Comics

Batman • Superman – World’s Finest #1

/ / Comics

Batman and Superman (and Robin!) are back together in a new World’s Finest team-up that gives me Batman in his classic 70s & 80s costume (with some unnecessary seams, seriously what is DC’s fetish with adding seams to all its heroes costumes?). Our main story features Poison Ivy and Metallo attacking Metropolis and Batman and Robin showing up to help the Man of Steel who ends up getting injected with Red Kryptonite.

The comic goes off in multiple directions here with a separate team-up between the Man of Steel and the Dynamic Duo and also the addition of the Doom Patrol to help with an out-of-control Superman. There are some aspects of the story I enjoy, including character designs and Dan Mora’s art, although once Superman gets infected (which seems to be where the comic’s main storyline will be focused going forward) things bog down a bit.

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Radiant Red #1

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Radiant Red is a spin-off of an Image Comics mini-series I never read, Radiant Black. As expected, this creates some challenges for the reader. The main character is middle school teacher Satomi Shen, and super-powered criminal and bank robber Radiant Red. Since the comic doesn’t go that in-depth on how her powers and costume work, I’m assuming that knowledge would have been part of the Radiant Black series. The gist seems to be, she’s done bad things in the past and has attempted to put that life behind her.

What we do get in Radiant Red #1 is a look at Shen’s personal life. We also are introduced to a pair of people snooping around including a reporter and someone of less scrupulous means who have a sudden interest in the bank robber. It looks like the past hasn’t stayed buried, but I’m not sure I’ll stick around for five issues to see where this one eventually leads.

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Red Sonja: Black, White, Red #8

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Three more tales of Red Sonja in black and white, and more than a little red thrown in, are collected in Red Sonja: Black, White, Red #8. In “Last Words,” my favorite of the three, Red Sonja confronts Master Valik the Merchant known for finding lucrative, but dangerous, jobs for thieves. These jobs are so dangerous, Sonja wonders just why any thief (including a few she knew) would ever take them.

Red Sonja and fifteen sailors survive the trip to Sleeper Island only to face the wrath of a demon even deadlier than the storm in “Fifteen Men on the Sleeper Chest.” And “Cursed” gives us Red Sonja and a young girl in the midst of a winter storm talking over the legend of a witch, killed by Sonja years ago, whose memory still haunts those in the woods demanding a sacrifice to be made to her.

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Seven Secrets #15

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The contents of not one but two cases will be revealed in Seven Secrets #15, although there’s a lot of explanation needed of what exactly the final reveal means. The Sixth Case’s opening reveals a baby demon with the power to destroy, but instead just looks a bit lost, leading to the death of another of the Order and a strategic retreat by Amon to the land of Faerie where he may have just stumbled on some unexpected allies. Releasing a demon on the world, and they still think themselves the good guys?

Coming at the end of the issues is the reveal that the Seventh Case is actually empty. The Seventh Secret has been walking around for several years now. And, if the world is to be saved, he’s going to need to live up to his destiny. We now know why Anton is scared of Caspar, but (given we know his death is coming) how exactly will this play out?

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Spider-Gwen: Gwenverse #1

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Gwen Stacys everywhere. That’s the gist of Spider-Gwen: Gwenverse when Gwen gets unintentionally added as an ingredient to a super-villain’s plan to overwrite herself into classic Marvel heroes across the multiverse. The result? Spider-Gwen’s world goes wonky, and in other times across other dimensions we have the creation of characters such Thorgwen (that was the best name you could come up with?).

Looking forward, it appears the series will be an interlocked number of What If…? style stories eventually rolled into one. Spider-Gwen: Gwenverse #1 offers a wonky set-up to allow Tim Seeley and Jodi Nishijima to play with any version of Gwen they can think up while Gwen is forced to fight and work with aspects of her own personality writ large. Is it worth $5 a pop? Maybe, eventually, for die-hard Gwen fans.

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