Category Archives: Reviews

Review: DC Super Heroes and Villains Fandex

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Workman’s new DC Comics Super Heroes and Villains Fandex has incredibly detailed information on the DCU’s major characters, but in a format and size that presents a few difficulties.

If you’re not familiar with Fandexes, they’re a series of field guides in the form of cards attached at the base, so that you can swivel any card out and keep it available. You can also open them up as a fan. I first heard of them as nature guides, but they’ve expanded to geography, history, and pop culture.

Wide Coverage

The DC Fandex has surprisingly wide coverage. 75 profiles doesn’t sound like a lot until you consider that it’s comparable to three standard-sized comic books with every page profiling a new character, not unlike the JLA-Z guide that came out around the time of JLA/Avengers. And the text on each card, front and back, is about as long as the classic Who’s Who entries.

They’ve managed to fit in more characters by combining legacies onto a single card. For instance, there’s one card each for Robin, Batgirl, Wonder Girl and Blue Beetle, with the cards profiling the various incarnations of the character. The Flash is simplified to Barry Allen and Wally West, though Jay Garrick and Bart Allen get mentions. On these cards they tend to go for the current version of the character for the image, so Flash is Barry, Robin is Damian Wayne, and Batgirl is Stephanie Brown.

Sometimes it does lead to duplicates. They managed to avoid it with Dick Grayson by profiling him as Nightwing and then picking up the Robin card where it left off with Jason, Tim, etc. But Barbara Gordon gets spotlighted on both the Batgirl and Oracle cards.

One nice bonus: if you were confused about the Monitors’ role in Final Crisis and Superman: Beyond, their card sums it up quite nicely!

Priorities

The guide describes the DCU roughly between Final Crisis and Blackest Night, featuring new versions of heroes such as Batgirl and Robin, and glossing over temporary changes. The Martian Manhunter and Aquaman entries don’t mention their now-reversed deaths, for instance, and Batman’s card focuses entirely on Bruce Wayne, with Nightwing’s card mentioning that Dick has taken over while Bruce was “presumed dead.”

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Review: Flash #1 — “The Dastardly Death of the Rogues”

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It’s refreshing to be able to read a Flash story that’s just a Flash story. After four months of retrospective on Wally West, three months off, then a year of rearranging the Flash mythos to make Barry Allen the Most Important Flash of All Time(TM), we finally get Geoff Johns and Francis Manapul’s Flash #1 — a story about the Flash vs. Rogues, and about Barry Allen and his day job.

You don’t need to have read Flash: Rebirth to follow this book. Or Blackest Night. Or, despite the banner across the top, Brightest Day. Actually, you don’t need to have read anything about the Flash to follow this book — and that’s something else that we haven’t seen in a while.

Story

Broadly speaking, the issue can be broken down into three main segments:

  1. Introduce the Flash.
  2. Introduce Barry Allen.
  3. Get the story going.

It moves in a way that the last three “first issues” of a Flash launch didn’t. The opening segment, after the equivalent of a cinematic pan-in, is one long action sequence. The middle segment slows down a bit, but manages to strike a good balance of exposition and characterization. Then the third segment jumps head-first into the mystery.

And the amazing thing? It’s actually fun. I know that’s the kiss of death in comics these days, but it also happens to be what I find myself wanting to read in a super-hero book lately. It has a sense of adventure that The Flash hasn’t really had since the days of Mark Waid’s classic run in the 1990s.

In a lot of ways, this book is 180 degrees away from Flash: Rebirth…and I have to wonder why Geoff Johns couldn’t have started with this approach a year ago, instead of spending 9 issues telling us, “It’s going to be great! Really! Barry is awesome! Can’t you just see how awesome he is?”

Art

Of course, a year ago, one thing would have been missing: Francis Manapul’s art. It’s refreshingly clean after Ethan Van Sciver’s incredibly detailed work on Flash: Rebirth, and while I love Scott Kolins’ pencils on the Rogues, Manapul’s is a better fit for the Flash himself. Rather than focusing on multiple images, speed lines, or lightning, he mixes and matches all of them along with blur effects to show speed.

Manapul also works in a lot of details that stay in the background, but reward a second read: Barry’s and Iris’ chat icons, a bystander taking a photo with a cell phone at a crime scene, the Weather Wizard’s rap sheet slipping out of a file while Captain Frye tells Barry of his latest exploits. Iris has a coffee cup within arm’s reach in every single panel in which you can see her hands, except one. These things are fun to catch, but they don’t take over.

The only problem I have with his art is that his faces sometimes (but not always) seem a bit off. I can’t quite put my finger on why.

Okay, it’s SPOILER TIME!

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Review: Flash Secret Files and Origins 2010

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More precisely, the book is Flash: Secret Files and Origins 2010 #1. (I’m always faintly amused at the tendency of comic book publishers to slap a big “#1” on the front of an obviously one-shot issue.) Like most of DC’s Secret Files books, this is made up of a lead story and a series of profile pages.

Lead Story

“Running to the Past” by Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins was a fairly standard Flash story. It doesn’t really stand out as particularly good or bad, but it serves as an introduction to Barry Allen, his primary motivation (the retconned-in death of his mother), and the sometimes lonely life of a speedster.

There are some nice moments, like the sequence of panels early on in which Barry hits a light switch, pours himself a glass of water, and then the light comes on (though if you think about it, that only makes sense if the water is sped up too).

Oddly, while the whole story is drawn by Scott Kolins, the epilogue featuring the Rogues looks vastly different. It really highlights something I’ve mentioned before, which is how well-suited his art is to the Rogues.

It is a Barry Allen story, first and foremost, though the rest of the “good guy” speedsters show up briefly. I didn’t really expect anything beyond that, but the solicitation text suggested that Wally West and Bart Allen might be more involved, and I’m sure there are people out there for whom that will be a factor in whether they pick up the book. Perhaps DC planned bigger roles or a second story, back when they still planned a series of backup stories featuring Wally and a Kid Flash book featuring Bart, but if so, it didn’t make it to the finished product.

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Review: Flash: Rebirth #6 — “Fastest Man Alive”

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Well, it’s finished. And oddly enough, that’s the strongest thing I can say about the conclusion of the Geoff Johns/Ethan Van Sciver miniseries. The main story wraps up rather abruptly, taking up about half of the issue (13 pages out of 22), with the rest devoted to character bits and foreshadowing. There’s certainly nothing wrong with character bits — they’re actually some of my favorite parts of this issue — but instead of a tour de force, Flash: Rebirth #6 wraps up with a resounding…well…it wraps up.

I don’t know if I’d feel differently about this if I’d read it before Blackest Night: The Flash, or before DC canceled their plans for the Kid Flash comic book and the backup stories featuring Wally West. I’m sure it didn’t help.

The best thing about the issue is that I can actually recognize Barry Allen as Barry Allen, not as some guy who has the same name and haircut. That’s one of the problems I had with the series up to this point: why go to the effort to bring back Barry Allen if you’re going to give him a personality transplant?

SPOILERS AHEAD!

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Review: Blackest Night: The Flash #3

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The conclusion of this miniseries — to the extent that it concludes, anyway — is more satisfying than the middle chapter. The story is more solid, and it’s visually more varied as characters with colors beyond black and blue join Blue Lantern Barry Allen onstage.

Speaking of color schemes, I noticed something interesting about the covers: they get progressively brighter. The first issue is mostly black and silver, with a dark blue logo outline. The second issue adds some color by putting Captain Cold in the center, and has a brighter logo outline. By the third issue, Blue Lantern Barry takes up the entire cover, and the logo is again a tiny bit brighter. I don’t know whether it’s intentional, but it’s certainly thematic.

The story follows three main threads: The Rogues in Iron Heights; Captain Boomerang; and the Flashes.

The Rogues’ story gets the least attention this time around. Once again it picks up right where they left off, but instead of focusing on emotional manipulation, it’s basically a dungeon crawl as they try to work out something that will shut down the Black Lantern Rogues. It does, however, give away a little more about the resolution of Flash: Rebirth

Captain Boomerang’s story is a sad one, and while moving, I’m afraid it significantly damages the character for future use. More on this in the spoiler section.

This time around the Flashes’ story works best. Barry Allen is still dealing with an unfamiliar power set, but by this time he’s gotten accustomed to it, rather than spending the entire issue learning how to use the blue ring…plus there are other speedsters around to keep the “Fastest Man Alive” theme on track. There’s also a solid resolution to one of the major story elements from last month.

Of course, since this is a side story to a larger event, it ends — or rather stops — with a big “To be continued” sign as several characters head back into the main Blackest Night story, and the big question from issue #1 is left unanswered.

Spoilers below!

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Review: Blackest Night: The Flash #2

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If there’s one thing that best describes Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins’ Blackest Night: The Flash #2, it’s “caught in the middle.” It’s the middle of a three-part story. It takes place between chapters of a larger story. It fits between the end of one Flash series and the beginning of another. It’s about people caught between life and death.

It’s also about mirror images, both in terms of opposites and in terms of forcing characters to look at themselves.

Unfortunately, it looks like this miniseries isn’t going to stand on its own very well, for the simple reason that it’s not a self-contained chapter of Blackest Night. Each issue is interleaved within other chapters of the larger story. The first issue brought readers up to speed with Blackest Night #4. This one doesn’t pick up where the last issue left off, but skips ahead and has to recap a couple of major events from Blackest Night #5 & #6.

That may be a big part of why I liked the Rogues’ story a lot better than the Flash’s: their story actually does seem to be a solid story, not a loose collection of scenes that fit between panels in another series. In that way, it reminds me a lot of Battlestar Galactica: The Plan.

Of course, another reason I liked the Rogues’ story is that it’s hard to go wrong with Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins on the Rogues. As I mentioned last time, Johns’ grim-and-gritty storytelling and Kolins’ angular art style are perfectly suited for the hardened Central/Keystone criminals…and for the undead Black Lanterns.

And now…it’s spoiler time! Continue reading →