Super-Powered Con Man vs Alien Overlord

By: Andrew Hines

Cole Cash has long been a favorite of mine since he was created by Jim Lee (imagine that). Before he got canned with the rest of WildStorm, he was a real badass with a silver tongue and all the ammo he could carry.   He ended up being a rather intriguing character during James Robinson's run on WildC.A.T.s, due to his dealings with boss Jacob Marlowe. As I recall, he was also the only full-blooded human on the team of Kherubim-Daemonite hybrids. It seemed to be like putting Batman, a normal person without powers or special jewelry, in the ranks of the Justice League. So, you know, there's that. The higher-ups at DC have begun integrating the Daemonites into the standard DCnU.

As much as it pains (and surprises) me to say, Rob Liefeld's writing is actually better than his art, which is unfortunately still on the cover. This is actually the issue that brings out my inner geek to the X-TREEEEMMME!!! Sorry, I had to. Anyway, this is actually a decent issue as far as writing goes, but since it's Liefeld it can definitely be better. I want to like it, because it's Grifter, but for some strange reason it falls slightly short. Liefeld apparently couldn't even be bothered to write the dialogue, which was done by Frank Tieri. You can sort of let that one speak for itself.

The art is decent, because it's not whatshisname.  Instead, the pencils were done by Scott Clark and the inks by Dave Beaty and colors were by Andrew Dalhouse. Like I said, the art is decent, not exceptional in anyway. I'd really like for something to stand out here, but it just doesn't. Really, the only good piece of art is the cover, which is done by Liefeld. The colors are about the only really good thing in terms of artwork.

This earns a B-. I like where the story ends and hoe we can see more of it when Liefeld's finished. It's good if you know the characters, but if you're just starting to know anything about Grifter or anyone from WildStorm, then check in later.

Hawk In The 'Hood

By: Andrew Hines

Hawkeye is a great character to use for a solo title. In a team with Captain America, Iron Man and Thor, what's a guy with a bow and arrow really gonna do? This why he makes much more sense as a solo act. Despite the questionable costume choices over the decades, he's still a good character to follow. For a reformed criminal, he's got a decent moral compass, even if his attitude isn't always exemplary. He may not be a hero's hero, but he knows what he believes in and he sticks to it. His methods may not make him a boy scout like Captain America, but they get the job done without a whole lot of collateral damage. This seems to be a good start for a solo series, but I can definitely see more being done with it. He's a versatile character and the issue  does a good job of showing us that.

Despite his last name making him sound like The Calculator's sidekick, Matt Fraction has just captured my attention with this first issue of Hawkeye's solo series. Pitting Clint Barton against Russian mob wannabe's was a great way to show what he cares about. Not your run of the mill superhero story, it's very different. In this industry, a good kind of different is hard to come by, so my hat's off to Mr. Fraction. He's started the series off by making Hawkeye very real, breakable, resilient and truly heroic. Making an Avenger seem human is a tricky thing and he's done a splendid job. The story flows like water, showing off several sides of the card-carrying Avenger.

David Aja and Matt Hollingsworth have done a good job as the artist and colorist, respectively. Aja's work reminds me of Darwyn Cooke's Justice League: New Frontier without trying to be. It's simple and elegant, which is exactly what a story about Hawkeye should be. It shows just how awesome Hawkeye is on his own without distracting from the story. Hollingsworth's muted colors are a great fit with Aja's pencils and inks. Their work fits together as if each guy's style were tailor-made to work in sync with the other's. Aja's panels and visual story-telling fit with Fraction's story quite well and make it seem like a tiny graphic novel.

I didn't go into this thinking I'd enjoy it but it earns an A, which is pretty good for a first issue. I recommend it to any Avenger fans.

Martian Manhunter vs Stormwatch

By: Andrew Hines

In the year since Stormwatch became a part of the DCnU, We've been waiting to see just how much J'onn J'onnz has changed. It looks like we get our answer in this issue. Now throwing the often underrated Martian Manhunter into Stormwatch, he may have a better home than he ever did in the Justice League. We probably won't get too into the other characters since this one pretty much focuses on the green guy with a fear of flames. As comic characters go, Martian Manhunter was always underutilized. For a guy with all of the powers of superman and a much more commonplace weakness, writers could have done a lot more with him. A good and moral character with more powers than Superman in the 70s and he's essentially sidelined most of his career. That changes in issue 12.

Peter Milligan is a writer I don't know too well, which is why this title is all the more impressive. He's been writing it since issue 9, the third writer to take the reigns of this book. I like the dialogue and pacing, which is hard to do on a team book. He could have gone many different ways with this type of arc, but this feels like it's the only way it really could have worked. J'onn seems more aggressive here than he ever has before, which is a nice change. He was always known as the soul of the Justice League, though now he seems to be the embodiment of the group's last vestige of hope in humanity's potential. This was a well-written issue and I wish Milligan luck on the next few.

Will Conrad and Julio Ferreira split artistic duties on this issue, which seems to work out well. I actually preferred the first artist, Miguel Sepulveda, who illustrated the first six issues, but Conrad and Ferreira are pretty good in their own right. Guy Major does a great job as the colorist in this issue, giving us some awesome effects on  the printed page.

I give this an A-, due partly to the excessive inks on this page and partly because it just feels too much like a filler issue. We also get some great action scenes and a flashback of Midnighter's chin spike coming in handy. (You'll se what I did there after you read the issue.) I still recommend this to anyone who ever liked Martian Manhunter or was a fan of Stormwatch before the fall of WildStorm.

Grundy Cometh...

By: Andrew Hines

Many people of this generation are unaware of the Justice Society or JSA. This title has been  a good way of bringing their legacy back to life. The fourth installment of Earth 2 introduces a fourth member of the future Justice Society. We see new faces and get a bit of tease on possible backstory for several of the characters. The character intros have been pretty good up to this point and issue four is no exception. There are bumps in the road with every story and several issues of discontinuity between characters from the old DCU and the new, they do make for interesting character development. This series (and really, the DCnU in general,) shows that superhero costumes can be both stylish and functional. The last real tick in the "W" column is that Rob Liefeld hasn't gotten his meat skinners onto the Earth 2 characters just yet.

James Robinson has done a good job so far with Earth 2. He has given new depth and realism to characters who haven't had a whole lot of that in recent years. Basically starting from scratch, since several of the Justice Society are now in the main DCnU, such as Powergirl and Mister Terrific, he's been making it his own. There's not much you can ask a writer to do beyond that. This is essentially a hard reboot of the entirety of Earth 2 mythology in the DCU, but with bits that link it to the current Animal Man and Swamp Thing story lines. He has left the past behind and created something new and intriguing, which I find to be better than something old being resurrected. I mean, look how Jason Todd turned out when he came back. ....Exactly! 

The art by Nicola Scott and Eduardo Pansica is pretty good. Even the look They've given to Jay's suit and Kendra's new Hawkgirl uniform. This version of Grundy works pretty well and provides a sort of visual reference to the Blackest Night event. Again, there is a full team to back them up. The inking team consists of Trevor Scott and Sean Parsons, who've done a great job on this issue. The colorists are Alex Sinclair and Tony Avina who have done a good job on this one as well. The first page and last are the best examples of how good this artistic team really is.

This one deserves an A- based on the few bits where dialogue is slightly lacking or pacing is a little off. Good job overall. I highly recommend it.

The Batman Starts Back At (Earth) One

By: Andrew Hines

We all know the story of Bruce Wayne/Batman. If you don't know the origin, then you really need to read this book. Geoff Johns scripts the Bat for the first time as a solo hero. Set in the same universe as Superman: Earth One from last year, it first reads like a re-imagining of Frank Miller's iconic Batman: Year One. This version finds the newly anointed Dark Knight taking a more vengeful path than Miller imagined 25 years ago. It also finds our beloved Alfred Pennyworth as a much more grizzled war veteran of Her Majesty's Royal Marines. Even Bruce and Gordon are somewhat different, as they are both quite embittered at this point. Even a well-known villain seems more ruthless and far more politically minded in Johns' version.

This is a perfect jumping-off point for anyone who needs a refresher course on the Caped Crusader. It covers both his parents' murder, giving a new culprit, and his first year as the Batman. We even get a look at a fresh-faced and fully sober Detective Harvey Bullock. Not yet the fat and cynical Bullock that many of us grew up with in the Batman animated series, he is much more optimistic and full of untapped potential. Oswald Cobblepot happens to be the mayor of Gotham City and we see Barbara Gordon before she dons her own cape and cowl as the original Batgirl. Aside form the faces we see, there are many differences between Earth One and the dwellers of Gotham we've come to know and love. It begins at a brisk pace and ends with a bang.

I know the last two have been written by Geoff Johns, but that's only because they were the best example I could give form the past week. This, however is the best example of a graphic novel I can give for the whole year. The pacing begins briskly, but it maintains a steady stride the whole way through. He writes established characters with a wonderful ease and introduces delightful new elements into their being. It's easy to forget that the traits weren't there all along because it fits Frank Quietly Gary Frank's pencils so well.

There's another man who has done well on this, Mr. Frank Quietly Gary Frank. Better known for his work with Grant Morrison on various Superman graphic novels, he lives up to expectations here, at times surpassing them. Jonathan Sibal's inks and Brad Anderson's colors fit the noir landscape of Gotham like a black velvet glove.

I honestly cannot find anything I would add or subtract from this book. It's full of the grit that Gotham is know for and with plenty of color in the right places. Full of realism and functionality, I have to give it an A. No other grade will do it justice, which what the Goddamn Batman (...I had to...)  is all about.

Editor's Note: Thanks to Marquis Samedi for reminding me that I screwed up. It has been edited to show what happened. My bad, I'll do better in the future.

Treasure of the Dead King

By: Andrew Hines

If you're new to the DCnU, then you probably aren't fully aware of how awesome Aquaman has become. Yeah, that's right, Aquaman! Not only has Geoff Johns made Green Lantern and the Justice League cool again, but he's also put a green ring back on Sinestro's finger and found a way to make Arthur Curry look like a badass. In the last few issues we've seen the group of "heroes" that Aquaman ran with prior to joining the Justice League. Dubbed the Others, they're an even looser group than the Justice League and Teen Titans have been this time around. In the last issue, Dr Shin revealed to Mera exactly why Black Manta despises Arthur so much, because Aquaman killed his father. Dun dun dunnnn . . .

This time, the focus shifts between six years ago and the present day. The surviving members have been drawn together to stop Black Manta from taking the last artifact and possibly destroying Atlantis and Arthur once and for all. At the same time, Arthur has been on a mad search for him waiting for the last member of the Others to make it back. The man called Vostok X, a super cosmonaut, has been alone on the moon for the last 6 years without any human contact, obviously. What are thou waiting for? I'm not telling you what happens. That would be spoiling everything.

Again, Geoff Johns' writing is pretty good. He has a way of pulling the reader into the story even though the character's history says we shouldn't care. He manages to weave awesome dialogue into what is already a fantastic story. He doesn't waste time on the right now, but balances between the moment and the bigger picture. Let's be honest, DC doesn't have a fantastic track record for larger arcs unless its some sort of universal event  for that year. Geoff Johns has been blasting that statistic into near-oblivion in the last few years since Green Lantern: Rebirth, joining the ranks of some of DCs greatest scribes, including Alan Moore, James Robinson, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman.

The art for this title has been fantastic since the beginning, as one of the few titles to keep the same creative team for almost the entire year. Ivan Reis' pencils, his brother Rod Reis on colors and with Joe Prado, Jonathan Glapion & Andy Lanning as the inking team have done a wonderful job. They've all managed to make the art fit Johns' script. That's a hard thing to do and they've done a sensational job. Big props to these guys. Doing the interior artwork is one thing, but they've also done some truly poster-worthy covers as well.

With this creative team, and Geoff Johns being DC's Chief Creative Officer to boot, how could this have been anything other than an A+? This one of the few comics that I have a hard time waiting the whole month for, but it's worth the wait every time.

Where In The World Is Black Hand?

By: Andrew Hines

Anyone who is familiar with Green Lantern should know that the GLs weren’t the Guardians’ first attempt at amassing an army. Before the first rings were handed out, they had the Manhunters, an intergalactic android police force that eventually went all HAL 9000 on all sentient life. They figured the GLs would be better since they could actually distinguish between, right wrong and that pesky grey area that lawyers live in. Then Hal Jordan had to become Parallax, kill half of the Corps and bring us around that whole Blackest Night fiasco. Now the Guardians want to bring about a mysterious Third Army. Apparently, Hal's old sparring partner Black Hand may have something to do with it. He seems to also be a Black Lantern still. Just sayin'...

As far as issue 11 goes, the “Revenge of Black Hand” (there’s a clue somewhere in that title), it starts off with Hal turning the tables on Sinestro, which made me smile. They’re starting to figure some things out and thankfully just said that Blackest Night definitely happened. There’s some great dialogue and Hal makes a rookie mistake or two. All in all Geoff Johns has done a pretty good job of pacing and storytelling. I’d go into more detail, but you should pick up the issue to read it for yourself.

The art really only ranks at a B. Doug Mahnke is a decent artist, but this really isn’t the title for him, especially since it started with Ivan Reis. The last half dozen or so, haven’t been as great as his potential has shown in the past. Likewise for Christian Alamy’s inks. It just seems excessive in places where some extra color could make a big difference. The same goes for Tony Avina and Alex Sinclair’s colors. Sinestro’s more pinkish than purple, but you’d never know it by the deep colors here.

As a whole, it earns a B+ from the art team and Johns’ writing. I recommend the title, but this issue isn’t their best.

Update: Comments and critiques are welcome and encouraged. As usual, please be constructive with them rather than negative. Thanks.