A baby-eating demon made out of babies? That's pretty damn gross.Pharyngula, incidentally, is a stage in the embryonic development of vertebrates during which most of the organ systems are beginning to develop but when embryos of all species are most similar to one another. So, closer to blastula than Dracula as far as naming goes.
As far as the end of the Black Mary Marvel vs. Dead Baby Suit Demon throw down, could it be Mary inherited Teth-Adam's reassigned magic word along with his power?
Six issues into the series and two out of six issues have used the last page as the cover. Aside from robbing the last pages of any impact, this decision highlights the sometimes shaky art that weighs these books down. Overall, the art has been pretty competent, but if you've got both an A-list and a B-list artist illustrating the same scene, the B-list artist is bound to suffer by comparison.
Um, the Monitors have a Forerunner and a Harbinger in their employ? Will they be hiring a Precursor anytime soon?
Like most of the storylines, the Donna/Jason team up is creeping along at a snail's pace. I wish I believed they were meeting in DC from reasons other than a pointless tie-in to "Amazons Attack", but I doubt it. Jason Todd is apparently the smartest man in the game right now, no matter where he happened to find a description of what a Monitor looks like. A little bit of light is finally shining in on these heroes, even if it is information the readers were already hip to.
Also in the "characters learning things we already knew" department, Jimmy finds out that Darkseid is somehow involved in...something. His informant, Sleez, is a John Byrne concoction; a childhood friend of Darkseid who was too depraved for the Lord of Apokolips. How depraved, you ask? During Byrne's post-Crisis restructuring of the Superman mythos, Sleez almost made a porn flick of Superman making sweet mind-controlled love to Big Barda.
Lazy, lazy coloring on the Suicide Slum sequence. It's one thing to make the buildings shades of drab, but did the prostitutes really have to be drab as well? And in case you didn't notice Holly Robinson standing next to the steps, she's been helpful enough to wear a bright pink kitty shirt.
And in a surprising twist, nothing at all happens with the Rogues. I wouldn't mind a couple pages of comic relief that didn't really advance the plot, but the dialogue in the Rogues' scenes is absolutely awful. It doesn't even rise to the level of Tarantino knock off. Some hint of what's going on with the Rogues needs to be dropped immediately to salvage this storyline.
This issue manages to get Jimmy, Jason and Donna at least up to page one, which builds up a little hope that things might finally start to kick into gear. I think this book can work if it can keep focusing on marginal characters involved in major stories, while playing carefully off events in bigger titles. All of which "Countdown" currently seems set up to do.
The JLA shot for next issue's cover doesn't exactly bode well in that regard.
2 comments:
I think the primary problem with the book, so far, is it's lack of focus.
It needs to do more that just be a 52 week tie-in.
We got a teaser/ad for Amazon's Attack at the end of last issue. But the only thing that happens in Washington is some chit-chat.
You can't introduce something like a war and not play it out in someway.
I've got a bad feeling they're about to do the same thing with the Flash/Rogues stuff. If whatever goes down in Flash #13 doesn't get heavily referenced in "Countdown" it's going to indicate a serious ongoing problem. But I agree, the reader should have gotten at least a couple panels of Amazons attacking if that's going to serve as the lead-out for the previous issue.
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