GOOD THING: A lot of good character moments here but for my money, the best is Blue Lantern Walker attempting to empathize with Atrocitius, as we learn about just what caused the Red Lantern leader to see out the power of Hatred in the first place. Namely, that his entire world/space sector was all but slaughtered by the Manhunter Robots for no good reason and The Guardians apparently covered the whole thing up.
BAD THING: Not a lot of action, as this issue is mostly dedicated toward the Rainbow Connection trying to win over Atrocitius and Larfleeze.
The Final Verdict: Good issue and a must read for anyone interested in keeping up with the main story of Blackest Night
Which really bothers me when DC is not properly collecting Blackest Night together. They're collecting the main series and the GL issues separately, which seems ridiculous to me.
ReplyDeleteThis is Final Crisis all over again, when they originally planned on collecting just the main series, even though Superman 3-D was essential to the story.
That's really annoying, if true. Especially given that DC did such a great job with the HC editions for The Sinestero Corps War. Two books for the main series, collecting the main specials, Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps. and a separate Tales of the Sinestro Corps HC for all the specials and one-shots.
ReplyDeleteI had hoped at least Blackest Night and GL would be intercut. GL Corps has actually been standing on it's own - for the most part - so far.
Honestly, I hate the way that they collected Sinestro Corps War. It's the same way that they've handled New Krypton, Justice and All Star Superman: they take these stories that are planned for a particular ending and then collect them completely separately. Especially given that they're complete stories.
ReplyDeleteNow, the argument could be made that they're too long to collect, but DC has collected longer stories before like JLA Year One and Long Halloween. Marvel is starting to make big collections, like Age of Apocalypse and the upcoming Clone Saga.
It just...it really bugs me. If you publish these issues originally with the intention that you need to read both, why not collect them together? Additionally, why not put everything in one volume? I had to wait a year...a YEAR...to read the second half of All Star Superman. And I JUST read Sinestro Corps War this year because they finally put it out in softcover.
Well, quite honestly they make more money on the hardcover editions. And not JUST because they cost more. :P
ReplyDeleteIgnoring that the libraries which buy graphic novels prefer hard-cover editions because they are more durable, the soft-covers get PULVERIZED in chain bookstores. If the readers reading them in the store don't destroy them, shelf abuse will. My local Borders, for instance, seems to have a contest to see just how many GN they can get into each shelf before something gets squeezed out with a warped spine.
And that's fine. I have noting against hardcovers in general (I love Absolutes and Omnibuses). I have a problem with hardcovers being released that contain only half a story. The complete story doesn't even get released for another few months. The whole idea of buying something in trade is to get the complete story all in one sitting.
ReplyDeleteImagine, for example, one of the Harry Potter books. But they release only half of it, in hardcover, with the second half not coming out for months. At the very least, each Potter (or Lord of the Rings...or any other novel in a series) is a relatively complete story on its own. So, both DC and Marvel need to treat their collections as such, not put out two or three separate volumes of one solitary story.
To use a different argument, suppose the casual book buyer in these chain bookstores picks one up. And then sees that they have to spend even more just to get the completion of one storyarc.
As for All-Star Superman and Justice VS. Long Halloween and JLA: Year One, there are two other reasons why DC started splitting the year-long storylines into Volume 1/Volume 2 books.
ReplyDelete1. The smaller SC are more durable - my copy of JLA: Year One wore out just from how often I read it and reread it. I can only imagine how quickly it happened with a library's copy.
2. The TP market demands it - if you were reading All-Star Superman as a monthly comic, you'd have waited a little over a year (there were some delays from month to month, IIRC) to get the whole thing. Partway through that, DC puts out the TP of the first six issues... both for the benefit of the people in the bookstores who never go to a small comic book store to buy monthly comics AND for those who missed out on the first few issues and don't have a small comic shop nearby who either have the back issues in stock or who aren't charging an arm and a leg for them.
Thankfully, most of the stories DC have done this with CAN be treated as a separate story... or at least broken into acts fairly easily.
ReplyDeleteTake Sinestro Corps War. The first HC edition ends with the Green Lanterns realizing - as they've been repelling all these other little outbreaks and preparing for an attack on Oa itself - that the Sinestro Corps goal isn't Oa... it's Earth!
Hush, too, can be considered in the same way. I think it was the first TP DC split in this way, precisely because of how quickly the original books went out of print and because of how expensive the single issues were on ebay after the fact. Still, the TP DID collect the first six issues, breaking just after the scene where Batman is stopped from killing The Joker.
Of course my perspective on this may be skewed since of of my favorite fantasy novels of all time, Magician by Raymond Feist, is similarly broken in half in its' paperback editions just because of how HUGE it is. The first book ends, oddly, just after some of the heroes have just finished holding back an invading army while the two main protagonists are respectively being possessed by a strange magical suit of armor and captive on another planet.
This sort of thing happens all the time in fantasy and science fiction writing, so the idea of ending a book on a cliff-hanger is not that unusual for me.