“It’s the Dance of Shiva, it’s the Debutantes ball, and everyone will be there who’s anyone at all.” From Monkey Wash Donkey Rinse, written by Warren Zevon and Duncan Aldrich.
When it comes to springboards for all those mega-super-battle-crossover things, a.k.a. event comics, it’s hard to imagine a more overused and hackneyed plot device than the Tournament. Everybody fights everybody, more or less one-on-one, until there is only one survivor who then must go on to vanquish the threat that started it all at least half-year previously, and then figure out a way to bring everybody back.
If I had a buck for every time this breathtakingly original stratagem has been deployed, I could afford to buy DC’s KO, the latest deforestation…, but I still wouldn’t have the time, energy, desire or wherewithal to sit down and read the whole thing.
When one of these events sounds interesting — and KO does not (to me; your mileage may vary) — I usually check out the enveloping miniseries and read whichever tie-ins I would have read anyway. Normally, I do not miss anything important when I pass over half of these issues and, in fact, like every other reader I maintain the right to bail when it becomes pathetically redundant.
KO began its journey with one of the longest set-ups in event comics history. DC shuffled its deck once again and told us all about the comings and goings of such important elements as Darkseid, Kirby’s Fourth World, Booster Gold, Doomsday, The Question, The Legion of Super-Heroes (remember them?) and of course Batman and his brooding brood.
They even relaunched still another new Justice League to use as its story wheelhouse, but this particular relaunch has a twist: everybody is in the League whether they want to be or not. All the heroes take their orders from the JL elite, including Mr. Terrific and Red Tornado, the latter having been integrated into the Justice League’s computers.
You know, after all these years reading the sundry Leagues Justice, the one thing that never occurred to me was “what these superheroes really need is a lot more bureaucracy.” Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: Is KO A-OK?”
