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DC Two Thousand #2

Scheduled to arrive in stores: August 16, 2000

Cover date: October 2000

Writer: Tom Peyer
Penciller: Val Semeiks
Inker: Prentice Rollins

Reviewed by: Neal Bailey (baileyn@cc.wwu.edu)


Reviewer's note: This review will take the fact that you have a basic knowledge of the story thusfar. I could have brought all of the convolution to its present state, but it would take more gigs than poor Mr. Younis has to spare... and regardless, if you pay attention to the details of this story, you will not get past the first issue anyway.

July 1, 1941.
T. O. Morrow, future controller of the world, plays with his toys, commanding them in a power trip. His robot breaks.

July 1, 2000.
T. O. Morrow has a stuffy nose. He commands his computer to fix it by sufficiently altering the time stream. How will he accomplish this? Give scientists a microwave oven in 1941.

His nose is soon not stuffy, and the only negative consequence is that a lot of people in this future turn into mutants. T. O. Morrow seems unaffected.

The Flash of the 40s is now chained up with a number of his comrades, a prisoner of T. O. Morrow. It can't have ended this way, he melodramatically thinks. It can't!

In the past, his younger self tells the Justice Society that their actions are travesties... using the technology of the future to make humanity better. They scoff at him, and he leaves with an agenda in mind to change the future, quiting the JSA.

Mid-Nite offers to take control of the team.

Spectre and Dr. Fate argue over Spectre's imprisonment of the JLA of the future. Fate wants to hear them out. Spectre damns them. He sees the future that we know as an abomination. He's very adamant.

Struggling in the sphere Spectre has imprisoned them in, the JLA cannot escape. A few are even feeling punishment bestowed upon them. Aquaman is kept near death but just hydrated enough to survive. Martian Manhunter is distressed by their high levels of stress... (?). Batman thinks that he knows a way out.

Hourman, Sandman, and Atom attempt to find Morrow's secret lair at the old World of Tomorrow exhibit, the inspiration for Morrow's evil future. They find a big toy robot that they are quickly overcome by before Flash from the 40s arrives and dispatches it. As a reward, Sandman gasses him to stop Flash's nefarious plot to save the future.

Batman explains his plan: Use the most superior mental intellect within the sphere to goad the Spectre into a fight. Meanwhile, Flash of the 90s will use the "internal speed variation" that he used with the Cosmic Treadmill to take the JLA into the past to take most of the members back to the future. Superman argues with Batman about sacrificing himself before Batman, but Batman argues that his superior sense of tragedy and sacrifice makes his mind stronger. Superman concedes.

The plan works, and everyone escapes to the future but Batman and Superman, who Spectre is so ticked at for their deception that he turns them to stone. Fate berates him.

The JSA's technologies are changing the world. Flash of the 40s arrives to tell Morrow's mother what she's doing wrong. Though, in actuality, this is impossible, because he was gassed twelve pages back, but oh well. Sigh.

Morrow of the future hands a scientist a map of the human genome.

The JSA break into the meeting and steal it. Morrow escapes to the future.

The JSA getting a hold on the human genome results in a future generation of nearly perfect and power hungry super heroes, who at the time that the future Morrow returns to his future present (yeah), are assaulting his fortress for control of the time stream.

The JLA learn this, and go... through a portal, I don't know if to an alternate timeline or to the same on Earth as opposed to the JLA headquarters to attempt to help.

Fate again berates Spectre with his same argument, and for some reason, Spectre shows doubt and concedes, releasing Superman and Batman. The entirety of both teams are then together, battling the super genetic JSA of the future.

Morrow, panicking, returns to the past to kill his mother. Why? It is never explained. [Editor: I think it was to harden him as an adult]. Flash of the 40's stops him after getting knocked down by rising and showing the young Morrow his future.

Meanwhile, assorted heroes attack Morrow's futuristic time control machine for control, though they cannot seem to penetrate its defenses.

Finally, inexplicably, the rays they've been pounding the machine with which haven't been affecting it until this point break the force field. Right after this, Spectre waves his hand and turns all of the JSA super genetic freaks into toy soldiers. A huh. A huh, huh.

Why he didn't do this for the great and mighty many splash page covered last few pages is alas, another mystery of the future.

Morrow, remorseful because Flash of the 40's showed him that he was trying to kill his mother, either that or Morrow, altered in the future due to seeing his future self in the past (it's never explained properly), agrees to help take back all of the technology Morrow distributed. They do, of course in the process returning everything to normal and not altering the future in any way. The JSA return to the past with no memory of what happened, though Morrow remembers everything. Morrow goes to jail.

1Story - 1: Would have received a Zero if that was possible! The last one had promise, if only for the fact that there was a chance that in this issue, all of the terribly loose ends might get tied up. Instead, these loose ends were ignored, and even more, even worse ones were created. Here they are, in detail.
1. The appearance of the JLA in the past is never in any way explained, save by Flash of the future's vibrations. All right. I'll suspend disbelief. A vibration can make time travel possible. But... there are eight hundred different ways that the JLA of the future would not have even survived Morrow's alterations at all, much less intact and as we know them.
2. Superman has a stronger mind than the Batman. Note that I do not say that Superman has a more traveled, or more tragedy-laden mind than Batman. I say stronger. Superman, in the past, has stopped his own heart, survived in the vacuum of space, and more recently entered a theta state upon which he did battle on the astral plane, I believe it was, all requiring intense concentration, more intense than anything that Batman has done in the psychic attack sense. Batman can lift a million weights, take the loss of a hundred loved ones, but those are emotional strengths, not physical/mental strengths. Superman should have taunted Spectre. But worse than this, Martian Manhunter's mind, I believe a psychic and telekinetic one, is more than likely stronger than Superman's. BAD ATTENTION TO CONTINUITY.
3. Spectre miraculously sees the light. You don't set up a character for nearly a hundred pages as a hard gluteus maximus regarding an issue and then suddenly have him change his mind. NO NO NO. Bad.
4. Morrow miraculously sees the light. See 3.
5. The whole JSA sees the light in the space of about three panels. And again, I spit on it. See three and four.
6. Where in the @#$&% DC Universe did Morrow get the technology, let alone the brains, to do any of this crap! He has a bulky friend on the last page, but other than that, he's a loner. And not a smart one, either. Not smart enough to discover time travel. Unless, of course, he found some kind of super vibrating device... sheesh.
And there are more, but I'm too mad at having dished out exactly fifteen dollars and ten cents on this worthless piece of trash.
I see one spark of hope in this book. I am a writer, and an unpublished one, save in this review column and a few local papers. If stuff like this can make it through the high grand annals of DC, then chances are some day they might actually look at some of my work.
Cookies and lemonade. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

2Art - 2: Again, full of space consuming, irrelevant splashes, some not even focusing on the characters being depicted. Base colors, very boundary oriented, with rare, larger than necessary exceptions. I could list the pages with unnecessary splashes, but it would waste my and your time.

1Cover Art - 1: Crap. Absolute and total crap. Nothing but a bland repeat of the first cover in the series, and at that one with even more shadowing on essentially idealistic characters. The lack of detail, the lack of any relevance to the plot, the empty space, it makes me sick. I could have drawn this cover. I can't draw my way out of a comic book con.

Mild Mannered Reviews

2000

Note: Month dates are from the issue covers, not the actual date when the comic was on sale.

January 2000

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