Gah. Does the "crisis in time" involve my lost time from reading this series? They've lost me. Can you tell? Somehow Extant, who is also Monarch from "Armageddon 2001," and who is also Hawk, of Hawk and Dove, and has Waverider's powers to manipulate space and time, also has a couple of teams of superheroes under his control, and it's never actually explained how this happened, except to tell us on the last page that it's explained in the Team Titans ongoing series.
And that's where they lose me.
This was a major plot point of the entire issue, but there's no reason or logic to it unless you've read an ancillary title that you might not actually be reading regularly to begin with. Once line-wide crossovers started pulling stuff like this, they lost what the crossover was meant to accomplish - all your favourite heroes in one story together, and that story made, as much as superhero stories do, sense. The original Crisis did this par excellance, as did Hickman's Secret Wars. I read Crisis with no other context for the DCU except that I knew of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. And the series made sense. The first Secret Wars is the same. I didn't have to read any of the other ongoing series to get a good, complete story.
I've ranted about this before, but I think it bears repeating. Not only is it, in my opinion, rude for a company to expect us to spend even more of what little we earn on comics we wouldn't normally want to buy, but it's also demonstrating some class-based exclusion. In a lot of ways it's saying that if you can afford it, you can get the whole story, but if you can't, then you get an incomplete experience. And that's not fair, and it's certainly not how art or media should be. But, unfortunately, it is.
More to come...
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