A Bad Prequel and Surprisingly Good Prequels

I'm not a big fan of prequels, whether they're books, movies, or comics.  Most of them suck.  But occasionally there are some that aren't terrible.

A couple of years ago, DC introduced new comics and non-illustrated books aimed at young adult readers.  To pander cater to the younger audience, they were written with the superhero characters as teenagers, before they became famous superheroes.

Two illustrated ones I got for free on Amazon Vine.  The first one was Mera: Tidebreaker.  It's about Mera, who in comics is usually Aquaman's girlfriend or wife.  The graphic novel is when she's only like 16 and hasn't yet gone to the surface world.  But eventually she does to search for Arthur Curry to kill him.  But instead she and Arthur wind up falling in love and stopping a war between Atlantis and the surface world.

The second one was Under the Moon: A Catwoman Tale.  In it Selina Kyle leaves home to escape her abusive father and ends up on the streets.  She has to steal to keep alive and eventually falls in with some other kids.  Then they run into some trouble but Selina is able to get out of it with some help from her high school buddy, Bruce Wayne.

One day Amazon had a couple of the non-illustrated YA novels on sale, so I bought the Batman and Wonder Woman ones.  The Batman one is called Nightwalker.  After an 18-year-old Bruce Wayne wrecks a car to stop some bad guys from getting away, he's forced to do community service at Arkham Asylum to scare him straight.  He meets a girl who's part of a gang called the Nightwalkers.  She doesn't talk to him at first, but eventually she talks to him--and only him.  So the cops encourage him to keep going back.  Eventually the girl is broken out of Arkham and the Nightwalkers take the mayor, Lucius Fox, and a bunch of other people hostage with Wayne Enterprises drones they hacked.  Bruce uses some Wayne tech to sneak in and save the day--sort of a precursor to what he'd do as Batman.

The last one I read was Wonder Woman: Warbringer.  Young Diana is trying to prove her worth to the other Amazons when she sees a boat going down in the ocean.  She rescues a girl and by asking an elder on the island, she finds out that the girl is a "warbringer."  She'll inadvertently cause an apocalyptic war to break out unless Diana can get her to some spring in Greece in like 3 days.  This prompts Diana to leave Paradise Island for the first time.  She and the girl inadvertently end up in New York, where Diana gets to see modern culture for the first time.  So of course there's some adjustment for her.  Then her, the girl, the girl's brother, and the brother's friend all set out for Greece, which is complicated because the brother is actually some kind of demigod!  Diana has to take him on and get the girl to the spring in time.  Does she?  Duh, of course.

These were all good mostly because they focused on telling actual stories, not trying too hard to tie to existing comics and movies and whatnot.  For instance, unlike the Gotham TV series, the Batman book doesn't try to wedge in the entire Batman mythos.  Bruce's best friend is Harvey Dent and of course there's Alfred and Lucius Fox, but that's pretty much it until Gordon shows up for a cameo at the end.  The author didn't try to work in the Joker, Riddler, Scarecrow, Ra's al Guhl, Robin, Batgirl, and everyone else.  That's pretty true for the others as well.

Contrast this to a pre-Disney Star Wars novel I read: Darth Plagueis.  Remember in Revenge of the Sith when Palpatine asked Anakin if he knew of the "tragedy" of Darth Plagueis?  This book was supposed to answer that.  But it makes the usual mistake of focusing more on connecting dots than telling a compelling story with interesting characters.  I mean most of it focuses on Palpatine, not Plagueis!

There's really nothing you could consider a "tragedy."  Plagueis is a member of the Banking Clan who's kind of like a Victor von Frankenstein or Mengele in that he experiments on other creatures to try to find the secrets of eternal life.  Why does he want to live forever?  He has no family, no love interests, or really anything except a desire to rule the universe.  But of course Palpatine betrays him and murders him and takes Maul as his apprentice.

The book was really, really, really boring because there was nothing really compelling.  Like the prequel movies for the most part there was too much emphasis on connecting to Star Wars lore and not enough on crafting an interesting story with characters you want to actually spend time with.

So the upshot of all of this is that just because something is a prequel doesn't mean it's exempt from following the principles of good stories.  You still need a story that can stand on its own and some interesting characters.  Otherwise it feels more like reading a history textbook.