First Impressions

Nasty weather kept me from getting my comics til today. Here's what I thought of the first ones I read.


Green Arrow and Black Canary 15
The new creative team takes over and I hope they're using aliases. Seriously. This issue makes Judd's run look positively brilliant. The long arc Judd wrote might've been a bit overblown and it might've suffered from the worst of his excesses, but damn it, the story moved. And, another plus, it was actually, a story, with chapters and all. This wasn't a story.

So, maybe you could say, it's a character study. Those can be wonderful. I loved the Justice League with Roy and Mari trapped underwater in a collapsed building. That was tight, tense, even claustrophobic with its complementary art. This GABC issue had none of that. It was nothing more than an excuse to rehash Ollie's history, and not a very good excuse at that. Dinah trapped by a goon with a knife at her throat? Ha! While Ollie lines up the shot to rescue her? Ha! All I could think is that Dinah just stood there willing to give Ollie the chance to play hero, because the Dinah we've come to know and love could kick that goon's butt before he could kill her. She's a top martial artist. Sure, I'll buy that she had an off moment and got grabbed. We all have bad days. But Dinah is cool and calm and knows how to break that hold. And on top of all that, nothing happens, or rather, nothing new happens. There's no new revelations or understanding that comes out of this, other than letting us know that Mia and Connor likely won't be around for a while, effectively removing the only true supporting cast this book has had.

The art was okay, nothing to get excited about, just average. If this is the quality of the book from now on, I might have to drop it. Damn.

Conversely, in Justice League of America 27, Dinah sticks it to Supes, Bats, and Wonder Woman for meeting secretly behind her back. McDuffie has finally hit his stride with this book. There's some strong interaction going on and an intriguing group of costumed metas called the Shadow Cabinet to deal with. They might not be as entertaining as the Secret Six, but they have possibilities. And it looks like trouble in paradise where Roy and Kendra are concerned. A lot was going on in this book, which was beautifully illoed by Ed Benes.

Then we come to another WTF comic, Titans 8, where Judd Winick seems to be overindulging even more than he did in GABC. Jericho was never on my list of characters I love reading about, and now he's just plain insufferable. However, the cliffhanger ending is intriguing enough for me to want to pick up the next issue. Damn it.

Trinity 28
We're nicely past the half-year mark on this book and it's a real hoot. The alternate versions of well-known characters are just plain fun, especially Richie Grayson and Pulitzer-mad Lois Lane.

More later. I've got what look to be good reads waiting.