Rann-Thanagar War #2. I find this one the least interesting, despite including the Green Lantern Corps. (And hey, isn't that one of Kilowog's race on the cover? I thought Kilowog was the last of his kind!) See, I'm not a big fan of when the characters all head off into outer space and junk... especially when guys like Batman get thrown out there. Although I respect the cosmic background of the Lanterns, my favorite GL eras have always been the earthbound ones. I think I get weary of the outlandish scope of it all... because there is always ridiculous amounts of Muppet-esque, homogenous alien cliches. Since I prefer character-driven storylines, the big epic space battles with copy/pasted alien cultures just fail to impress me.

And this one is turning into one giant DCU alien war, with endless streams of non-human soldier characters eating laser in every panel. The Khunds all look the same. The Thanagarians all look the same. The Rannians all look the same. The Tamaraneans all look the same. It's draining. What really annoys me is the inevitable ratcheting-up of the carnage, with cities being razed and planets getting purged. As soon as you start blowing up planets, you lose the ability for the reader to empathize with the drama of it. And it's really difficult to maintain any gravitas for what happens next, because you've already blown up a planet full of millions of people. It's like the Empire taking out Alderaan in Star Wars: that ends up being the only truly badass thing the Empire ever does because it is an untoppable achievement. The rest of the movie is filled with Empire lowlies who can't shoot straight. They manage to build the universe's ultimate weapon yet fail utterly is designing a way to protect it.

Anyway, I will be disappointed if this is the thread that leads to Infinite Crisis. Because then we'll definitely be chucking Batman and Flash and everybody else on spaceships, fighting aliens, and getting mired in the kind of dopey writers' amateur hour where anything can happen because it's sci-fi.

And where's Darkseid stand in all this?

Day of Vengeance #2. Terrible cover. Has almost nothing to do with the story inside. Not a bad art piece, I guess, just irrelevant content.

Great hook to kick off the story: without a mortal host, the Spectre has lost his powers of scale when judging sinners! So he punishes a child who stole $6 exactly as he punishes a murderer. Gruesomely. And as bad as that is, it gets worse when the ethically confused Spectre starts taking advice from the new Eclipso.

But here's where I am lost, and it has to be leading into a big explanation in upcoming issues or else there's a major continuity breach somewhere. The first issue shows Spectre going nuts and bearing down on the DCU's magical community. The Enchantress escapes from Spectre's latest donnybrook and recruits some help from Ragman, Blue Devil, Detective Chimp and a couple magic-users I don't recognize. Their goal is to stop the Spectre before he kills them all, in a misguided fit of vengeance against pure magic.

I get that there's a couple flashback scenes in this one, showing how Eclipso/Jean Loring (I'm still upset about that, by the way) convinces Spectre to go after magic-users - including some brief throwndowns with Phantom Stranger, Dr. Fate and Madame Xanadu - leading up to his big offensive from which Enchantress barely escapes.

What I don't understand is page 7, where they show Enchantress herself, seemingly in possession of Eclipso and bolstered by her erstwhile teammates, talking Spectre into going on the killing spree in the first place. My guess is that the team eventually figures out that they actually need Spectre to go crazy, so they travel back in time in order to force him into it. But nobody mentions that, and after the possession scene they go right into planning their strike against Spectre, so the whole thing is very confusing.

I don't see this one as being the sole trigger to Infinite Crisis either, simply because of how difficult it is to get the magical characters and the super hero characters in the same room together.

OMAC Project #2. I'm still uncomfortable with the portrayal of Max Lord. It is truly out of nowhere that he would have been a secret villain overlord all this time. We probably should have gotten some kind of JLA book last year that hinted at this; some way to lead readers into that concept. Instead, they recently did two Giffen-age Justice League stories that featured Max as we knew him then: the crafty businessman with a sense of humor and a penchant for ridiculous marketing! I'm not convinced we won't see some sort of evil twin or similar old saw trotted out to explain this change in Max. If not during this story, then undoubtedly in some future one where the writers of tomorrow decided to undo the damage to good ol' fun times Maxwell Lord.

What's nice about this one is that it deals directly with the real point of Infinity Crisis: the liberties taken by the League with the minds of the villains they fought... and with Batman's. That Law and Order stuff with Sue Dibny's murder was a good read (except for the final revelation, bleah), but it's the lobotomy of Dr. Light that is the true ripplepoint.

Pissed off about their secret vote to alter minds and memories, Batman builds a super spy satellite to watch the League's actions. Somehow - we don't know how yet - Max Lord gets ahold of it, and his plan is to... well, I don't think we know that yet either. But it's safe to assume it's not a benevolent plan, since the execution of Blue Beetle last issue and the cleansing of Max's co-leaders in Checkmate this issue. (A scene which, by the way, has huge staging problems.)

Best line: Batman asking why Booster Gold is invited to a top-level summit between himself, Superman and Wonder Woman. "Diana, why is he even here?"

And I'd love to know what they argue about once Max turns off audio to the spy feed he has on that meeting. In a series of panels, you can clearly see Superman put his hand on Wonder Woman's shoulder, followed by her scowling and pushing it off. Shades of Kingdom Come, that is.

A nice companion to OMAC is the "Crisis of Conscience" storyline that just started in JLA #115. Also deals with the ramifications of Identity Crisis, and signals the end of that terrible Crime Syndicate story.

Villains United #2. This one has the best twist. There's two villain teams here - which is the twist that comes out of issue one - Lex Luthor's group that has enlisted almost every villain in the DCU, and a mysterious team of six relatively minor villains that wants to take down Lex's intiative. The laws of storytelling suggest that the small group will be the underdog squad that miraculously succeeds against all possible odds. That was the setup in issue one, made all the more expected by the amount of page time devoted to the smaller team.

Well, in this issue the six are betrayed, and captured by Lex's group. Haw! Try and predict that one, fanboy!

Not that the underdogs can't still win, just that I never would have guessed they would get so completely shut down on their first mission in the second issue.

I was also shocked by Catman's decision to don his costume for the (failed) Secret Six strike. I was all set to respect his Ka-Zar look in #1, and then we get an unflinching reminder of the character's origins in 1960s crapland with that yellow-and-orange cape-and-cowl number.

It is still way too early (#2 of 6) to predict how we get to Infinite Crisis from here. I think the key is to look at what small Crises can be dealt with before launching into the big Crisis. Rann-Thanagar is easy to write off: the war ends. Most likely some impossible peace treaty will be brokered at the last minute, or we'll find out that Thanagar wasn't blown up after all, and the status quo of outer space can return. Day of Vengeance feels to me almost like the original Books of Magic miniseries from 15 years ago... a big story for the Vertigo expatriats but barely a blip for anybody else. And since the DCU's major players are the super heroes, you sort of expect the Crisis is going to center on them.

That leaves OMAC and Villains United, which could easily dovetail into each other. You have Lex Luthor's amazing alliance of villains on one side, Max Lord's shadow organization on the other, and the heroes - infighting and largely oblivious - stuck in the middle. Since the Max thing is so wonky and Checkmate has never been much of a name brand, the logical assumption is to have Batman's stolen spy satellite fall into Luthor's hands... but of course villain team-ups never work out because their egos never cooperate.