Milk Wars

Gerard Way, Steve Orlando & others Milk Wars (2018)
I bought the first one then waited patiently for further issues, and before I knew what had happened, the fucker had already been collected as a trade paperback. I'd assumed it was to be just some Doom Patrol crossover affair, so I suppose that's where I went wrong. It turns out to be a Young Animal crossover affair, specifically all the characters from Gerard Way's Young Animal imprint getting to play ball with Batman and the like.

It starts well with the Doom Patrol arriving in a humongously square version of the DC universe in which the ordinarily feral Lobo wears a cardigan, smokes a pipe, and takes pride in his lawn; and then the rest of the story is told though combinations of less interesting characters as written by persons other than Gerard Way. It doesn't quite go completely tits up, but there's a distinct sag. I don't really see the appeal in Mother Panic, and Batman as mild-mannered vicar is probably funnier if you care about Batman; and the subsequent chapter told through Wonder Woman and Shade just isn't very interesting, and has the added disadvantage of resembling a million other contemporary comic books.

I go into my comic shop, and everything is on fancy paper with lavish printing with all manner of CGI effects applied to the coloration, and the art is technically gorgeous but for that it all resembles a confluence of manga, bandes dessinées, and nineties independents, because - pow -the comic has now grown up to such an extent that it's slightly ashamed of being a superhero book, and Blue Beetle must therefore aspire to European cinema, or at least to something drawn by the Hernandez brothers. I think I liked the superheroes a little better when they were crap, and cheap, and when they knew who their audience were.

Anyway, that's what the Wonder Woman sequence looks like, with a bit of cutesy Hallmark card physiology thrown in.

The arrival of Cave Carson at least serves to bring us up to speed on what we've been reading, summarising the narrative glossolalia of previous pages, until we're back with Gerard Way and the Doom Patrol for the conclusion.

The story seems to be about the homogenisation of assorted DC characters, specifically the tension between wildly creative modes of storytelling as spun by wacky individuals, and the corporate and formulaic, specifically the corporate and formulaic which demands that continuity take precedence over creativity, and which reboots the DC universe every couple of years so that we don't have to think about Superman drawing his pension. It's a nice idea, and a story worth telling, but rings about as true as U2's political activism given that DC are owned by Warner, which rather leaves Milk Wars looking a little like the very thing it attempts to criticise. It's nice that they take the piss out of the fucking Funko Pop! thing - a worthless phenomenon if ever there was - but doing so doesn't make DC a samizdat guerilla outfit; and I'm only focusing on this aspect of the book because - well, they brought it up.

On the positive side, Gerard Way is as entertaining as ever and there's a lot to like about this book, but it sags in the middle and some of it is simply incomprehensible hipster noise.