Go read Chris Sims on the first issue of Sword and Sorcery, a just-launched DC comic featuring a rebooted
Amethyst written by the creator of 1980s cartoon/doll line tie-in
Jem, a comic that is shipping at the same time there's an
Amethyst short on Cartoon Network as part of of the channel's "DC Nation" programming block.
It's weird: I just read Rob Saklowitz's book
Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture a few months back, and he argued rather persuasively that the future of comics companies like DC and Marvel lie in an effective "trans-media" strategy, a future that involves the challenge of reorganizing their characters and franchises across multiple platforms so that they all cohere into something recognizable, consistent and (ultimately) salable. And yet I've seen little—as in,
no—evidence that anyone at DC Comics is even really paying attention to what's going on in their cartoons and trying to calibrate their relaunched comics line to those more popular and accessible takes on the characters.
Short of making Batman's costume fussier and redesigning Harley Quinn so that the two characters look a bit more like the versions of them that appear in the
Batman: Arkham Ayslum video games, it doesn't look like DC has even attempted to meet the challenge of transmedia synergy yet. This despite an overhaul of their entire line that's barely even a year old.
Anyway: Attempted gang rape in
Amethyst, the sort of thing a wag might make up as a hyperbolic example in order to parody the sort of screwed-up mindset evident in DC's publishing strategy, only ha ha, you
can't make fun of DC for this kind of thing because there's nothing to exaggerate up to. Or down to, as the case may be.
Man.
Attempted gang rape in Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld.
What's on the next ring of the downward spiral at DC, pedophilia in a New 52
Sugar and Spike, or bestiality in
Shazam...? Keep reading to find out!
Wait, why would
anyone keep reading this shit...?
