[Comics] Planetary/JLA: Terra Occulta

When DC first started releasing books under the Elseworlds banner, it was a pretty interesting concept for sure. While rival titles like Marvel's What If...? explored what might happened if one or two things changed during key events, Elseworlds were complete reimaginations of many of their most beloved characters in strange and interesting ways. It certainly helped enrich the notion of a dynamically thriving multiverse, as has been a common theme across DC stories especially in cases when the fans embraced a particular Elseworlds universe more than others.

So what happens when you merge the Elseworlds concept with a comic book line like Planetary, which already deals with a Multiverse and many alternate realities? Well, you certainly get a pretty interesting tale and one that makes you wonder if it's something that might eventually get included in some potential Planetary story in the sky or just another Elseworlds book that will remain independent of the rest of the DC universe.

Planetary/JLA: Terra Occulta is essentially an Elseworlds title that pits an alternative JLA versus an alternative Planetary. Where normally such crossover titles involve the two groups working together to defeat a larger foe, this time around things were reimagined such that the Planetary members were essentially the bad guys while the JLA were trying to find a way to defeat them.

In this world, Planetary pretty much behave in a manner similar to how The Four do back in the primary Wildstorm universe. Of course this time their global archeology missions have affected the likes of the JLA leading to things like the theft of Superman's original spacecraft, the capture and dissection of what could have been Martian Manhunter and the destruction of Themyscira using a space laser cannon of sorts to name a few. Thus we get the rather human-looking Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman meeting in secret in order to find a way to take out Planetary.

I didn't quite realize how much of an alternate reality this story was set in and initially assumed that maybe the JLA just didn't fully understand Planetary and its mission and thus were incorrectly seeing them as bad guys. Of course this wasn't the case as the comic went along and more and more I realized that this wasn't quite the same Planetary that I had been following in other titles. So that's definitely something you'll need to accept as you jump into this book.

Plus you also have to remember that the JLA won't be the usual powerhouses in flashy costumes. Given the interference and manipulations of Planetary during their formative years or during those key moments when they're supposed to discover their powers, they're now pretty much superheroes in hiding and in dire need of finding a way to deal with a group as elusive and powerful as Planetary without tipping them off somehow. This does present an interesting dynamic to things but it takes a bit of a while to really get there.

Overall, the story was just okay and a tad confusing at points. Then again, this is both an Elseworlds book and a Planetary book, so confusion is par for the course. It's not a rock'em, sock'em kind of action title but then what Planetary book is such, right?

Planetary/JLA: Terra Occulta gets 3.5 dead alien Lanterns out of 5.

[Comics] The Final Night

In DC Comics' history, the comic book company has often needed to resort to massive comic book crossover stories to clean up loose ends, realign continuities and pretty much address a lot of the messes that naturally come up when you have so many writers working on so many different superhero titles independently.

Unfortunately, the quality of these crossovers tend to be highly inconsistent given the greater priority is often the need to clean things up as opposed to making the story strong enough and solid enough to stand on its own and really be something worthwhile.

In my opinion, The Final Night was one of those sadly weaker stories whose only function in life was to correct an error in writing that resulted in many disgruntled fans.

The Final Night has a very simple story when you get down to it. A massive alien entity only known as the Sun-Eater has arrived in our solar system and threatens to consume our sun, Sol. I know, that sentence was overly obvious, huh? Threatened by the loss of Earth's primary power source, the heroes of the world start to work together to defeat this menace but their initial efforts fail. Ultimately, it takes the powers of Hal Jordan as the villain Parallax to defeat the alien in an act of noble (and supposedly redeeming) self-sacrifice.

Image via Wikipedia In the the back stories and reviews about the mini-series, it seems the writers had several goals in mind when creating this story. One, the wanted to introduce the new Justice League of America (JLA) as they had a new book being released as well around this time. In addition, it was a way to redeem Hal Jordan as a potential hero although he still technically "dies" as a villain. The third item was the largely unnoticed resurrection of Green Arrow (Oliver Queen) given the involvement of Parallax at the time.

The main story about the star-consuming alien and that whole but was just hokey. I mean really, couldn't we have come up with a much better villain than that? While I give credit for their effort to explore the impact of the loss of the sun on the more common population, it was just a somewhat silly notion overall.

Plus the decision to "bring back" Hal Jordan from the realm of villainy was clearly the writers caving into public demand in the form of outraged Hal Jordan fans. While I personally didn't necessary 100% support the initial decision to turn Hal Jordan into Parallax, I hate it more when comic book writers cop out on their own decisions and resort to big events like this to sort of make up for the perceived "mistakes" if prior editorial decisions. It take a few more epic-scale stories before they fully bring some sense of order to the Green Lantern side of the universe.

For the most part, I don't consider this story to be essential to any collection. It's maybe worth reading at least once in order to get updated on what happened to Hal and stuff but once you're done, it's not crucial to keep the book (if you just borrowed it) or have to buy one at all. Don't even re-read it. That's it. It's over.

Time to move on.