My Week In Comics 6-29-11

I haven't posted anything in a few days. I find myself once again in a bit of a rut with this whole blogging thing -- but at least I'm not backed up with movies to write about. (What, you think I'm going to see that Transformers crap?) I do plan to post about how I spent the 4th of July. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you already have an idea. For now, though...

Flashpoint: Lois Lane and the Resistance 1 (of 3)
Flashpoint: Project Superman 1 (of 3): The Lois Lane book was actually released a week earlier but I skipped it. After taking another glance at it I decided to try it. Since everything in this Flashpoint universe is changed, these two books aren't actually related. Lois is still a Daily Planet reporter, but to her disgust she's stuck covering Fashion Week in Paris instead of hard news (along with Jimmy Olsen). Then fate intervenes, in the form of Emperor Aquaman's flooding of western Europe as part of the Atlantean hostilities against Wonder Woman and the Amazons. Olsen is killed but Lois survives and is taken by the Amazons to New Themyscira (the former Great Britain), where she ends up (thanks to her possession of Jimmy's camera) joining the resistance movement. Meanwhile, the Project Superman book takes place in flashbacks, starting 30 years ago, when a U.S. soldier arrives at a secret underground facility in Metropolis (with a certain General Sam Lane in charge), having volunteered to undergo treatments that would give him superpowers. Ummmm...isn't this more of a Marvel thing? Anyway, the goal is to have a powerful hero who can also present himself as normal-looking to the world -- all the better for the good old USA. But things don't quite go as planned, and a few years later our super-soldier is kept locked up in the facility, until meteors crash into Metropolis, and on the last page we see that one of the meteors is actually...you guessed it...a rocket carrying a baby. Which brings up a question: how would the changes in Earth's timeline caused by the Reverse-Flash cause the ship from Krypton to crash-land in Metropolis instead of on the Kent farm in Smallville? This seems more like a random change done for plot purposes, unless the coming DC Universe reboot in September is even more drastic than I imagine.

Batman, Incorporated 7:  Meanwhile, in the unchanged (for now) DC universe, we have a story that doesn't have a lot of Batman. It centers around one of those he inspired, Man-of-Bats, who fights crime on his reservation along with his son, who's called Raven. But unlike Bruce Wayne, Man-of-Bats doesn't have unlimited resources, and the Leviathan criminal outfit is making things on the reservation much tougher.

Quick Review: A Nightmare On Elm Street

Hollywood brings us yet another remake -- this time it's "A Nightmare on Elm Street." There are differences in some plot details between the 25-year-old original and this one, but the basic premise is the same: Freddy Krueger is killing teenagers from beyond the grave through their dreams. Jackie Earle Haley is Freddy now, instead of Robert Englund. In most of the movie Haley's in full Freddy makeup, and when he is, he talks just like he did as the masked vigilante Rorschach in "Watchmen." Like in the original, Freddy is a mostly serious killer, instead of the guy spouting one-liners from the later sequels. There were a couple of humorous lines, though. Obviously this was a financial decision to reboot the franchise; creatively, there's no real reason for this new version to exist. I managed to enjoy it enough, however. My grade: B-minus.