Lazarus Planet

Mark Waid and a cast of thousands Lazarus Planet (2023)
I really should have limited myself to the issue featuring the Doom Patrol, although I suppose had I done so I would have been left wondering whether the rest was any better; but no, I just had to buy the collection because I wanted the whole story, except it turns out this isn't the whole story and the saga - such as it is - somehow manages to sprawl off into issues of World's Finest, Batman, and others because can you really have too much of a good thing?

Lazarus Planet is DC's version of the White Event from Marvel's New Universe line back in 1986, or possibly an homage to that issue of the Simpsons comic where the power plant blows up  irradiating everyone and turning them all into superheroes. This telling of the same tale features a magic volcano which erupts, blanketing the Earth with material which causes certain individuals to develop special powers. However, this collection isn't so much a conveniently linear account as a bunch of loosely related strips set against the background of the aforementioned occurrence, and most of them are pretty much self-contained to the point of being incidental. Being the work of writers and artists other than Mark Waid and Riccardo Federici - whose alpha and omega issues sandwich the bulk of the narrative and are the best things here by some margin - Lazarus Planet looks a lot like obscure hopefuls given the chance to create exciting new superheroes for the DC Universe because, as we all know, if there's one thing wrong with the DC Universe it's that it doesn't have enough superheroes.

So once you're done with Mark Waid and Riccardo Federici's bookends, this thing looks massively uneven and, on close inspection, not actually much good. Sure, it's lavishly produced, printed, and coloured, and it looks expensive, but the taint of manga is overpowering with big eyes and cutesy postures at almost every turn, because apparently that's what the kids want. I remain unconvinced by homegrown American manga on the grounds of it all looking the fucking same with a homogeneity that not even seventies Marvel managed. It pushes buttons rather than making its point with an actual narrative, so far as I can see, and its a lazy affectation. Everything on the page is a quotation. Maybe there's some good stuff out there somewhere but I've yet to see it, and what we apparently have right now makes everyone channeling Rob Liefeld back in the nineties seem like a period of wildly adventurous experimentation.

This wouldn't be so bad were it limited to the art, but much of the writing is engaged in the same bland low calorie impersonation - cutesy TikTok teenagers with purple hair going crosseyed when confused, communicating in teenspeak, short clipped sentences dripping with irony, like yeah, right? Take the imaginatively named City Boy, a spawn of that pesky magic volcano. Here's a kid who casually notices that he's acquired powers akin to psychometry which somehow put him in touch with the soul of Gotham city, so he can sink into the pavement or see through the asphalt to the utilities buried beneath the streets. He finds an old tiara which his power tells him was mislaid by some society woman many years before. He meets Nightwing, Batman's pal, for no obvious reason beyond establishing continuity. Then he finds the society woman, now an old lady, and returns the tiara which makes her happy; and that is somehow the fucking story because it's job, I assume, is to impersonate something you've already read. It sits on the page, barely moving, and with less actual content than a three-panel Garfield once you're done looking at the cheekbones, lacking even presence sufficient to be condescending in its pose of simplicity. Stay tuned for more from the same spigot, loyal consumers.

So yeah, Lazarus is mostly bollocks, and the latest Doom Patrol revival doesn't fare much better for looking as though it was drawn by Philip Bond, perhaps even written by him given the dreary emphasis on the power of friendship and hugs. The back story to the entire thing is drawn from the Chinese legend of the Monkey King, which likewise deserves better than this.

I guess the comic book industry has been merchandise to its own big screen success for a while now, which is presumably why so much of Lazarus Planet screams tie-in product and no-one is reading the fucking things these days.