation building on the past and adding their own mark.  one of the best at that is current superstar geoff johns who seems to be writing everything and revitalizing all corners of dc:  from the future with the legion of superheroes…to the past with this cast.  his contribution was to develop the future generations of the jsa.

the downside is that geoff johns has left the book and the two books in its place are pretty standard superhero generics. barely memorable stories which is a shame since the two guys on the books have done well elsewhere.

i gave the overall vibe half a year to develop and the pattern has been the same: underwhelming. i’ve had my share of average superhero tales. maybe these really are books for the next generation who haven’t read these stories with these characters.

i need something more….something other. irredeemable for example. starman, an even better example. or sweet tooth which i will discuss next.