It’s been quite a year for high-profile titles of mind-numbing awfulness. Having already had one crack at the First Annual Jeph Loeb Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Shit Comics courtesy of Titans, Judd Winick bravely steps forward with another attempt – and I have to say, he’s in with a good shout. This appallingly misjudged, dreadfully-executed piece of tosh is certainly worthy of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ultimates 3, Hulk and All-Star Batman. The fact that it’s even worse than expected, though, is no small achievement in and of itself.

After all, some concepts are so staggeringly misguided that you genuinely wonder how anyone came up with them, let alone that they snuck past editorial level. I’m not talking about fan-angering decisions such as One More Day – which at least had a clear and frequently-communicated purpose behind it – but instead about… well, about stuff like this. It’s just a deeply flawed premise. With the odd exception drawn from a character’s background and personality – Green Arrow is Green Arrow because he’s a rich leftie, while Hawkman is a cop from a fascist alien society – you simply can’t go round slapping political motivations on the big superheroes. It’s not what they’re there for. You can “do” politics in a book that’s designed for it, but it has to be something specific – the animal rights stuff in Animal Man, the immigration material in Blue Beetle – but the major characters are just too big, too deliberately universal in their appeal, to go closing them off to massive portions of society. Make Superman right-wing, for example, and you betray his “everyone is equal” philosophy as well as ignoring his own status as an immigrant outsider; make him left-wing, meanwhile, and it’s impossible to reconcile with his role as a vigilante.

So having already established that the mere idea of having the DCU’s heroes getting involved in the US Presidential elections (incidentally – “DC Universe Decisions”? Yes, folks, Darkseid and Mongul really care about the US elections) is fundamentally screwy, it remains to be seen if the execution can salvage it to any extent. Which – as you may already have gathered – it can’t. Even if I’d agreed with the basic idea behind the book, it’s appallingly handled. The first major mistake actually undermines the original concept entirely – it’s not based around the “real” election. It couldn’t be, of course. It would be far too controversial for DC to bear should Superman be “outed” as an Obama supporter, or Bruce Wayne stood shaking John McCain’s hand. Instead, DCAmerica is voting for entirely fictional candidates. And could nobody at DC see that this just defeated the point of the entire enterprise? The only reason a book like this could exist – even if I didn’t agree with the idea of doing it – would be to deliberately ascribe certain political views and alignments to certain characters, in a deliberate “look how daring and concerned-with-contemporary-issues we are” kind of way.

And it’s not even like it’s a particularly close analogue. Aside from a brief mention of one of the candidates’ military background, we know nothing about any of them, nor why a particular hero might vote a particular way (a ludicrous talking heads sequence sees a bunch of heroes giving a bunch of completely superficial reasons for their voting patterns, undermining just about every one of them as a three-dimensional character). It’s further divorced from reality by the laughable idea that there are more than two candidates on an equal footing – here, there appear to be at least four, including both a token woman and a non-white. In this sense, it’s an idealised view of American democracy – topped off by an appallingly self-congratulatory opening page that beats its chest proudly at such “facts” as “[John Adams’ succession] was the first time in recorded human history that a great nation transferred power to a nonfamilial relation without battle or bloodshed” – that completely ignores any genuine issues that people might have with the process (it makes no mention of disenfranchised Florida voters, for example…)

Quite aside from all of this, by all the usual criteria by which we usually judge a comic, it’s woefully done. Given that both Winick and Bill Willingham – who really should know better – are credited as writers, it’s hard to know exactly who’s responsible for what (although the awful adolescent “fight” between Greens Lantern and Arrow is clearly Winick – I’d guessed that even before Black Canary walked in and called them, yes, you guessed it, “brain donors”), but that doesn’t really matter so much, because there isn’t a decent moment in the whole thing. It’s simply dreadfully under-thought at just about every level – take, for example, the brief appearance by Guy Gardner. In recent years, Gardner has seen genuine development, and has become a proud and revered member of the Green Lantern Corps – effectively the lead character of that title, a role he carries well. To read this, however, you’d think he’d moved no further from the macho thug of the ‘90s (the one that had long since had the humour of the Giffen-era caricature stripped out). It shows the same staggering lack of awareness of just what’s going on in other comics (and while we’re at it – in almost every other title, including this week’s Supergirl, Batman is repeatedly described as being “off the grid” in order to cover for the events of “Batman RIP”; so when has he had the time, or indeed the sanity, to get involved in the upcoming election?) that has characterised Titans, and demonstrates just why Winick is one of the laziest writers out there. Howard Porter, meanwhile, escapes too much of a tearing-off only because I’ve just realised how long this review’s already become (er, sorry); but then, while his work isn’t great, it’s at least “passable” (just the odd instance of dodgy face shapes), rather than plumbing the depths reached by his cohorts.

I don’t think I would have believed you if you’d told me I’d see a comic stupider than Hulk this year. While that title has been abhorrent in just about every way, there’s at least the sense that it’s being deliberately stupid. There are different demographics to aim for, I suppose. DC Universe Decisions aims, supposedly, for a higher common denominator – it thinks it’s intelligent, but it’s actually just as dumb. And in a way, that makes it even worse.

Tags: Bill Willingham, Howard Porter, Judd Winick
Publisher: DC