Green Lantern: New Guardians #24 – Justin Jordan & Brad Walker
This. Issue. Is. Completely. Pointless. Listen, I absolutely love Green Lantern and the mythos and all those corps and stuff like that (except for a few) but I really, REALLY can’t get behind this event AT ALL. It’s utter garbage, really. I’m going to talk about spoilers here because IT DOESN’T MATTER IF I SPOIL A CRAP BOOK FOR YOU. I really apologize for the rant, but when characters I love are treated by such horrible writers, especially after a prophecy has been set in place. Green Lantern’s new event – Lights Out – has done absolutely NOTHING for any of the characters, and it hasn’t even developed ANYONE including the main villain at hand. So, Relic just wants to destroy all the Corps? Not like we haven’t SEEN THIS BEFORE.
In Green Lantern: New Guardians #24, Kyle Rayner and Hal Jordan are once AGAIN arguing about the next plan of action after fleeing from a destroyed Oa. Hal, brilliantly, comes up with the idea to use their last remaining amounts of ring batter y to fly ALL THE WAY to Ysmault, because Guy Gardner is in with the Red Lanterns and since their rings aren’t running off of a battery necessarily like the other Corps, Relic can’t hurt them THAT much. Brilliant, right? Except, there’s a twist! The “entities” that make up the Corps’ energy and their rings (lolwut?) start flying into Kyle Rayner and possessing him and then they’re all like “bitch we’re going to fight Relic ourselves, bye.” Hal, however, being the fearless leader of the Corps that he is, decides to chase Rayner (who is possessed) but those entities just magically transport Hal and his crew to Ysmault, to which Hal says “we don’t have enough juice to get back to Kyle”…so would they have enough juice to get to Ysmault without any help? Anyway, Kyle Rayner is flying through space and suddenly, the guardians appear and they’re all like “you forget to send us to Ysmault LOL” and basically they start blasting Kyle with energy and Kyle’s mind was fighting the entities, and eventually Kyle gets the WILL to control the beasts and take back his body. So basically, the whole issue was a pretty pointless piece of garbage to give Kyle more power even though KYLE DOESN’T EVEN BELONG IN THE NEW 52.
Justice League Of America #8 – Matt Kindt and Doug Mahnke
I can’t stand Matt Kindt’s writing. I just really can’t. I don’t know if there is anything of his that is really spectacular that I should read, but everything I’ve read from him from DC Comics in the past months has either been pretty bad…or just bad. Basically, this issue features Star-Girl and Martian Manhunter waking up in a field and they discover that one of Firestorm’s counterparts is still alive as well. He warns them that this is just a falsified prison and that they cannot escape, no matter how hard they try. Except, that in the end, Star-Girl magically finds a way to get out of the prison. However, things may not be how they seem because in the beginning, Star-Girl remembers the Crime Syndicate broadcasting their message all over the world and having all the villains rounded up, but actually said “How Do I know This?” so the whole issue, regardless of how terrible and continuity-error filled it was, could have some meaning in the long run.
Really, though, this whole thing was just an exposition-filled piece of filler and a waste of time. Martian Manhunter is just exploring the different “levels” of this so-called prison that has each of the heroes from the Justice League imprisoned, except there’s a continuity error here seeing as Shazam is locked up on this prison, so unless the whole thing is just some stupid illusion, that’s quite the plot hole considering Pandora’s Box turned him Evil and he joined up with the villains in Forever Evil #1.
Really, the only thing to appreciate in this book is the everlasting wonderful pencils by Doug Mahnke, whose artwork used to do wonders for Green Lantern and even with shit writing, still does for Justice League of America. The colors on this book weren’t so special, but they helped the pencils and got the job done. To summarize, JLA #8 was just a giant complete waste of time.
Forever Evil: Rogues Rebellion #1
I can’t really say I quite liked this issue. I mean, it was pretty decent and actually showed some aftermath and tie-in to the universe and the world of Forever Evil, which is actually something they did right, but Rogues Rebellion just doesn’t hook me at all and I can’t get into it. Probably because I’m not the biggest Flash fan and haven’t read the New 52 series yet, but this was a nice character piece for the Rogues, however it’s a terrible jumping on point for new readers.
In this book, Flash’s Rogues Gallery visit Central City after the meeting with the Crime Syndicate only to find it practically demolished. They don’t want to take over, necessarily, or even kill or cause havoc. They just don’t want to, really, see their playground demolished. Eventually, they start investigating what happened and they come to the conclusion that it was Gorilla Grodd who screwed up the place and find some cops tied to trees. They recap the Gorilla Grodd one-shot and then the Rogues rescue them, to no one’s surprise, really. They then go to try and rescue Lisa (who the [frick] is Lisa? I don’t know because I don’t read Flash. They only quickly say who she is, but regardless, this is only one of the few examples of how this book is a terrible jumping on point.)
Regardless, there’s not much for me, personally to like about this issue. It’s not a great jumping on point and it doesn’t seem like its necessarily needed for the Forever Evil universe, but are any of the spinoffs? This week, at DC Comics seems to be poorer than the rest but I have high hopes for the weeks and months to come. Forever Evil: Rogues Rebellion is a greatly written issue, it’s just hard for me to be hooked or even interested in it. Sorry, Flash fans.