A blissfully light week. Which is very nice, since I had to hold over a couple of titles from last week, just because of sheer volume.
Brightest Day #4
Written by GEOFF JOHNS & PETER J. TOMASI
Art by IVAN REIS, PAT GLEASON, ARDIAN SYAF,
SCOTT CLARK & JOE PRADO
Covers by DAVID FINCH
1:25 variant covers by IVAN REIS & OCLAIR ALBERT
If this is the BRIGHTEST DAY then what is Black Lantern Firestorm doing on our cover?!
This is the same blurb you had for your last issue! At least this time it's correct.
Y'know....I gotta get down to brass tacks, here. This series/event isn't working anywhere near as well as Blackest Night did. It's not "bad," with Geoff Johns at the helm, you know it's always going to be readable. The trouble is, there's no intensity. Nothing seems to be pushing the storyline forward, it's just meandering. We're four issues in, and I'm kinda tired of the mysteries piling up with no real forward momentum. I'm not a decompressed storytelling hater, but, man! I think it's time for some major events to kick in, rather than just setting up, and setting up , and setting up.
The Spirit #3
Written by MARK SCHULTZ
Co-feature written by MICHAEL USLAN & F.J. DESANTO
Art by MORITAT
Co-feature art by JUSTINIANO
Cover by LADRÖNN
FIRST WAVE takes a break this month but THE SPIRIT marches on! Angel Smerti has delivered The Spirit into the deadly grasp of the Octopus, and the only one who can save him is… Angel Smerti?! Can The Spirit possibly warm her icy heart with a knife pressed against his throat?
And in THE SPIRIT: BLACK & WHITE co-feature, Michael Uslan and F.J. DeSanto deliver a tale of treason on the airwaves, stunningly illustrated in rich graytones by Justiniano!
Generally speaking, this series is on track. Which is nice to see, since the Doc Savage book was, and is, just an abortion. There's a nice sense that Mark Schultz understands the feel of the world Will Eisner created, and that give him the leeway to play around with details. I love the new seedier version of Commissioner Dolan, it's a noir trapping that feels very, very right.
The changes to Ebony White, once the epitome of ugly racial stereotypes, are welcome, but changing a black boy to a lilly-white girl doesn't exactly feel like a step forward. Darwyn Cooke, in the prior DC series, managed to just make him a streetwise, stand-up kid, and that settled it in my mind. Now the regular cast seems a bit...monochrome.
This particular "Black & White" selection is hard to call. Uslan was a producer on that God-awful Spirit movie, where Frank Miller just took a hatchet to the whole thing. Just awful.
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