DC Comics General

I second the motion! :)

JMS Announces "Flash: Earth One

http://www.comicbookresources.com/article/sdcc-jms-announces-flash-earth-one-talks-gender-issues-on-television

Interview with Bennett.

well they are alternate versions of the jl. of course they would turn on each other at the drop of a hat.

Ambar favors the Pre-Crisis Crime Syndicate, who actually acted like a functional unit with a sense of 'honor amongst thieves' between them.

"Bennet" well I guess I won't be getting this.

Yeah I'm just saying it would make sense, and also that they didnt really betray each other. leave each other when it was obvious they were gonna lose yeah and argue yeah but there was only one big betrayal.

Marguerite Bennett is awesome. Her and Gillen's run on Angela: Asgard's Assassin (and the Secret Wars 1602: Angela Witch Hunter) have been freakin' great.

God i hated what they did to earth 3 lex in forever evil

THE ONLY SUPERHERO IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. JK, HE'S JUST AS BAD AS THE ACTUAL VILLAINS. ISN'T IT EDGY AND SMART??

...huh? You mean Alexander Luthor was evil? Doesn't that...kind of invalidate the entire purpose of Earth-3? I mean, that was the Earth were everyone's alignment was reversed, so the Justice League was evil, but the villains were good.

I mean, I know Alexander Luthor Jr went evil, but he was the son. He had no counterpart. (And he was really a Deus Ex Machina in the original Crisis anyway.) But why did Alexander Luthor go evil?

Yeah, Alexander Luthor, it turned out, was just as bad as the villains. He murdered people to steal their super powers.

In Forever Evil, everyone from Earth-3 was evil. They were weirded out by this whole "altruism" thing when they came to the main universe. The question of how the fuck concepts like a police force arise when everyone knows 99.9% of everyone you ever meet wants to fuck you over is not, to my knowledge, addressed.

Okay, well, that's weird. The old Earth-3 (and the Morrison written Earth 2) all had it as a world where everyone's morality was reversed.

It all goes back to Morrison's Earth-2 and his masturbatory metafiction obsession.

But in Morrison's Earth-2, Alexander Luthor was good. Sure, not just the morality was reversed but also the narrative outcomes - evil will always win, instead of good - but that has nothing to do with what they did with Earth-3 in Forever Evil.

I'm not saying narratively, I'm just saying that's where the seeds started for "What if everyone was awful?"

At least, that's just my guess.

Bennet might do good Marvel work but her DC work has been godawful. Just... the worst. and with marvel she has a good writer helping her.

and yeah alexander was evil, as were the corrupt cops of the rogues and whatnot. there were no good people it was a completely evil universe.

My research indicates that Star Trek had its first Mirror Universe episode decades prior, so blame Roddenberry.

edited 13th Jul '15 5:01:57 PM by rikalous

In Forever Evil, everyone from Earth-3 was evil. They were weirded out by this whole "altruism" thing when they came to the main universe. The question of how the fuck concepts like a police force arise when everyone knows 99.9% of everyone you ever meet wants to fuck you over is not, to my knowledge, addressed.

Never mind the fact a society where everyone just wants to screw everyone else over and no one is able to do good for others would never have mastered the concepts of education, child care, a proper health system, or many other things on which an actual civilization relies.

It doesn't seem to go quite that far in practice. Johnny Quick and Atomica were in love, Earth-3 Bruce Wayne didn't want to kill his parents. So you could have functional family groups.

Any civilization beyond scattered hunter-gatherers or family-sized fortress-farms, though, tends to require some basic level of trust for more than half a dozen specific people.

Man, you guys must hate Bizarro World.

Bizzaro world works because it's SUPPOSED to be stupid. Earth-3 is supposed to be an actual, functioning universe.

It's also worth mentioning the Pre-Crisis Bizarro World was actually, in-universe, actually quite short lived anyway— from when an adult Bizarro (as opposed to the first Bizarro Superboy fought) created it already well into Superman's career, to when Bizarro himself destroyed it in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? So it really didn't have a lot of time to fall apart on its own logic flaws.

Earth # struck me as having the same problem that I always felt existed with Klingons in Star Trek (per the movies and TNG; they weren't nearly as extreme on the original series). How did a culture so intent on killing each other ever develop past the stone age? If everyone were as selfish as portrayed on Earth 3, humanity would act like bears in the wild, individuals who kept territory and just came together when in heat or something.

Kurt Busiek had a run on JLA where he tried to massage the Crime Syndicate's world into something resembling function, up to nullifying the meta-narrative stuff that made it frustrating as anything besides a joke on the reader. In that case, he stressed favors as a means of social interaction and the basis of all of the systems in the world. A bit of a stretch, but pretty much all he had to work with.

The 'favors' system actually worked quite well in the animated movie, I think. But then, the impression the movie gave me was not the world shaped the characters into being villains, but the characters being villains shaped the world around them instead. Other than the Syndicate, the society in that world seemed to be morally more or less like our own, for instance (which is why there is hope once the Syndicate is toppled, something that wouldn't have been possible if mankind itself was throughly corrupted).