The Virgin Read: She Really Has No Business Talking About Frank Castle And Final Crisis, But That's The Business She Requested

Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds # 2
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by George Perez, Scott Koblish
Published by DC Comics

Punisher # 63
Written by Gregg Hurwitz
Art by Laurence Campbell & Lee Loughridge
Published by Marvel MAX

These two comics couldn’t be more different.  I’m setting them side by side right now, and I'm opening both to the very first page.

Punisher is a continuing story with one main character and has a recap page.  (Thank you!)

Legion of 3 Worlds (from this point forward known as LO3W), dives right in to the story with an ugly Tinkerbell flying.  Or is it two ugly Tinkerbells?  I couldn't tell by the drawing.  Then the 6^th panel shows two dialog bubbles, one being directed to a being that is not in the panel.  Great.

Let's turn the page….Punisher is awash with cool shades of blue and purple.  Minimal text.  A story told mostly in pictures.  Imagine that?  A story told by pictures in a comic book?!  Hey!

The 2^nd and 3^rd page of LO3W is very busy with a lot of color….people….text.  There are panels of different sizes.  There are non-paneled areas with several scenes.  It’s a lot to take in.

Okay, right there in the two preceding paragraphs do I have the experience that ends up accurately describing how I feel about these comics, if I had to do it in one word.

Punisher = Cool.

LO3W = Busy.

Something has started to happen to me in recent years when I am visually over-stimulated or just generally over-stimulated.  I rode the Batman and Robin roller coaster at Great Adventure a few years ago and sort of passed out/fell asleep in the midst of it because it was just too much.  My system just said "Nah, not interested" and shut down.  Something similar happened when I tried to watch one of those Star Wars movies with Jimmy Smits – at one point the huge screen was filled with spaceships and exploding stars and fire and my eyes got droopy and I fell asleep.

So here I am, reading this issue of LO3W, trying to take in everything on every page, trying to take in all the varied story lines so nobody will get mad at me for giving up the way I did last time, making sure I pay attention to who is who, not ignoring anything, studying all these colors and overall busy-ness--and on page 22 I fell asleep.  I'm not trying to be mean or nasty here, but I just rested my eyes for a few seconds and fell asleep.  Then I got myself up, finished the comic and took a serious nap.  This was the middle of the afternoon!  I wasn't tired when I started!  I hadn't just eaten a turkey dinner!  It was two o'clock!

I don't know what to tell you.  There was just so much going on.  I’m sure a fan who keeps up regularly may be juiced by all the plots and sub-plots and sub-sub-plots.  I gotta say though, to me?  It was kind of boring.  I had been so psyched to finally read a Geoff Johns comic book after attending the DC Panel in Baltimore.  It seemed like he wrote nearly every comic book the company publishes!  Yet here I am, and I haven't read a single one.  After reading this, I feel the fraternity vibe that I got out of that Baltimore panel more than ever.  I’m sure their fans are very happy, and they probably should be.  This has to be writing that's specifically for them.  This is a comic book for DC fans, god, it felt like a love letter to DC fans.  If I were to try and judge DC by this one comic book, this Mardi Gras of characters and confusion, they don’t want new readers.  They just want their current readers to stay, to have babies with them, to buy land.  They aren't interested in pledges.  Initiation is over.  The club is closed.

Look, before you get all antsy--that’s totally fine!  I'm not going to even hate on the comic.  (Except – Superboy.  I mean, I get that he has mean red eyes.  I'm very intimidated.  But no pupils?  That’s just stupid.  Everyone else from other universes still has human eyes.  What’s up?)  And look, I'm sorry.  But this is simply not enjoyable to read, much less follow.

Then, there is The Punisher.  I've been made to understand that people may not be as into the new team writing The Punisher as they were the old team that wrote it.  But for me, with LO3W as a comparison, I really enjoyed it.  It’s the absolute antithesis of LO3W.  The colors and art are all dramatic, well put together.  There’s a coolness and an intensity to the story, both at the same time.  There’s human emotion about human circumstances that I can relate to.  (I mean, I’ve never killed anyone, but I’m no stranger to the feelings of love, revenge, hate, shame, guilt, desire, need, etc.)

With all that said, I did have a few small quibbles with this book.  I’m not sure where I’ve seen it before, but, I’ve seen this before.  I somehow knew, and “guessed” from the beginning that the little girl was already dead when she was put in the warehouse.  It was too set up.  It didn’t make any sense for a girl to be there alone.  And like I said, I must have seen that somewhere before.  I don't know why, or how, I've seen the dead body of a little girl put in a warehouse behind a mirror to confuse and upset somebody, but I have seen it.  

I have both a compliment and critique here.  The story in this comic seems to want to delve into the duplicity of one aspect of human nature--that love can make us kill; that a desire for justice can make us behave unjustly, etc.  It seems that it wants to use The Punisher to illustrate that internal struggle.  Therefore, I wish I would have seen more of it when Punisher exhumed the girl’s body and cut her open to check the bullet.  There’s a full arrary of emotions that a person would go through in doing such a thing – a person racked with guilt and pain over the idea that he accidentally killed the little girl he was trying to save.  Would it be so easy to cut her open?  If he cut her open and found his own bullet, and learned that he truly had killed her, what then?  And just that possibility alone, lurking inside Punisher’s head, should have upped the tension for him before cutting her open. 

This book keeps trying to put us in the Punisher’s shoes – for catharsis, for perspective, or just any exploration of the experience.  I would have liked to experience his angst, fear, shame or just any of the inner turmoil he went through in that one  experience rather than just see it dismissed in four panels.  That’s the place where I think they missed the boat.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it.  I would definitely read it again.  And maybe its just that I’m human and prefer human stories to superhero stories.  If I were a superhero, I’d have probably liked Legion of 3 Worlds better.

But I doubt it.

-Nina Stone, 2008

Comments

[Kenny]

Nina, I love your articles. I've been reading comics on and off my whole life, and I see nothing wrong with your approach. If you open a comic and it's presented like a mess, then why are you going to have any interest?

[nina]

Thanks, Kenny!

[David Uzumeri]

In Mr. Johns's defense, that was probably the worst place to start, even regarding his writing - his Superman or Flash stuff is far more reader-friendly, and even a lot of people I know who are usually fairly big fans of his stuff find Legion of Three Worlds compressed, convoluted, confusing and confounding. So while your opinion of the book makes a bunch of sense, extrapolating its failures to everything Johns does is more of a fallacy.

[Tucker Stone]

David, I pretty much think Nina's stuff doesn't really need defending--it is what it is, but I think you're kind of creating an argument that isn't there. She doesn't go on to say anything specific about Johns that isn't birthed out of this comic and her interpretation of the "vibe" at the DC Nation panel, and when she makes the statements here about DC creating comics that are insular and unfriendly, all of it is clearly prefaced by the statement "If I were to try and judge DC by this one comic book..." There's no generalization about the guys work, just a statement that this one is by him, she had a negative reaction to a publicity panel he was a big portion of, and that's it. There's nothing in here that I see that, as you put it, extrapolates its failure to everything Johns does.

[David Uzumeri]

Sorry, I guess I was speaking in the abstract, thinking that's what someone could take away from the article and responding to that rather than, you know, the actual article, which is shitty commenting on my part. I didn't mean to be accusing people of stuff they didn't say, and apologize if I was misconstrued in such a way.