Earth 2 - Society #16 and #17

[history79]

#16

















#17

Comments

[scorntx]

-"Earth 2 is a joke. Barren and useless. Theatrical scenery with no substance. You should have left the world-building to someone with the genius for it."-
I do apologise, Mr. Abnett, but could you repeat yourself? I couldn't get the point of what you were saying because you were saying it so loudly.

Not that he doesn't have a point, mind.

[thehood]

I think you're looking too much into that.

[scorntx]

I really think I'm not.

[theflames]

I mean... I haven't followed this comic at all and even i could see that line was VERY on the nose, to the point where it didn't even seem like real dialogue...

[reveen]

That's kind of fucking hilarious coming from a writer with an extensive array of Warhammer 40,000 books under his belt.

Warhammer 40k

[blue_bolt]

I haven't read even half of the 40K books out there, but some of the ones I've read are fairly decent.

Of course, if the writing here is any indication, I should stay away from the Abnett ones.

[theflames]

Can someone fill me in with what went down with earth 2? Their world died twice? whats going on...

[scorntx]

Well...
Way back when the Nu52 was young, Earth-2 was attacked by Steppenwolfe, Darkseid's uncle, who among other things killed their Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman (and a lot of other people). A couple of years later, some new superheroes started showing up, like Jay Garrick and Alan Scott...
And then their world got blown up by Darkseid's forces, so they tried fleeing to Earth-0, but thanks to some time-travel shenanigans that didn't happen, so they wound up captured by Brainiac on his private world, and when that was over they settled on a new planet which they called Earth 2 (geddit?).
Which is where this series started.

Oh, and there was some other stuff.
Power Girl and Helena Wayne had their own series, which was kind of pointless and boring, and PG was pretty unlikeable. Then in Earth 2: World's End Helena died.
Thomas Wayne turned out to have been alive all this time, then he became Batman. Then he died in Convergence. Earth-2's Dick Grayson became Batman in his stead.
Red Tornado is a woman, and also Lois Lane.
The current Superman is the son of Zod. But he's alright.
Terry Sloane was reinvented from a hero whose motto was "fair play" to a smug berk who is actually evil.
They had versions of Connor Hawke, Al Rothstein and a new version of Citizen Steel. They all died, by the way.

[beyondthefringe]

It's like... why did they hate Earth 2 so badly? Why did they feel the need to reinvent all these characters and then shit all over them and their world so badly that they destroyed the world multiple times?

Sometimes I think about being angry at how it all turned out, but that would require too much effort. Instead, I remember that the real Earth-2 is out there somewhere, untouched and happy.

[scorntx]

Hanlon's Razor, and all that.
The people behind these things genuinely don't seem to understand how little people want stuff like this, or why it's upsetting to fans.

[tigerkaya]

Its almost like Dan Slott wrote this.

[sapphite]

This kind of reminds me of some of the poorer written "What Ifs" from Marvel. The writer would be assigned a one-shot story and realized they didn't have to worry about continuity or marketing issues and could just write whatever they wanted. Wanna kill off Wolverine? Go for it! Get rid of all the superheroes? Have Doom toss the planet into the sun? Go crazy! And so What Ifs too often racked up body counts just because the writer was enamored of the fact that they could actually get away with such stuff.

Then you have Earth 2. There's clearly less of a need to maintain the editorial stasis most comic books face, so the writers are able to make whatever changes they want. It's small stuff at first, Jay being a young man just getting his powers, Alan becoming a single gay man who just lost his fiance. Nothing too jarring or off-putting. But those changes keep piling up, and no one seems to be pulling them back. No one's telling them that they want the book to be a long running property, so the writers have to think about the next group that'll be working on the book. No one's telling them that the company has to maintain the character IPs, so that things have to be recognizable to the audience. And before you know it, the world's been destroyed and the book is near unreadable to anyone who hasn't been diligently following it.

[jeremyp]

I have similar reactions. I really dislike it when they create worlds/characters whose only purpose is to then be systematically destroyed in a cynical, almost sadistic way. It seems like a shallow and meaningless way to tell a story.

[theflames]

Wow... 'longevity' doesn't seem to have been part of the mission statement for this series...

thanks for filling me in though.

[matrix_dragon]

Dammit. I stopped paying attention to Earth-2 after Convergence, but I was hoping the ending to that meant they were done with the angst and pointless suffering of the handful left alive. They'd earned their happy ending, dammit.

Reminds me of something alluded to in Gwenpool's book

[chortles81]

The only way for their happy ending to definitely stick would have been to tell no more Earth-2 stories.