It Takes Two

Tonight's reviews might be influenced by the natural gas smell that permeated much of NYC this morning. heh

Atom 7
This just keeps getting better and better. Gail Simone has set a nice tone for the book with loopy villains, eccentric good guys, outrageously fun plotlines, and those fun scientific quotes. This issue had a typical set-up feel, but the talking "haid" kept things hoping. At some point, tho, Ryan's gonna have to set his foot down and not let baddies and other weirdos dictate to him. I think that would be the perfect character development for this book. Nice art, too.

Nightwing 128
Marv Wolfman hits the right notes here with Dick's thoughts, going far to resurrect him from the craptitude of his last two chroniclers. He looks like himself, he acts like himself, and he's showing a self-awareness that's commendable, even if he hasn't been too forthcoming with what he did to screw things up with Babs. The end of this arc ended satisfactorily with a visit from Lex Luthor in full command of his powers, which means he manages to survive 52. But there's one itty thing that bugs me, and it's not a factor of the book so much as a factor of keeping the book and Nightwing isolated for now, if not from the Bat books, then from the rest of the DCU.

I get that it wouldn't work, story-wise, for a mention of another character not part of the book or story. But with Dick going on thinking about escaping death twice and facing the abyss, I wish, just this once, he could've thought about the close friend who faced his own mortality and his fear and who Dick helped find his way back from his own abyss of fear and doubt. Yes, of course, I mean Roy Harper. When Roy was shot five times in The Outsiders, it was Dick who was there to help him fight his way past his fear of the gun. In real life, Dick might not go to see Roy so they could compare notes, perhaps because things might have deteriorated in their relationship too over the past year, but damn it, he would have thought of what Roy experienced. I can't imagine a real person not thinking of it. And while this is just fiction, not real life, the stories we read reflect a certain reality, minus that whole "invulnerable guy from another planet who can fly" thing. These characters become real to us and we come to expect them to react, to think and behave, as real people would given their circumstances.

So I felt a bit cheated here, partly because it should have been mentioned and partly because it was an opportunity wasted to keep the interconnectedness of the DCU, so well demonstrated in 52, a part of the individual books.