Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week 18

Batman Beyond: Rebirth #1 by Dan Jurgens, Ryan Sook, Jeremy Lawson and Tony Avina

This is one of the "Rebirth" launches I was most perplexed by. Not because it's such an unusual concept or unlikely character, but simply because it seems like DC has already given the book plenty of time to run its course. That, and it just strikes me as odd that of all the excellent DC cartoons to keep trying to make into an ongoing series, they keep pushing Batman Beyond, which whatever its original charms seem fairly limited to something like, I don't know, Justice League Unlimited (Hey, what if all of DC's superheroes were on one big, All-Star Squadron-sized super-team?), or Batman: The Brave and The Bold (Hey, what if Batman hung out with Aquaman and Plastic Man all the time, and oh yeah, Aquaman was Marvel's Hercules?).

Admittedly, I've also kind of lost track of what's what with the publisher's Batman Beyond efforts. There were a few books set in the original cartoon's continuity, and then after the year-long New 52: Future's End series (the second-to-last hurrah for WildStorm character's in the DC Universe), a near-future version of Tim Drake traveled to a further-future where he assumed the mantle of Batman from Terry McGinnis and...I lost track after a couple of issues, because I was pretty sick of Batman Beyond after Future's End. (Double-checking, it looks like that 2015-launched series lasted just 16 issues, but, given the timing, it was likely to have been canceled as part of "Rebirth" rather than for any other reasons.

So I was a little surprised at how straightforward this book was.

Still written by Dan Jurgens, who is also writing Action Comics for DC, he's joined by artist Ryan Sook for a rehash of Batman Terry McGinnis' origin story, which may or may not vary too much from that of the original cartoon, which I only saw in fits and starts in Cartoon Network repeats. It seems like pretty much the same story, although there seem to be more Jokerz around. They are, in fact, the major threat, and what Terry busies himself fighting when not flashing-back to his origin. The big cliffhanger ending? The Jokerz are trying to resurrect the original Joker...I want to say "again," as there was a direct-to-DVD Batman Beyond movie entitled The Return of The Joker.

I suppose if this particular milieu is of interest to you, then this comic will be as well. What I've found most appealing about it in the past is the aesthetics, and while Sook is an unquestionably great artist and his work here is great, it doesn't really look or feel like Batman Beyond, either the cartoon or the pre-Future's End comics.

I'm afraid this is one I'm just not interested in at all. The first official issue of the series will debut at the end of the month, with Jurgens remaining on as writer and Bernard Chang, who drew the previous volume of Batman Beyond, taking over the artwork. Sook will still be around though, providing covers.

Teen Titans: Rebirth #1 Ben Percy, Jonboy Meyers and Jim Charalampidis

As I've mentioned in this feature repeatedly, 2011's Flashpoint/New 52 reboot of the DC Universe had some pretty harsh consequences for the characters of the previous iteration's first, third and fourth generation of superheroes (That would be the Golden Age heroes, the first crop of sidekicks and the 1990s-era second crop of sidekicks). Collapsing the fictional timeline from decades down to just five years had the effect of wiping out entire generations of characters, and those that did remain did so in forms that were somewhere between tinkered with and hideously mangled, and often in ways that didn't make sense if you stop to think about them for any length of time (i.e. Batman's four Robins, two of whom had grown to adulthood, in just five years).

While the Justice Society's generation was simply wiped out (with versions of those characters appearing in a series alternate reality series all sharing the title Earth 2), the Teen Titans franchise was apparently marketable enough to keep around, even if it meant they would be hideously mangled. Of the original Teen Titans, only Robin Dick Grayson and Speedy Roy Harper were still extant at the point of reboot, but new versions of Aqualad, Donna Troy and Kid Flash would eventually be introduced.

Of the Marv Wolfman/George Perez era Titans, the ones who have anchored Cartoon Networks' Teen Titans Teen Titans Go cartoons, Cyborg and Starfire were aged up to young adults, with the former being snatched up by Geoff Johns to be a founding member of the Justice League and the latter relegated to Red Hood and The Outlaws for some reason. Raven and Beast Boy, meanwhile, were introduced as teens, and would eventually find their way into the pages of the ever-troubled Teen Titans book.

As launched, that book was sort of picking up where Johns' run on Teen Titans had ended, with the core of the Young Justice team now the Teen Titans. September 2011's first issue was written by Scott Lobdell and penciled by Brett Booth, and featured on the cover Red Robin Tim Drake, Kid Flash Bart Allen, Wonder Girl Cassandra Sandsmark, Superboy, Solstice, Skitter and Bunker–you know, the Teen Titans.

That series lasted 30 issues (including #0, #23.1 and #23.2, because comics), with Lobdell, a veteran of 1990s X-Men comics, writing until the very end, getting assists from Fabian Niceiza on a trio of issues. Booth was the primary artist for much of those issues, while Eddy Barrows had a short six-issue run and Tyler Kikham a slightly shorter five-issue run (Ig Guara, Ale Garza, Angel Unzeta and Robson Rocha each drew one or two issues as well). While 30 issues seems like a relatively short run for a book starring that franchise in the second decade of the 21st century, it managed to survive several cullings of the the moribund New 52 line...and would be immediately relaunched anyway (as was done with Suicide Squad).

The second, post-Flashpoint volume of Teen Titans lasted just 24 issues, but it was canceled in order to make way for the third volume, which I will get to in a moment here I swear. This second New 52 volume launched under the new creative team of Will Pfeifer and pencil artist Kenneth Rocafort, and started with a more recognizable team: Red Robin, Wonder Girl, Beast Boy, Raven and Bunker. Pfeiffer wrote the first sixteen issues, and was then followed by Greg Pak for three issues and Tony Bedard for four issues. Rocafort drew seven issues, but the art was pretty inconsistent; Ian Churchill drew eight issues, and at least eight other pencil artists drew between three and one issues a piece. The book grew increasingly messy as it went on.

And that, finally, brings us to the third and (hopefully) final relaunch of the Teen Titans, in this one-shot special by writer Ben Percy and artist Jonboy Meyers. As I mentioned when writing about this issue for Good Comics For Kids, the great thing about this book is you don't really have to have read or even know anything about the previous 50+ issues of New 52 Teen Titans comics. Red Robin Tim Drake is pretend dead, which is why the old team has scattered and why there isn't currently a Teen Titans, and that's all you really need to know–maybe it would also help to be aware of the fact that current Robin Damian Wayne has a big red bat-monster...?

For the line-up, the creators have chosen a pretty instantly recognizable team, one that could certainly pass for the Teen Titans if you're only familiar with them from mass media adaptations: Robin, Beast Boy, Raven, Starfire and Kid Flash (Wally West...no, the other Wally West). As I mentioned at GC4K, that's the team from the cartoons, if you swap out Cyborg for Kid Flash, or the team from Justice League Vs. Teen Titans, if you swap out Blue Beetle for Kid Flash.

At first glance at the cover, it might be hard to wrap one's head around this particular team–Damian's never met these guys, Starfire's not a teen, etc.–but Percy cleverly uses Damian as his proxy. Why this particular team, exactly? Because Damian wants them, so he rounds them up and forces them into the same place at the same time against their will. This is going to be the Teen Titans now because Damian says so, apparently.

This is loosely one of the "bridge" format Rebirth specials, but it's less concerned with wrapping up old business from the previous Teen Titans than it is collecting a few of those characters from where they ended up (Starfire's own solo book was also canceled at about the same time as Teen Titans).

Percy and Meyers show us the four non-Damian Titans going about their business, and then each being captured by an mysterious hooded figure via elaborate traps (Spoiler: It's Damian).

In LA, Beat Boy is trying to party his troubles away and restart his acting career. In the Caribbean, Starfire is trying to break up a slavery ring. In New York City, Raven's trying to find some peace and quiet (I'm not sure how this fits with her own miniseries, which has her attending high school in San Francisco, but I didn't like the first issue of that and have no interest in the rest of it, so personally I think I'll just ignore it, if that's okay with you guys). And in Central City, this universe's Wally West (not to be confused with the pre-Flashpoint Wally West, currently appearing in Titans) is fighting crime and getting used to his new powers while wearing the classic red and yellow Kid Flash costume.

One by one they all get shocked or drugged into unconsciousness, only to awake in their costumes (I guess Damian undressed and re-dressed a few of them?) in a big super-villain trap. And out steps everyone's favorite arrogant little bastard:

What next? Well, Teen Titans #1, naturally. Where's it going? I don't know. But credit where credit's due, this is an inspired line-up in that it both looks like what one might expect the Titans to look like, while simultaneously introducing brand-new characters to the franchise (the Damian version of Robin, this new version of Wally West) and characters who haven't had an in-current-continuity association with the team or with one another.

It's a pretty great jumping-on point, introducing all five characters quickly and efficiently and spending the minimum amount of effort wrestling the team into place so the storytelling can start. Whether that story will be interesting or not remains to be seen, of course, but Damian is such a strong character that generally just putting him in a scene goes a long way towards filling it with conflict.

Additionally, the more out-there redesigns the characters suffered have been abandoned, and while they're not exactly in their most familiar costumes, either from the comics or the cartoons, Raven, for example, looks like Raven, Kid Flash looks like Kid Flash, despite the color of his skin being darker than Wally or Bart's (gone is the silver costume he debuted in).

This is only the second issue of a Teen Titans comic I've been able to read cover to cover since 2011 (the other was the last issue of the previous series), so from design, to rendering to storytelling, this is maybe the best the book's been in for pretty much ever.

I'm excited for Teen Titans #1, which will launch the last week of October and be by the same creative team as this issue.

Blue Beetle #1 by Keith Giffen, Scott Kolins and Romulo Fajardo Jr.

I don't really have anything to say about the first issue of this series that I didn't have to say about the Rebirth special; this very much reads like #2 of an already in-progress series.

Keith Giffen's bickering characters are all inherently unlikable, to the point that I can't wait to get away from them all. Jaime's indulging Ted doesn't really seem logical, if his only motivation is to get the brilliant billionaire to remove the alien artifact from his back. The superheroes-fighting part is pretty dull, as Blue Beetle takes on a member of a metahuman street gang, only to have the rest of the gang appear on the last page to presumably fight him some more next issue. Something more interesting is going on in Jaime's dreams, in which a Doctor Fate battles a giant version of the scarab.

I continue to love co-plotter Kolins' art, and particularly his version of Blue Beetle, the scarab and the bug, but there's not much here that's much fun, beyond Kolins' rendering of the title character. That's probably enough of this series for me.

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week 17

Cyborg #1 by John Semper Jr., Paul Pelletier, Tony Kordos, Scott Hanna and Guy Major

I found the first issue of the new, second volume of a Cyborg ongoing solo series to be surprisingly strong...although I must confess that was in large part because of how low I set the bar after the rather dull and predictable Cyborg: Rebirth #1, which simply ran through his origin one more time and introduced yet another iteration of the whether robots have souls or not issue (As I said at the time, it struck me that comic book writers only tell such stories about robots, cyborgs, androids, synthezoids and other artificial people, when really it's a pretty fundamental human concern. I worry about that kind of thing, and the only metal in my body is a filling where a cavity used to be).

After two pages of foreshadowing the threat that appears on the last two pages to engage Cyborg in a fight, the issue opens with Cyborg stopping some (relatively) petty crooks, then having an elaborate diagnostic run by his father and his friend Sarah at STAR Labs, and then she takes him out for ice cream and jazz music.

If this marks the end of his newfound worry whether he is a real human being with a real soul who has a bunch of robot parts, or if he is an elaborate machine that thinks it has a soul, then it would be a fairly satisfying conclusion to that conflict, even if the scene in which he rediscovers his soul could be viewed as rather trite, depending on how cynical vs. how generous a reader wants to be (It involves a blind jazz musician named Blue, who would stand out as a magical negro type if this comic weren't mostly populated with black folks).

To pencil artist Paul Pelletier's credit, he manages to sell Cyborg's discovery of his soul or humanity–or at least his realization that he can appreciate improvisational live jazz–really well with a few drawings and shifts in facial expression. He likewise handles all other aspects of the book pretty well.

As for the villain that picks the fight with Cyborg, after being awoken by the other villain, the one revealed at the end of the Rebirth special, it's yet one more instance of the Dan DiDio Era, worst-of-both-worlds approach to continuity. It's Kilg%re, a Flash villain from 1987 who played a role in the JLI-era Justice League comics and hasn't been heard from since.

Semper Jr. resurrects the character here, where so far it is simply a big scary robot, but if that name or history is at all attractive to you, then you've been reading DC comics rather voraciously for decades now, and are unlikely to be too terribly interested in the re-booted New 52 universe and this Cyborg comic, and if you're attracted to the NEw 52 universe because it's young, fresh continuity, then you're not really going to feel anything when a writer name-drops a minor 30-year-old character.

Kilg%re, it should go without saying, is a pretty bottom-of-the-barrel antagonist, so it's not like there is some core, timeless element to it that a rebooted version of it can accentuate to the degree that even a rebooted version of, say, Ultraman (evil Superman from an alternate, opposite reality) or Kite Man (guy who commits crimes, with kites!) might possess.

Nice art though and, as I said, I was actively worrying this would be much worse than it actually was.

Trinity #1 by Francis Manapul

One thing I've been curious about for a while now is where, when and with whom the term "trinity" originated in reference to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. I know Matt Wagner's awkwardly titled 2003 miniseries Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman: Trinity is the first time the three shared a book with that word in the title (a title later used for the excellent but underrated Kurt Busiek-written 2008 weekly series and now this new monthly), but I have to imagine the term pre-dates Wagner's series.

I suspect that the idea of the trio as the three greatest heroes in the DC Universe is a fannish concept, and it certainly figured in the epilogue of 1996's Kingdom Come by fans-turned-pros Mark Waid and Alex Ross. You'll recall the series ending with the three of them having lunch together, and deciding to raise Wonder Woman and Superman's child together, as a trio of parents.

It certainly seems like a rather millennial idea. In the Golden Age Batman and Superman (and Robin) shared a book, while Wonder Woman was part of the Justice Society. In the Silver Age, Batman and Superman (and Robin) continued to pal around, and were only occasional members of the Justice League, which was originally essentially all of DC's Greatest Superheroes Who Aren't Batman and Superman (and Robin)! And if by the Bronze Age Wonder Woman was seen as a peer to the World's Finest, 1985-1986's Crisis On Infinite Earths scuttled all that by re-introducing Wonder Woman into the rebooted DC Universe as a newcomer whose career was beginning something like 10 years later than the careers of the World's Finest (causing no end of problems for poor Wonder Girl, and necessitating her replacement in Justice League history with Black Canary).

Because these characters really do have a life of their own to some degree, the idea of Wonder Woman as Batman and Superman's peer rather than a sort of superhero ingenue gradually gained gravity as the years passed, so that by the time of the continuity re-shuffling of Infinite Crisis/52, she was again a Justice League founder.

As I mentioned the other day, there's something of a flaw at the foundation of the new Trinity series, though, at least on a conceptual level. In the post-Flashpoint continuity realignment, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman all began their careers around the same time, all met one another almost simultaneously and all founded the Justice League together. However the Superman that is starring in Trinity is not their Superman; he's the pre-Flashpoint one, so what we have here are The New 52 Batman and Wonder Woman, who have known one another and worked together for a good 5-8 years, teaming with an older, wiser Superman from a different reality, who they have just met.

Francis Manapul, who writes, draws and colors this issue, has chosen to embrace this peculiarity to DC
s trinity, premising this first issue on Lois Lane (also from the pre-Flashpoint DCU, her New 52 counterpart having been conveniently killed off shortly after New 52 Superman died) inviting this universe's Batman and Wonder Woman over to their Hamilton County farmhouse for a surprise dinner. Her thinking being that her husband, now going as "Clark White," needs friends. So she turned to this dimension's versions of his two best friends from their home universe.

It's all a lot more complicated than it needs to be, and is unfortunately going to be something that is more-or-less constantly being referred to, as there will always be a wedge between Superman and the other points of the trinity...probably. The mysterious Mr. Oz, who doesn't appear here, has repeatedly mentioned in other books that things aren't exactly what they seem with the Supermen.

So In this issue, Manapul introduces us to the trinity in double-page splash lay-outs, as Wonder Woman and Batman converge on the White farmhouse to have dinner with Clark, Lois and their son Jonathan (who accidentally blasts the visitors with heat-vision). Their basic relationships are established pretty quickly, and Manapul writes off a further New 52 complication to the idea of these three as best superfriends (the fact that New 52 Wonder Woman and New 52 Superman were an item).

There are some cute moments, including Batman being forced to wear plaid after Jon accidentally heat-visions his shirt off, and Wonder Woman bringing a wild boar to dinner (Jesus Diana, just bring a bottle of wine; you expect Lois to clean, cure and cook that thing in order to feed her family of three? You better hope they have a meat cooler somewhere on the farm). As to where it's all going, there's some coy allusions to Jack and the Beanstalk, and it ends with the three heroes looking into a mirror where a young Clark Kent is looking back at them, his father behind him.

It's a pretty classic, pretty effective "What the heck is going on? Find out next issue!" ending, really. While there's nothing wrong with the writing, the book's great strength is Manapul's artwork. He's one of the best artists DC has working for them these days, his design style looks like a compromise between that of Cliff Chiang and Time Sale, and his coloring is particularly effective at the sunset, bucolic world of the rural parts of the DC Universe (as he ably demonstrated during his too-short run on Adventure Comics with Geoff Johns (I'd heartily recommend their Superboy: The Boy of Steel collection, if you haven't read it yet).

I'm not entirely sure of where the book is going, and what might keep it going after this initial outing. With a small, focused Justice League team–just these three and five other characters–it seems somewhat odd to have a comic book starring half the Justice League (I'd kind of like to see Aquaman force Flash, Cyborg and the Green Lanterns to hang out with him once a month or so, and they can all get together and kvetch about the "Trinity" who are too cool to hang out with them unless the world is ending and they need their help).

Given Manapul's artwork though, this should be a particularly easy "Rebirth" book to keep an eye on.

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week 16

Okay, so here's a question that didn't occur to me until literally five minutes ago: Is Gotham Academy: Second Semester, the only new DC comic to launch this week that wasn't on the new Young Animal imprint, part of the "Rebirth" initiative or not?

I had been operating under the belief that it was, seeing as how it was a shared-universe, DCU book that was canceled around the time as all of the other such books, and being relaunched with a new #1 during the roll-out of all the other "Rebirth" titles, even if it was near the end of that roll-out (I believe there are just two more books yet to debut, Teen Titans and Trinity).

But when I sat down to write about Gotham Academy: Second Semester #1, I see that it lacks the "Rebirth" branding along the top that all of the other "Rebirth" books have:

Which reminds me that when DC first announced the line-up of Rebirth books, Gotham Academy didn't appear on that list, which lead to fans wondering for a few days if it was being canceled and staying canceled, rather than being canceled just to be relaunched.

I can't imagine why it wouldn't be considered part of "Rebirth," as it's a non-imprint, DCU title set in the shared-universe (unlike, say, DC Comics Bombshells or The Legend of Wonder Woman or Scooby-Doo Team-Up or Scooby Apoaclypse), but there is clearly now "Rebirth" logo atop the first issue.

As a relatively poorer-selling DCU comic that is nevertheless high-quality and all-ages in address, it's the sort of book that DC should be publishing and continue to publish as long as they can, and one that could probably use any sales boost it can get. Which, I suppose begs a question for the retailers in the reading audience--Does the "Rebirth" banner across the top help sell more books if all other factors are even?

Like, would Gotham Academy: Second Semester #1 see a sales increase based solely on the "Rebirth" logo? Little else here in direction or creative team has changed, so it's difficult to even find another comic in the exact same place as Gotham Academy. Given how relatively deep a corner of the Bat-Family books Gotham Academy occupies, I suppose it's theoretically possible that the "Rebirth" logo might have hurt it, as a long-time reader who only reads that book from DC's line might be intimidated, thinking it's part of a bigger crossover?

I have no idea. I'm just wondering aloud, basically.

Given that I'm not sure, I suppose I won't offer a review here...especially since I just reviewed it as part of this week's "Comic Shop Comics" the other day.

I will recommend it, though, and Gotham Academy in general. The series centers on an unofficial Detective Club as a prestigious, Gotham City boarding school, the members of which are constantly finding themselves engaged in the weird goings-on there, and at the weird city in general.

It's not really a Bat-Family title, despite its participation in the fringes of certain events, having published an "Endgame" tie-in one-shot and participated in "Robin War." Bruce Wayne gets mentioned and occasionally appears, and Robin Damian Wayne has appeared more frequently, striking up a friendship of sorts with Maps, the weirdest and quirkiest and most mystery-obsessed member of Detective Club. And the faculty of the school seems to consist of one Professor MacPherson and a bunch of Batman villains, ranging from Dr. Langstrom (Man-Bat, natch) to Mister Scarlet (Batman '66's Bookworm).

I like it a lot. I will note that it reads better in trade than in single issues, though.

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week 15

Cyborg: Rebirth #1 by John Semper Jr., Paul Pelletier, Sandra Hope, Tony Kordos and Guy Major

Like most of the (in-story) third generation of DC superheroes, Marv Wolfman and George Perez's character Cyborg suffered from the 2011 continuity-scrambling Flashpoint/New 52 initiative, but he did so in a rather unique way. He survived the purge that affected much of that generation of heroes, and while his history (i.e. that which made him him) was completely erased, he was promoted (or re-promoted, I guess) from a Titan/Teen Titan to a member of the Justice League in the new continuity.

And so he ascended to number seven in the overall ranking of all DC superheroes (above Martian Manhunter, who traditionally held that spot for decades), but he was now a blank slate, nothing more than a name and set of kind of generic computer-related powers. For much of the last five years in the pages of Justice League, Cyborg was little more than a receptionist and transportation system for the other six Leaguers.

DC awarded him his own ongoing monthly series–his first since his 1980 creation–in 2015, and it lasted the same 12-ish issues as the other series DC launched around that time, just enough to fill two trades. Did it get canceled due to poor sales, or simply because DC canceled everything around that time, in order to relaunch many of the books as part of the "Rebirth" initiative...?

I don't know, but I would imagine from the fact that Cyborg is one of the latest of the "Rebirth" relaunches, followed only by low-selling (but good!) Gotham Academy, that it was a combination of the two.

Cyborg 2.0 has an entirely new creative team, in writer John Semper Jr. (David F. Walker wrote the majority fo the previous volume, followed briefly by Wolfman) and pencil artist Paul Pelletier, here inked by Sandra Hope and Tony Kordos. I would like to say they have an entirely new story to tell, but they don't seem to have anything to say about the new, New 52 version of the character that hasn't already been said in the previous volume, Justice League and related comics.

An unseen narrator, who isn't revealed until the surprise ending, tells Cyborg Victor Stone's origin story, starting with the meeting of his parents and ending in his joining of the Justice League, while the superhero battles against a big, monstrous artificially intelligent threat with self-repair powers and its own dialogue bubble style. The bad guy, named "Malware" (If I were texting you this review, I would hear include the eye-roll emoji), is trying to get to and through the Red Room in S.T.A.R. Labs, which is either where the little, backwards talking, funny-dancing guy from Twin Peaks hangs out or where Doctor Silas Stone and Doctor T.O. Morrow keep all the alien technology, I forget which.

Then he reaches a secret room, where Stone keeps a secret about his son's recreation as a cyborg. Are you ready for the big revelation? Get this. What if Cyborg, being mostly mechanical, doesn't have a soul? What if he is more machine than man? What if–hey, did you pass out? Wake up, wake up! Yes, I know this is like, Robot Guy Plot 101, and DC and Marvel have been writing various versions about this since before Cyborg was even created, and yeah, you can probably think of a dozen different manga and anime series with the same conflict, and while I don't read prose science fiction because of all the words, something tells me someone or eighty authors have covered that ground pretty thoroughly as well, but, well, that's what they're going with here, I guess. Maybe the series will last 12 issues...?

(Why is it only androids and cyborgs who worry about that stuff, by the way? In real life, don't we all wonder if we have souls or not? Why isn't there a Batman series premised on his philosophical questions?)

The one aspect of the book I did find interesting was the second-to-last page,where we see the surprise-ish bad guy looking at a huge bank of monitors on which we sell a whole mess of various robot and cyborg characters from throughout the current DCU–The Metal Men, OMAC, Robotman, Red Tornado, The Brain, Cyborg Superman,  Steel (for some reason), some characters I don't recognize–and intimates that they are all part of some bigger plan.

The artwork is fine. I've always like Pelletier's pencil work, which is well-suited to classic super-heroics, but here he's inked in such a way that it all looks a little too New 52 to me. It's the same visual white noise that makes so many of the DC comics of this area (although they are steadily improving!) boring to look at, which is something a superhero comic book should never be.

I'll read the first issue of the series proper, for the purposes of this feature on my blog, but I'm not looking forward to it, and can't imagine I'll be reading #2. (Well, maybe I'll play "The Night Begins To Shine" on repeat while I read the Cyborg #1. Perhaps that will improve it. It certainly can't hurt it!)

...

You know, while I'm on the subject of a Wolfman/Perez-era Titans creation, it may be worth considering how DC has made use of that group of characters since their reboot. While DC kept Cyborg's basic origin–suffering what should have been a fatal accident, Victor Stone's super-scientist father saves him with robot parts-–itt was now attached to Jack Kirby's Fourth World characters, and occurred in the pages of Justice League, where he was the team's sole teenage member.

Starfire hung out with Robin II-turned-The Red Hood Jason Todd and Arsenal Roy Harper in the pages of Red Hood and The Outlaws, briefly earned her own ongoing series and is now poised to join the next iteration of the Teen Titans, as its sole adult member (the membership of this line-up will reflect that of the recent Justice League Vs. Teen Titans movie, and Geoff Johns' basic conception of a post-Young Justice Teen Titans series in which Starfire, Cyborg and Beast Boy served as mentors to the fourth generation of heroes.)

And Beast Boy and Raven? They're a good five years younger than their two former peers, and have been appearing in the pages of Teen Titans, where they have been peers of characters who used to be among the fourth generation of DC's heroes, like (Red) Robin Tim Drake and Wonder Girl Cassandra Sandsmark.

None of the four are involved in the new Titans series, which features the grown-up sidekicks who were the original Teen Titans which...I actually can't make sense of following Flashpoint/The New 52/Convergence/DC Universe: Rebirth. From what I've read of it so far, it seems to me a more appropriate title might be Nightwing and The Donna Troys.

...

Oh! One more thing, and then I'll move on, I swear. The narrator is extremely specific about how long Cyborg has been Cyborg in this comic, even counting the seconds. But the years he places at five, and then a few months, suggesting only five years and a few months have passed since Justice League #1-6. That's fine...except time seems to move faster in Gotham City than anywhere else in the world. At least twice Scott Snyder's scripts have suggested a year has passed (between The Joker having his face flayed off and "Death of The Family," and then again between "Death of The Family" and "Endgame"). And, of course, in DC Universe: Rebirth we saw 10-year-old Damian Wayne blow out the candles on his birthday cake which indicated he was now 13.

So a few months in Detroit is three years in Gotham City, I guess...? Man, Alan Moore and Doctor Manhattan must have really did a number on the DC Universe!

Supergirl #1 by Steve Orlando, Brian Chin and Michael Atiyeh

It may be in large part because the Rebirth special braced me for the many ways in which the new Supergirl series will cover very similar territory to the television series, but do so by veering in different directions, but I found this issue a lot easier to parse. And a large part of that is also definitely the art by Brian Chin, which features more distinct character designs, so that for example, the four blonde women all look like different people.

Writer Steve Orlando attempts an All-Star Superman homage on the first page, attempting to boil Supergirl's origin down to just four panels and short phrases just as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely managed to do with Superman's origin in their book, but it doesn't really work here. That's partly because Superman's origin, for all the tinkering it's gone through over 75+ years, has had enough commonality in all of those versions that Morrison and Quitely could pick the phrases and images that repeated in all of them. No such luck with Supergirl, whose origin changes so greatly from version to version, and even having read the Rebirth special, I'm still not entirely sure of the specifics as presented here (I think Supergirl is from Argo City, a floating city in a forcefield above Krypton, that was destroyed along with Krypton...?).

It's rather unfortunate, because the homage attempt is so obvious, the fact that it doesn't quite land is sort of embarrassing to watch, like a basketball player on a fast break going for a three-pointer and getting an air ball, rather than going for the easy lay-up (Sports metaphor!).

Things improve on pages two and three, and remain strong after that. While a relatively large part of the Rebirth special was devoted to info-dumping, here Orlando re-states the new book's premise by showing rather than telling: Because adolescent Supergirl didn't grow up an Earthling the way her cousin Superman did, the government doesn't trust her as much. So Department of Extranormal Operations head Cameron Chase has made a deal with S-girl. In exchange for restoring her lost super-powers, they've assigned her foster parents who are DEO agents and the secret identity of Kara Danvers, via which she will attend high school in National City and continue to acclimate to Earth. As in the TV show, Supergirl and the DEO will work together to fight super-threats (I hope Orlando's DEO better-resembles the version from D. Curtis Johnson's Chase, John Ostrander's Martian Manhunter and other comics of that era, rather than the version on the TV show, which consists of a base with four rooms and like a dozen not particularly bright agents in matching black uniforms.)

This issue is mostly devoted to demonstrating Kara's difficulties in acclimating to her new world, as Orlando and Ching continually flip-flop back and forth between daily life on Krypton to that on Earth. In this issue we also meet Cat Grant, who appears to be characterized more closely to how she is on the TV show than how she has been previously in the comics (that is, she scans here more like a particularly bitchy Lois Lane than anything else). We also meet a new supporting character (the guy in the glasses in the lower left-hand corner). And Kara comes face-to-face with the same villain introduced in the epilogue of the special, The New 52 Cyborg Superman, who is apparently her father and whom I know absolutely nothing about (I think his presence here is particularly wonky, though, given that the television show has used "Hank Henshaw," the secret identity of the original, pre-Flashpoint/New 52 Cyborg Superman as the director of the D.E.O. who never, ever turns into a cyborg of any kind).

I liked this a lot better than the special, as I've already mentioned, and actually think it makes for a better starting point, particularly since it also demonstrates the visual style of the series (the special was drawn by several different artists, none of whom were Ching). I think it will take a few issues before we can really get a sense of how good it may or may not be, and if DC has finally gotten around to giving fans of the show a solid, in-universe comic to enjoy, but so far so good.

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week 14

There were five Wednesdays in August, so on the fifth week of August–and the fourteenth week of DC's "Rebirth" rollout–no Rebirth-branded specials or new series launched.

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week 13

Blue Beetle: Rebirth #1 by Keith Giffen, Scott Kolins and Romulo Fajaroo Jr

This is the Blue Beetle relaunch at least some DC readers have been anticipating since at least 2013, when writer Geoff Johns introduced Ted Kord into the post-Flashpoint DCU in the pages of Forever Evil. As promised in the pages of the Johns-written DC Universe: Rebirth #1 special, however, this book isn't about the old universe's Blue Beetle II becoming this universe's Blue Beetle II, nor is it a third volume of Blue Beetle starring the old universe's Blue Beetle III, Jaime Reyes. Rather, this is going to co-star Kord and Reyes as different parts of Team Beetle, with Reyes using the scarab-generated suit and Kord working behind-the-scenes as a sort of advisor and engineer.

It's at least something different, which means maybe this will last longer than the last Blue Beetle series. Just to recap, Reyes was introduced as the new, third Blue Beetle during Infinite Crisis, a series that was the climax of a chain of events originally investigated by Kord, who was killed off in a scene that no one anywhere on Earth liked at all. Infinite Crisis was followed by a Blue Beetle series that lasted 36 issues, from 2006-2009. Giffen co-wrote the series at the outset.

After the 2011 line-wide reboot "The New 52," Blue Beetle was relaunched, but this short-lived incarnation lasted just 16 issues. It was written by Tony Bedard, which I point out only because this volume was Giffen-less. I don't think that's the reason it was canceled, so much as that it was competing against 51 other DC super-comics, and a five-year-old character wasn't exactly ripe for a reboot.

So now we start a third volume, with original co-writer Giffen back. He shares a "story by" credit with artist Kolins, while he scripts the dialogue (unfortunately).

The premise seems something like a compromise one meant to appeal to fans of both Beetles, but it's pretty shaky. Reyes goes to Kord, a brilliant billionaire genius with a reputation for having a heart, in order to have him help remove the alien scarab that has attached itself to his spine (and thus transformed him into Blue Beetle). Instead, Kord builds a mobile, blue beetle-themed headquarters (The Bug) and wants to become part of a dynamic duo with Jaime, who hates that idea.

It can't sustain itself like that for very long, as Jaime has no reason to agree to the arrangement, so hopefully Giffen and Kolins write a change-of-heart for the title character into the story STAT. Otherwise, the plot of this issue reads like a weird cover version of Giffen's original series: There's Jaime's big family, his two bickering best friends and there's local super-crime boss, the aunt and guardian of one of those friends.

In this issue, Jaime suits up to fight weird villains Rack and Ruin, who are holding up a Starbucks Sundollars just to pick a fight with him, and a Doctor Fate shows up (I think there's two, possibly three at the moment).

Because I've read much of the 2006-2009 series, much of Jaimie's non-superhero life seemed repetitive to me, and the fact that Giffen gave his friends such annoying, mean-spirited dialogue as they argued made me think of them as I did Giffen's Sugar and Spike in Legends of Tomorrow–I don't really want to be around them at all. (Similarly, Jaime seemed so belligerent with Ted that it only made it harder to suspend one's disbelief regarding the new direction).

As with the Sugar and Spike feature, however, Blue Beetle: Rebirth has some excellent art work...if only the story was half as fun and intriguing as installments of the Sugar and Spike strip.

I really like Kolins' re-design and rendering of the Blue Beetle costume. He looks very close to his previous incarnations, but with a much more expressive face and dynamic body. The eyes and mouth are great, the scarab's antennae are great, the fingers, the toes...I really love the way Kolins draws the title character.

That is easily my favorite part of this issue, and the thing that would most likely make me want to read Blue Beetle #1 and beyond.

Deathstroke #1 by Priest, Carlo Pagulayan, Jason Paz and Jeromy Cox

This issue made me curious about the rationale that went into choosing which books received Colon Rebirth #1 specials and which did not. In some of the cases, where the more popular characters were involved and the events of those specials would spin out in to multiple books (or storylines, in the case of Wonder Woman), it seems obvious that the specials functioned as deck-clearing exercises, jumping-on points for new and lapsed readers that simultaneously served as bridges to regular readers.

Other books featuring characters in transition from one status quo to another–like, say, Dick Grayson, whose Grayson book ended and who was being relaunched into another volume of Nightwing–similarly make sense.

I'm not so sure about Deathstroke, though. Certainly it's writer Christopher Priest, who is just going by "Priest" in the first two credit boxes, treated the script for Deathstroke #1 as if it were Deathstroke #2, rather than a second #1, following the Deathstroke: Rebirth #1.

Not that I can say I blame him. Starting any new book with two consecutive #1s is like something of a challenge, and it will be interesting (well, interesting to me at least) to see how the specials are collected. Will Batman: Rebirth #1 appear in the first collection of the new, "Rebirth" era Batman or All-Star Batman....? Will some of the collections read extremely poorly, with narratives that start, stop and star again, all within the first twenty-some pages...?

The first Deathstroke collection by Priest, Pagulayan and Paz won't have that problem, at least, although I can't help but wonder if someone decided to skip Deathstroke: Rebirth #1 and start instead with Deathstroke #1 will be a little lost.

Not only is this the second chapter, but Priest isn't exactly doing any hand-holding in the way he tells his story, stringing together a series of vignettes along two time-lines that interact with one another, and leaving it to the reader to sort out exactly who is who.

This issue seemingly ends a 40-page story, with Deathstroke reuniting with Wintergreen, his family life layed-out and his extremely complex moral code demonstrated in almost byzantine fashion. Priest did some extremely cool stuff with Clock King here, although that seems to be the last we'll be seeing of him for a while; the other villain, the African warlord called "The Red Lion," seems to be sticking around though.

Priest infuses the story with a welcome, and somewhat unexpected, sense of humor, and it's very elaborately plotted in a way that can seem challenging, but also makes for a rewarding read.

Visually, I can't remember a time a Deathstroke book looked better, but I know it was more than five years ago.

This past week there was some online titterings that the villain of the next Batman movie would be Deathstroke, which seems like a terrible idea to me (He's such a...normal character, of the sort that could have appeared in pretty much any action movie of the last 40 years, that seeing him fighting a "realistic" Batman who is also rocking body armor and guns and shit just sounds...boring). If that does turn out to be the case (Sorry, Catman! Maybe next time!), then it's a good thing that DC's Deathstroke is in such solid shape at the moment.

Between collections of this and the original series, DC will certainly have enough material to put together plenty of decent trades to put in the hands of new readers curious about the character from the film.

The Hellblazer #1 by Simon Oliver, Moritat and Andre Szymanowicz

After the The Hellblazer: Rebirth special, writer Simon Oliver and artist Moritat's run on the latest volume of the constantly relaunched John Constantine ongoing series* begins in earnest.

It includes a few flashback panels to the previous series, the short-lived Constantine: The Hellblazer, which only serves to underscore how drastic the changes to the character, at least visually, were between the two series. The Constantine: The Hellblazer version, drawn by Riley Rossmo, had short, well-groomed hair and was dressed in tighter-fitting, more stylish clothes...even an actual coat, rather than a trench coat, which made him look like someone you might actually pass by on the streets of New York City, rather than a television police detective. For this series, the character's third since the cancellation of his 300-issue, 1988-2013 book, he's back to looking like the older, rumpled, ill-groomed, Vertigo-era Constantine, who wears a trench coat the way Superman and Batman wear capes.

The plot hearkens back farther still, to Constantine's original appearances as a supporting character in the pages of Alan Moore and company's Swamp Thing, as the big, green guy with red eyes and orange dialogue bubbles grows himself a body in the greenhouse behind Chas' house asking for a favor. He wants Constantine's help tracking down Abby, who is no longer where he (and we) last saw her.

To help, Constantine makes Swamp Thing ride in a cab, and introduces him to his sorceress friend who helped him get back into London in the Rebirth special.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to a pair of very long-lived supernatural beings who look like men and have differing views about how openly to act in history. In fact, when we first meet them, one of them is about to prevent Archduke Franz Ferdinand from being shot, but his brother stops him before he can stop the assassin. They appear at the end, where they exchange words about escaping the notice of the creator (Interesting point that Oliver puts in one of their mouths).

It's an interesting set-up, and Oliver writes nice Constantine/Swamp Thing banter. Additionally, Moritat's art is pretty excellent, and doesn't look much of anything like what one might expect a Constantine or a Swamp Thing comic to look like. All that said, there's nothing so remarkable about the comic to really justify its existence at this point, or to suggest that this comic will succeed where the last three failed. Rather, I would guess that after a few months of a Rebirth-inspired uptick in sales, this will fall back to the same place as the previous series, meeting the needs of the too-few John Constantine fans out there.

Constantine, like Swamp Thing, could probably both use a couple of years off at this point, and Oliver and Moritat could both use better vehicles for their considerable skills.




*It's likely growing tiresome for you guys to hear me constantly repeating the same point, but this is such a salient example that it's kind of hard to pass up. If the premise of DC Universe: Rebirth #1 and therefore the status quo of the DC Universe, is that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen characters are villains who "ruined" the DC Universe by creating The New 52 (in-story), then the most obvious reading is that Moore is in part responsible for the current sorry state of the DC Universe, relative to the pre-Flashpoint DCU. Naturally then the publisher plans to move forward with a slate of relaunches that includes...an Alan Moore creation. And one once deemed too dark and mature for DC's superhero line, and had to thus be relegated to asomewhat walled-off mature readers imprint.

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week 12

Supergirl: Rebirth #1 by Steve Orlando, Emanuela Lupachhino, Ray McCarthy and Michael Atiyeh

DC Comics sure took its time getting a Supergirl comic–any Supergirl comic–on the stands in time to meet the demand of the fairly well-received Supergirl TV show. It wasn't until late in the season that they managed a digital-first series that tied directly into the show (a sort of comic book cul-de-sac that never interested me, and always struck me as counter-productive), and showed the general lack of care that goes into the creation of pretty much all of the publisher's digital-first comics (Here, as in most cases, there were too many artists drawing in too many divergent styles). Now that the first season is completely over, and ratings have dipped enough that the show is moving from a network to CW's superhero ghetto in order to be more cheaply produced, there's finally a new, ongoing, canonical Supergirl comic, designed with one eye towards appealing to viewers of the show (Viewers who wanted a Supergirl comic, like, last year and then patiently waited until this week to get one, I guess).

It's...kind of weird, actually.

I confess to complete and total ignorance of what the publisher did to the character during the course of their 2011 New 52 reboot, aside from remembering that her costume was redesigned as a one-piece with an awkwardly-placed red panel that made it look like she flew off forgetting to put on her skirt.

This proved somewhat challenging, as writer Steve Orlando's approach to the Supergirl: Rebirth special is the "bridge" one, essentially moving the character from where she left off (Her last monthly, launched as part of The New 52, was ironically canceled just months before the debut of the Supergirl TV show, rather than simply being retooled to appeal to a different and broader audience, a la Cameron Stewart, Brenden Fletcher and Babs Tarr's not-a-reboot recalibration of Batgirl) to where she's going. This means there's a lot of business that seems a little out-of-left-field, like the Department of Extranormal Operations helping the powerless Supergirl regain her lost super-powers, for example.

Knowing next-to-nothing about this Supergirl and her origins means I don't know where she came from, what the deal with her family is, how she escaped Krypton, why she was sent to Earth, what her relationship to Superman is, what she's been doing on Earth all this time and, oh yeah, what the deal with red Kryptonite is these days. After so many reboots, rejiggerings and resets, Supergirl is one of the handful of DC characters–The Legion of Super-Heroes, Hawkman, Donna Troy–where all of the particulars of her stories just register like white noise to me.

What's most interesting–and weird–about this series is how Orlando adopts elements of the TV show and attempts to ground them in the current DC Universe and the result feels awkward, as if the premise here is from an earlier, abandoned draft of the story bible for the show.

In Argo City (labeled here as "Survivor of Krypton's Destruction...Soon To Meet Its Own"), Supergirl's dad Zor-El is a judge sentencing a criminal of sorts to the Phantom Zone (on the show, her mom had a similar role). The DEO director is Cameron Chase (created, like the DEO, for the short-lived but promising 1998 series Chase by Dan Curtis Johnson and J.H. Williams III), whereas on the TV show the director was Hank Henshaw (Spoiler alert: Who was really a superhero posing as the late Henshaw), while Chase appeared in just a single episode as an FBI agent. They have assigned Kara Zor-El, who is going to work with them to repay them for helping her get her powers back and basically because she could use the support, to two married agents who will pose as her foster parents, Eliza Danvers and Jeremiah Danvers. Both characters on the TV show in small roles, although it is Kara's foster sister who is a DEO agent, not her foster parents.

They are all based in a facility in a desert outside of National City, like on the TV show, where Supergirl has been assigned the human identity of high school student Kara Danvers. Her costume is patterned after the one from the TV show, but with New 52 seams, no tights and a field of yellow behind her S-shield.

This issue is basically all set-up, the conflict being Supergirl having to deal with Lar-On, the Kryptonian werewolf that her dad sentenced to the Phantom Zone in the flashback, who was released from the Zone on Earth when Supergirl's power-restoration rocket was fired up.

Despite how much of this scanned like set-up white noise to me, I have to say, I do like the sound of "Kryptonian werewolf." (Much more so than "Cyborg-Superman," a version of which will apparently be involved in the ongoing series that will follow this).

The artwork by pencil artist Emanuela Lupcchhino and inker Ray McCarthy is quite strong, but having all three women in the narrative be identical-looking ones with shoulder-length blonde hair probably wasn't the smartest of choices. Lupucchino and McCarthy do great work giving the characters expressive faces, but their style isn't the sort that's devoted to giving them distinct faces.

Structured as it is, this is a difficult book to judge as anything other than a potential jumping-on point. Personally, it read as too little, too late to me (this is pretty much exactly what DC could have come up with just by watching the first highlight reel of the pilot episode, or reading descriptions of the series), but far better to have a so-so Supergirl series than not have one at all, I guess. I'd have to read another issue to know if this is a series I want to read regularly, but at this point I'm more mildly curious than excited.

Batgirl and The Birds of Prey #1 by Julia Benson, Shawn Benson, Claire Roe and Allen Passalaqua

Counting Batgirl and The Birds of Prey: Rebirth #1, this issue marks the first 40 pages of the new Birds of Prey book, and it just doesn't seem to be working. Again a chunk of the issue is devoted to Batgirl Barbara Gordon's time as Oracle, working as Black Canary's partner from her clocktower base...none of which ever happened, as per the Flashpoint/New 52 reboot. This sort of soft, title/s-specific reboot can occasionally work in small doses here and there, but is particularly frustrating here and now, given how frequent DC's reboots are (this could have occurred in the wake of Convergence or Multiversity, for example, or the upcoming Watchmen crossover of some sort that DC Universe: Rebirth all but promised).

Grafting the old Helena "The Huntress" Bertinelli's origin and characterization onto the new Helena Bertinelli's not really working either; co-writers Julie and Shawna Benson just seem to be writing her as is she was the previous continuity's Helena, rather than as the entirely new person with an entirely new background that she is, with only a token nod or two to the fact that she used to be the leader of an international super-spy organization.

The plot of the special continues here. Someone is using the Oracle name for nefarious purposes, and Barbara Gordon wants to stop that person, with Black Canary at her side for old time's sake. Meanwhile, The Huntress wants to murder the very same people Batgirl and Canary need info from, as they all conspired to kill her entire family a long time ago. After a very confusing fight scene involving a guy who controls snakes, in which an exploding couch is randomly drawn in background of one panel for no reason, the three women decide to strike up an uneasy alliance.

Claire Roe's art remains good in terms of draftsmanship, if it can be difficult to make sense of at times (see above), but this premise just isn't working for me at all...even if it does seem an improvement over that of the New 52 series. What makes this disappointment all the more disappointing is that the last Batgirl cream team spent so many months putting together an even bigger and far better team that was apparently sadly shelved in favor of this (and, I suppose, elements of the "Rebirth" version of Detective Comics).

Suicide Squad #1 by Rob Williams, Jim Lee, Jason Fabok, Scott Williams and Alex Sinclair

After the tinkering with the premise of the New 52 Suicide Squad to bring it more in line with that of the original incarnation (and that of the film, which seemed an amalgamation of the two eras of the team) in the Suicide Squad: Rebirth special, writer Rob Williams now launches the new series in earnest, and it is essentially a canonical, comic book extrapolation of the film.

The current line-up lines up pretty much exactly: U.S. military guy Rick Flag is Amanda Waller's new field leader, superhero Katana is his lieutenant and this first mission calls for the talents of Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, Killer Croc and one June Moon. Each of them are kept in shipping containers in Belle Reeve prison, which looks like he has been redesigned to maybe be submerged under the water of the Louisiana swamps (Legion of Doom-style), but Jim Lee's double-page splash establishing shot isn't too terribly clear on this matter (a big single image like that shows import and detail, but no movement, and buildings aren't exactly things that can be drawn with enough dynamism to suggest movement).

After the team is assembled–via a neat sequence where large, mechanical arms pluck their shippint containers up and move them to surround a meeting room of sorts, their doors sliding open to allow them entry–Waller gives them their mission and off they go, entering hostile territory via some kind of weird ring of car seats that requires them to wear space suits. When something goes wrong, Flag heroically tries to save one of their number, which endangers them all to the point that their only hope for surviving this early part of this mission is for Moon to turn into her powerful other self.

And that's it. That is the whole first chapter of this story. If you were among the many who was wondering just how on Earth notoriously slow–and presumably quite buys–artist/DC Comics Co-Publisher Jim Lee was going to manage drawing a 20-page book on a monthly basis, the answer is, he's not. He just drew the first 13 pages. The book is apparently going to be divided roughly in half-ish, with Lee drawing the the lion's share and the remainder being filled with character-specific back-up stories by another artist (here, Jason Fabok).

It...is not ideal, but I imagine that it is well worth a less-than-satisfying issue-by-issue read in order to keep Lee art in each issue, and thus sales appropriately high. It will likely read much better collected, particularly if they put the Lee-drawn team story all together in the front of each volume, and the back-ups in the, um, back.

In this issue, that back-up is entitled "Never Miss," and is both a kinda sorta run-through of Deadshot's origin (in broad strokes) and a team-up with Batman. When a Kobra cultist kidnaps his daughter, who doesn't know her dad, in order to force him to work for them, he instead turns to Batman for help, promising to use rubber bullets. He keeps his promise, until he stops, and surrenders to Batman after they save his daughter.

I'm not sure how much, or even if, this differs from the New 52 origins of the character, but Fabok at least draws Floyd Lawton to look like Floyd Lawton, so it's already head and shoulders above the last Suicide Squad #1 from 2011 (despite forgetting Floyd's mustache on the cover, it's worth noting that Lee and Williams do remember it in the interior art).

I was a little disappointed that so few of the character/costume designs matched those of the film, which, in general, were far superior to their New 52 costumes. Deadshot is still wearing his dumb New 52 costume, rather than a pared-down version of his original, as his movie costume basically was. Katana's basically wearing what she was in her short-lived solo series (again, I liked the movie costume better, which looked both more realistic, more functional and sexier, thanks to the bared abs, rather than the bodystocking). Boomerang's wearing the same basic costume he has for a decade or so now (I don't like the hat). Enchantress, who had the most striking and scariest fucking movie redesign looks like she did during Shadowpact, really; just a green bustier and pants and a hood, making her resemble a green Raven (we only see her on the cover, though). Harley most closely resembles her movie self, but then, she went through a redesign to match that design in her own comic series recently.

Of the last two Suicide Squad #1s I've read–three, if you count the Suicide Squad: Rebirth #1 too–this was by far the best, but, again, I suspect it will read better in trade.

Two quick, anal-retentive nitpicks, before I go.

First, I thought it weird that they were apparently all incarcerated with their costumes and weapons, given the pains taken to keep them isolated from one another and the prison staff, including Waller. Deadshot and Boomerang could so easily come shooting and boomeranging, for example.

Secondly, I wasn't aware Killer Croc was arrested again after the last time I saw him (the Bat-office has been transitioning him to sort of a bad-ass good guy over the last couple of years, making him more of a Catwoman-like character), or why he went to Belle Reeve instead of Arkham Asylum. Personally, I like knowing details like that (which, I suppose, could be explained in a forthcoming back-up, particularly if they are all going to cover similar ground to the back-up in this issue). Likewise, it's weird to see Harley in such a high-security prison here, whereas she's free and gainfully employed in New York in her own series. Having not been following New Suicide Squad too closely after the first issue or two, I just kind of assumed she had some very liberal work-release policy, or was volunteering with the Squad of late, but it's really hard to square Harley Quinn #1-#2 with Suicide Squad #1.

As a comedy series, the Harley monthly has a bit more wiggle room with continuity–and her Little Black Book team-up series even more so, as it's seemingly completely out-of-continuity–but given the character's popularity, it seem like DC might want to encourage readers of either series to read the other, and thus a little work to align them more closely would make some amount of sense (At present, there seem to be two Harleys with two different status quos and personalities).

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week 11

Deathstroke: Rebirth #1 by Christopher Priest, Jason Paz and Jeromy Cox

Deathstroke is, like Red Hood, another book that the market seems to have rejected, but DC seems determined to find a way to make work, even if there's no real mass-media incentive for doing so (as with, say, Suicide Squad and Teen Titans). The ongoing series that will launch following this Rebirth one-shot will be the third Deathstroke series since fall of 2011. The first, which ran through three writers, lasted 20 issues. The second, which launched in 2014, also lasted 20 issues, and only burned through two writers in that time. Prior to 2011's new 52 relaunch, Deathstroke hadn't supported his own book since his 60-issue, 1991-1995 title, written by co-creator Marv Wolfman.

This new book would therefore seem to have something of an uphill climb, but it does have something of a secret weapon this time out: It's being written by Christopher Priest. An extremely talented, awfully under-appreciated and too-rarely-seen comic book writer, Priest is due for a greater and wider appreciation in the coming months, as Marvel has reprinted his Black Panther run in anticipation of the upcoming feature film that will almost certainly draw upon it for inspiration, and it was just recently announced that a animated series based on The Ray is in the works. While that character has been around in various incarnations since 1940, the only ongoing series he supported was a 29-issue, 1994-1996 series written by Priest (which I hope DC will be collecting shortly, as I've never read it in its entirety in order, having tried to assemble the run in back-issues; and hey, DC, while you're at it, can you also collect Priest's excellent Justice League Task Force run? Thanks!).

I found that development a little disappointing, on account of the fact that I really like Priest, and really have no interest in Deathstroke, one of the many, many characters who suffered from the erasure of history that accompanied the New 52 reboot and who, simultaneously, seemed to suffer from overexposure. (I read a handful of Tony Daniel's run on the second New 52 volume of the series, and I still feel like I've seen Deathstroke in about 85 or so different appearances throughout the line).

So what are the first twenty pages of the Priest/Deathstroke pairing like? "The Professional" is broken up into tiny sub-chapters, with titles appearing in all-black panels. The action jumps back and forth from what appears to the rather distant past, in which a blonde, two-eyed Slade takes his to small children camping, and the present, in which Deathstroke takes a job in Africa for a warlord that is complicated by the surprise appearance of a supervillain.

Wintergreen is also involved, and thanks to the reboot and all of the appearances of Slade and the Wilson children that I haven't read, I have no idea what current continuity is regarding all of these characters, which is probably for the best. This feels and reads like a completely fresh start, which is as it should be.

The surprise villain, who Deathstroke is at first paid to kill, but is having some trouble doing, and then redirects his attention elsewhere, is an apparently elderly and terminally ill Clock King. Refreshingly, he's in his classic costume, which looks more like a pair of pajama's covered in clocks than anything else (He's not wearing the mask, though; that would just be silly). It's perhaps a little weird that in this short-lived universe any super-people have been around long enough to get old, but it's nice to see that the creators haven't tried to make Clock King look more realistic or bad-ass, neither of which has suited the character very well in the past.

There is a lot of mystery involved in the plot, particularly in how these various things connect, and what it is that makes Deathstroke change his direction, but these are of the intriguing, rather than confusing, variety of mystery.

Carlos Pagulayan's pencils, inked by Jason Paz and colored by Jeromy Cox, are the best applied to this character and his adventures in...well, I can't remember the last time I read a comic called Deathstroke that looked this good. The style is perhaps nothing special, and is, in fact, even boring, but its professionally executed, and there's obviously a high degree of talent involved. It is, by no means, bad, which, in the unfortunately low standards of superhero comic book art, the same as being really rather good.

The design of the lead character is a functional one, and his colors have been rendered rather drab. The orange is a sickly shade, the blue is no black, and the fish-scale style armor is now silver chain mail. It is neither as colorfully super-villainous as the original George Perez design, nor as outlandish as the the New 52 redesign, which only really looked all that good when occasional cover artist Simon Bisley was drawing it with the sense of exaggeration it deserved.

I personally can't say I'm excited or terribly enthusiastic about what follows, but this is certainly the firs time I've been interested in what happens next in a Deathstroke comic since, I don't know, he fought Batman in 1992 or whenever...?

All-Star Batman #1 by Scott Snyder, John Romita Jr., Danny Miki and Dean White

When DC first started announcing their new "Rebirth"-branded line of books, the most notable absence was writer Scott Snyder, whose run on Batman with pencil artist Greg Capullo was the New 52's one completely unqualified hit. Sndyder's apparent leave from the Bat-books was cause for some concern for a bit–right up until his All-Star Batman, a new series apparently focusing on Batman's rogue's gallery, was announced.

The title is a rather uncomfortable fit, as "All-Star" was used by the publisher to denote out-of-continuity books featuring their biggest characters by the biggest creators, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's limited-series All-Star Superman and Frank Miller and Jim Lee's unfinished All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder (there was talk of an All-Star Wonder Woman and an All-Star Batgirl, but neither ever materialized). The only other All-Star-branded book was the recent "DCYou" launch, the miniseries All-Star Section Eight, a quasi-canonical miniseries featuring a continuity I doubt will ever be referred to outside of writer Garth Ennis' future Section Eight comics (The fact that Batman scoffs at his many unpaid parking tickets or that Martian Manhunter smells godawful is unlikely to come up elsewhere, you know?).

The "All-Star" of this book seems to be in reference to the talent. While Snyder is the new ongoing's writer, the artists will rotate arc-by-arc. In this initial story arc, "My Own Worst Enemy," pencil artist John Romiat Jr. is joining the old Batman team of Snyder, inker Danny Miki and colorist Dean White. JRJR was a high-profile "get" for DC, and I'm sorry to say that a rather unremarkable run on Superman is all they've gotten out of him thus far. This looks like it will be a correction of that, as well as providing a better showcase for JRJR's skills at action and design.

This $4.99, 32-page comic also features a back-up story drawn by Declan Shalvey, and Paul Pope, Sean Murphy, Francesco Francavilla and Jock are among the artists announced for future contributions to the book.

The villain in this first arc was a genuinely surprising one: Two-Face. For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, the villain has been all but absent in the New 52. Snyder used him briefly in his "Death of the Family" story arc, appearing alongside The Penguin and The Riddler in a Joker-prompted gathering of Batman's worst enemies, and his only other appearance has been Peter Tomasi, Patrick Gleason and company's Batman and Robin story arc, collected in Batman and Robin Vol. 5: The Big Burn, in which they give the character a brand-new origin story...and kill him off (and in a much more final way than the typical comic book villain death; he shoots himself in the head during a daily game of Russian roulette).

Snyder begins in medias res, with Batman escorting Two-Face somewhere 500 miles north of Gotham City, with seemingly everyone wanting to stop the pair from getting to their destination. As gradually comes out, after Two-Face engages in some sort of city-destroying attack (all of Batman's enemies are now terrorists) involving acid rain, Two-Face offers a carrot-and-stick deal to everyone. The carrot is the sum of the top three gangsters in Gotham City's net worth, while the stick is the release of all of the information Two-Face has accumulated on everyone in Gotham City during his years as a prosecutor and villain. Stop Batman and you get the money...and stop the secrets, including yours, from getting out.

There's still some important bits of information to be revealed, and it's being held back from drama's sake–Batman is betrayed by someone very close to him, which results in the Batplane being knocked out of the sky one mile into the journey–but Snyder does the job of delivering a simple, action-movie premise. Batman must get an unwilling Two-Face somewhere, while a bunch of super-villains attempt to stop him.

The villains here are all bug-themed. Batman makes his entrance being flying-tackled through plate glass by Firefly and Killer Moth, both in elaborate new, matching insect-costumes that allow them to fly (I don't think we've seen Firefly in the New 52 yet, and Killer Moth's costume looks 1,000 times better here than the very weak, un-moth-like one he's been wearing previously; I think his costume should be lame, lamer than this, actually, but at least this one is moth-themed). This is, by the way, the sort of scene JRJR excels at.

The other villain is Black Spider, whose costume looks a little like post-Crisis Black Spider II's costume, only cooler, and with Doctor Octopus-like arms I'm not a fan of, but it does allow Batman to fight him with a chainsaw, so that's fine.

Two-Face's dramatic first appearance–he spends much of the book wearing a hood–also reveals a great new design, and the impact of the moment is bolstered by the fact that we've barely seen the once omnipresent villain over the course of the last five years (DC's various Batman writers really should endeavor to create more new villains, allowing them to keep big one's out of the spotlight for longer and longer; the decision to use The Joker and Two-Face sparingly have made the appearances of both seem like really big deals).

A fourth villain appears on the last pages, and he is restored to his pre-New 52 look, thank God. Without spoiling his identity, this villain had one of the most striking designs of any DC villain and thus suffered more than most of the bad guys when given a New 52 redesign. He's not really a Batman villain–only in one particular Batman cartoon–so seeing him here at all was kind of a fun surprise.

The Shalvey drawn back-up, colored by Jordie Bellaire, is "The Cursed Wheel," and it's the first part of a story focusing on Duke Thomas' new training regime as...whoever he is now, in his black and yellow colored Bat-costume. ("So can I call you Robin?" Commissioner Gordon asks Thomas in the main story, and Batman answers for him, "I'm trying something New, Jim. Something...better, I hope." Well, when you do figure out what to call him, can you let the rest of us know? It's really bugging me. And if we decide that we don't have to have names for superheroes any more, can we stop calling Cassandra Cain "Orphan" and not call her anything either...?).

Having read the first few issues of Batman and Detective Comics and just the first issue of All-Star Batman, I feel pretty confident in saying that if you only read one Batman comic book, this should be that one. It has the best art by far, it's most focused on the title character as the star, and between the business with Duke and the super-villain gauntlet Batman's running outside of Gotham City, it it's the book that feels like it's doing something newer and more unexpected with the 75+-year-old character than any of the others.

Red Hood and The Outlaws #1 by Scott Lobdell, Dexter Soy and Veronica Gandini

This is the first official issue of the third Red Hood ongoing of the past five years, but the title actually began two weeks ago with Red Hood and The Outlaws: Rebirth #1. "The Outlaws" of the title–a new version of Artemis and some iteration of Bizarro–show up on the cover of this issue, but 40 pages into Scott Lobdell's new storyline, it is still very much a Red Hood solo story (Artemis gets three lines of dialogue, and makes her first appearance on the last page of this issue).

Based on the fact that these first 40 pages or so have been the best and most readable that Lobdell has written featuring The Red Hood, and that the premise so far established–the Hood infiltrates the criminal underworld, trading on his not undeserved reputation as a Gotham villain–doesn't really require a team, I can't help but wonder if maybe DC and Lobdell should have tried a Red Hood solo series this time out (the first Red Hood and The Outlaws teamed him with Arsenal and Starfire, and that was followed by a Starfire-free Red Hood/Arsenal book).

As in the Rebirth special, this issue opens with a Batman-starring flashback, cleverly colored by Veronica Gandini to look sort of black-and-white-ish with bright spot red color on teenage Jason and faded bits of color here and there. He is gradually working his way into the good graces of Gotham crime boss The Black Mask, and seems to have gotten to the second-in-command position pretty much overnight (Still no reference to, or explanation why, he wear Batman's bat-symbol on his chest is he's supposed to be a bad guy who recently fought Batman. Surely the skull symbol of the supervillain costume he wore in Batman and Robin, or nothing at all, would be a better look for a bad guy supposedly completely unaffiliated with Batman? Nightwing and the various Robins looks less visually allied with Batman than Red Hood does). Black Mask has a job for Red Hood, a train heist, and it is aboard the train he meets Artemis, who artist Dexter Soy draws wearing what looks like an Elseworlds version of a Wonder Woman costume, standing with her hip jutted out as if she just reached the end of the catwalk and carrying a comically large, manga-style battle axe.

No real mystery what will happen in the next issue ("Next Issue: Red Hood V. Artemis!" reads the bottom corner of the final page), but it remains to be seen how Lobdell will manage to form a workable team out of such three divergent characters, and how exactly that will fit in with the plot of these first issues.

Superwoman #1 by Phil Jiemenz, Matt Santorelli and Jeromy Cox

It would be wrong to call this the most unexpected of the new, "Rebirth" era Superman family of books–New Super-Man features a Chinese teenager with Superman powers, for example, and Super-Sons will features Superman and Lois' extra-dimensional son teaming up with Robin Damian Wayne–but Lois Lane-gets-superpowers is surely a rather unexpected premise for a new ongoing series (although this is the sort of thing that would have powered, say, 12 pages or so of a Silver Age Superman book).

"Unexpected" is probably an important word to keep in mind here, as there's a rather good chance that a great deal of marketing misdirection went into this book. I don't want to risk ruining it for anyone who hasn't read it yet, so after the next paragraph, if you haven't yet read the book but don't want to be spoiled, you can quit reading the post now. Deal?

Writer/penciller Phil Jimenez does a pretty phenomenal job of presenting a particular dense, satisfying read. Almost every page has a lot of panels on them, many of them full of highly-detailed artwork and a fair amount of dialogue. Few name American artists could get away with this amount of visual information per page in a mainstream super-book–Jimenez inspiration George Perez comes to mind–but he pulls it off rather beautifully. It also means that when we get a two-page splash page showing the new Superwoman in flight over Metropolis, the image hits with the impact a splash is supposed to have. They have become so commonplace in superhero comics that they rarely even work anymore. The plot focuses on New 52 Lois Lane (not to be confused with the other Lois Lane, the one from the pre-Flashpoint timeline who was living in secret with her husband and son) teaming up with Lana Lang as Superwoman to carry on the legacy of their dead friend, Superman (The New 52 one, not the pre-Flashpoint Superman, who is currently starring in Action Comics and Superman).

You may remember from the death of Superman, one of several recent Superman comics referred to via asterisk and editorial box here, when he died, red bolts of lightning shot out of his body and hit Lana and Lois, imbuing them both with super-powers. Lois seems to have gotten the traditional suite of Superman powers, while Lana got the Electric Superman powers somehow, and when she goes into action as the other Superwoman, she looks like the Superman Red version of Strange Visitor.

So there are two Superwomen. Why is the book called Superwoman instead of Superwomen then? Good question. Do note that the placement of the S-shield in the logo does make the book look like it may be called Superwomans, though.

In this issue, other Superman Lex Luthor has built a giant helicarrier-like boat to help protect Metropolis, and wouldn't you know it, something goes wrong, necessitating both Lois and Lana to go into action. Later, while investigating the boat, Super-Lois gets attacked by what looks like some kind of female Bizarro, and is killed.

Now, I assumed she was "killed" rather than killed, and she would turn out to be A-OK next issue, as is often the case in superhero comics. It is her book, right?

My comics dealer, in asking me what I thought of the book (he liked it too, for what it's worth), noted that it seems to have solved the Rebirth DCU's "Two Lois" problem. Killing off New 52 Lois means pre-Flashpoint Lois would be the only Lois in the current DCU, and as for keeping this title going, well, if Lana Lang is also Superwoman, then she would simply become the Superwoman that stars in Superwoman.

Like I said, the thought didn't even occur to me while reading, but that does clean up the Superman books kind of easily (even if it's all extremely fucking confusing), and will (hopefully) allow the various creative teams to just get on with it already (If they even want to, of course. Dan Jurgens has had Superman fighting Doomsday in the pages of Action Comics for, what, like 80 pages now?).

I guess we'll have to wait and see. If that is what happened, then that is both an admirable subversion and a rather annoying bit of subterfuge on the part of DC. If not, well, they have to do something with the extra Lois somewhere down the line, right? (I'm not sure how the older Lois from a different universe will take the place of the younger Lois of this universe, particularly since they don't look too terribly alike, but then, I don't know how they plan on resolving Superman's outted secret identity yet either).

At any rate, I can't say I'm too terribly thrilled about where Jiminez is working at the moment–I'd prefer him on Justice League or trying to fix the Titans, I think–but it's nice to see DC hiring Jimenez to both write and draw a book. He's good at both, but he's best when he's doing both simultaneously. And there's no better value in comics outside of Legends of Tomorrow, at the moment, as 20 Jimenez pages contain about as much story information as 40-60 Everyone Else pages.