Welcome to the second chunk of this week’s reviews.  For those of you befuddled by the notion of downward scrolling, you’ll find the regular X-books here, this week’s podcast here, and a wholly unrelated wrestling column here.  Oh, and check the podcast if you want to see what Al and I thought of Brian Bendis and Mark Bagley’s new creator-owned series Brilliant.  (I’ve got seven DCU titles to cover here, I’m not going to review that one twice.)

Aquaman #1 – This one, however, I will come back to briefly.  We talked about it on the podcast, and we weren’t greatly impressed by it – though I think I liked it more than Al did.  But across the board, it seems to have been getting decent reviews.  Which kind of mystifies me, to be frank, because as far as I can see, nothing bloody happens.

I wonder whether the issue here is that Geoff Johns is reinventing, or at least heavily tweaking, the character.  And if you’re familiar with Aquaman then perhaps a lot of this will register to you as some sort of change.  But I know virtually nothing about the character, and so for me, there’s no sense of change – it’s just a premise being laid out at length.

Let’s break it down.  Pages 1-2: creatures (nicely drawn creatures, too) emerge from the bottom of the sea and start heading upwards.  That’s your threat.  Pages 3-9: Aquaman stops an armed robbery.  This is a power-demo sequence, like when Jim Shooter was editor-in-chief at Marvel, and every Spider-Man comic began with Spider-Man establishing his powers by beating up some muggers in an alley.  It also sets up the idea that Aquaman doesn’t get respect.

Pages 10-16: Aquaman goes to a seafood restaurant and orders a meal.  He has a brief interaction with a waitress who might conceivably turn out to be a recurring character, though there’s little here to indicate it.  He corrects some people’s misconceptions about him and then has an awkward conversation with a blogger which reinforces the “no respect” idea and which gives Johns a chance to work in some exposition about Aquaman’s back story.

Pages 17-19: Aquaman tells his wife, who gets no real introduction and no opportunity to display a personality beyond “supportive lover”, that he’s decided he’s not going back to Atlantis, and he’s going to stay on the surface with her.  There’s no real context to this, so it’s not a dramatic decision, it’s just spelling out the character’s position at the start of the story.  It’s the equivalent of opening with “So my family had just moved into town…”

Pages 20-22: The creatures from the opening pages (remember them?) arrive on the surface, attack a boat, and kill everyone.  The end.

That is not a story, or even really the start of a story.  What it is, is a load of exposition coupled to a few pages of subplot setting up the villain for the story which, let us hope, might actually get around to starting in the next issue.  Now, I can see that if you’re familiar with the character then you might well get more entertainment here out of picking up on the ways Geoff Johns has altered him.  But leave that element aside – this is meant to be aimed at new readers, right? – and for the life of me, I don’t understand why this is getting so many positive reviews.

Flash #1 – This is more like it.  The previous run of Flash certainly had its problem, but I did enjoy Francis Manapul’s art.  So I was looking forward to this, subject to the usual caveat when an artist takes over responsibility for the story: can he write?

Well, this is a solid enough first issue.  It doesn’t bother with an origin flashback (it’s recapped on the credits page, which is good enough for me), and instead it just focusses on introducing the Flash, setting up his supporting cast, and introducing a weird pseudo-scientific mystery for him to investigate.  I’ve no doubt that some fans of the character will be infuriated that DC have hit the reset button to the extent of extricating him from his marriage to Iris West, but frankly, I have some sympathy with Marvel and DC where that sort of thing is concerned; it’s part of resetting the character to a classic status quo with less baggage.

There are some wonderfully inventive splash pages in here, and Manapul also turns out to be one of the rare artists who can make the revised costumes work – or maybe it’s just that the Flash benefits from having some subtler speed lines added to his costume even when he’s standing still.  No supervillains here, no falling back on the old Flash standards; instead we’ve got a story about Barry stumbling upon an old college friend, seemingly working as a henchman.  Naturally it turns out to be a bit more convoluted than that.

While it’s not in any sense a Silver Age pastiche, the book echoes back to some of the themes of classic Flash stories – it’s a basically shiny, optimistic city, where weird science is going to let exciting and bizarre things happen.  The hook here isn’t the character himself so much as the tone of his stories, and that’s fine by me.  I’m pretty happy with this one.

Fury of Firestorm #1 – Gail Simone’s other DCU book is being co-plotted with artist Ethan van Sciver, though the actual art comes from Yildiray Cinar.  It’s a complete reboot, but while Batgirl seemed to be labouring under the weight of selling the revamp, this title seems a lot more comfortable with what it’s doing.  It’s not quite there – the tone’s a bit heavy-handed at times – but it’s a decent enough idea in theory.

The format with Firestorm for a while now has been that two characters get merged into a single body and have to get on whether they like it or not.  This version takes a slightly different route.  It’s got Ronnie Raymond as the well-meaning (white) high-school jock, and Jason Rusch as the abrasive, academic (black) high school journalist, who also happens to have somehow ended up in possession of an Object of Tremendous Importance.  But, at this stage at least, instead of them both ending up as a single Firestorm, they end up as two different Firestorms.  (Complete with matching costumes, which is… odd, now I come to think of it.)  They can merge and be even more powerful, but they don’t have to.  Or such is apparently the idea.

I quite like that as a way of freshening up a fairly restrictive gimmick that’s surely been worked into the ground over the years.  And while the odd couple thing plays to stereotypes, that’s okay as the broad starting point – just because it’s how they see each other, it doesn’t follow that the characters have to be stuck in such rigid roles.

But the social-awareness stuff is really a bit leaden, and while a couple of parallel scenes seem to suggest that both characters are meant to be broadly sympathetic, Jason’s obnoxiousness to Ronnie is so utterly unprovoked that it’s hard to avoid turning against him.  Frankly, there’s precious little in this book to suggest that he does have a valid point; he comes across as borderline paranoid.  If that’s what they were going for, then fine, but I don’t think it was.  There’s potential in here, but quite a few kinks to be ironed out if it’s going to be realised.

Justice League Dark #1 – As a superhero writer, Peter Milligan is intermittently successful but usually at least interesting.  Thematically, this loosely follows on from his Flashpoint: Secret Seven mini, which used many of the same characters, and was frankly a bit of a mess.  But in plot terms, of course, it’s a fresh start.

On one level, it’s very simple.  The Enchantress has gone mad, and her magic is causing all sorts of weird things to happens.  The Justice League are pretty much useless against magic, so it’s the oddball magical types who will have to sort things out.  As a justification for keeping the team around, that’s perfectly solid.  Not that the team actually forms in this issue; against the common background of that threat, it’s a scattered collection of introductions to the characters.  Shade’s clearly a central character here, and as in Secret Seven, Milligan’s at pains to get across the idea that he’s not a hero so much as a well-intentioned danger to everyone around him.

It’s not a perfect first issue.  For one thing, it simply assumes that we all know there’s a connection between the Enchantress and June Moone, which seems a bit optimistic for such a relatively obscure character.  You need that knowledge to understand how the Enchantress gets identified as the villain, which is obviously a major plot point.  And while there’s plenty going on in this issue (the pace is actually pretty hectic), the title characters don’t really get much further than individually deciding that they should do something about the threat.

But there’s also a lot of ideas being thrown around, a decent sketching out of most of the cast, and a nice balance between unsettling weirdness and familiar DCU elements.  And Mikel Janin’s art generally gets the tone right for those elements to sit together, though I could live with some less obvious photo-referencing.  As a first issue, it does enough to live up to my expectations that I’m going to stick around.

Superman #1 – George Perez’s present-day Superman title has had some middling reviews, but I thought it was perfectly okay in a slightly old-fashioned way.  Yes, it could have come out twenty years ago, but what exactly were you expecting from your George Perez comic?  If you’re willing to take it on those terms, it’s a nice enough intro of the supporting cast, along with a new status quo for them all.  Superman is one of those characters where the basic elements are so well known that I think Perez is entitled to assume everyone has heard of the Daily Planet, and start by shaking that up a bit.  It also sets up a nice tension with Superman as a traditionalist vaguely uncomfortable with the forces of change, which I like, since it allows him to be wrong about something without undercutting the character.

While he’s more powerful here than he was in Action Comics (set five years ago), Superman still seems to have been dialled back a bit, and I quite like the way the book emphasises him as the local hero of Metropolis rather than positioning him straight away as a top player in the wider DCU.  And there’s no denying that Perez knows how to tell a story.  What really doesn’t work, though, is a string of narrative captions which are supposed to be Clark Kent writing up the battle for an article in the Daily Planet.  The style is wildly wrong; it reads like fanfic, not journalism, and it needs to go.  If we’re going to be regularly told that Clark Kent is a great print journalist, best let us imagine for ourselves what he writes like.  It’s safer.

That connection to Stormwatch, by the way, turns out to be a one page subplot where a big alien blows a horn.  I know, I was expecting a bit more too.

Teen Titans #1 – It’s a gathering-the-team issue.  Or rather, since it’s 2011, it’s a gathering the first bit of the team issue.  Again, I’m sure there’ll be some handwringing over the fact that some of the characters on the cover get nothing more than cameos in the issue itself.

But so far as it goes, it’s decent enough.  The team may not be formed, but there’s a respectable chunk of story nonetheless.  The issue starts with a new Kid Flash – in a nicely designed home-made costume – trying to make himself useful in putting out a fire, ignoring everyone who tells him he’s just going to get in the way, and, well, getting in the way in spectacular fashion.  The basic idea, it seems, is that the DCU is spawning an increasing number of dubiously competent teenage superheroes, and nobody’s quite sure what to do with them.  Meanwhile, an organisation called NOWHERE is going around hauling superhuman teens off the street, and Red Robin (that’s Tim Drake, the former Robin) is trying to stop them – which at least gives him a decent reason to meet other teenagers and, presumably, form a team at the end of this story.

It’s basically a Tim Drake story, with Cassie Sandsmark showing up in the second half – she understandably doesn’t want to be called “Wonder Girl”.  The pattern here is presumably that NOWHERE and Tim’s growing band hunt down future cast members one at a time.  That’s complicated somewhat by the addition of Superboy in the closing pages, particularly if you know how Lobdell established this version of the character in his own first issue.

Brett Booth’s art is indisputably school-of-1992, but it tells the story clearly enough, and the two lead characters get decent enough introductions.  It’s not a blow-away first issue, but there are moments that work.  Certainly better than I was expecting, and I might give it a bit of time to see how it beds down.

Voodoo #1 – I know, I know.  I’ve seen some very divided reviews on this one, and I was curious enough to download it and judge for myself.

Given the complaints over Catwoman #1 (which does sound dreadful), and the Starfire scene in Outsiders (which is, on any view, wildly misjudged), a comic about a stripper sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster.  More precisely, the concept seems to be – as explained by a character who might not necessarily be correct – that Voodoo is an alien spy who has, quite conveniently, chosen to disguise herself as a New Orleans lap dancer.  Contrived?  Of course it’s contrived, though the story at least makes some effort to put in stuff about customers from a local military base.

There’s a lot of stuff in here which is exploitative on any view – do we really need to see her performing twice?  But that said, the underlying attitudes are a lot less irritating than the other two books, since at least here it’s all explicitly in the context of performance.  It’s not trying to say that she’s actually like that; quite the contrary, the whole point of the issue is that it’s obviously an act and we’re meant to be speculating on what she’s really like and why she’s there.  It’s also only fair to note that the issue ends with her leaving the club, and that the upcoming solicitations tend to suggest she’s not going back to it.

I’m actually not sure quite what I make of this book.  Since there’s an alien invasion angle centred on New Orleans, presumably it’s going to link a some point with its stablemate Grifter.  It’s not a superhero comic in any sense; it’s a comic about an inscrutable femme fatale being kept under watch by agent Jess Fallon, who seems to be the actual protagonist of the series, at least in terms of the way this issue is structured.  It’s very nicely drawn, for the most part, and a credible case could be made that the exploitation content in the first issue is there for both plot and thematic reasons – though if that’s the idea, I still think they’re trying to have their cake and eat it, and they could have dialled it back a bit with no real problems.  It’s certainly going to alienate a fair number of readers.  But there’s more going on here than I was expecting, and it could develop into something worthwhile.