Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Review of "Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating the DC Universe Omnibus"



Review of
Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating the DC Universe Omnibus, ISBN 9781401238858

Five out of five stars
 There is no greater living legend in the world of comics than Stan (the man) Lee. His collaboration with Jack Kirby and others at Marvel Comics gave us many of the greatest comic book characters ever created, Lee is arguably the greatest living creative force in entertainment. Over the last several decades, there have been two large entities in the comic book world, Marvel and DC, each with its own collection of major characters.
 The premise of this book is to have Stan Lee recreate many of the most popular DC characters, using his powerful imagination. Lee performs a reboot on Batman, Robin, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Superman, Catwoman, Flash, Sandman and Shazam. These are not simply restatements of the well known stories of the origins of these characters, in many ways the only similarities are in their names. For example, Shazam is now a large red creature with fangs and wings, Aquaman is formed from water and Batman is a professional wrestler.
 Along with the physical differences there are major changes in their personalities. Superman’s powers are toned down, but his attitude has been dramatically increased. A JLA is formed when the world is in peril, but the members find it almost impossible to stop bickering long enough to face the threat. In the comic book world of print and screen, the origin stories have been repeated many times with few differences.
 Not so in this case, it is clear that Lee and his collaborators were given free reign by the executives at DC to go wherever their minds took them. This is very refreshing, another retelling of the destruction of Krypton and the lonely flight of Kal-El to Earth would have been boring and unworthy of such a great endeavor.
 This is a great comic book opus, it is new, refreshing and incredibly original. I strongly recommend it to all fans of the comics.

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