Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This week, Bennett looks at the Big Two summer events.I didn't review DC's Free Comic Book Day offering, The New 52: Futures End FCBD Special Edition #0 in last week's Confessions, but for the record this wasn't due to any supposed animosity towards the publisher or their output. The only reason I didn't write about it was because it wasn't included in the review copies Diamond Comic Distributors provided me with. To read it I had to schlep down to a comic book store like a regular person and get one, and my reaction after finally reading it was… gosh, it's dismal.
But I'll circle back to Futures End in a minute. The main thing I got out of reading it, once that sadly familiar sinking sensation that this was going to be the new status quo for at least the next three months of DC Comics finally subsided, was the realization that Futures End and Original Sin both had an identical theme. These Marvel/DC summer events always have a theme, some sort of meta subtext for all of the surface sturm und drang, preferably with a torn-from-today's-headlines quality that gives the proceedings a little verisimilitude. And that theme is of course, eyes.
Well, duh, you might very well say. It wasn't exactly like either Marvel and DC were trying to be subtle about it (Brother Eye, The Watcher, etc.*), but as obvious as they were being, I was being that much more oblivious to what was rolling up underneath the surface. Marvel is trying hard to sell this one as just some kind of simple murder mystery, and let’s face it, the consequences of keeping and revealing of secrets is classic stuff, found in everything from soaps to Shakespeare. But it's clear from all of the "sins" and "secrets" being floated in the solicitations for the Original Sin comics that these stories are informed by contemporary surveillance state infringing on civil liberties anxieties. I don't know if these comics will be any, you know, good, but at least there's a possibility that they'll be interesting.
On the other hand, while Futures End also uses the all-seeing eye as a leitmotif, here that seems to be more of a happy accident. In this one Brother Eye has been reduced to just another generic rogue A.I. that seems to have picked "global human extinction" out of a book of motivational mad libs completely at random. Because mass surveillance leads to mass extinction, I guess. Futures End gives every indication of being a half-hearted, reheated slab of Terminator flavored with bits of X-Men: Future Past. I'm not made of stone; I'll admit it was kind of fun seeing the formerly perfect forms of DC characters twisted into what looks like Sid's nightmarish creations from Toy Story (Hawkman looks especially ooky on the cover).
But otherwise this is just another "we've got to stop the hellscape future from happening" story, something we've seen and seen, so it makes sense that DC is hoping real hard that it'll seem brand new to the more youthful audience it’s ruthlessly pursuing. Last week I compared their comics unfavorably to a much reviled brand of men's "fragrance" and I've got to confess, I kind of felt bad about that. At first. But it's clear from the ads included in this giveaway that buyers of Axe Body Spray are exactly the demographic they're actively pursuing. I speak specifically of the one for the DC All Access web series which features the bodies of its hosts Blair Herter and Tiffany Smith contorted into poses that positively scream "extreeeeeme." And I really don't have the necessary words to describe the one for Splat Color Gel, which appears to be a hair product of some sort, except to say that my stomach hurts when I look at it.
* Marvel's even dragging perpetual fifth rate Ghost Rider villain The Orb into Original Sin because, well, he's got a great honking eyeball for a head. I can only hope that DC will realize that Futures End is the perfect opportunity for them to turn tenth rate Green Lantern villain Professor Ojo into a major league badass.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.