12.12.07 Reviews - Part 1

I thought I would get the proverbial caca de toro out of the way. There are some good books out this week, but sadly these ain't them...

Green Lantern #25 (DC): This is a fun wrap-up that doesn't hold up to prolonged scrutiny very well, but... fun, nonetheless. I did enjoy Sinestro's attitude and his seemingly winning some sort of moral philosophical debate as the GL's are forced to hypocritically authorize lethal force, but it's all not so much a denoument to the war, as it is a springboard for next summer's big GL mega-event, literally. We get all sorts of interesting story bits being dropped that will be milked, err... that the creative team will get mileage out of, complete with different Corps divisions symbolized by light color, and further exposition about "The Blackest Night" prophecy. Also, are the Guardians just completely useless or what? Half the time they're used as deus ex machina to show up and fight the Anti-Monitor, and the other half is dedicated to conflict avoidance and yammering on about the 10 Laws of whatever. Artistically, there's an impressive amount of characters on some of these double page spreads. I suppose that takes a skilled hand from a craft perspective, but in terms of storytelling it doesn’t really resonate emotionally with power or awe for me. There's simply lots of ring bearers flying around, some getting hacked up all Ridley Scott style. A generous, Grade B.

Green Lantern Corps #19 (DC): Moving right along, we've got some horrible art here that jumps inexplicably from being sharp and angular to round and mushy on some facial close-ups. Identified as an "Epilogue" to The Sinestro Corps Wars, this issue largely serves no purpose and is just unnecessary filler material. So, Guy Gardner gets with Ice, only to be rebuffed, Kyle contemplates a career, it's all just random and not very satisfying. It's just there, and there's no there there. A very unkempt, Grade C.

New Avengers #37 (Marvel): The thing with Leinil Yu is that when he's on, he's on. And when he's off, he's so horribly off. His smaller panels are like tiny little ant farms, a mass of unidentifiable lines just squiggling around. There were so many times that I really had no idea what was going on, the lack of panel to panel storytelling ability just reduced this to a bunch of character collages that were strewn about on the page. Bendis' script was no help either in deciphering this melee of activity, there's one sequence where 5 different people are talking and the dialogue is a little something like this: "Ninjas." "What?" "Oh." "Who?" "Hey there!" "Pow." "@$%@." WTF, man? I'm certainly not the first guy in the blogosphere to nickname New Avengers the Liberal Avengers, while dubbing The Mighty Avengers, The Republican Avengers, because they tend to wear their politics on their respective sleeves, but here it's more obvious than ever. Maria Hill essentially informs a prisoner that "you're a terrorist because I say you're a terrorist, and therefore we can detain you indefinitely, use any method of info/confession extraction imaginable, oh and by the way, you lose all human rights." At the end of the day, I have no idea what's going on here and just started glossing over; scanning for things I visually recognized or words that made some semblance of people speaking coherently. Alas, Grade C-.