*huff* *puff* you guys, I *huff* did it. I made it halfway through my challenge. Holy crap, 100 books is a lot for someone who reads as slow as I do. Also, focusing on books makes my pop culture ADD very cranky. Sometimes a guy just wants to sit down and gorge on 30-40 hours of Buffy and Angel and then kill everything that moves on my Playstation. Then the guilt comes back and I get back down to business. Will I make my goal?! Stay tuned to find out. I have 7 months to get through 50 books. This means I have the challenge of finding engaging books that aren't 800+ pages. Or lots and lots of graphic novels. I'll try to keep mixing it up though. I have made a promise to read White Oleander at some point.... But on to today's offerings!
I will go ahead and just review all three of these together. After the last entry, I was trying to figure out if I even liked graphic novels anymore. Fortunately, these three titles proved that the comic book form still has a lot to offer. Unlike say, Justice League Dark, Green Lantern and friends demonstrate that having a few relateable and grounded characters make all the difference. Hal Jordan and Sinestro's uneasy alliance makes for great storytelling. Just beneath the Buddy-cop bickering lies the very real threat that Sinestro could turn on Hal and any point. Having a point of reference give the story license to go in all the crazy directions that it does because you remain invested in the development of the characters.
The Justice League reboot tells an origin of the team that finds a way to highlight the different strengths of all the members and make them all individuals as well. Superman is the boyscout, Green Lantern is the jock, The Flash is the teacher's pet, Cyborg is the rookie, Batman is the paranoid survivalist, Wonder Woman is the foreign exchange student, and Aquaman is that kid who you thought was quiet and weird until he gets an army of sharks to kill the crap out of everything. We don't need these guys to be deep, but we do need them to be easy to tell apart. The new Justice League title is very successful at building this team dynamic. It's a nice vision of what a Justice League movie could be if Warner Brothers Studios wasn't run by morons.
Finally, we get a fish-out-of-water adventure in the form of Supergirl. Superman's older cousin was put in stasis when Krypton blew up. She crashes on Earth not having aged a day and is understandably dubious when a full grown Kryptonian claims to be her baby cousin. All kinds of shenanigans follow and we once again see an adventure story done right.
That's it for now, see you when I muster the motivation to write again.
All three books 9/10
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