The search begins!

The costume box returns.

If you couldn’t tell by last week’s comics, I’ve been a little bit busy. I’ve had a big project at work that’s been sucking up most of my waking time. Things are finally winding down this week, which is good because I’m waaaaaay behind on my comic reading. I have a huge stack of Kris’s comics that I need to read. I’m surprised he’s not turning purple trying to hold in all the stuff he wants to talk to me about the comics I haven’t read. Maybe he’s just forgotten it all and then when I finally read it and I’ll be like “Can you believe that happened?!?!” he’ll look at me like I’m crazy and have some witty retort about how he has no idea what I’m talking about. We’ll laugh for a while and then write it down and you’ll see it up here a couple of days later. With that little peek at our writing process, I think it’s time I stop rambling.

Anyway, while I haven’t read everything that we’ve been pulling, there are a couple of can’t miss titles. DC’s running two bi-weekly events right now, Brightest Day and Justice League: Generation Lost, that have both recently finished their 8th of 26 issues. The former follows the overarching story of the return of the Blackest Night Twelve[^1] as they try to figure out why they were brought back while the later focuses specifically on one character that was brought back, Maxwell Lord and the re-unified Justice League International that’s trying to combat him. We had assumed that Brightest Day was going to be the epic title that would end each week leaving us in shock and awe and aching for the next issue two weeks hence. While it’s been interesting, having so many characters to follow has left it very disjointed. Within each issue, there’s not a lot of story progression. Kris thinks that it might have been better if they had doubled the length of each issue and made it a monthly book instead.

On the other hand, Generation Lost has consistently blown us away. Judd Winick has done a phenomenal job of taking a group of B-list super heroes and demonstrating why they are heroes. The writing is funny without being slapstick or overly stupid. When the story needs to get serious, it tightens its belt and things get serious. If you could only pull one of these two books, definitely make it Gen Lost.

If you’re reading Gen Lost, you’re reading Power Girl right? Judd Winick took over the writing for PG about the same time as he started Gen Lost. While Power Girl and Gen Lost have had two disconnected stories so far, it definitely looks like there will be some connection down the line. I think you could read each one separately and not miss anything, but reading PG along with Gen Lost will make the Gen Lost experience that much richer. Even if it doesn’t, why would you pass up the opportunity to read such a fun book?

The other can’t miss title from Kris’s pulls is Wonder Woman. Everybody made a big deal when J Michael Straczynski started his run with Wonder Woman 600 and changed her costume. Now, three issues in nobody has been talking about the book. It’s a real shame, though, because it is a phenomenal story. Yes, some of the concepts - Diana’s arguments about the lack of influence of the gods, for example - are a little cliched, but they’ve been packaged together into a very compelling story. Wonder Woman was always one of those characters that I knew I was supposed to like, but was never really interested in. JMS’s run has definitely changed that. I know eventually that this alternative timeline with the renegade Amazons will be reconciled with the rest of the DCU and the previously established Wonder Woman mythos. When it does, I hope that WW will keep some of the bad-assery that she has now. It’ll be a much more interesting read.

Hopefully, I’ll get caught up in the next week or so. Then, I’ll have even more comics to rant about.

[^1]: The twelve dead heroes and villains that returned to life at the end of last year’s Blackest Night event.