Tuesday, July 30, 2013

The Movement #1 (July, 2013)



Coral City: Two cops busted some teenagers in an alley. They found drugs on the boy, yet they planned to let him go... so long as they got to keep the evidence for themselves and get a peek at his girl, first. The cops' incriminating words were electronically thrown back at them as dozens of masked outcasts played back recordings of the dirty duo. The cops bugged out, but the footage was delivered to local news outlets for broadcast by the anonymous activists of the controversial hacker group Channel M. Their Captain wanted to dump the cops on administrative leave, but their union protected them until they faced formal charges.

Meanwhile, another victim of the Cornea Killer turned up in "The 'Tweens," a neighborhood under complete control of the super-human group "The Movement." When a young teen identified only as "Burden" was brought into a nearby church by a minister, he suddenly appeared to be possessed by the devil. The Aryan lad's ruckus attracted the nearby police, but the cops were driven out by a rampaging horde of rats under the control of the metahuman Mouse. More police had their squad cars destroyed by Tremor. The winged vigilante Katharsis caught up with one of the dirty cops and beat him bloody. A woman called Virtue told the Captain that the police were not allowed in the 'Tweens, and "read" him, learning his wife was having an affair with one of his subordinates. The Captain wasn't inclined to listen to her demands, but when he tried to borrow the minister's phone, found that the holy man had a Channel M mask of his own, as did each member of his congregation present. While the Captain cowered in shock, the Movement took on Burden, who they realized was a super-human with mental disorders rather than a possession of the infernal.



"Eaten from the Inside Out" was by Gail Simone and Freddie Williams II. So DC set up this (politically outdated) stunt with the release of two new titles in the same month, one to represent the 99% of average people, and one for the 1% of super-rich who control more than a third of all wealth. This one was by a name writer with a commercially known artist featuring the kewl rebel kids, and the other one was by kiddie book creators whose title was in a cancellation dead pool before the first issue was even solicited. Surprisingly, this one was much less good. The characters are far less sympathetic-- obnoxious caricatures of Anonymous that play as a seriously off-brand X-Men at best but really more like cheesier unhip wannabes of yore like the Wolfpack/Fallen Angels/Psi-Force. Between the rigged rhetoric and the lame chartacter intros lies a threadbare plot and an insubstantial read. Williams' art isn't the annoying cornball chiarascuro of Captain Atom, but he's still drawing grim n' gritty posed action figures instead of human beings. More than anything, this debut reminds me of Grant Morrison's parody of Rob Liefeld, Doom Force, rather than the many crappy but sincere New Mutants knock-offs, and this is easily the worst thing I've ever read from Simone. The only movement I felt was in my bowels.

New 52's Day

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