Brightest Day keeps rolling along and the latest installment starts to stray (slightly) from the recent trend of telling a single story about one of the resurrected heroes in each issue. It’s mostly about Aquaman and the new Aqualad, but there’s a little Firestorm in there too. The shift to focusing on a single story in each issue has the downside of not being terribly interesting when it’s not a character you’re invested in. It’s been mentioned here before that “no one” reads Aquaman and the fact that this story has little to do with the central plot of the series doesn’t help. As a result, we end up talking about Batman.

Read more of this article »

DC Comics’ Brightest Day spent another issue focusing on a single character last week, with Martian Manhunter getting all of the attention this time. While the previous issue dedicated to Dead Man (with a special appearance by Bruce Wayne as Batman) advanced the plot of the series, that’s not necessarily true here. It was still a decent book, but we end up spending more time talking about Aqualad and Batman Beyond of all things.

If the content of Brightest Day can be interrupted by one digression after another, it only seems fair that our discussion of it follow the same course.

Spoilers ahead.

Read more of this article »

Welcome back again for our semi-bi-weekly discussion of DC Comics‘ Brightest Day series. Issue 11 focuses on Aquaman and Firestorm with a few pages dedicated to the Martian Manhunter. We also manage to bring DC’s Earth One graphic novel series, a Doctor Who episode from 1975 and Death herself into the mix.

Spoilers will follow…

PTB: I guess the cover lets us know that the Black Lantern Firestorm isn’t unique to the story. While we’re talking about him, what do you think of his new name “Deathstorm”?

KevinMLD: I’m not a fan yet. It just reminds me of this terrible Dick Grayson-from-the-future storyline that ran in Titans in the ’90s. I don’t know what all the details ended up being, but basically this guy who claimed to be the future Nightwing was evil and called himself Deathwing. It was horrendous. Here’s a picture of his extreme costume courtesy of the seriously amazing TitansTower.com website. If you’re at all curious about the Titans, you can spend hours there.

Read more of this article »

Our discussion of DC Comics’ Brightest Day series continues with issue #10. Lots of Firestorm. Lots of Aquaman. Also included is a discussion of the possible coolness of Black Manta and obvious lameness of Deathstorm.

Spoilers to follow.

PTB: A very misleading cover this time around. Deadman doesn’t even appear in the book. Aqualad doesn’t appear to be a villain, but I’m getting the impression something may change when his powers kick in.

Still, it’s a nice looking cover.

KevinMLD: I agree it’s a nice cover but the Black lantern Firestorm from a few issues back would have made WAY more sense here.

Read more of this article »

Everyone gets a mystery this issue as things really start to happen in Brightest Day #7. All of the White Lantern’s resurrected characters from Blackest Night make an appearance and some of their individual stories start to connect. At the same time, many new stories are seeded throughout along with a series of Fall TV ads.

PTB: This issue is basically that teaser image we discussed last time expanded to 22 pages. I’m not sure if I like it.

KevinMLD: I thinks it’s about time something happened in this title. This could have been issue 1 or at least issue 3. It didn’t need six issues of set up.

Read more of this article »