I've said it before, and i'll say it again .

Weak edditing.

Anyone would think a bunch of Marvel deconstructionalists had gone over and worked for DC on a "monkeywrench" mission ... oh, wait ...

LoL

All the Best

Noman

I first noticed this trend in DC comics a couple of years ago during the Superman arc where Supes fought Preus. Preus had his cult followers bringing him a steady stream of human women which he brutally raped and dismemebered at his leisure. The gore and violence of that was so shocking that I considered writng a letter to DC, but I figured a company that would publish such carp aimed at a kids market would not care, so I did not bother.

I was also put off by the recent gory events in 52 and JLA 6. I feel it was all done strictly for shock value and added nothing to the story at all. If anyone wants to start a letter writing campaign to DC and ask them to tone it down several notches, I'll happily join in.

don't forget, Red Tornado also amped up the wind speeds to the point that he ripped Grundy IN HALF!

While you can't always tell the level of violence of a book by its cover,
it is fairly obvious which titles both DC and Marvel are marketed to younger readers.

Yeah, comics stopped being aimed 'at kids' a long time ago.

If you've got any question about that, try finding anything -- including Marvel Adventures and the assorted Superman and Batman Adventures books -- that's suitable for a child to read. My three-year-old wants to read comic books like his dad, but there's just nothing out there that I feel terribly comfortable exposing him to.

Comic book publishers long ago realized that their core audiences were the 15-40 male demographic, and they've tailored their stories to entertain and keep that audience. And, when 'kids' (read: teenagers) are exposed to more graphic violence in video games and on network television than what they experience in comics, I'm not sure how one can argue that the comic publishers have crossed any lines.

I haven't read comics in years (as you can probably tell from what I'm posting), but I'm assuming here that Reddy = Red Tornado? Isn't Red Tornado a robotic kind android that houses two wind elementals and Soloman Grundy is a plant elemental of some sort? Or did the latest Crisis re-set them to be something else?

Please don't tell me Red Tornado is Ma Hunkle again...

Really? I haven't read any of those titles beyond flipping through Marvel Adventures a few times and it didn't seem to be any worse than the old Spider-man books I read as a kid.

Red Tornado's 'spirit' was finally embedded in a flesh-and-blood human body at the beginning of the new Justice League of America series, and following the events of 52.

Grundy is, more or less, a zombie (rather than a plant elemental -- that's Swamp Thing).

As Red Tornado's 'gimmick' is that he is constantly blown up. Now that he's in a human body, his 'blowing up' was a bit more ... bloody. His spirit will likely, again, be transferred into another robot host -- and, in fact, I think it was transferred into Amazo at the end of this issue, if I recall the spoilers correctly.

Red Tornado (the android) had his "soul" magically migrated to a human body. Ma Hunkle has been nowhere near JLoA. Solomon Grundy is a being that keeps getting killed and comes back with a different personality each time. This time around he came back as an intelligent being and was trying to end his cycle of deaths and come-backs.

I love DC comics, but must agree that the events of 52 and JLoA seem more in tune with Marvel Zombies than with the DCU. I do wish they'd tone it down or at least keep these events off panel. I have a 2 1/2 year old that is getting into comics and at the moment I only let her "read" Justice League Unlimited and/or Disney-type comics. All of my other books stay far out of her reach.

Trust me, for a three-year-old who is still afraid of the dark, the big bad wolf, and has now started saying that his mom's reflection sits is his room at night (which, frankly, even creeps me out), he doesn't need anything like what the Avengers or Spider-Man typically fight to add to the things he has to be frightened of in the middle of the night.

Man, if my kid started talking like that about his mom's reflection I wouldn't be able to sleep!!! I have watched too many horror flicks about kids seeing otherwordly things to be able to just gloss over that sort of thing. Goes to show you what the media, Hollywood, and my own twisted imagination have done to me!

Ah, okay. Thanks for clearing that up.

I seem to recall a Swamp Thing storyline from the 80's that said Grundy was a failed attempt at creating a plant elemental/guardian for The Green using an escaped criminal's corpse. I thought he was more plant then re-animated human corpse and that was why the golden age Green Lantern's ring didn't work on him*, not that that hasn't changed over the years too.

* For anyone not familiar with the golden age Green Lantern, his ring was ineffective against wood as opposed to the color yellow that the silver age Green Lantern's ring was uneffective against -- and they both really hate these guys http://www.greatsouthernwood.com/

Yeah, that's exactly why it creeps me out. And, when he's cries in the middle of the night and wants you to go up there, you walk into the room just hoping that he's not actually seeing anything that you might wind up seeing, too ...

Dude, now you're starting to creep me out as well. I swear, if my little girl were to come up to me and tell me that she "sees dead people", I think I'd have a heart attack right then and there!!! My youngest sister had an "imaginary friend" when she was a toddler and I was a teenager. I always took off when she would tell me that her "friend" was in the room!!!

That was great and disgusting, but what was even more awesome was when Reddy tore Grundy in half! SWEET!!!