Rob Hunter (1)

I really like the covers on this series. That was about it. First off it said the series was going to be 8 issues, but it ended up being 6. Then the covers showed that it should be read at a certain time during the Countdown series, but then the inside said the events happened at least 10 issues off from what the cover said.

Then on to the story. I never really understood what was going on. I'm not sure if it was because I wasn't familiar with ANY of the characters involved, or it was just written poorly. Maybe a little of both. Either way, it didn't make for very enjoyable reading.… (mehr)

So, I am as big a fan of Justice League Europe as you'll find. Years before I really got into comics collecting, I had complete runs of three series: Alpha Flight, Star Trek: Early Voyages, and Justice League Europe. Yeah, I have weird tastes. I was drawn to its seeming absurdity of premise (the Justice League... in Europe!), but I stayed because I loved the characters, especially Elongated Man, who remains a favorite to this day.

All this to say, is that I think the Extemists are dumb and probably the worse part of JLE. I think they appeared twice (in the storylines The Extremist Vector and Breakdowns), and as pompously serious dark and gritty genocidal villains, they were a complete mismatch for the fun tone of JLE. JLE could get serious when it needed to, but this was not the way to do it. Maybe they were intended as a commentary on the excesses of 1990s gritty comics, but then the commentary did not land. If as a hardcore fan of JLE, I don't give a crap about the Extremists... then who does?

Despite that, DC brought them back for Countdown to Final Crisis and even devoted a six-issue miniseries to their backstory! I can't fathom why. Countdown to Final Crisis is inexplicable enough; why does it have two six-issue miniseries that tie into it? Why would you pay money for this? What artistic purpose does this book serve? I don't mean "artistic" in a high-faluting way, I mean, "Why would anyone enjoy reading this?"

Answer: no one would. This is another Final Crisis tie-in that isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

DC Comics Crises: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (mehr)

Ever since Jim Starlin's Mystery in Space with Captain Comet, I've been interested in DC's "space heroes", and so I've followed their adventures from there to Countdown to Adventure and thence to here. (DC hasn't created an ongoing for them, but with some kind of limited series always running, there's essentially one anyway.) But none of the subsequent volumes have been quite as good as that first volume of Mystery in Space. It's nice to see all the space heroes in action here, but there's almost too many of them-- no one gets a role sizable enough to be interesting, aside perhaps from Comet. (Though it is nice to see Tyrone, the Weird, and Chief Justice Max again; Starlin seems to do the best with his characters.) And the story isn't that great, feeling mostly like a series of fight scenes.

I was all set to complain about Ron Lim's art, but then I realized the problem wasn't him; it was Rob Hunter's inks. When Scott Koblish takes over inking in issue #4, the art is much clearer and nicer. The best art in the book, though, is Starlin's own work in the "Hawkman Special" interlude. Shame that its story is just a bunch of meaningless retcon continuity gubbins. I'll pick up volume two of this title, but it had better be dang good to keep me journeying with the space heroes; as much as I like them in principle, the execution is often lacking.

DC Comics Space Heroes: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (mehr)