I'm saying I didn't love it. I was kinda hoping to be more impressed and inspired by it than I was. I understand that 2025 me is a bit more discriminating than 1985 me, but still. 40 years is a bit of time, and I obviously know a bit more about storytelling and pacing and those sorts of things than I did in middle school (you'd hope). All that said, it felt reading it more like an event than a story. It was trying to be a story, but it knew that it was an event. I recently sold the complete run of Secret Wars (same era) on EBay, and had paged through that as well before shipping it off - it wasn't quite this compressed. Secret Wars had a more manageable cast (of course), and a smaller scope, so it gets a pass for having to accomplish less with the same amount of room. It had more breathing space to tell a story.
I was expecting to get more I could beg/borrow/steal for Cataclysm Across the Cosmos, but it really didn't give me a lot. However, it did help me to decide that I'm going to go ahead and layer the Public Domain characters into my own world as well (and you can layer them into yours. Feel free). Ever since I moved backward from the 21st century to the 1980s as my default setting, I've known a few things are going to happen in Doc's future - one of these is that Echo City eventually becomes the main city of the game world. In previous iterations of the game, Meridian falls entirely during an alien invasion and becomes a toxic wasteland. I don't think I want to go there anymore, but I do like the idea that Echo City is directly impacted by the Cataclysm; the city is completely changed by the Cataclsym, its entire history and character changed. It's the more 'pulp' city anyway, and these characters largely have a pulp background, so just making it into a giant pulp action comics playground seems like a decent way to go. If Meridian is Metropolis (Doc's city, first and foremost), then Echo City becomes more like Marvel's NYC where everyone else just happens to be... and a place where I can maybe establish the next great team of heroes that includes a mix of my own original characters and PD characters as I've re-imagined them.
Influential old comic stories are so interesting to visit or revisit sometimes just for how they make us reflect on the different time in which they were written. I think it's hard to expect just about any historical comics to really hold their weight as works of art in the wake of the sort of postmodern era of stories we entered with the rise of the writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking at an O'Neil/Adams GL/GA book on my shelf and thinking about how quaint some of these groundbreaking stories are in retrospect. At the moment, it's hard for me to imagine Watchmen or All-Star Superman ever feeling quaint, but maybe there's something even more transformational right around the corner.
Right. It was a bit discouraging (I guess?) to read and know how much I revered it at one time, and now I see overdone characterization and too many thought bubbles that exist only to move the plot forward. Ultimately, I don't really want to read the comics again - I want to feel how I felt when I was a teenager experiencing these things for the first time.
DeleteI know exactly what you mean! On the thought bubbles too...some of the writing that I now recognize as forced (but that I took as "normal" at the time...and so also has a bit of a warm nostalgic feel to it) is the thinking and the ridiculous mid-fight dialogue that heroes have when they have to give details about stuff that happened last issue.🤣
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