Lewis Lovhaug: Linkara, The Sniper

Quotes 

• Announcer : Warning: The following review contains a lot of ranting from Linkara concerning the 2011 DC reboot. If you enjoy said reboot, Linkara respects your opinion. However, he dislikes the reboot and wishes to express his displeasure. If that upsets you, you may want to skip the next few weeks' worth of episodes. Still, I would not worry. I'm sure Linkara will be fair and balanced about it.

  Linkara : [yelling]  "THE NEW 52" SUCKS ASS AND I FRICKIN' HATE IT!

• Linkara : It's finally time for me to review a comic from the DC relaunch of 2011, or the "New 52", as it is called, despite the fact that the number of comics being published and being given time in the company varies, so it's not really "52" and it is no longer new. Don't you just love it when a company is unable to count?

• Linkara : Some of you may be surprised that this is the first comic I'm looking at for the reboot instead of "Red Hood and the Outlaws", which I have complained about more than once, to the point where many said the book got better in later issues and I should give it another chance. I took them up on it and read up to issue 8 or 9. It did not in fact get better. In fact, I felt it was getting worse with every successive issue. I don't feel I'm ready yet to tackle that one, especially since every comic reviewer out there has already deconstructed "Red Hood and the Outlaws" and pointed out how sucky it is. And really, my biggest contribution has been pointing out how stupid Roy Harper's trucker hat looks. But because this year, we've taken several looks at the Teen Titans, particularly their entire history up until the early 2000s, analyzing a specific crossover storyline in this book probably helps highlight the major issues with the current book and the reboot as a whole.

• Linkara : Just take a moment to enjoy the surroundings, everyone. I hope you like the color red because that's what you're gonna be seeing throughout this crossover. Although, personally, I can't really tell the difference. When I have to read stuff like "Marville" or anything by Frank Miller or Rob Liefeld, I see red for weeks at a time.

• Linkara : I know there are people out there who do enjoy "The New 52", and there are also people out there who want to know if I hate everything about it, or if there are books I can recommend from it. Well, the good news is that I do enjoy several series in it, and here are some of them: "Demon Knights", "Batwing", "Justice League International", "World's Finest", "Earth 2", "Batgirl", "Batman" by Scott Snyder, "Nightwing", "All Star Western", the Green Lantern books, and "Deadpool". And before anyone asks, I have no opinion regarding "Trinity War" because I'm not reading "Trinity War". All it did when I first heard about it was raise my hopes that the old universe might return, and instead it's just a crossover of all the Justice League books that I didn't like to begin with. Whoopee.

• Linkara : [about "The Culling"]  And this is our first problem with the storyline, which is subsequently a complaint I have with the reboot: the crossovers. When this story was released, the books hadn't even been out for a year yet, and they were already doing a crossover! I've said it before, and I'll say it again: you need to have a status quo before you can shake it up. And it's not like the story of this crossover was so complex that you needed it to be a crossover. At best, it's a "Hunger Games" ripoff. No, I don't care if "Battle Royale" came first! "Hunger Games" was what was popular, so they were ripping off that!

• Linkara : This is still a problem with these books: if you want to attract new readers to comics, making long crossover events that interrupt other storylines is not the way to do it. You can't expect new readers to jump on the crossover bandwagon right away. Give it a year or two, let the readers get adjusted to the setting and these characters, then you can do your big crossover event where most of the characters aren't actually involved in most of the action, but they get a temporary sales boost.

  [he briefly pauses to massage his forehead in frustration] 

  Linkara : Sorry, sorry, um... we had a point here, didn't we? Oh, yeah, as you can tell, I'm a bit opinionated about the state of affairs of my favorite company and my favorite team. I know, a comic fan on the Internet whose opinionated. A shocking development, to be sure.

• Linkara : You know all that history of the Teen Titans I spent, like, two-and-a-half hours yapping about? You can throw it all away. It has nothing to do with this comic. There were no Teen Titans before this group, except for when it was first printed, and there totally were. You know how some businesses have, like, a gift shop in the lobby? DC has a retcon shop. Buy one, get one free on Wednesdays. The problem is that the retcons are sometimes spilling into each other and you don't know which is which.