 |
| Captain Atom gets some bad news |
Sunday afternoon means a look at this week's comics.
So here we are again, with the wonderful Jaime Reyes becoming Blue Beetle once more. This time, there's no Infinite Crisis related origin which would seem to imply that's not one of the big events that have made it over to the new DCU. Other than that, pretty much everything established in the previous series appears to have made it through mostly intact. Jaime, like I said, becomes the Blue Beetle; the Reach still created the scarabs; the Green Lanterns are still the Reach's enemies; Paco, Brenda and Jaime's family have all made it into the book; and even Brenda's mysterious aunt La Dama is here. And yet it's missing the charm of the original. What little interaction there is between Jaime and his family is sadly antagonistic and Jaime's both mean-spirited and more than a little cowardly.
Still, it's early days and I'm hopeful that things will pick up.
We finally get to meet the woman that made Billy Butcher happy. Becky Saunders, a social worker, helps him realise that he's the one he's been angry at for so long, as well as helping convince Butcher's mother to leave his abusive father. Oh, and she also helps him kick the booze, too. It's all going so well at the moment but the problem with that is we have an inkling of how it's going to end, both from the hints that have been dropped in The Boys main storyline as well as the realisation that this is Garth Ennis writing - good-hearted people tend not to do too well in his world.
Still, it's another cracking issue.
Now this caught me by surprise a little. I've said before that I'm not a huge fan of J.T. Krul's writing but picked this up because I like that character of Captain Atom - have done since the Justice League Europe days, really. And here, Krul does a pretty good job on the whole.
Atom's introduced with little of his history being revealed but at the same time he's already at risk of losing himself and his humanity. There's more than one resonant moment between this version of Atom and Watchmen's Dr Manhattan - his ability to alter the molecules of an enemy, his fear of becoming distant from humanity, not to mention his general appearance. The art by Freddie Williams II is relatively standard for a comic with the exception of Atom himself who almost looks like a water-colour painting super-imposed on to the page. That may sound odd, but it works, also serving to separate the character even further.
It's a good first issue and better than I expected.
Between delivery cock-ups and damaged shipments it's taken me this long to get hold of a copy of this and there's no surprise when I say it's great. It's simply Giffen and DeMatteis doing what they did best with the characters they are perhaps best known for, ably assisted by the master of comical facial expressions, Kevin Maguire.
Running gags, telegraphed punchlines, visual jokes and running gags abound in the tale of a drunken Parademon who loses at poker to Multi-Man and ends up involving the Justice League trying to take down a transformed-by-Apokoliptian-technology Big Sir. If you liked the original run, if you liked the I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League run, you'll love this.
Kinda fitting that this is my farewell to the old DCU, I suppose.
Another title that's not changed that much in the relaunch, we find a couple of Green Lanterns being killed by an unknown and unseen assailant before joining Guy Gardner and then John Stewart on Earth. Both Gardner and Stewart are in the process of trying to have normal lives, Guy as a teacher, John as an architect, but it's not working out for either of them. There's a very nice scene with the pair of them discussing what they want to do and it's something that's not seen that often. In the old series, Guy was more Kyle Rayner's friend but here we see him bonding with John. Cue a trip to Oa and finding out about the Lantern killer and they round up a team of Lanterns and set off to find the murderer.
It's a good issue and continues the solid run.
And what made me smile:
Oh, Ted, how we miss you.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for wanting to leave a comment, but this blog is no longer maintained. Feel free to visit my new site/blog over at
crisisonearthprime.com
Look forward to seeing you there. :)