I’ve never been a big comic book reader, but it’s a big part of geek culture so when DC Comics did their big reboot/reset/renumbering/whatever with the New 52 I decided to look into it to see if it’s something I’d enjoy. My conclusion so far is that the writing in these books is pretty terrible. Here’s an example from Green Lantern #3: Sinestro (the red guy) is trying to enlist the aid of Hal Jordan to help solve a problem on the planet of Korugar, but Hal wants to resolve some issues in his personal life first:

Conflict! Hal wants to wait, but Sinestro believes that they can’t wait a single second. After some more character stuff, Hal eventually gives in an flies off to Korugar with Sinestro. And what is step 1 of this plan that couldn’t be delayed for a second?

Yes, that’s right: wait until sunset. It’s a good thing they got started on this “do nothing for a while” plan right away, thus averting the needless suffering that any delay would have caused! In order to manufacture conflict the writer has abandoned any pretense of continuity of motivation. At first we were led to believe Sinestro disagreed with Hal because Sinestro is the kind of guy who sacrifices anything for his greater goals. Now we see that this couldn’t possibly have been the reason, so we have to retroactively conclude that he’s just petty and obnoxious, and not a character we should take seriously. The entire comic book business model seems to be based on audience attachment to the characters, so undermining the characters in pursuit of false drama seems like a poor choice for a comic book writer to make.

This is just one example. While there are occasional fun moments in some of the other books I’ve read, most of them seem to be long periods of nothing happening punctuated by short periods where the visual storytelling is so muddled that I can’t tell what’s happening. Additionally, even though the New 52 is supposed to be a “jumping on point” for new readers, many of the storylines involve fallout from events that took place before issue 1. They’ll frequently name-drop characters for dramatic effect without laying the groundwork in the current series, guaranteeing that the drama only works for long-time fans. Several of the storylines started in medias res where the writers seemed to be using the frantic pace and unanswered questions as a way of building reader engagement, but they don’t seem to realize that this approach to storytelling is at odds with getting invested in the characters, which means that killing one of them off has little dramatic payoff. Maybe I’ve just been looking at the wrong books, but I’m hard pressed to think of any instances where the writing impressed me. My overall conclusion is that the writing in these books is bad.