The latest direct-to-DVD feature from Warner Brother Animation is Justice League: Crisis on Two-Earths. The other features they’ve done have been good, maybe even brilliant, but I think this is the one I anticipated the most. And it’s good, really good – not quite as good as Justice League: A New Frontier, but it’s close. The main film does seem a little short (75 minutes), but that’s made up for by the presence of the Spectre animated-short on the Blu-Ray disc.
Some spoilers follow…
This is quite amazing. It’s the Justice League recreated on an Etch-A-Sketch by the Etch-A-Sketch Man (alias Christoph Brown) and edited together by Nathaniel Brown. What impresses me isn’t just his skill with the device, but a lot of these are actually quite good compositions regardless of the medium.
[Via: This site]
This Next Wednesday sees the end on one of the most contentious Justice League stories in years. The Source has a five-page preview of Justice League: Cry For Justice #7 by James Robinson and Mauro Cascioli. We may know broadly how this ends, but many of the details and drama remain to be unveiled. And if you need those splashes splashed together BCs got that covered.
Correction 25/Feb: It’s actually the following week (March 3rd) that Cry #7 comes out. DC normally puts previews out for the following week, but this one is for two weeks after it was posted and I didn’t read the date closely enough.
Eagle eyes readers of DC’s April Solicitations can’t have helped, but have noticed that Starfire – a recent convert to the JLA – appears to be joining another team already. The blurb for REBELS #15 read:
Straight from the pages of Titans, Starfire joins our merry band just in time for super-genius Vril Dox to pick up the pieces from last issue’s climactic battle with Starro the Conqueror.First on his agenda: rebuild his interplanetary police squad, L.E.G.I.O.N.
Well it appears that at one time there had been a REBELS/JLA crossover planned. During an interview with Tony Bedard, writer of REBELS (the current incarnation of Vril Dox’s LEGION team) and the new writer of Green Lantern Corps, CBR staff writer Jeffrey Renaud asked him about those plans:
Renaud: Any chance Green Lantern Corps will crossover with either of those popular team books because I believe there was a Justice League of America/R.E.B.E.L.S. crossover planned at some point?
Bedard: The Justice League of America/R.E.B.E.L.S. thing has evolved as the “War of the Supermen” event evolved, and James Robinson will end up handling Vril Dox’s role in the fate of New Krypton himself.
The reason that Starfire makes a logical choice for REBELS is that Dox is going to be setting up his new headquarters in the Vega System – the star system that Kory’s people were originally from.
Renaud: Can you give us any updates on what’s coming in R.E.B.E.L.S., like a certain new team member, and The Great Ten? And are you working on anything else these days?
Bedard: The whole Starro saga concludes in R.E.B.E.L.S. #14, and after that we’ll be seeing some exciting changes for Vril Dox and company. There will be a new L.E.G.I.O.N. headquarters in the Vega System — the most lawless sector in the galaxy. Starfire will join the cast, and there will be a lot of intrigue involving the Tamaraneans, planet Rann, and other cosmic locations and races that don’t fall under the Green Lantern umbrella. And we’ll see a showdown between Dox, his villainous son, and his father, Brainiac.
The entire subplot of bouncing between teams makes a certain sense for Kory as a character. It was built up in Titans that she was suffering from the slow dissolution of the team and that she really needed to move on with her life. Accepting Vixen’s offer of a position with the JLA was one way of doing that until it turned out that three other Titans were following her. Moving back to the Vega System may be the amount of distance she needs to escape the Titans.
Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths is an original DC Universe direct-to-DVD animated film. Many comics fan will recognise the basic premise from Grant Morrisons’s acclaimed JLA: Earth-Two graphic-novel, but this movie is an original story. It has its roots in the transition between the second and third seasons of the Justice League cartoon when it rebranded as Justice League Unlimited. Dwayne McDuffie was commissioned to write a movie that explained the differences between the two set-ups, but it wasn’t made. Fast-forward a few years and WB Animation have dusted down that script, reworked it to stand on its own, and released it as Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths.
This clip from the movie of the JLA assembling their Watchtower/Satellite headquarters makes the connection pretty obvious – you can almost imagine the voices of the other original artists.
Newsarama hosted premier screens of the films on the East and West Coast. There was a live panel at the New York screening that was attended by James Woods (Owlman), writer Dwayne McDuffie, and voice director Andrea Romano. The West Coast premier was also have a panel hosted by Newsarama. It had larger roster including the executive producer Bruce Timm, the producers, and several actors.
At the East Cost panel James Wood’s described the thinking process of his Owlman character:
I was reading about an idiot savant chess player, and he went into real mental illness because he was so far ahead of his competitors that he got bored and was waiting to see them realize there was no way out.
McDuffie also expanded on the conversion from JLU to a standalone movie:
I was working on Justice League, and we were about to start Justice League Unlimited. The plan was to do a version of this story as a bridge from how they went from 6 characters to 60. There wasn’t the staff [at WB Animation] to do the design for both of these at once though.
Bruce Timm called me and asked if I’d be willing to rewrite it to be a bit more like the comics and less like the [cartoon] series. We switched Green Lanterns, we switched out all of the guest Justice Leaguers. In the TV series, they were all characters who had met Batman in other series. The only one who was in both versions was Aquaman, who was going to be in there, cause I think Aquaman’s cool.
Wood’s then noted that he was the villain in the spoof Aquaman movie featured in the Entourage.
In a studio provided interview Executive Producer Bruce Timm was asked about the biggest challenge in translating a Justice League Unlimited script into a stand-alone movie.
The biggest challenge, and this is kind of esoteric, was that we had to find the line between the original source material and making it feel like a stand-alone movie so anyone that didn’t watch JLU could follow it. We really didn’t have to tweak the script too much – I think about 95 percent remains untouched. In terms of visual styling, we also wanted it to stand on its own and not necessarily as a continuation of the old show. We have this brilliant character designer – Phil Bourassa – who draws in a style similar to my own in terms of simplicity, but slightly different. So it doesn’t look 180 degrees away from the old show, but it definitely feels unique.
And, MTV’s Splash Page picked up on comments Dwayne McDuffie made about already having written two other animated movies.
“I’ve written two more [animated] movies,” said McDuffie. “I can’t say what they are, although I’m dying to say what they are. They’re really cool. [Warner Brothers Animation] kind of likes to announce just the next [animated film] to keep focused, but I think people are going to be pretty excited.”
The DVD and Blu-Ray copies of Crisis on Two Earths go on sale on Tuesday. I’ve got my blue ray copy on pre-order from Amazon, but it looks like there are a lot of copies out there already. I’ve got a saved search with Google that alerts me to new articles or webpages mentioning the Justice League and for the last week or so it has been inundated with links to pirate sites offering the film for download. I won’t download it, but I certainly won’t claim to hold the moral high ground. Nevertheless, I’ve been surprised by just how many times it’s been downloaded. A quick check of a couple of torrent sites shows 9000+ seeds/leechers for the most popular Crisis on Two Earths rip, which is three times more than for Smallville: Absolute Justice and comparable with the aggregate numbers for many motion pictures. Hopefully this will translate into enough sales to warrant subsequent Justice League movies.
When the Justice League reformed four Graduates moved up from the Titans. So far we’ve examined the recent history of Dick Grayson, Donna Troy, and Starfire. That last of the four Graduates is Cyborg.
Victor Stone was created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez for The New Teen Titans. He first previewed in DC Comics Present #25 (Oct 1980), before making his first real appearance in The New Teen Titans #1 (Nov 1980). Many times Cyborg’s team-mates have called him “the tin man with a heart” for it is his essential humanity and decency that have defined him and not the cybernetics and metal that cover much of his body. He takes after his scientist parents with an IQ of 170, but he rebelled against their home schooling and sought companionship at a normal high-school student. He became a medal winning athlete and may even have turned professional if it hadn’t been for an accident at his father’s laboratory. Vic lost his arms, legs, half his head, and a significant fraction of his internal organs to the accident.
Vic’s father was a cyberneticist and he used his own prototype technology to save his son by replacing Vic’s damaged organs, limbs, and skin with gleaming metal implants. His new body was faster, stronger, and tougher than his original, but Vic only saw himself as a half-man/half-machine monster. The empath Raven sensed Vic’s despair and recruited him into the reformed Teen Titans. It took Vic years to come to terms with his machine nature, but at least the Titans gave him a place in the world. It was with the Titans that Vic met his best-friend, Garfield Logan (Beast Boy/Changeling), a young man who like Vic had been transformed into a superhuman/freak by scientist-parents who were just trying to save his life (New Teen Titans 1#, Nov 1980, DC Special Cyborg #1, July 2008).
Victor Stone’s life has been a struggle to retain that part of his humanity which still remains intact. He almost totally lost himself to the technology when he bonded with an alien race called the Technis and unwittingly became a threat to the Earth. The Justice League thought that the Technis/Cyborg union was an enemy and the Titans had to fight their mentors to save their friend (JLA/Titans #1-3, Dec-Feb 1998-99). Nightwing and his friends were able to move Victor’s conciousness into a new hybrid biological/living-metal body. This new body allowed his to appear human again, but a fight with the Thinker’s digital intelligence caused the alien metal to spontaneously downgrade into a configuration that exactly matched his original cybernetic body.
The Justice League had insisted Cyborg stay with the Titans as a condition of his freedom after the Technis affair, but he came into conflict with them again after the death of Donna Troy. A new Teen Titans were formed with Cyborg, Starfire, and Beast Boy as mentors to the former-Young Justice. Some of the Leaguers were initially distrustful of their pupils joining the Titans, but Stone managed to allay their fears (Teen Titans #6, Feb 2004). He appeared to find a new purpose as their leader and the heart of the new group. He also seemed to find a peace with his own cybernetic nature. Few saw his workshop beneath Titans Tower where he allowed himself to be completely disassembled each night by machines that preformed a constant cycle of maintenance and upgrades. Vic had inherited his father’s gift for cybernetics and had made himself completely responsible for his own body so that he was not reliant on STAR Labs or other facilities for his routine “health” (Teen Titans #9, May 2004).
During the Infinite Crisis Cyborg accompanied the recently resurrected Donna Troy in her investigation of the spatial rift that had opened in deep space. However, there was an accident when the survivors tried to teleport away from the collapsing rift. Unlike Starfire, Cyborg actually made it to Earth, but his body somehow became fused with Firestorm’s body on a molecular level. Doctor Mid-Nite of the JSA was able to keep them both stable until they could be separated (52 Week #5, 7 June 2006). Firestorm survived their merging relatively unscathed (52 Week #24 18 Oct 2006), but Cyborg wasn’t so lucky. He was heavily damaged and appeared inoperable. Deshaun, the fiancée of Vic’s old girlfriend Sarah Charles, studied Vic’s condition, but he was unable to reassemble him (DC Special Cyborg #1-6, July-Dec 2008).
Without a senior Titan to lead them the Teen Titans floundered amid an ever-expanding roster of neophyte or untested teen heroes. After Deshaun’s failure to repair Cyborg, Beast Boy had recruited the twin geniuses Marvin and Wendy Harris. It took them six months to repair his cybernetics sufficiently for his core systems to reboot. Many of the Titans found it comforting to talk or bound idea off of the unconscious Cyborg in much in the same way that people talk to coma patients. Cyborg wasn’t conscious of this, but enough of his circuitry was online for it to record everything they said to him. When he finally awoke Vic was saddened and shocked at the state of the Teen Titans and he immediately re-recruited former members Wonder Girl and Beast Boy (Teen Titans #34-37, May-Aug 2006).
With the Teen Titans becoming more self-reliant on the West Coast, Vic decided he should try recreating their success with an East Coast team. None of the other senior Titans were available, so he put together his own group including the latest Hawk and Dove, Anima, Little Barda, Son of Vulcan, Lagoon Boy, and Power Boy. The new group appeared to have potential, but they were ambushed during an early training session by three Trigon Seeds (Raven’s siblings) who were looking to kill as many former Titans as possible. Power Boy was killed and Cyborg was left as an immobile torso (Titans East Special #1, Jan 2008). Nevertheless, the attacks did prompt a reformation of the original Titans as a group (Titans #1-4, June-Sept 2008).
An individual matching Cyborg’s description was reported to have attacked several STAR Labs facilities. Upon investigating Vic discovered that a former friend had been turned into a military-grade duplicate of himself. Vic, the Titans, and Teen Titans stopped his rampage, but they discovered a conspiracy coordinated by the intelligence broker “Mr Orr” to turn injured soldiers into cybernetic super -oldiers using technology stolen by Deshaun. Vic wasn’t against helping injured soldiers to walk again, but he was horrified to see his father’s technology perverted into a lethal weapon. Even Orr’s Cyborg Revenge Squad couldn’t stop Cyborg reasserting control of his family’s intellectual property (DC Special Cyborg #1-6, July-Dec 2008).
Joey Wilson, the body hoping son of Slade Wilson (the Terminator), had once been a Titan, but the strain of jumping through so many people’s minds had sent him insane. He had tried to assassinate several presidential candidates and to kill his team-mates, before the JLA and Titans defeated him. However, Joey had hidden himself deep in Vic mind. He used Cyborg’s electronic interfaces with Titans Tower to spy on the new Teen Titans team and then attempted to kill them before he was again defeated (Titans #11, Teen Titans #69, Teen Titans Annual #1). The Titans knew that a psychopathic killer called Vigilante was after Joey, whom they still hoped to save, so they staged a battle with Cyborg making it look like he was still possessed. Vigilante show up and blew the machine part of Vic’s head off. Cyborg remained unconscious while the Titans and Vigilante clashed with Joey’s latest attempt to kill them (“Deathtrap”).
Afterwards Vic undertook an intensive routine of upgrade and maintenance on all the Titans and Teen Titans systems until Beast Boy pulled him away to spend some time in the daylight. He’d been punishing himself for the death of Power Boy and was afraid that the Titans, his family as he saw them, was drifting apart again. Beast Boy and Saran Simms pushed Vic to start dating again and recommended an online dating service. After several anti-technology encounters with a couple of friends and former friends, he finally decided to leave the technology side behind and accepted a blind date with a scientist called Dr Tamara Belson (Titans #14, Aug 09).
Vic had been the one who has pressed for the Titans reformation – something the others resisted until the attack on Vic’s Teen Titans East. However, they had all slowly begun drifting into other lives or roles leaving Vic and Starfire to hold the fort at the Titans Compound in New York. An attack by Phobia forced Vic and Kory to re-evaluate their own insecurities, for Vic it was the fear of loosing his team-mates (Titans #21-22, Mar-April 2010).
Why does Cyborg deserve to be in the Justice League? Because Vic would already be in the Justice League if Superman and co. were in charge. His name was first put forward by the trinity in the “Tornado’s Path” story arc and he was universally agreed upon as a good candidate. Batman noted that Dick Grayson had told him Cyborg was ready to join the League and would definitely say yes if asked. As fate would have it Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman didn’t get to determine the roster of the new League so Cyborg wasn’t asked at that stage.
Cyborg is the standard bearer of the Wolfman/Perez New Titans as an independent group. He was the leader of Geoff Johns’ Teen Titans and was responsible for bringing the New Titans back together. If he is joining the Justice League is a definite signal that the New Titans do not exist as a group any more.
One trading card set I haven’t seen in my local Forbidden Planet is the Rittenhouse Justice League Archives card set, which is a pity as they’re actually rather good (the cards that is, not FB – that’s a slowly brewing rant for another day). Luckily there are sellers on eBay that sell the entire 72-card base set for less than five-pounds. Fast, quick, and without the hassle of having to buy separate packets. There is a rumour that there might not be any more DC Cards of any sort, so this may be the last set we see. Maybe they need to address the marketing and distribution if my experiences are anything to go by. Well if it is the last set they’re certainly going out with style.
What I like about these cards is that they’ve turned the old Mike Sekowsky JLA artwork into expertly cropped masterpieces. The card quality is also higher than most card-sets so that enhances the feel that this is a cut above the rest. I’ve posted some examples above. I particularly like that Flash card (card #55 featuring JLA #54 – the Royal Flush Gang’s return). It has a certain pop-art feel to it that easily surpasses anything by old Lichtenstein (as a digression: I recently saw one of Lichtenstein’s comicbook panels for the first time in a Madrid show. Can’t say I was impressed. In almost all cases the original panels are better than his vaunted swipes).
Something I did side step by just buying the base set was the entire phenomena of sketch cards. As they sound, these are little card sized sketches done by one of 39 artists who each do 200+ sketches. It works out as less than one sketch card per base-set. Plenty of people just collect the sketch cards so it should be quite easy to pick up their disregarded base-sets.
Some team-ups have never been dreamed of, until now that is. The Comics Alliance’s Chris Sims and Rusty Shackles have reimagined the cover from the JLA and JSA’s first team-up as this team-up between the JLA and the Wu-Tang Clan. Go to the Comics Alliance to see the full version.
Toyfair, the giant show for toys and games, has just finished. There were lots of announcements and photos, the Mattel JLU line is still running (great Lobo figure and Superfriends style Batman) and their DC Universe line is growing (Tyr WTF?), DC Direct are producing great stuff, and there are more Morrison era JLA figures. However, its the above Justice League plush figures spotted by Toon Barn that really caught my eye. As Toon Barn’s Rob says
Now, tell me this; what kind of horrible super villain would you have to be to want to hurt these guys? I mean, look at them! They’re adorable!!
DC Comics have released a 5-page preview of this week’s JLA issue. Most of the new group is together, but everybody is still getting use to being in the new Justice League.What is Green Arrow up to with the Shade? That can’t end well.
DC’s square thumbnails are something of a pet hate for Rich Johnston (I can’t say I entirely disagree with him). He’s illustrated a better way of displaying these previews by putting together his own version of the JLA #42 preview using the Issuu image displayer.
(I’ll post the review for JLA #41 once I’ve finished these Graduates mini-profiles — just Cyborg to go).
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