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The Brave and the Bold #6 is out today, featuring a pretty striking cover, Green Lantern and Batman trapped within the horrible eye of one of the Luck Lords. This concludes the first story arc in B&B, and paves the way for the Wonder Woman / Power Girl pairing slated for #7. Some thoughts, floating in the spoiler zone:
[+] [-] Spoiler A pretty harsh open splash page for Mister Waid, although it clearly established the stakes and of course we're all going into this knowing that destiny can be subverted -- that's the whole point of super-heroes, isn't it?
Batman's in the 31st Century with the Legion, caught in a trap by the Luck Lords and their Thanagarian hawk-warrior minions who have apparently decided to wear budgie-inspired helmet at some point in the last thousand years.
One of the problems I have with the threeboot Legion: Invisible Kid does not look like a Legionnaire. I like the idea that he's shorter and younger than the other Legionnaires, but he hasn't caught a costume, he just looks like some kid who stumbled into the fight. Even if Kitson was pencilling this rather than Perez, it would take me a minute to figure who was trapped with Batman and Brainiac 5. The threebooted Invisible Kid just hasn't been given a distinctive enough look at this point.
Luck Lords as war profiteers, artificially manipulating planetary politics....seems like a lot of work to keep a war going for ten centuries.
Again, typical of time travel stories where you know that this is all going to be undone, there's some more gore -- I'm not sure I needed to see Braniac 5 reduced to bits of flying green meat.
I love the Rannian weaponry like the aqua-ray!
Waid continues to write a Supergirl that I want to read about. Her ruminations in an earlier issue about whether or not she'll be a Superwoman followed by her willingly looking into the Book of Destiny. We get a nice little recap of the story arc so far...
Power Ring / Zeta-Beam MacGuffin works well within the rules and limitations of a Haneyverse proto-Silver Age story. Perez pulls it off for the story's benefit by clearly marking it as a deus ex machina - a heavenly beam of green from the clouds.
The timestream spread is gorgeous in a geek-Silver Age science fiction comics way. OMAC! Ultra! Space Ranger! Along with all those Flashes zipping back and forth down the ages. Including, notably, John Fox.
The revelation of who the Men who weren't there are - initially I thought Destiny had meant the Luck Lords themselves, but clearly not - is fun and in fitting with the "throw all the action figures in the toybox at the plot" method of storytelling that Waid is using, giving Perez tons of favourites to draw - but the mechanics of why the Challengers of the Unknown defied death to the point of disappearing from the Book of Destiny doesn't really gel for me, given the number of characters who have escaped death or been resurrected outright. I don't necessarily need a pseudo-scientific explanation, but something more about how Batman reached that conclusion about who to call in when his best friend has walked away from the grave and half the Justice League...
Supergirl suffers a GEOFF!JOHNS! moment, but thank god we're in a Waid comic and the whole thing can be hand waved with trinary suns and super-power speed-healing.
Ace of the Challengers riding a giant, flying, purple gun. I tells ya...
I still don't know how I feel about that final page, but I definitely want to see more of Waid's take on Kara. |
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