Flashpoint: Week 5

I’m almost all caught up with my Flashpoint backlog, which is great because I have some non-Flashpoint-related posts that I’m excited to get to.  Look forward to those, but for now here are the books from last week.

Fan Fiction

If you look at online reviews and commentary about The Widening Gyre, you will often see it referred to, derisively, as “fan fiction.”  What this means, of course, is that it is the work of an amateur, an outsider, a member of the fandom who only wishes he could be a “real” comic book writer.  While I would argue that this label could be applied to any Batman story not written by the decaying corpse of Bob Kane, I understand what people mean.  The Widening Gyre clearly is the work of an enthusiastic fan, who is chomping at the bit to oversaturate the book with oh-so-clever little nods to the DCU, often at the detriment of the story he’s trying to tell.  But that’s mostly because Kevin Smith is insane.  Today I am going to tell you about another celebrity-penned “fan fiction” vanity project, that happens to actually be really awesome.