Wednesday Already

Man, I love Bart. And also this new writer, some character going by Marc Guggenheim.

Cop on the street: “Have we met? Something familiar about you…”
The Flash: “Dude, I’m the Flash.”

Reading a cape book set in Los Angeles almost feels unnatural. All the capes are supposed to be hanging out on the eastern seaboard, aren’t they? But it’s Bart, so he can be anywhere pretty fast anyways. Though according to this book, running around makes him hungry.

There’s a lot of secret identity shit this time around. Bart bitches out his girlfriend for gabbing about his (even though she didn’t), but it’s okay because his heart’s in the right place because he just doesn’t want her to go and get raped by Dr. Light. The conversation highlights DC’s need to keep their publishing schedule on track because if this book came out last week or if last week’s 52 had been delayed (lol 52 being delayed), it would’ve been a “hey Ralph Dibney’s dead oh oops spoilers above” situation.

Oh and hey, YET ANOTHER BOOK WITH THE NEW GODS. I don’t really care for them all that much, but having Steppenwolf around to say “Step away, stripling.” is worth it, I suppose. And having the friggin’ JLA show up to save the day is always fun. Too bad Ron Adrian can’t draw Hal right. He looked like Kyle in the wrong costume.

And yeah, if you haven’t read last week’s 52, spoilers above.

Blue Beetle #11
DC Comics

Writer: John Rogers
Artist: Rafael Albuquerque

I like legacy heroes. I think DC has developed a wonderful tradition of passing on a hero’s mantle from character to the next, maintaining a built-in familiarity with a character’s name, while at the same time allowing to reinvent a concept when needed. Maybe it’s the fact that when I started reading comics, Wally West was The Flash, not Barry Allen. Kyle Rayner will always be my Green Lantern, not Hal Jordan (don’t get me started on Rebirth. I’m so serious), but I tend to think of myself as more tolerant of the “passing the torch” from an established character to a new one.

Which brings us to the new Blue Beetle. I never cared one way or another for the Ted Kord version of the character (not that he was even the first Blue Beetle himself), so the Jaime Reyes version of the character had a clean slate to impress me.

And it did. I love this book. Love love love.

It’s the mark of a brilliantly accessible comic book where it can be the 11th issue of an ongoing series, be in mid-storyline, and feature one of the fucking New Gods and still manage to hook me completely. Actually I have next to no idea what on Earth is going on in this book whatsoever. I know that Jaime is the Blue Beetle, and is attempting to gather more information on the scarab that provides his powers. I know Jaime and his friend are somehow marooned on some sort of alien planet. I know there’s a guy in a loincloth and sword and METRON and oh talking animals.

I swear, I should hate this book so hard. But it’s just so, so good.

So what’s good about it? Well the art is amazing. I can see from the credits page that this is the artist’s first issue of the title, and it’s an awesome showing of things to come. He manages to handle the inherent problems with having a 16-year-old superhero protagonist by drawing Jaime, you know, like a 16-year-old kid. Even when “powered up” by the scarab Jaime has bony arms, skinny legs and the frame of a normal kid. Instead of taking away from the superhero-ness, it makes for an awesome contrast for when the scarab goes apeshit and sprouts all kinds of death weapons.

It’s the writing that sold it for me though. Jaime is written as being completely out of his element. As a 16-year-old strapped to a machine of pure death, stranded on a strange planet with his best friend, should be. It’s always bothered me that when new characters gain superpowers writers so rarely take the opportunity to play around with a normal person being put into these fantastical circumstances. It’s just nice to see.

And the book is funny. Really funny. Metron popping up and scaring Jaime, “a forehead full of justice”, there are so many shining moments of my type of humor in here, I honestly can not wait for the next issue. Not to mention devouring the previous 10 issues in the run.

Pull or Drop? Pull pull pull. This is the type of book that should spin out of a legacy character relaunch. Identifiable protagonist, hilarious humor, cool action, mystery, it’s all here. What a cool book.

I like the JSA. I never really read anything before this new series launched and I couldn’t care less about the whole legacy thing, but the team has come together nicely. That said, some of the reviews I have read so far have been complaining about the bad guys in this first arc. The JSA are fighting some Nazis. What’s wrong with that?

The little two line prologue that intros each issue talks about how they’re a WWII-era team, so I say fighting Nazis makes perfect sense. Calling them the Fourth Reich seems a little obvious, but the Nazis were not known for sublety. Reichsmark’s power of turning anyone he touches into a metal statue is pretty bad-ass. The Nazis have kind of hokey dialogue, but you can’t make the Nazis seem cool, that’d come across bad. But I say as villains for the JSA, Nazis are awesome.

And you can quote me on that. “Nazis are awesome.”

Also, Starman being crazy is crazy awesome, especially when Sandman shows up and calls a meeting and Starman starts singing “Mr. Sandman”. And then whispering “52!”

I give this book fifty-two swastikas.