Green Lantern #43

Remem­ber those books from the 90’s where the bad guy, or some other “spe­cial guest star” would take over a book, spray paint­ing or oth­er­wise cov­er­ing up the main title? I kind of wish they did some­thing like that here, as this book is totally Black Hand’s story.

It serves as a nice pre­lude to Black­est Night, retelling Black Hand’s life story and touch­ing on his child­hood, first appear­ance in a Green Lantern book, his role in the recent — and overly long — Secret Ori­gin arc, right up to Green Lantern: Rebirth. There’s also a call­back to the German-speaking  Grem­lins that kid­napped him soon after. It looks like Johns has another bad guy/girl wait­ing in the wings once Black­est Night wraps up. Unless they’re a major player and I’ve com­pletely mis­judged who it was sup­posed to be.

While I can appre­ci­ate Philip Tan’s char­ac­ter designs, his rushed, rough pen­cilling on the book itself really didn’t do any­thing for me. Doug Mahnke on the other hand should be per­fect fit for this book. I’m only famil­iar with his work on Super­man: Beyond and the last issue of Final Cri­sis. But the way he was able to have the char­ac­ters con­vey even the small­est emo­tion should be a great boon to a book entirely devoted to explor­ing large facets of the emo­tional spectrum.

Wednes­day Comics #1 (of 12)

After Trin­ity I was all but ready to give up on the weekly comic for­mat. Trudg­ing through 52 issues of epic space opera that alter­nated between molasses-speed intro­spec­tion and smash cuts of earth-shaking bat­tles took a lot out of me.  But I think DC had the mea­sure of their audi­ence. They knew that the next weekly had to be some­thing spe­cial. Some­thing with a touch of nov­elty to draw an audi­ence made up of those already worn down and those look­ing to break into the comics scene. Some­thing with a strong cre­ative team to keep peo­ple com­ing back. And I think they’ve done it.

There’s 14, one page sto­ries con­tained within, all of vary­ing qual­ity (but none of them ter­ri­ble).  That they’re all set “out­side con­ti­nu­ity” isn’t a great prob­lem. The character’s basic per­son­al­i­ties and dri­vers are all there. Green Lantern wears green, flies in space; Super­man beats the hell out of robots while pro­tect­ing humans.

Though this is only the first issue I do have my favourites already. Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred’s Meta­mor­pho is just the right amount of 1950’s pulp adven­tur­ing; while Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner’s Super­girl is, in a word, cute. Sgt. Rock, Bat­man, Kamandi are three more sto­ries that have me bit­ing my nails and hang­ing for the next issue. I guess the only story I really have a prob­lem with is Won­der Woman. It’s overly wordy and the panel lay­out makes it incred­i­bly hard to fol­low. If they’re going to con­tinue  framign it in the same way I’d sug­gest using arrows to direct the reader from one panel to the next, much like tra­di­tional large for­mat news­pa­per comics have.

I really hope this works out for DC. I’d love to see this done as a yearly event. Some­times its just nice to read a comic that just wants to enter­tain you and isn’t hung up in push­ing things in “a bold new direction!”

My local comics shop had com­pletely sold out of copies by Mon­day. So hope­fully DC see this as a sign that most of the spec­u­la­tors have left the mar­ket and that there’s peo­ple out there will­ing to read their sto­ries regard­less of what the damn thing is printed on.

Com­plete List

Booster Gold #22
Green Lantern #43
Wednes­day Comics #1 (of 12)
Dark X-Men Begin­ning #1 (of 3)
Ms Mar­vel #41
X-Men: Legacy #226

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