OMAC Project #5 So if an OMAC rips off your helmet, but you can still talk and walk around three pages later, that's good enough for it to claim "Threat neutralized"? Because that's what happened to Rocket Red. After the cliffhanger in issue #4, I thoroughly expected Dmitri to be offed. So when another OMAC calls out "Target eliminated" after sending an energy bolt through Fire's back, I don't think I'm going to take it all that seriously.
And Rocket Red dies anyway, but not by an OMAC's hand.
This issue's big moment - apart from another Giffen JLA member biting it - is that Sasha finally goes into her new OMAC form, something that's been adequately telegraphed for the last couple issues. (She spent plenty of panels coughing and questioning herself.) As an OMAC, she is hideous. Silver skin like Argent but with a goofy big clown eye. I can't imagine the Bat-editors expected this to happen when Sasha exited those books.
What's with the complete aping of the Manhunters shtick? Is it 1988 and I'm reading Millennium again? Whaddaya know, sleeper OMAC agents are all over the country. I'd fear that this OMAC Pod People burst is the Infinite Crisis except that it will be too easy for half-OMAC / half-human Sasha to send out some kind of Abort command that will shutdown all one million of them.
Once upon a time, I liked this miniseries, but the OMAC thing grew way out of control. It has ceased to be a character piece and has turned into a silly action title. I'm starting to think it ceased being a character piece the moment Beetle was shot, and that happened before issue #1.
Day of Vengeance #5 Black Alice is the new Dial H for Hero. Except that she steals temp powers from existing characters rather than Mad Libbing up a new one each time.
It is plain that the team here is being set up for a new ongoing series. I'm not sure why we get all the Captain Marvel interludes in this issue, unless he's going to end up joining in the big conclusion.
Rann-Thanagar War #5 Still sucks. We're calling Hawkwoman dead now? Won't be the first time.
Villains United #5 I called it! Cheshire's laydown with Catman was specifically to get her out of her blackmail threat!
This book is just filled with great moments. Tons of fun dialogue and characterization. The difference is that these characters interact in actual modern conversation, as opposed to the stilted Flash Gordon tripe going on in Rann-Thanagar War. I was going to post some good examples, but I feel like I'd be posting the entire book. I'm really pulling for this to be the incident that leads into Infinite Crisis, although, as I said before, I don't think it will be that cut-and-dried. DC will have some kind of twist.
JSA Classified #3 Have I mentioned how much I love this Power Girl story yet? The art is fantastic. Amanda Conner has a very animated style... I don't know what other books she's done, but she has to be a grab from some independent somewhere, because her art is so unlike traditional super-hero work, yet comes off totally at home among it. I mean, she's not doing this book as some kind of crazy Jimmy Corrigan avant garde art piece... she's more like the Hernandez Brothers on Love and Rockets. Still, it feels fresh and fun and she should be put on an ongoing title as soon as possible. I love artists with a wide range of facial expressions, and Conner effortlessly shows off her gift for that in this storyline.
Speaking of the storyline, I have to gush over that as well. I fully acknowledge that this is a fan-service piece. Without some previous exposure to Power Girl's convoluted and confused place in the DCU, you would miss out on the many references to comics history. The gist is that PG is on a search to discover her true origin... and echoes of what might be keep appearing to her in the form of visions that only she can see. What's great is that each one could conceivably be a workable fanboy dream. Power Girl is actually from the Legion of Super Heroes, sent back in time and mind-wiped. Power Girl is actually a member of the Anti-Matter world Crime Syndicate and they want her back. Power Girl is actually the daughter of an adult Superboy and Wonder Girl in the future. And that's on top of the previous PG origins: Power Girl is Superman's Kryptonian cousin (the post-Crisis recasting of pre-Crisis Supergirl) and Power Girl is the granddaughter of an ancient Atlantean mage.
Plus, Psycho-Pirate is in it. Now, I'm not stupid enough to think that if he hadn't been one of the major players in Crisis on Infinite Earths he would still be interesting. He is an unexplainably overpowered villain in a universe full of them. No, he is cool specifically because of his role in Crisis... and because very few books have used him in the 20 years since.
And the last line of this issue, delivered by Psycho-Pirate: "Worlds lived... worlds died. But you survived." I love a good Crisis ref.
I went back and re-read Crisis last week. The difference between the writing of 1985 and 2005 is roughly equivalent to the difference between 1965 and 1985. There is a lot of groan-worthy dialogue and a lot of just-accept-it moments. At times you can almost see the big clipboard ticking off the plot points this thing had to hit. Wally West loses his speed disease: check. Introduce new female Wildcat: check. Devolve Wonder Woman into clay: check. There are certainly plenty of good moments (like the sendoff to the Earth-2 Superman) and I'll be the first to say that Crisis was the most daring feat ever attempted in super-hero comics before or since... but there's a good deal of flatness there to the modern reader. And then there's the problem of that all the stuff that Crisis eliminated that has since been re-introduced, like the return of Supergirl... the story suffers a bit for that. One of the central points of Crisis was to clean up Superman's extended family, and now here we are with far too much of it seeping back in.
Green Lantern Corps: Recharge #1 Speaking of undoing stuff. It wasn't that long ago that the Guardians were all gone (save Ganthet), Kilowog was dead, Hal Jordan was the Spectre, Guy Gardner had the power to be a Marvel character, John Stewart was in a wheelchair, there was no Corps, and Kyle Raynor had the last surviving Guardian-powered ring. Now everyone is okay and back in green. It took DC plenty of nonsense to get here, but we're back to where the GL comics were a decade ago.
This story should be told inside the Green Lantern book itself, but that book is currently dripping with Hal Jordan soap and too busy to handle something like this right now. I hope that the goal is to bring the Corps over into Hal's book, if only so we bring an end to the ego-fetishism going on with Hal's return. The goal is to establish Hal as a solo act first, I assume, before saddling him with the legacy of the GLC.
So in the new Corps, we get two Lanterns per sector... which explains why we can have Hal and John as active Lanterns on Earth. Kyle and Guy, however, are summoned to Oa to work with Kilowog to train all the new recruits. Predictably, Guy is outraged. Also, the yellow impurity is back, but only in the Power Ring of rookies.
Big foul ball coming... Guy, complaining about his new duties, says he is "not a teacher." I seem to recall that Guy's job, pre-Lantern, was as a gym teacher in Baltimore... and that he was good at it. Maybe Crisis retconned that away.
Ultimate Fantastic Four #23 When I opened to the first page, I instantly thought, "Oh crap, that zombie Marvel Universe thing is still going on?" This storyline is that memorable. It is amusing that the chief requirement to be a Marvel zombie (pun intended) is to be missing an eye. I'm not sure what I think of the Ultimate FF these days. I'm sticking around just to see how classic FF storylines are being re-interpreted into the Ultimate universe, but by and large, they're not all that different. For example, Ultimate FF Annual #1 introduces the Inhumans, and the big change is that Medusa actually has snake hair instead of being the big flowing Kirby redhead. The Annual also revisits the Inhumans' practice of arranged marriages mere months after the same topic was explored in the Marvel Knights Fantastic Four books. I don't know how well these books sell, but I don't really see much distinction between the Ultimate FF, the Marvel Knights FF and the regular variety FF. I would not mind seeing that triplet reduced to one book. With Mike Wieringo on art, please.
