Originally Posted by Leo656
Well, the easy one first. I was a big fan of Matrix Supergirl, in part because I was a big fan of DC's "No More Kryptonians" edict at that time. I liked how they managed to fit both a new Supergirl AND Superboy into the mythos, without having them be tied to their Silver Age incarnations. I was never a big fan of either the "Superman's Cousin" Supergirl or the "Young Clark" version of Superboy. The old Superby stories were corny as hell (and Clark as Superboy was a giant retcon anyway) and Kara Zor-El's character has frankly NEVER been all that interesting. I've gone on at length about it in the past, but Kara never had any identifiably personality in the past, and when they brought her back a few years ago the best they could do to give her one was make her an unlikeable, super-emo brat. And I didn't like that either.
But I was a huge, HUGE fan of the three-part "Supergirl Saga" which ended John Byrne's run, with Superman bringing Matrix back to our Earth from the Pocket Dimension. The early stories with Matrix being all brain-scrambled and having a mental link with Superman, to the point where she/it thought they WERE Clark at one point, were some really interesting stuff. Then when she came back to Earth during the "Panic in the Sky" storyline and picked up as Supergirl, that started a really cool run for the character. I always liked how hard they worked to really make her as different from Superman as possible, down to having a completely different power set and everything. It circumvented a ton of problems the Kara version always had, specifically being that she's really just Clark with a skirt. Matrix was much more of a unique character, despite her origin being more complicated (allegedly the reason she was written out and replaced with Kara back in 2004).
At first, I wasn't as much a fan of the whole bit where Matrix merged with Linda Danvers, but honestly that entire Peter David series was probably the single best Supergirl run of all time. They managed to introduce some of the old Silver Age mythology in a new and cool way, and having Matrix merge herself with someone else felt like a natural evolution for her/it, since as an artificial life form Matrix had always had some major existential crises going on anyway, so all the stuff about her journey to try and become a "real" person and obtain a human soul were supremely interesting.
So yeah, huge fan of Matrix Suprgirl, and she's always been my favorite version of the character (with the Matrix/Linda hybrid a close second). They did so much evolution with that character over more than 15 years, to the point where simply erasing her from ever existing and just replacing her with plain old Kara again felt like a huge, HUGE step backwards. I was open to it, but then the whole Emo Brat stuff mixed with the "Zor-El was secretly a bad guy and sent Kara to Earth to kill Kal" angle just ruined it for me. Especially when they couldn't even keep that straight and went back and forth on it every week. One week, Kara was sent to kill Kal... next week, it was false memories... next week, she WAS a sleep agent but had managed to "overcome her programming"... the week after that, it was all some Black Kryptonite hallucination... I'll be honest, I tapped out pretty early on all that. They really botched it.
Just like with Barry and Jason Todd, I never saw any Kara stories post-2004 that made me GLAD that she was brought back and kicked her replacement to the curb, because just like with Barry and Jason I thought their replacement character was much more interesting.
-------------
As for Lex being a clone and passing himself off as Lex Jr., I'll be honest it all came off a lot better than it probably sounds on paper. Lex was dying of cancer (brought on by his Kryptonite ring), and they needed a way out of that plotline, so they had him fake his death in a plane crash. Without Lex to keep Metropolis running, the city started falling apart until his "son" miraculously showed up to take the reigns and fix everything.
This was rather ingenious on Lex's part, because firstly, it created an environment where the people of Metropolis were suddenly more sympathetic to Lex than they'd ever been before, seeing as how once he was gone everything started to collapse. But furthermore, Lex Sr. was fairly well-known as a scumbag in spite of his public persona, so by passing himself off as his "son" he managed to get a fresh start and clean slate. He managed to fool everyone, even Superman, into thinking he was a super-nice guy with nothing but pure intentions, and this allowed him to operate unfettered. Previously, he always had someone keeping one eye on him, and whenever anything bad happened Lex was usually the first one under suspicion; by using the "Lex Jr." persona, he was able to remove all suspicion from himself and keep Superman or anyone else from hawking him. It was honestly pretty brilliant.
I liked it. It added a whole new dimension to the cat-and-mouse between Superman and Lex. It was a very "Lex" thing to do. And, when the time was right, it allowed him to re-emerge and claim anything evil he'd ever been linked to was really his "evil" clone, and in turn get ANOTHER clean slate (with nobody but Superman being aware as to what had really happened).
I had missed like a year's worth of Superman comics when all that was going on, so when I picked them back up again I was a little confused about the whole "Lex Jr." business, but it didn't take long to get caught up since his underlings were in on the scam and also his thought bubbles explained it frequently. So I think in like one or two issues I was all caught up on what was going on with that. I thought it was very creative.
-------------
Also, I do think the Superman books were pretty much at their BEST through '94 or so, but there were still a lot of good-to-great stories after that and through 2000 or 2001. After that it got spotty. But in the late-90s and early-2000s you still had some stuff like the Dominus plotline or the "King of the World" story that were very good. They lost a little momentum around 1994 but it's not like everything ground to a halt.
-------------
As far as the Batman stuff, it wasn't a bad run. I have some issues from back then; they're fine. It was definitely a better era for single-issue stories, but honestly I always find the 80s and 90s Batman stories to be far more memorable. The 70s were just too "conventional" for me; stuff like "Riddler robs a bank, Batman stops him, next issue it's The Penguin, rinse and repeat." They were written well enough but most of it was pretty "vanilla".
All my favorite pre-Crisis Batman stories are collected in the "Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told" trade paperback, as well as the "Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told" companion volume.
It's not like I outright dislike the Silver Age; it's just that I grew up in the Post-Crisis era when everything had a lot more depth and sophistication; even as a kid, everything Pre-Crisis just came off as super-simple and one-dimensional. Most of the DC comics before 1986 had only a little more depth than an episode of Super-Friends; I was much more intrigued by the stuff people like Byrne, Ordway, and Starlin were writing at the time.
|