Project Zebra: Cats thrive on technomancy at the zoo ►
◄ My review: The Autobiography of Mr Spock (2021)
See here for my thoughts on Part 1 and below for the underwhelming rest of the series, with some side discussion of the source material.
Part 2
Things start off quite decompressed. Jenny is Charles Darwin's great granddaughter and wakes up in a coffin in Westminster Abbey, rather than the graveyard she ended up in Mark Millar's The Authority* and Secret History where her headstone read "Bugger This. I want a better world." It's inferred that her revival is because of 9/11 somehow. American exceptionalism? Unrelated to that, Jenny made out with Superman when he was in college, which may or may not be an oblique reference to Superman analogue The High in WildStorm as well as a mermaid I presume is the golden age character Lori Lemaris. Doctor Manhattan... er, Captain Atom vaporises one of his hostages, cures another's cancer and then brings the first hostage back in a demonstration of his 'godlike' abilities (but this is a DC universe, reality-warping being aren't exactly uncommon, characters come back from death so often it's often referred to as a revolving door, and very few characters claim godhood). Like issue one, nobody reads as in-character.
The overuse of censored swearing is annoying. Chiefly because the censored bits don't sufficiently indicate what word has been censored, which interrupts parsing the text. The fact that 2024 DC feels the need to censor any of this is rather pathetic, especially in a "black label" imprint for an adult audience, but the fact that the writer knows it and still makes the same dialogue choices gets tiresome. Typical Jenny dialogue is peppered with occasional British vernacular such as bollocks, bastard, git, hell, bloody, etc rather than much of anything stronger.
*Background info which is more interesting: in the Mark Millar Authority, a bad guy was going to have had Jenny's corpse dug up, but it got censored by DC. A lot of other things in the run were also editorially censored, more controversially and pettily including a kiss between two gay heroes.
http://sequart.org/magazine/2461/censorship-of-the-authority/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authority_(comics)#Millar/Quitely_run
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/absolute-authority-vol-2-restores-bush/
Part 3
Captain Atom throws Flash out of a bar, demonstrating a nebulous power set and plot armour. The Justice League decide to go in anyway and get their arses kicked to the point of fatalities. In flashbacks, Jenny has a conversation with Superman about his non-intervention policy and is rude to a cafe owner. Although you can pick it apart in more detail it's a quick read, and it's unlikely even in a non-continuity story that Leaguers are dead or that if they are it won't be undone. So let's wander off-topic and talk about the original source material, then look at the detail of the new.
Rich Johnston notes that Ellis's concept of authority leans towards "someone exerting control they did not earn and do not deserve". It isn't really developed in the original 12 issue The Authority run, but left to Millar to make explicit and exaggerate. The lack of developing or exploring implications of it is a comment that could equally apply to a lot of Ellis characters; his typical MO is writing cynically wise-cracking, hard-drinking, hard-smoking anti- or fringe establishment types that many commentators consider functionally interchangeable and assume are wish-fulfilment self-inserts. Many would fit the description of an authority that commands obedience through force without much critical examination and are usually presented as reluctant anti-heroes with "well, someone has to step up and do things" motivations.
To give Tom King some credit, his League does talk through options before going in after Atom. He seems to 'get' versions of those characters more than Jenny, or maybe it's the fact that DC have written so many different versions of the characters that anything goes. The idea that flashback Superman would consider not discreetly intervening to disable an IED to make a political point is a bit more iffy. Atom's playing with the civilians is creepy, but less god-like being and feeling more like dialogue that would fit "real crime" drama.
Jenny's assertion that the League aren't gods and that neither is Atom but that at least he (on some level) knows it feels like the first piece of dialogue in this instalment that elevates the story or the character, helped by not having the comical censorship. Batman dying like a chump after apparently failing to talk down Atom by bringing in his daughter Margaret (who also gets cremated with nuclear fire)... doesn't, and just telegraphs even harder the What If? status of the story. Atom is still a Dr Manhattan analogue, and Jenny is mostly played by Tank Girl. Everyone else is a bit part that exists as story scaffolding.
The remainder is the flashback seeming to move towards revealing how her modern-day troubleshooter role evolves, with Supes claiming he can't stop conflict and Jenny riposting "unless you do". Which comes across as a moment of decision to be someone who saves the world and changes it, bada bing bada boom. But it's no Kingdom Come, or even Obsidian Age.
Part 4
In 2011 Jenny confronts a banker (with a bodyguard) to background noise of a news report about terrorism. It appears that in this continuity, her powers allowing her to travel along electrical connections also allow her to teleport others with her. Is that new? Even if it isn't, it feels lazy. She kidnaps him to a foreclosed property, talks to him about sub-prime lending and brings in a previous home-owner who was affected by the financial crash, who without any fanfare kills him.
In the present day, Jenny talks to Atom and asks for two hostages to be released as a gesture. The League are still dead in the background. Jenny restates the pre-DC timeline of living from 1900 to 1999, and her view that the C20th is unkillable. The issue ends with her praying for grace and forgiveness.
This part was more enjoyable. The banker being executed by an ordinary late middle aged woman was relatively unexpected, and maybe it's the wish fulfilment fantasy aspect. Maybe Tom King is going to do something with the last two issues other than talking Atom into resurrecting the League and giving up his power or offing himself. I greatly doubt it, but it's still possible.
As a non-sequitur aside, the anti-competitive DC/Marvel joint trademark on "super heroes" has been cancelled which follows on from news of Diamond Comics losing its hold on DC, Marvel and IDW a few years ago. Read into that what you will about big name companies mishandling IP rights.
Part 5
Since part 4 was released, the internet (and a lot of ordinary folk, which is alarming US authorities) has taken Luigi Mangione to its bosom for the retributive killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York.
It's certainly a more compelling story than this, which wastes most of its page count on flashbacks of Matches Malone and Clark Kent recruiting Jenny (who assures them she could kill the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight) as a more ethical Amanda Waller, and then on Captain Atom's origin story. The sliver of content moving the story forward is Jenny asking a psychiatrist whose cancer Atom cured previously to help stop him, playing into the hoary old cliche that he was looking forward to death and being reunited with his wife (it also feels like time to repeat a popular observation that religion is less ridiculous in the DC universe, where death is a conspicuously revolving door, and reiterate that resurrection or reset is almost certainly going to be be the plot summary for the end of the series).
Where I think the story fails spectacularly is Jenny killing a pigeon in the same way Atom did whilst sitting on the same bench. It's heavy-handed symbolism to indicate that they're similar, playing god, etc, but it also carves in stone how much Tom King just doesn't get the character. Jenny may well think that pigeons are plague-carrying rats, I think that's been used in dialogue in previous material, and control localised lightning strikes and the energy that animates things, but she's not cruel or callous. I'm sure the character did plenty of reprehensible things in the past and don't recall her being vegetarian or vegan (Authority teammate Swift usually was, IIRC) but killing animals as a narrative trope is extremely jarring. It feels like this version of Jenny has only the most superficial connections to the WildStorm one and King's taken the "or I'll come back and kick your heads in" of the original to heart but few of the character's better qualities.
There's also a marginally more subtle plot thread in the issue. At the bar where Batman and Clark find her, Jenny's face down next to a guy commiserating the 2016 US election and specifically his daughter being upset that the US didn't get its first female president and the bad guy won. At the end of the issue, Jenny teleports into the bedroom of presumably the same girl and tells her that "there's a $%^& [bitch?] out there who still has your back". The DC approach to swearing continues to interfere with intelligibility and the writer continues to make poor choices by using dialogue that will be censored. The girl looks a lot like Jenny. It seems like there's better than average odds that Jenny has been kept on, so to speak, and brought back to cover for the period until her replacement (i.e. the spirit of the 21st Century rather than the 20th) is old enough to take over.
So what could you do with the character or concept that's interesting? DC has played with the century spirit lineage with Jenny Crisis over in The Outsiders, an is-it-isn't-it DC take on Planetary which latched onto the idea of the character's state of mind being bidirectionally linked to the world around her, but also the overpowered nature of other later Jennies. The idea of a lineage is easily misjudged by writers. Elsewhere we've had Jenny Soul (an alternate 20th) and Jenny Steam/Freedom (her predecessor in the 19th if I recall correctly). Steam isn't the worst idea, and heat/pressure or boiling in general and aerosolisation has more story potential than specifically boiling water.
It's a similar problem with Captain Atom. Electrical or nuclear energy isn't nebulous, but with Atom it isn't really nuclear energy and crosses over into 'quantum' power hand-waving. Jenny Quarx/Quantum, Jenny Fractal and Jenny Crisis are literal do-anything plot devices. Reality warpers have a long history in comics (the Doctor in the original Authority, James Jaspers or Franklin Richards in Marvel, Manhattan or ye olde classic characters such as Mr. Mxyzptlk in DC) and the trouble is, in a nutshell, that they quickly become boring. Essentially they're godlike beings when writers feel like it and consequences are often revoked in reset-button plots without any kind of satisfying narrative reasoning. See also: parallel universes and alternate realities, which are related conceits I usually don't get along with.
Part 6
2020 with COVID news on the radio, and Jenny confronts Superman (both distancing in masks) about not fixing things. In a medium about suspension of disbelief, this takes a lot of suspension... Silver Age Superman could focus his vision down to atoms, and most modern versions allow him some tricks such as being able to date objects by their composition plus radiation-less x-ray vision. There's no real excuse for the lazy writing that he wouldn't be able to tell if he was carrying COVID, nor that when you put Superman together with Batman, Mister Terrific, etc, the pandemic would have been over within a week or two, and with a solution for the blood-brain barrier issues and systemic infection. Jenny recalls losing relatives in the 1918 pandemic.
Jenny goes back to the bar and swears at Atom. There are references that suggest that The Authority as portrayed in Wildstorm comics happened in this timeline (though how that team and the Carrier and Bleed would coexist with a Justice League and everything else in the DC universe isn't engaged with). Atom hand-waves and when she looks outside of the bar there's nothing but blank white space. This implies he's wiped everything out, and has power far in excess of Star Trek's Q blah blah blah. As a visual effect and concept, it's lazier than the pandemic scene. In mainstream DC, characters such as Prometheus, Superman and the White Martians have access to a dimension of white nothingness known variously at the Ghost Zone, Phantom Zone, Hyperspace or limbo and IIRC there was something similar in the 75 issue Vertigo Lucifer series, venturing outside of creation, outside of the comic pages, etc. On top of hand-waving Atom defeating the League and everything else, with no limits on the scope or nature of his power over an entire universe well-populated with more powerful characters, we're definitely in teen-fanfic-with-budget territory. It's genuinely awful and possible that King is going to go for the full bingo card of "it was just a dream" in the last part.
It's worth also noting the way pages constantly cut between scenes continues to be tiring and the flashbacks waste most of ones allocated to them. Here it's hard to read as anything other than the issue being padding.
Part 7
Well, there's the reset button, although the way in which it's pressed manages to disappoint in some unexpected ways.
Atom's dissolution of the world/universe/multiverse is taken entirely at face value. He has that level of power, and none of the many DC cosmic beings are mentioned or do anything about it. There are heated words between him and the remnants of humanity inside the bar, before he kills them. Jack Hawksmoor gets a mention, then Jenny reminisces about Virginia Woolf before also being rendering to smoke and ash. Atom looks around, snaps his fingers and says "I see". Fade to white.
The rest is a conversation between Jenny, Batman and Superman in a recreated multiverse (the term multiverse being used, even though nothing in this story has happened off-Earth, let alone elsewhere) about things going Just As Planned, with flashes of the lives the ex-hostages are now living. It's implied that Atom has cycled through creating and destroying realities until he was compelled to recreate the status quo of the world that was and focus on changing himself. Jenny says something glib about not fighting life but living it, and not asking for light but finding your own fire. A message is relayed to a human-seeming Atom who may or may not still have his powers that if he tries it again he'll get his balls fried off. The last page is Jenny looking out over a city and saying that that's done, who the @$@$ is next?
If this is being left open-ended for a possible sequel, it doesn't deserve it. King has spent seven issues relying on other stories, events and authors for gravitas and emotional impact, with little or no pay-off.
This could have been a story about Jenny taking on rogue supers in her own more usual power class with ingenuity, reasons for working off the grid of other supers, and an occasional narratively-justified deus ex machina. It's not a bad premise. What was delivered is largely boring and unsatisfying.
References to recent real-world events are likely to age badly and this is written and set only a quarter of the way through the current century. Of course, if the other three-quarters consist of more pandemics, climate-related disasters, energy and resource shortages, fascism in the US, nuclear escalation, significant wars, massive refugee crises, etc, King's work here is even more likely to disappear, whether it makes blunt mention of a few news stories or not.
People have pointed out that breakaway comics companies like WildStorm in the 90s tracked with that decade: pushing boundaries (from the puerile to political) and reacting to the aftermath of the Comics Code, ranging in tone from the thoughtful retro and reappraisal of Tom Strong and Astro City to the more chaotic and higher energy Gen 13 and Welcome to Tranquility. Not all of it was gold by a long stretch, but it threw out a fair few interesting ideas. (On a small tangent, since the original WildStorm era is something of personal interest I picked up an ebook copy of Wild Times: an Oral History of Wildstorm Studies from Big Cartel here.)
Can lightning strike repeatedly? Is another equivalent of WildStorm possible? Ask me at another time and I might give a different answer, but right now I think it's the wrong question. There continue to be high points in mainstream storytelling such as 2010's Mystery Incorporated take on Scooby Doo or Jonathan Hickman's Marvel writing that are intelligently crafted and work on a rewarding number of levels. Big name studios can take chances that pay off, and a lot of it is finding and green-lighting good creators then not squashing them under committees. If there's a habitable world to do it in, there'll be good storytelling there somewhere.
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