The first volume of the DC reboot Superboy, SUPERBOY Incubation by Scott Lobdell and RB Silva, starts off well as Superboy wakes in a mysterious government lab, gets thawed out and begins to develop his powers and agrees to help his creators at N.O.W.H.E.R.E. track down various rogue metahumans (including the rebooted Teen Titans). By the end though, it’s just going around in circle—constant reiterations of how weird Superboy finds people, constant evil plans from his masters, a few fight scenes mixed in—nice try, but no more than that.
BLUE BEETLE: Road Trip by John Rodgers, Keith Giffen and multiple artists makes me appreciate why this pre-reboot version of Blue Beetle (a Latino teenager who acquires a mysterious ET scarab) became so popular. Characterization is good, the sense of an ordinary kid being plunged into the superhero world comes off (this is something comics have tried a lot the past 20 years, but it doesn’t usually work) and the stories are solidly entertaining. Well done.
BLUE BEETLE: Reach for the Stars by John Rodgers and Rafael Albuquerque has Blue Beetle meeting the Reach, the mysterious alien creators of his scarab and discovering his original purpose was to serve as a fifth columnist helping the Reach conquer Earth. While the magic that tainted the scarab in his origin has left him free of control the Reach has other tricks up its sleeve … Very good again, obviously a big influence on the second season of Young Justice.
VIETNAMERICA is GB Tran’s story of discovering his Vietnamese-American family’s history both in the US and in the mother country. This one struck me as rather generic—the story of the immigrant’s son learning his family’s past is one that’s been done a lot, and Tran didn’t do it well enough to hook me.
COWBOYS AND ALIENS by Fred Van Lente, Andrew Foley and multiple artists is, I think, less fun than the movie. The graphic novel makes little attempt to go beyond the title: Aliens land, they attack the West, cowboys and Indians shoot back, that’s all folks. Disappointing.
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