For The Horde – I Mean The Sinestro Corps! DC Universe Online Legends #16 Review

If you’re one of those people who’s screaming self-righteously that there was no need for DC’s New 52 and that everything was fine in the old DC Universe and that your book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland will be available in paperback in November, you do still have an option available… kinda.

Since the launch of the DC Universe Online massive multiplayer online roleplaying game back in January, DC has been putting out what should amount to a three-dollar advertisement to the game: DC Universe Online Legends. It’s an old instinct for these MMORPG companies: people love the continuing stories in the game, so make some quick bank by putting out a comic based on the continuing stories in the game! It’s the kind of cross-media pollination to create market synergy that makes marketing people hard and other people want to set marketing people on fire.

Almost exclusively, these books fail on both a marketing and artistic level, because the publishers generally treat them like what they are: a financed, short-term cash-grab. Seriously: what talent are you going to put on a book with characters you don’t that’ll be canceled the day the game servers get shut down? Frank Miller? Yeah, try Francois Jean-Baptiste Charlemagne Milloirse, and even then only if he agrees to run his own script through Babelfish to save on translation costs.

So DC Universe Online Legends should suck… except DC owns these characters, they have a financial interest in how well the game does, and the marketing actually makes sense: if someone who never read comics tries the game (Let’s say his friends told him there were girls in there – there aren’t, by the way), there’s at least a CHANCE that they could wander into a comic store looking to learn more.

The upside to this for comic fans is that the development cycle of an MMORPG is significantly longer than it takes for Dan DiDio to say, “Fuck it! DO-OVER!”, which means that if you have a rage-on over the fact that Superman’s underpants aren’t on the outside anymore, this book has been a safe haven. In addition, since DC has a vested interest in making the book at least decent, they started out by putting A-List talent like Marv Wolfman on the book.

With that said, Marv’s arc on the book is over, and the game just put out an expansion pack containing a bunch of Green Lantern stuff, so DC Universe Online #16 is just a Green Lantern story. And since Green Lantern was hardly affected at all by the New 52 reboot, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference between this book and the DCnU proper.

Still, this is a pretty good book if you’re a Green Lantern fan.

The story is pretty simple: the Sinestro Corps is at war with Brainiac and his robot army, so the Guardians, who hate both sides, send the Green Lantern Corps to keep the battle contained while they all kill each other. It turns out that Brainiac has an ace up his sleeve, the kind of ace that can turn the tide of battle and force an entire guild – I mean, “team of Green Lanterns” – to perform a dungeon crawl – I mean, “infiltrate enemy lines” – to destroy it.

So the story gives what this type of book requires: a scenario hyping new game content a DC Universe Online subscriber could play. But there’s more going on here.

Writer Tom Taylor – a playwright from Australia who’s been doing some Star Wars comics for Dark Horse and took a turn at The Authority – does excellent work with the main Green Lantern characters, particularly Guy Gardner, who is positively gleeful at the idea of watching Sinestro and Brainiac stomp the shit out of each other. The dialogue is generally excellent, particularly Guy’s:

This is NOT a moral dilemma…

These guys — both sides — SCUM, right?

Can you not find the positive in ANYTHING? This is practically CHRISTMAS!

Seriously, don’t make me come in there and smack your internal monologue around.

Of course, the dialogue really has to be that good after how the book started: with Sinestro thinking how you can’t hear in space. It’s the point of five panels of writing… followed immediately by Sinestro – the guy who just told us you can’t hear in space – shrieking, “BRAINIAC!!”. In space.

But back to the story proper: Taylor takes what should be work-for-hire on a loss-leading marketing ploy and infuses it with moral questions. About the nature of only following orders. The morality of taking no stand in the face of genocide. The law of unintended circumstances. That is a lot going on for a paid videogame ad, and it pulled me into a book that historically I’ve only gotten because my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me to remember that he doesn’t carry Juggs Magazine no matter how often I ask or how many children are in earshot, has a very broad definition of the terms “subscription” and “Justice League”.

I was also pleasantly surprised by Bruno Redondo’s art, who I am only familiar with as one of the artists on the upcoming cereal box comics. It’s fairly straight-ahead comic pencils – clean lines, nothing too stylized to scare off any videogame nerd who might be buying their first comic – but he does pretty dynamic action and good facial expressions, which are key to a character like Guy Gardner and to the emotional beats Taylor builds into the story. My only complaint is that we’re supposed to believe that this is a battle of apocalyptic proportions, and while Redondo shows the gore of war, I wanted more sense of the scale of the battle which I only got in a single splash page. So while I wouldn’t hunt Redondo down on Artists’ Alley for a commission, he certainly gets the job done.

I’m not going to recommend this comic as an ongoing buy; it has its own continuity tied more to the game than to any DC continuity, it’ll fold the minute the game starts to lose subscribers, and it looks like we’re going to have rotating creative teams every time the game sells an expansion pack. But if you like Green Lantern stories, this is at least as good as what’s going on in Green Lantern Corps, so you might want to give the current arc a try.

And if you’re one of those people who’s still raving that they want Superman’s underpants, stick around: this will be the one place you can get them other than a Japanese vending machine, or an online sting operation.