I'm really quite impressed with the quality of the stories in this Spotlight series. Both today's Brotherhood story and yesterday's Changeling/Cliff Steele story were good, solid, entertaining superhero tales. I think that perhaps some of this hinges on the stories being written more toward a reader with some depth of historical knowledge of the DCU and of comics.
Today, for instance, the Brotherhood, while recruiting Warp, are blasted to a strange, post-apocalyptic world on the verge of exploding (!!), and assist Tin, the Captain, and the Professor in escaping with the last of the planet's refugees. These three characters are, of course, the leading men of the Tintin books by Herge. The history of this doomed planet, an alternate Earth, follows the history set down in Tintin's adventures, offering a bleak, but also somewhat fitting, epilogue to the series.
Though driven by a desire to save themselves, of course, the Brotherhood actually seem to connect to Tin and his comrades, and work with some fervor not only on their own behalf, but that of the surviving humans. Is it simply the nature of Tintin's universe that the Brotherhood become...redeemable, somehow? It's hard to make these kind of decisions about B-list, or C-list, villains, as we encounter them so seldom. I know this version of the Brotherhood has appeared in the various New Teen Titans series, but is it often enough for us to get a more nuanced idea of the people on the team? Superhero teams get month upon month to tell the minutiae of interpersonal dynamics; villain teams rarely get that chance. I think we're to understand that they're constantly sniping at each other, looking over their shoulders, always expecting treachery. But if you've got a group who are ideologically on the same page, in that they believe in the same thing (they are, after all, called THE BROTHERHOOD OF EVIL!!), then why wouldn't they be able to be friends with one another?
I'm sure it's something that has been explored with other groups.
Open Letter to Gerard Way and DC Comics.
I would very much like to write a Brotherhood of Evil series.
Yrs.
Tom.
(That never works, but maybe one day.)
I like to think that the Brotherhood bonded over this event, that it somehow strengthened them as a team because they knew they could trust each other? Maybe I'll have to find all of their subsequent appearances. There really is always something to hunt for :D
"So it is agreed, if we are to escape, we must learn to work together."
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