Quote:
Originally Posted by ThaVirus
Well yeah, no doubt, Supes has always been a country boy with a love for Lois Lane and Batman is one of the most tortured comic-book heroes out there. But, and maybe I'm just ignorant on the subject, it seems like the majority of DC superheroes have no substance.
-The Green Lantern: A pilot who gets chosen to be an intergalactic policeman. BORING.
-The Martian Manhunter: A Martian with more power than Superman who's race got slaughtered. BORING.
-Wonder Woman: An Amazonian with unbelievable bodily dimension. Good fap material but.. BORING.
-Aquaman: The dude talks to fish. BORING.
-The Flash: He's really fast and cocky. BORING.
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I'm going to have to defend Green Lantern, the Flash and Aquaman. And DC in general.
The modern incarnation of Green Lantern, since Rebirth in 2005, is absolutely outstanding. It's a big space opera worthy of the original Star Wars, and a lot of it centers on Hal's relationship with Sinestro, his guilt about killing most of the Green Lantern corps when he was possessed by Parallax, and his struggles to earn back the trust of the re-formed Lantern Corps.
Now, with Green Lantern alone, you have a betrayal from a once-close friend, and a devastating mistake that forever changed the way people see you, and now you have to fight to redeem yourself. To me, those are stories you can really invest in. Green Lantern is also very easily the best-written DC title going these days; Blackest Night was a wildly popular and successful DC event which was primarily focused on the Lanterns. Brightest Day is less concentrated on Hal Jordan, but it focuses on the newly discovered/created White Lantern. The next DC event is going to be 'War of the Green Lanterns', which ostensibly means GL has been the foundation of every major DC series since Final Crisis. The reason for that is the writing; Geoff Johns is, for my money, far and away the best comic writer working today, and he's responsible for most of the Green Lantern stories and a new treatment on the Flash.
The Flash I'm most familiar with is Barry Allen, and he only recently returned from being dead for 20+ years; he's trying to find his place in the world, and while coming back from the dead on it's own is something nobody has any experience with, feeling out of place and wondering what you're supposed to do is an extremely accessible premise.
Aquaman aka Arthur Curry died, came back as a zombie, was saved from said fate, but now controls zombie sea creatures. That's just effing cool.
Wonder Woman? I'll admit, I'm not a fan. She's kinda like Superman with tits, but never really seems all that necessary to the plot of any given story. On the plus side, she has killed people, and is willing to do so again; in that respect, she's interesting. But I don't lose sleep when she's not in a story.
Honestly, if you have some negative preconceptions about DC but still know enough about the core characters (Superman, Batman, Flash, Green Lantern etc) to get by, I'd really suggest checking out Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis and Blackest Night. Final Crisis is in there between Infinite and Blackest Night, but you can skip to the end; all you need to know is
SPOILERS
Batman dies at the end of Final Crisis, and Martian Manhunter is killed about a third of the way in. And Barry Allen comes back from the dead/Speed Force.
And then you can skip to Blackest Night.
It's a bit of a chore I know, but trust me dude all those books are so well-written, so well-drawn, it's well worth your time to check them out.
If I could just add one more thing; I don't know why you don't include Superman among the 'boring' DC characters. He's written to be far too powerful, and though I love Superman 1 and 2, and can stand Returns, when you get right down to it, it's very difficult to make him an interesting character because he's too perfect. He's strong, he can fly, he has heat vision, super breath, x-ray vision, super hearing, he's indestructible etc. Where's the challenge? To me, anything that made Superman interesting was thrown out when they established Lois knew who he was. That's the biggest part of Superman's charm, for me, his balancing of personas.
There was a line on "Lois and Clark" way back in the day that went something like 'Lois, Superman is what I can do, but Clark Kent is who I am'. There's so much less drama involved when she knows who he is. And when you really can't have 'drama' when the hero is as invulnerable as Kal-El, it doesn't make things better to write out the one source of tension you DID have.
Now, all you can do is write about Superman's internal difficulties with personalities in the Justice League; understanding why they mind-wiped Batman, etc. Which is fine, don't get me wrong. But that lacks something, in my mind.
Anyway, I've nerded out enough for everyone, so I'll stop now.
Cheers.