Does Forever Evil: Arkham War Hold Anything New?
Arkham War was revealed this week and basically Scarecrow seems to be at the forefront, but the gist is that the Gotham villains have carved out parts of Gotham and are all looking to take over the city. Seems a bit too much like Arkham City for me though I am interested in the Scarecrow playing a larger role. Here's what writer Peter Tomasi said about the project:
“Scarecrow is, believe it or not, the one person who believes there should be a plan, so he's the one person who tries to bind them together, at least, to realize they should all be working together because at some point in FOREVER EVIL: ARKHAM WAR #1, Scarecrow realizes that Bane is coming and he has his eye on the prize -- Gotham -- and he knows he can't fight [Bane] with a schizophrenic army. He needs to have the psychos all on the same page, if only for a little while,”
My problem with this storyline and really the entire Batman line of books is that they've stopped creating new stories. Instead they just infuse stories either previously done (i.e. Death in the Family and Year Zero) with a slightly different twist or they take entire story lines that happened out of continuity and bring it into continuity. It reminds me of what happened to Marvel when the Ultimate line began to do better than the 616 line of books. Suddenly Ultimate styled stories were appearing in the regular universe, but they felt shoehorned and out-of-place. Eventually Jeph Loeb killed the Ultimate line and stopped that problem, but Batman has yet to do that. For the past two years we've had rehash after rehash of stories. They've literally set out to retell the same tired history instead of what the books were doing before the reboot... paving the way for the new. It reads like fan fiction to me. What's worse is that the Batman video games were once some of the worst games ever made, but now they're quality and storytelling has surpassed the comics. Good for video game fans, but shitty for the monthly reader.
What are your thoughts?