These comics sucked
DC shipped the final issues of both Gotham Underground and Salvation Run last Wednesday. While I had actually been enjoying these series up until this point, both of these endings sucked. It certainly didn’t help that these issues shipped after Final Crisis #1, which they were supposedly leading up to. For that matter, it didn’t help that Final Crisis #1 sucked.
Salvation Run had been a pretty fun series where all the villains on Earth are shipped off to a another planet that’s supposed to be their prison. It was just a bunch of villains being villainous for most of the series. Personalities clashed, people were killed, and brains in jars were used to bludgeon their french gorilla would-be homosexual lovers to death. Y’know, good, clean fun.
Then a bunch of parademons attacked the villains in the final issue, and suddenly the villains were the good guys. And they were fighting parademons. Ugh.
Did this series really need to crossover with Countdown, or Death of the New Gods, or whatever this was supposed to be related to? The writer didn’t even bother explaining why the parademons were there. Amanda Waller is responsible for sending the villains to the prison planet. Something tells me she didn’t call up Desaad and ask him to send some Apokoliptian minions to attack them after a few months.
And the worst part? Most of the villains manage to escape the prison planet through a portal Lex Luthor managed to construct, but their prisoner gets left behind with no way of returning to Earth. Who is their prisoner, you might be asking?
Martian Manhunter.
But wait, wasn’t he very much on Earth in Final Crisis #1? Salvation Run #7 shipped two weeks after Final Crisis #1, yet the stories blantantly contradict each other. That is just laziness, pure and simple.
Gotham Underground started out as a series about the Batman family trying to figure out where all the villains have been disappearing to, but really hit a rough patch about halfway through and never recovered. This series could have been really cool if it had focused on the Batman family trying to solve the mystery of Salvation Run, but instead it evolved into a gangwar between Penguin and several mob characters I’ve never heard of before. And yes, I am using the phrase “Batman family” just because I know Doom Deluise hates it.
So after nine issues, what did Gotham Underground accomplish?
Well, Batman’s back (bet you didn’t know he had ever left). And now the Penguin is a snitch for Batman. And some guys you’ve never heard of now run the organized crime ring in Gotham. And they have eagle-people and mouse-people as bodyguards.
Oh yeah, and Batman never figured out where all the villains had disappeared to. Not that it really matters, since they’re all back now, but it seems wrong that the World’s Greatest Detective never solved the mystery he set out to solve.
On the bright side, both series are over now. And I only had to buy 16 issues to get to the uninspired conclusion, unlike the 51 issues it took me to get to the end of Countdown.