Spoony the Pussy One: Life is in the Render Queue

[Keith Chegwin]

Nah, I'm going to give him credit for at least trying to make Green Lantern stuff interesting.

That's not what he was trying to do at all
See the Rayner stuff was a genuine attempt to make Lantern stuff interesting. With Jordan you had a hero who was kind of a dull boring guy and it was very difficult to do stories about him because he really had only two modes, nice guy and prick, so he didn't really leave much of a lasting impression.

So what they did was they blew up his city, killed all his friends, had him go mad and turn into a villain. Then they killed the Corps and instituted Rayner as the last Green Lantern. The whole thing about Green Lantern was that he had this intergalactic community of cops to teach him, train him, guide him and provide back-up for him whenever he needed it. Other than Jordan, not counting the Golden Age Lantern, there were like two other Earth Green Lanterns. Rayner didn't have that. He had no one to teach him how to be superhero, he didn't have a massive support network. He had all this power but he had to learn for himself how to use it and to make matters worse there was still this all powerful, evil Hal Jordan out there who was systematically eliminating all the Green Lanterns. The appeal for it was a lot like Spider-Man, before Marvel Corporate/Disney decided that the teenaged Spider-Man should always have an older mentor figure to guide him (usually either Iron Man, Captain America or Nick Fury) going against the entire point of the character.

Then Johns came along and took a massive shit on all of that, basically to reinstate his fanboy wankery. He brought back the Corps. He brought back Jordan, and brought him back as the default Green Lantern. Which would be one thing on its own, but he basically undid Jordan's entire character arc. Instead of great personal tragedy making him snap and go crazy, it was a space parasite who made him do all those things. Instead of having good and evil within his nature and just as big a potential for evil as well as good, he was always pure good it's just a space parasite who made him act bad.

This is also why his Superboy is incredibly shit. I mean, the idea that he's half Superman and half Luthor (basically half Angel and half Devil) is not a bad one, in itself. It's just that, aside from one story where Lex Luthor activated the kill-switch and Superboy tried to kill everyone, he never did anything with it. Superboy's character as written by Johns is just mini-Superman. He even started to give Superboy Superman's power set. He writes flat, one-dimensional, one note characters.

Nobody cared about them since the Green Arrow Blackskins stuff in the 70s.

Thing is that people did care. Because they were mad. They didn't even have a problem with Rayner, as such, they just wanted the Corps back. Ten years later fanboys like this are actually writing the books and the results are what you'd expect.

As for everything reverting back to the status quo--thats more the nature of capeshit than the writer.

Well, compare Johns to somebody like JMS, who is an actual writer and not just an elevated fanboy, and who wrote Spider-Man. When Joe Quesada made him undo the Spider-Marriage he protested. He wanted his name off the books. Quesada was basically telling him the story to write, and it was a bad one and he wanted his name off the books. When Quesada said 'just undo everything so he was never married', JMS wanted to take it back further and change key events so that the Spider-Man we'd see as a result would be a completely different character and not just a worse version of the one Quesada read when he was a kid. Quesada said no (to be fair, the kind of changes JMS wanted to make would have affected thirty years of Marvel continuity, not just Spider-Man) and instead said 'lol everything's the same they just were never married lol'.

Compare this to Johns, who not only undoes everything but does it with glee. He was hired by Didiot because he'll do it. Because, like I said, he's a fucking fanboy. It doesn't matter to him that people like Rayner Green Lantern or Wally West Flash. They aren't the versions he grew up with, so he'll undo them all and completely piss all over twenty years worth of stories and fans of those stories.

[rabidtictac]

The Rayner run of green lantern was the only one I liked. Hal is a boring normie fuck. Rayner shit was '90s as fuck but at least it was kind of interesting.

[Guest]

Hirai Kazumasa was the only good capeshit writer.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

OPM is a gag comic. It's the current year and normalteens haven't figured this out.

Every good gag comic is also a good entry of its genre in its own right. It's why Vanilla Dragon Ball is still the best shounenshit.

[Guest]

Mob was better than OPM but Kugelfish won't read it because he thinks the art is "bad" like then pleb he is.

[BenComicGraphics]

Keith is 100% correct about Johns.

Geoff Johns is given a huge amount of leeway from fans and higher-ups for a JSA run he didnt' even solo write(co-writing credit of that run? David Goyer. Little known writer. What did he do again? OH YES! THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY!) Seriously, to this day, Johns survives on the credit for the JSA run. He 'Fixed Hawkman'... Uh no he didn't. Post-Crisis Hawkman was fine until some idiot suit decided Hawkworld was in continuity.

The Superboy thing pissed me off. I grew up reading the Kessel/Grummett Superboy. I knew the character fairly well. Johns actually wrote a fan letter into the editors of the book pushing the Luthor theory. Kesel outright rejected the theory. Johns, suddenly in a position of power decided his fan theory was right? Worst kind of writing a writer can do. Not to mention Superboy had a unique powerset that wasn't a plain copy of Superman's powers. That got quickly ignored.

He also burns pages of books to retcon minor things that bug him. Arisa and her relationship with Hal just plain makes Hal look bad. She was a literal child when he slept with her. He came up with some sort of weird time displacement with her solar system bullshit that, BTW, did not exist in continuity.

Same with Hal's earlier bouts with alcoholism being the influence of the goddamn yellow fear monster. When Hal as GL was reintroduced, I think they succeeded in absolving Hal of all sin.

When his Teen Titans run first started, I knew a guy that was a Bart Allen fan that asked point blank why Johns changed Bart so much.

"I didn't like him so I changed him until I liked him" was his response. When asked why Johns forgot Bart's relationship with his first girlfriend, Johns again went "Well, they weren't really close..."

Johns is just like every new wave writer in that he takes a huge steaming dump on the past readers. The difference is Johns was given leeway because of his supposed cancer-curing JSA run(that he didn't even solo write).

[Guest]

I don't read comics because I'm not gay so I only know Jeff Gohns as the guy who made an """" official """" sequel to Watchman that he spoonied his way into not finishing.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

A sequel that assimilates the Watchmen characters into the DC universe, no less. Not sure how well Nite Owl would fit, considering there's already Owlman (Evil Alternate-Universe Batman) and the Talons (Evil Zombie Dudes). I'm also not sure if Doctor Manhattan is truly necessary since there's a weird Alternate Universe Superman that is already an autistic god (though I guess that one's just a Manhattan expy).
Though I seem to recall that the Watchmen characters have started as DC expys, so yeah, fucking confusing.

At least they didn't resurrect Rorschach. Instead we have like Rorschach II or something, but probably hangs out with The Question because why not.
But who am I kidding, he probably has the same personality as the original so a bunch of hack writers can finally canonize their rad fanfics.

[Keith Chegwin]

Though I seem to recall that the Watchmen characters have started as DC expys

They're Charlton characters. Basically when DC bought Charlton's characters, they wanted to do a big event with them. That eventually became Watchmen. But Alan Moore wanted to do stuff like kill them off and DC said 'No, we want to incorporate them into DC Comics later' so Moore created completely new characters based on the Charlton ones.

[pibbs]

Interesting...