Who'd Like A Cocktail? #242

Who said romance was dead?

A delayed Cocktail this week due to a fun weekend away. Onwards!

AQUAMAN #23.1 - Amanda Waller offers Black Manta membership to the Suicide Squad just before the Crime Syndicate crack the place open, freeing him and dozens of other villains. Like most of them, he attends the big meet up shown in Forever Evil #1 where he learns that the Syndicate have killed the League, including Aquaman. As the death of Aquaman was his only reason for living, Manta's understandably annoyed and he heads home to mourn at the grave of his father. When Ultraman moves the moon, it causes havoc with the tides which was over the graveyard where Manta's father is buried, washing his bones out to sea. All of a sudden, Manta has someone new to hate.

It's okay, I guess - unlike most of the other villain stories this month, it's not really an origin story and, I think, actually benefits from that.

EARTH-2 #15.2 - Grundy returns to Earth-2 and proceeds to absorb the life force of various people, regaining his strength. Interspersed with that, we see his origin as a Louisiana meat factory worker in 1898 who avenged the death of his wife by killing her abuser, his half dozen work mates and then himself.

It's a much of a muchness; Grundy's return from the moon isn't explained and his origin doesn't really add anything to him. Meh.

GREEN LANTERN #23.2 - some two-penny alien military type threatens Warworld before being taken aboard it and introduced to Mongul. He then gets the guided tour before learning his planet's population has been overwhelmed by Mongul's forces before he's killed.

Still, the art's quite nice.

JUSTICE LEAGUE #23.2 - after proving his worth as a bounty hunter without mercy, Lobo is given information about where his long sought after target - the man who's been using his name and his face - is hiding. Turns out it's on Earth and Lobo's target is . . . Lobo.

No real surprises from a story point of view - after all the hoo-hah about new Lobo's look, the story itself turns out to be a nicely plotted introduction to the new Main Man, complete with idiosyncratic dialogue captions which, while they appear irritating at first, serve to completely differentiate this Lobo from the old one. Of course, as I mentioned in my write up of Stormwatch a couple of weeks ago, there's no mention of the Lobo that's running round with that team on the edge of the galaxy. Jim Starlin appears to be given carte blanche to do what he wants with that title and not have it affect or be affected by anything else in the DCU. Weird.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #7.2 - Caitlin Snow heads to the Arctic a brilliant scientist and re-emerges as Killer Frost after her colleagues attempted to kill her and instead accidentally helped her gain powers over ice and snow. She then fights Firestorm and discovers he has the ability to temporarily return her to human form. Instead of asking nicely, of course, she then goes a bit mad.

It's not bad on the whole, perhaps because it's an origin story we haven't heard before. While the Killer Frost name has been around for years, this is a new version of the character so a new origin's welcome. The only thing I didn't like, though, was the retconned multiple battles with Firestorm: you'd think they'd have been mentioned in his own title, don't you?

TEEN TITANS #23.1 - it's the origin of Trigon, a man who's absorbed all the evil in a universe. Once he bends one universe to his will, he uses a novel form of travelling from one to another - he plucks a woman from the destination universe, impregnates her, sends her back and is then born of her to repeat the process. Along the way he finds some resistance, not least a woman with armour suspiciously like that of Wonder Girl. At the end, he's looking to conquer Earth and his latest mother/bride is asking for help to kill him.

Decidedly so-so.

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And what made me smile:

If you're going to reference any John Carpenter film, it should be the best!