Who'd Like A Cocktail? #22

This week's post (actually last week's) is a bit late as I spent the weekend at a writers' convention catching up with old friends and getting very, very drunk with them.

The week just gone was a little light with only a handful of titles popping up. The Brave And The Bold #17 saw Marv Wolfman returning to Raven who's out to help Supergirl deal with the murderous programming her father implanted in her mind before she left Krypton. I don't follow her title so this was something of a surprise to me but it was made clear enough to pick up the salient points. Meanwhile another person with father issues is student Jonathan Mitchell whos dad turns out to be a bit part Justice Leaguer who tried to be one of the good guys but, due to his arrogance, ended up not really as one of the bad guys but more of a deluded fool. Mitchell is happy, if not eager, to embrace the powers he has while Supergirl and Raven try and sort out what's happening in Kara's head.

Dreamwar came to a close with #6, the two universe's heroes banding together to prevent a Sun-Eater from being birthed out of Earth's moon. The heavy hitters head skywards to try and work something out leaving Midnighter and Raven (she's getting around this month) to track down the spoiled brat behind it all - Chimera. Turns out he's been hiding not so much in plain sight but certainly without leaving his trailer, and with him forced to wake up at Superman's suggestion, the DC heroes vanish from the Wildstorm universe. As with all good mini-series, this one is left open for a return which, if Keith Giffen were writing it, I'd definitely be buying.

Reading a title because of the character can carry you through a period with a less than brilliant writer; reading a title because of the writer, however, might mean dropping the title once that writer leaves. That's the situation I'm in with The Punisher after reading #62. I've been a fan of Garth Ennis's work for years and his run on The Punisher was fantastic. Only a couple of issues in and Gregg Hurwitz's story of kidnappers and drug factories is good enough fare for a plot but I find myself wondering about his Punisher. Is it me or is Frank Castle just talking too damn much? Hell, even the narrative captions sound like he can't shut up for more than five minutes. I'll be sticking with this for a few more issues at least as this might simply be teething troubles . . . at least I hope so.

The Rann-Thanagar Holy War continues to rumble on with #5 beginning with a big old dose of angst and guilt as Adam Strange muses on the mistake he made which cost Starman his entire world. Deacon Dark ends up spurring on the holy war of the title, helping to engineer a battle between the two worlds which would end with their entire destruction. The heroes, though, manage to convince both Rannians and Thanagarians that their respective gods do not wish them to fight and the break off the battle and head home. Dark, however, gets his own god resurrected and the interference of the heroes causes the much talked about but seldom seen Lady Styx to turn her attention to Rann. It's all big, silly, space opera nonsense but, as long as you discard Jim Starlin's notion of Hawkman's origin, it's good fun.

Trinity #16 seems to be one big fight this week, with numerous heroes kicking supernatural butt as the Trinity themselves battle the three bad guys behind their troubles. Enigma being the Anti-Matter Earth's Riddler came as no surprise - Kurt Busiek loves the world that Grant Morrison created in Earth-2 - but one thing I didn't see coming was the hint that Despero isn't actually Despero. Meanwhile Hawkman (hey, isn't he on Rann at the moment?) leaps headlong into danger and ends up hitting some sort of temporal distortion that appears to have ruptured his past lives, separating them out from each other.