Sunday, May 02, 2010

Two Reviews

Wonder Woman 43
I could look at this cover for hours. Just lovely. Diana's family troubles continue with her supposed aunt ready to destroy earth. Etta and Steve have been wonderful supporting castmates and I hope that continues with the new creative team.

Rise of Arsenal 2
I have no idea where this is going and where Roy will end up or even if I'll like it, and while I know some people haven't liked this, I have gotten caught up in the emotion. The art has been wonderful, and Lian, in Roy's dreams, looks like a real little girl, and the grief on Roy's face and everyone else's at the funeral, is palpable. Roy's acting like a jerk, but he's also going through the stages of grief. He seems to be past denial, and he hasn't really gotten to bargaining yet, but anger and depression are well established, especially anger in his lashing out at his friends. Roy's always been one to push people away, out of fear of losing people. After all, he's lost everyone he's cared about. For a while, it looked as if he finally had a solid, dependable love in his life: Lian. But now she's been ripped from him. Old hurts and anger at Ollie resurfaced when he learned Ollie denied him vengeance for his daughter's death. He's popping pills, but so far, hasn't fallen all the way into addiction, though the drugs have to be affecting him negatively, keeping him from dealing with his loss and the grief. And all of it is just a way to deflect the anger from himself, because he wasn't there for Lian, which haunts him in his dreams. She died, and he blames himself and, no surprise, Cheshire blames him, too.

Will he be able to fight her? Does he even want to? Does a part of him want to give up, crawl into a hole, die? Or will his inner strength, his enormous capacity for survival, kick in? This is an emotion-packed story, giving Roy some of his most dramatic, angsty scenes, but was it really worth killing a little girl for one storyline? If Roy is to remake himself, yet again, could there have been a way that did not involve killing Lian? I guess I won't be able to begin to answer that until I see where he ends up.

2 comments:

  1. Wonder Woman was awfully good. I'm going to miss Gail something terrble.

    I'm torn about Roy. I like Roy, and I'm sorry that they are doing such horrible horrible things to him, so a part of my feels quite sad. On the other hand, he's being a real ass to all of his friends, and the other part of me wants to slap him silly.

    And I was quite fond of Lian, she was a sweet and fun character, and it was an interesting idea to have a hero who was a single father, and I'm sorry that they've done away with it, in exchange for...what really?

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  2. Well, grief can make someone be a real ass, so I can forgive Roy for that. He's not like Ollie, who's an ass most of the time.

    But yeah, Roy as single father gave him a special niche in the DCU and no matter what, they took that away.

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