Green Lantern #37

Orig­i­nally I wasn’t going to review this book, but when the Irre­press­ible Rory Byrne demands you read it,  adding “You will shit bricks” you’re required to at least put a few words down.

So here we go.

At the end of the last issue there was this great expec­ta­tion, from Space Ganesh and the other guy,  that Hal Jor­dan would become the leader of the Blue Lanterns. This issue starts out with him “politely” refus­ing the offer before tear­ing off on the two space hip­pies and head­ing after Sine­stro, who’s been spend­ing his spare time cru­ci­fied on the Red Lantern’s cen­tral bat­tery after being cap­tured dur­ing the Rage of the Red Lanterns one shot.

There’s some clear delin­eation between the three rings: Green are cops, Red are ani­mals and Blue are saints. They later live up to the bible metaphor by part­ing an actual red sea. The true nature of the red spec­trum is explored a bit more. It seems that the rings are lit­tle more then par­a­sites. After purg­ing the host body’s blood they take over motor func­tions and most thought processes. Much like those hor­rific wasps that ride around on cockroaches.

While it’s not the first time Hal Jor­dan has worn mul­ti­ple rings (see here and here) that chap­ter end­ing def­i­nitely rates as one of the coolest moments of this entire Green Lantern vol­ume. Yes, Rory, bricks were shat.

Dark Avengers #1

There’s two ways they could’ve gone in this issue:

• through a series of small inter­con­nected scenes, show “the boss” trav­el­ling around putting the team together through a num­ber of every expand­ing word bal­loons; or
• some­thing interesting.

Guess which road Bendis went down?

I’m prob­a­bly being too harsh here as the book isn’t a total wash. They’ve got Mike Deodato on art  for one thing, con­tin­u­ing the good work he did on Thun­der­bolts. I thought the expres­sions on each of the ex-Thunderbolts, espe­cially Bullseye’s, as they realise all their dreams have come true were great. Deoad­ato on art and most of the Thun­der­bolts star­ring. They couldn’t have made it any more obvi­ous that this is a con­tin­u­a­tion of the Thun­der­bolts line.

Hope­fully the new mem­bers aren’t going to take the Sentry’s mopey bull­shit. If I could have one request, please give me one issue where they beat the ever-loving shit out of him for being such a sad case. Do that and I’m in for the long haul.

Mighty Avengers #21

This is a great exam­ple of how to make the Ulti­mate line redun­dant. While over in Ulti­ma­tum They’ve had to deal with a flood sub­merg­ing New York, here in the reg­u­lar old 616, New York has been hit with a del­uge of blood, Canada is choked with flesh eat­ing locusts and some­where else  the New Avengers are being used as fer­tiliser for fast grow­ing sen­tient plants and the entire state of Okla­homa has van­ished. Sud­denly the split sec­ond flash flood­ing in the Ulti­mate uni­verse doesn’t seem that ulti­mate anymore.

The recruit­ing scenes aren’t all that dis­sim­i­lar to those in Dark Avengers, but they’re car­ried off a lot bet­ter. Biblical-level crazy shit is a great moti­va­tor. The book shares a lot of the same beats as Dark Avengers, but the way Slott writes dia­logue makes it a much more enter­tain­ing read. See Amadeus Cho’s con­ver­sa­tions with Pym. Both books also share a sim­i­lar antag­o­nist. Dark Avengers gets Dr Doom’s ex, Mor­gane Le Fay while Mighty Avengers has a pos­sessed Quick­sil­ver and some shirt­less guy who likes writ­ing on himself

Which book you grab depends on how you like your heroes. Do you like the bad guys mas­querad­ing as the world’s heroes, albeit offi­cially? Grab Dark Avengers. Do you like you heroes just doing hero-ey stuff? Grab Mighty Avengers. Do you like your heroes to be the under­dogs, strug­gling to get on in a world where they’re oper­at­ing ille­gally? Grab New Avengers. (reviewed next week, fight fans!)

X-Factor #39

There would be a fairly detailed review here. I say “would be” because at the begin­ning of the book Peter David swears all read­ers to secrecy and asks that we don’t spoil the book. So I’ll hon­our that. What I can say is that the book is well on it’s way back to it’s first year lev­els of awe­some­ness. After flip­ping to the back cover I had to sit alone on the couch for a good five min­utes just to digest what I’d read. It’s been a long time since a comic had that much of an emo­tional impact on me. Bravo, Peter David, bravo. Good to see the art back on track after the mis­step that was the Stro­man period too.

Com­plete List:

Final Cri­sis: Super­man Beyond #2 (of 2)
Green Lantern #37
Trin­ity #34
Aston­ish­ing X-Men #28
Dark Avengers #1
Mighty Avengers #21
Thun­der­bolts #128
Uncanny X-Men Annual #2
X-Factor #39
X-Men: Legacy #220
Angel: After the Fall #16

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