Kate Bishop <> Hawkeye

I was excited when I heard that the Young Avengers just might be in Marvel Universe. I don't get excited about a lot of the standard teams, because I know that we'll see them again...and again...and again. Doesn't mean I don't like them, but it's nothing to get excited about. The Young Avengers, though? We'll see them once, with random support popping up rarely and without warning, I suspect.

Anyway, I was further excited, as I've said, to learn that the Young Avengers would carry the bulk of the Avengers team-attack theme. In the previews, we saw Vision, Young Avenger - and he blew my mind. He blew a lot of minds, I think. Then we saw Kang <> Iron Lad - and thank goodness we got that errata - and he's solid. Patriot, Hulkling, Wiccan, etc...overall, the Avengers have an extremely strong lower-curve that lends itself well to team attacks, though they have nothing even comparable to Quicksilver, Mutant Avenger + Legendary Battles, sadly.

Still, Kate Bishop <> Hawkeye was a card that caught my eye pretty quickly. I understood that free-stuns were powerful, but her ability is so extraordinarily costly, especially in the age of Pathetic Attempt, that I was curious as to why she was made rare. It didn't seem that there could be a draw engine worth her cost, and while there were some rare occasions where you'd want to stun someone with cost 3 or more, that would be extremely rare.

The more I thought about it, though, the more powerful I realized she was - when she worked with the rest of the Young Avengers to help Captain America during the Civil War.

Cost: 3 Patriot, Elijah Bradley * Young Avenger
Team: Avengers
Ranged
ATK: 5
DEF: 4
Leader: Whenever an adjacent character stuns an opposing character, rally for a character card.

Cost: 3 Liberating Number 42
Whenever an [Avengers Icon] character you control stuns an opposing character this turn, rally for a character card.

Two common cards that make Kate Bishop go crazy - fitting given her on-and-off crush with Patriot and her ceaseless loyalty to fighting against the Registration Act. Think about that. Let's say you have 4 characters surrounding Patriot. Three of them team-attack. Kate stuns one with her ability, and the three team-attackers stun one - that's 4 rallies - and 3 more for each Liberating Number 42 you can play. The further Kate gets into the revolution, the more she's inspired to keep going.

The more I think about the modern Avengers Team-Attack deck, the more I think that mono-Avengers can't work. However, I've heard some fun things about Bring Your Own Team Golden, and I think Avengers will be my team. I'll try and get a deck up soon.

MUN: General Thoughts

I know, I know. Boring. You've seen everyone post their thoughts on MUN. You're sick to death of it, I'm sure. You've already seen that I enjoyed MUN draft quite a bit. You hate me. Well, I love you, so I'm going to talk in brief on my MUN impressions anyway.

First off, I have to say: Crime Lords. Hell yes, Crime Lords. I think that they did a really good job making a truly defensive team, and what few (read: one) deck I've been able to build from what MUN I could afford has been a severely bastardized Crime Lords/SHIELD army deck. UDE did a great job making army decks feel fresh in this set, by the way - I've never enjoyed playing them until now, but with cards like Maria Hill, Dum Dum Dugan, and Squirrel Girl feeding the fire, I think there are some cool things to be done.

Anyway. Crime Lords is now a fun, defensive team. They do curve and they do army - strangely, at least in my cheap-as-possible deck, army/stall - and they introduce some fun ideas. The sheer power of their reinforcement tricks now makes them formidable, and their army is fed by insane, cool cards like Underground Laboratory, potentially one of the most powerful draw effects in the entire game.

SHIELD seems to be, at least the core team, is almost entirely army based. Yeah, between the potent rush of DCL and the insane armies of MUN, things are getting fast. The cards I mention above are a few commons that feed their army theme beautifully, and cards like Nick Fury certainly don't hurt. They're fast, they're reliable, and they're brutal. Watch out for SHIELD.

Nextwave is like Shakespeare, but with lots more punching.

The Warbound are interesting. I enjoy a good 'I Stand Alone' team, but I haven't enjoyed the feel of the Warbound. Part of it stems from a long-held complete apathy towards the Hulk. Part of it stems from the sheer amount of rares necessary to play a decent build of it all. It takes a lot for me to swallow a such a rare intensive build, and they don't have it.

Negative Zone is fun. I know there were a lot of complaints about the lack of content, but the team does well with what they've got. The multiple non-unique Negative Zones were a great idea, and while some of the Legend content is lacking - Thanos' sole legend card seems to be something of a joke - they are still a fun, coherent team.

Illuminati: waaaaaaaaaaay too rare intensive. Not a chance. Awesome idea, not NEARLY enough content available for the average player to give it a shot.

Thunderbolts are great. First off, how awesome is Thunderbolts Mountain? Soooo awesome. And the preview article for it was a masterpiece of modern english literature. Otherwise, though, they're still an interesting team. Radioactive Man is brutal, and the team's resource acceleration trick, all preview-pride aside, is a great trick that I suspect we'll be seeing quite a lot of.

Avengers is amazing. They're one of the sets best success stories. The team is versatile and hard-hitting, with great legend support and a variety of tricks that can be used to beat-face, as well as the return of their team-attack theme. That has me really excited, as I loved Avengers Team-attack before - and while they've sadly been severely depowered, the theme has also been paired with the best Avengers in the last...well, ever: the Young Avengers.

Alpha Flight is actually Omega Flight, and they're strategy of playing a huge number of plot twists is straight-forward and fun. But it's nothing special, and like many mini-teams, feels like a little bit of a waste, since you can't really play a mono-team deck with them - you're forced to team-up. I love the fan-teams, but I hate that they're all mini-teams that are almost unplayable.

The set is fun, but is hampered by a miniscule print-run with far too many cards, the best of which are all but impossible to find for anything resembling a reasonable price. Still, it's a vast step up from Marvel Legends, and the Legends they picked here - Captain America, Iron Man, and Hulk - are far more worthy than those of MVL (though there were the occasional bizarre choice - Baron Strucker, anyone?).

More on MUN soon, as I try and build an Avengers team-attack deck - and fail miserably. Though, a BYOT golden age one would be a LOT of fun...

The Dark Knight: Review in Brief

...OMGWTFWOW.

(actual review to come later tonight)

This post paid for by the Committee of Cal is Experiencing a Stunning Lack of Sleep Foundation.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

I don't know how many of you enjoy musicals. I love them, and I've never really understood people who dislike something just because it's a musical (like Sweeney Todd - seriously, it's about revenge, cannibalism, and serial murder, and people still make fun of it 'cuz there are songs), but I know that people out there like that do exist.

I don't know how many of you enjoy Joss Whedon. I like him alright, and I understand people who dislike him. I myself hated the first two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (seasons 3-6 are solid gold, though). If you are feeling particularly open-minded, there are a few episodes of Buffy I'll suggest in a later post that might turn you on to the show. Nonetheless, one of the most fun, clever episodes of the show, I thought, was "Once More, With Feeling", the musical episode. It was serious and sad, but also self-satirical and pretty damn funny. Overall, it was just a damn good watch.

Ever since then, I've kind of vaguely wished to see Whedon do another musical. He isn't a Sondheim or Schwartz, but the Buffy episode was fun, the songs were catchy, and the camp was glorious. And, recently, I've gotten my wish.

http://www.drhorrible.com/

Whedon, long a fan of superheroes and longer, I think, a fan of cheesy fun, has created Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, a 45-minute-long Internet musical about a supervillain trying to make it into the big time. Dr. Horrible is played by Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Houser, MD & Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle), and he's trying to make it into the Evil League of Evil. To do so, he must first prove himself to them, overcoming his own self-confidence issues and the massive physical powers of his nemesis, Captain Hammer, played by Nathon Fillion (Firefly, Serenity).

The first act came out yesterday, the next tomorrow, and the final comes out on Saturday. Watch quickly, though - on Sunday, they'll be taken down and packaged for a DVD release.

Joss Whedon. Super-villains. Musicals. It's like Christmas for me, and I thought I should share for those few of you who share this particular interest of mine.

I apologize for the lack of recent VS content, but it's hard to find inspiration when I spend most of my time on a fan-set, and have no one in the area to play with. Still, I've been looking through the MUN cards, and liking what I see, so I'll likely touch on that soon enough.

Hope you're all having a fantastic summer.

The Best Books You Aren't Reading: Manhunter

A few years back, Marc Andreyko, a rookie writer for DC, launched a book called Manhunter. It isn't the first book to bear that name - it's the third, in fact. But, while Andreyko made nods to the previous series', and indeed used many of the previous casts in his supporting cast, he and artist Jesus Saiz worked together to create a new person to wear the Manhunter mantle: Kate Spencer.

Kate Spencer smokes. Kate Spencer is a divorced, single mother. Kate Spencer is violent. Kate Spencer is fully-clad. In other words, Kate Spencer is everything you never expect to see in comics today. Hell, Marvel recently jumped through hoops vast, flaming, and cheesy to avoid having Spider-Man get a divorce, and most comics don't tend to deal with divorced single mothers. She's a lawyer on the West Coast, a famous prosecutor who loves to shut down the sociopaths and sickos of the DC Universe. But when Copperhead, a vicious cannibalistic murderer, gets off on a technicality, Kate takes justice into her own hand. She steals some equipment, blackmails a tech guy into helping her - does whatever is needed to get the job done. And what the job is, that first time, is putting a hole bigger than a fist through Copperhead's skull.

Kate may not be like the average DC character, but the tone and style of the book are pure DC. There's a deep sense of interconnectedness that Kate has with the past - one slow-burning side-plot throughout the series has to deal with her unknown father, and his past in the DCU. She's got connections to a number of bigger heroes, but she doesn't really care, in the end. All she wants is to stop these madmen from running loose.

The book has a solid, well-rounded supporting cast, ranging from her young son Ramsey to her co-worker's boyfriend, JSA's Obsidian. Mark Shaw and Cameron Chase are two old-school names that some fans might recognize, and they're both given a second life in the book, as is Director Bones.

Manhunter is a good book. It's not great, but it'll never let you down. It's violent, but fun, with more than a touch of criticism on the society that lets these people run free. But it never has that sense of "I MUST BE BAD-ASS" that pervades and often destroys the similarly themed Punisher books.

Manhunter just restarted. The entire first 'season', in a way, is collected in a series of four trades, and there are two issues out now in the second season, a perfectly fine jumping-on point, from the looks of it. Manhunter had a very near run-in with death a year or two back, as the book was on the verge of cancellation. An inordinately strong fan-campaign saved it, but good will and great fans only takes you so far, and the book deserves at least a shot.

Remember the deal? You buy an issue of one of The Best Books You Aren't Reading (just click on the tag below for a full list of 'em) and you don't enjoy it, I'll send you an MVL/DCL/MUN/promo EA or rare and I'll ask you to find some sort of contest to give the copy you didn't like away.

Sorry I don't have a plethora of images for you to enjoy on this one - I'll add 'em as I find 'em. As is, take it on my word: the art is good, the writing is good, the book is good.

Edit: Also, as a note, this was apparently my 75th post. Go me!

Public Service Announcement: Want to Write Comics?

Comics is a freakin' hard business to break into. One writer famously (to certain circles...of extreme geeks) compared breaking into the comics industry to breaking into a fortified medieval castle. As soon as one person finds a way to break in, the people at the castle say, "Well, shit, this is obviously waaaaay too easy" and they seal that entrance off. What the person was trying to say was, everyone has to find their own way in, because there is no surefire way to get in aside from, of course, being personal friends with Joe Quesada or Dan Didio.

Now, there are a lot of things you can do. There's the "Keep plugging away at it and hope you get it right some time" approach, and I suppose if it works for sex, it could work here, too. It's tough, but if you get published in a variety of places and occasionally drop your name in the right circles, you could get an invite to pitch a story, or you could just get a pitch accepted at certain publishers.

There's the contest route - that's more for artists, though. Writers rarely get contests (though the Shadowline segment of Image comics deserves a MASSIVE heaping of respect for their recent writing contest - "Who Wants to Create a Super-Heroine?" Look it up.) so that's unreliable.

There is always, of course, showing up to conventions and praying. Wouldn't recommend it, but it's worked before.

The point is, there are plenty of ways. That's not what this post, which shall be quite brief, is for. This post is for one thing: to begin to compile a list of comics companies that accept blind or relatively blind submissions. If you want to write comics but aren't confident in your networking skills, these guys are your best bets to get that foot in the door. This list is pretty small right now, but as I do more research, I'll update this occasionally.

Avatar Press
Avatar Press has recently begun to make a pretty sizable splash in the comics world, getting a number of projects from creators like Warren Ellis. Books like Anna Mercury, Gravel, and Doktor Sleepless are all published by Avatar, as well as a number of other projects. Avatar also accepts submissions from unknown writers AND writers pitching projects with no artist attached - a relative rarity, it seems.

There are problems, of course: one thing Avatar wants is an 8-12 page story featuring a character they own, but as you peruse the website, you may realize that it's rather difficult, or potentially impossible, to find a list of characters they own. That's just one small problem with the whole process, but they're still a good potential publisher for you. Violence, sex, and language all seem to be acceptable, and their content ranges from spandex to occult murder mysteries.

Dark Horse
Dark Horse seems to accept blind submissions as well. Their guidelines for submissions are clearly spelled out. They don't seem to accept e-mail submissions, which is honestly a little bit disappointing, but totally understandable. Dark Horse is probably a more recognizable name to you than Avatar Press, so you may want to give them a shot.

Finally (for tonight), a surprise...
Marvel

Marvel Comics, as one of the big two - as, perhaps, the bigger of the big two - is something of a shocker. But they do accept 'blind' submissions. Their process, however, is notably more rigorous. Before you get to pitch your series "Gambit and the Sex Hounds of the Bayou", you first need to send an inquiry listing your writing experience. Then, that on file, they'll contact you if they want to hear from you. It's at that time it seems you can make your pitch. So, not quite blind acceptance, but it's pretty damn close to accepting unsolicited submissions.

Ultimately, with hard work, you can probably break in. I wish any of you trying luck, and I'll talk to you all later. Hopefully about VS. It's hard to talk VS when you don't have anyone to play with, but I'm trying to teach my girlfriend how to play. I don't think it's going well.

Ah, oh well. Enjoy your reading, your writing, and your gaming, in whatever order you most enjoy reading, writing, and gaming, and I'll be posting again semi-soon.

DCU

As some of you may know, I spent the last few months working with a few people from VSrealms on a fantasy card set. I know that fantasy card sets aren't that popular, but I enjoy creating them - and more than that, I thought that this one was important because of the uncertain future between DC and UDE.

We decided to make a DC Universe set, to match UDE's Marvel Universe set. We took some votes, and then we slowly but surely began to build a 330 card set. It's not perfect, and I apologize. We don't have the resources that the actual R&D has, nor do we have the practice, nor, I suspect, the flat-out skill. But we still feel that we made a fairly good companion set to Marvel Universe, and we wanted to show it off.

However, on VSrealms, we quickly realized that we would be banished out of the General Discussion section - and as you all know, if you aren't in the General Discussion section, you don't get a whole lot of notice. We wanted out work to be seen, but more than that, we have set up a preview season in which any member of the VSrealms community could preview a card. People seemed to enjoy the idea, but it's a pain to write the preview article (or, you know, create a 330 card set) and have no one see it.

So, we created this blog
http://dcupreviews.wordpress.com/
to get the previews out. Soon it will be updating via the Syndicate and getting votes on Kamiza's great site, hopefully garnering a little bit more notice. I urge all you people reading my blog - yes, all 3 of you, no exceptions now - to check out that site, and the Fantasy Cards section of VSrealms.com at some point, and let everyone know what you think of the preview articles and of the cards.

Thanks, and have a great day!

Final Crisis Analysis, pt 1

I said earlier that Final Crisis is turning out to be an issue that is pretty heavy on subtext. You can read FC#2 easily as a complete newcomer to the DC Universe and still find an enjoyable issue. However, if you don't mind digging a little deeper, Final Crisis #2 opens up into a number of crazy interpretations, a rich discussion of DC's past, present, and future. It becomes a brutal examination of the struggle between Good and Evil.

So, to spark a little interest in 'deep readings' - which I'm sure you all remember from school as a massive pain in the ass, but which are actually quite rewarding when you're doing them on something you care about - I thought I'd post this. It's from a great poster on a message board on gaiaonline.com.. It's an amazing breakdown of the first half of Final Crisis #2. I hope it sparks a little interest in the series - or, at the very least, sparks a little interest in sharing your own interpretations of the events of the series. It really is a fascinating rundown, so I hope you enjoy!

--

What follows is in no way analytical, being just some random thoughts I had while reading Final Crisis #2. Some of which aren't even about Final Crisis. Nevertheless, it demanded to be called...

FINAL ANALYSIS


"Stop! You must be supercool to proceed! Your life depends on it!"

I've talked here before about how the real Joss Whedon (as opposed to his evil clone that writes comics) considered the title of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to operate like a nightclubber bouncer; Screening those seeking admittance to the fiction. If you were cool enough to get past the title, you were cool enough to engage with what lay beyond.

Morrison previously used this sort of challenge to the reader at the start of Seven Soldiers' penultimate issue, asking "Can you imagine...Frankenstien in Fairyland?" because if you couldn't then you didn't stand any chance of keeping up with what followed. But this is the most literal use of the 'Page One Bouncer' technique imaginable, and it's a bit of a pity about the context really. Seven Soldiers had 28 slices of fried gold preceeding its direct challenge to the reader. Final Crisis had one hugely disapointing first issue.

"You must be supercool to proceed!" in this context makes even the most enthusiastic reader think ,"Grant, love. You're the one with something to prove over the next thrity-nine pages, not me."

Of course, he does prove it because the issue turns out to be screamingly brilliant, so that's alright then. OR IS IT?

Have a look at this spot-on review from CBR...
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=user_review&id=201
"Timothy Callahan"
-

"Final Crisis" is not a tour through the DC Universe. It's not a fun, light-hearted summer event. It's a deeply disturbing look at heroes under siege. And it's very good.

-

And have a look at this wonderfully sneaky 'praise' from Bendis...
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/080627-WWCBendisJohns.html
"Bendis"

-

But I've also been thinking about Final Crisis too, and remembering I had a similar reaction to the first two issues of The Filth too. I was like, what's going on here? There were giant hands! But at the end of it, I was like, 'Oh, that's the best comic I've read all year!' And I'm not even sure I got it all. And I'll read it again. And I've bought it every time it came out.

I don't know that you'll have that feeling [with Final Crisis] but you may have that feeling at the end. Not everything has to be spoon-fed. And I love to spoon feed. But that doesn't mean everything has to be the same flavor. Look, it may be the biggest 'what the fuck?' ever. But there's a track record with him that it might end up being like The Filth. Which would be awesome."

-

It's now obvious that Final Crisis isn't going to read much like a summer event book, but rather more like a seven issue Grant Morrison story. And Bendis' backhanded compliment there allows him to suggest that the best it could possibly turn out like is The Filth - a book which only an 'elite' of readers can understand, and which only a handful of those can stomach.

"Here's me giving the kids Independance Day," Bendis is implying, "And here's you trying to screen Bruno Dumont's L'Humanite in the same multiplex."

You don't, as has been discussed, have to have a strong background in DC continuity to follow Final Crisis. But it might turn out that you do have to be supercool to proceed. Does that really make much sense for DC's summer event? Because, and I hate to say this, an awful lot of the target audience really isn't.

"When will he realise that being fantastic is a superpower in itself?"

I wonder what we're supposed to do with the Super Young Team?
If this were Invisibles, Morrison would be directing us to love them, and if this were Seaguy he'd be directing us to hate them. We seem free to make up our own mind here. I like 'em.

Not as much as I love seeing Shilo as the man with the plan though.The DCU must see him like we see Tom Cruise, mustn't they? Big celeb who thinks we're beset by fallen-alien-god-spirit thingies.

"These super-people who built the machine made of parallel universes"

Interesting choice of words. If the Orrery we saw in the first issue isn't a way of perceiving the multiverse or a device for sustaining and regulating it, but rather a machine that's just been built out of it then there're some big questions to ask.

What would a machine built out of universes be for? What would it do? What would it produce?

If I were doing a proper critique of this issue then I'd link this with all the stuff about fire in the first issue and talk about 'the use of tools' as a major theme of the story so far, but I'm eager to get on to the next scene because it's incredible...

"Who knew the sound of breath whistling through smashed cartilage could be such a turn-on?"

Who wants to bet that is was round about here Bendis started thinking about The Filth?

Because obviously a scene of a once-decent cop brutally beating a pedophile while threatening to smash his brains open with a toilet seat doesn't belong in a superhero summer event. The superheroes haven't realised it yet - they're on the moon, almost anticiapating J'onn's ressurection because they know how the DCU's rules work - but they don't live in the DCU anymore. Evil has won the day. They're living in Sin City.

In the first issue Turpin was capable of horrible things, like mocking Vic's death, but of then immediately recognising that he'd done wrong. This Turpin keeps on with the horrible, because he belives his actions are justified, which is a huge bit of the Kirby Mythology. Look at the posters around Granny's school in the flashbacks to Scott's youth or to Godfrey's first sermon in Forever People. Darkseid doesn't work so much by inculcating evil in others, so much as by allowing them to justify thier evil to themselves and take it further.

"You're not a beast -- if you kill for Darkseid"
"You're not a liar -- if you lie for Darkseid"

You're not a thug, if you beat someone to death trying to find missing children.

But of course, there are no missing children. And if this were a film then Godfrey's simple and creepy, "But you already met the children, back in New York" would be the equivalent to "You're eating worms" in The Lost Boys. It's possible there's a metafictional joke going on here, in that Turpin's first scene strongly appears to break the continuity of the previous issue, until we get that little bit more information.

Too much going on to dwell on that though, as watching Turpin's progress lets us know how the Fallen Gods work. They're in everyone (evil was in Turpin when he made his cruel joke) but sometimes they're really in someone (Turpin's now being so fully riden by the God of Evil that Godfrey can talk to him as if he was that God).

I love the lack of any glamour attached to evil in this series. It's just brutal and ugly and nasty. The various series that've lifted Darkseid out of the Fourth World context and used him as an all-purpose Generic Evil Space Tyrant have generally tried to make him cool and majestic and awesome and stuff. But that's not really very much what evil's like. Darth Vader's cloak swishing about and the Imperial March booming away are one thing, but evil looks a lot more like the decaying body of the three year old on the news yesterday who was locked in a room full of flies and dog shit and starved to death while her mother went to the pub.

The best line in Millar's Wanted, which seems more relevant to Final Crisis by the page, is "People love facists, man. You ever met a woman who fantasised about being tied up and raped by a liberal?"

Kirby's mythos has always offered us facism without the erotic fantasy. There's a pretty obvious biographical reason for that.

His Fourth World asks a very strange question. Only that could only have arisen via the culture-fuck of one of the War generation trying to tell his most personal story while simultaneously trying to get down with the kids of the Woodstock generation; what if fascism wasn't a political ideology but was a cosmological principle? All those hideous ideas, which compelled artists to become soldiers in order to slap them down, what if they weren't just Something That Happened In Our History but were hardwired into the very mathematics of the universe?

If the logic of facism, of anti-life, were something as fundamental as that, could we still fight it? Should we still fight it?

(One of the reasons The Fourth World never feels concluded is because nobody's ever understood that and finished the saga with the "HELL YES!" it demands)

So here's how evil is in Final Crisis then. All shit and tears and smashed cartilage. It's getting Turpin hard, but hopefully we're all feeling a little ill. People might fantasise about being raped by some idealised facist, but nobody fantasises about being raped by Josef Fritzl. The Dark Side is less sexy than the one they've been selling.


"Warn the Justice League! Warn everyone!"

This doesn't just mean, "Get a big team of like, loads and loads of superheroes together!"
This means that everyone is fighting this war. On every level. You and your mum and your dad and your gran and a bucket of vindaloo.

One of the most fun things about the series so far is how it's eliminating the distinction between a 'cosmic' book and a 'street level' book. The distinction's entirely false anyway - Daredevil's struggles are all concerned with huge abstract concepts just as much a Doctor Strange's adventures are. The only difference is that in Doctor Strange's adventures the huge abstract concepts get externalised into big nasty Demon Princes and stuff, and in Daredevil's adventures then the huge abstract concepts stay internalised as Guilt and Anger and Shame and so forth.

This can be a huge problem for storytelling at the Huge Summer Event level because you've got characters who normally fight their Big Eternal Struggles inside thier heads side-by-side with characters who normally fight thier Big Eternal Struggles against the Demon Prince of Guilt, the Elder God of Anger and the Spooky Ghost of Shame. You get Spider-Man trying to fight Thanos.

But what we've got here is something that's been set up so cleverly that the conflict happening on every level is explictly the same one. This is nothing new to comics, try and argue whether Sandman, Hellblazer or Lucifer are 'street level' or 'cosmic level' books and watch the grown-ups laugh at you. But it's very unusual for a big crossover thingy to mange to set up a story in which the actions of the Question and the actions of the Spectre carry equal importance.

If you've got conciousness, you're a cosmic entity.

I wanted to write about much more of the comic than this, but I've frazzled myself out for tonigt concentrating on a single two-page scene of Turpin beating up the Mad Hatter. Sorry.