Well another six months have passed and I’m back again for the second half of DC’s relaunch year. Has it gotten better? Or has the same ridiculousness continued to be spewed. Only one way to find out, and that is to read on.
CW’s cleverly titled Green Arrow adaption, Arrow, got a new extended trailer with nearly 4 minutes of footage. Aside from still looking pretty decent there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from a particular villain I don’t think anyone expected.
If Slade Wilson is in this sucker my interest level may have graduated from curious to excited.
You picked the winners to the first round of our Fantasy Battle Tournament and your getting the chance again in round two; past winners are pitted against each other, you vote on who wins, and we write out the story. Check out all the polls and the bracket in the full article and try and guess who we’ve picked is behind all this…
So right off the bat, I must let you know that I am not a DC fan. I am a collector of 25+ years and 80% of my collection is Marvel. I do know some DC history and I always pick up the “events” from the amazing Crisis on Infinite Earths until the most recent load of camel dung Flashpoint. I know most if not all of the characters but not their history or personality quirks. With the DC Reboot, I, as a DC Noob, was given the rare opportunity to get in on what is supposed to be the ground floor of a new Universe. A fresh start into some of the greatest comic book characters ever created.
Stepping into the ring today is the deadly soviet super spy versus the tactical terminator for hire. The fans have been polled. Their votes have been recorded. Let the battle begin.
The current run of Titans has some interesting recurring themes, when you think about it. The name itself, usually used for heroes, now for this band of murderers and mercenaries. Then you have Roy Harper, a former hero fallen very much to the dark side. Osiris was a hero, too, and is now obsessed with restoring his lost family to the point he’s killing people to do it. Isis seems to be back, and either her power has gone wrong, or she’s the way she was just before the Wizard Shazam de-powered her and turned her to stone– a killer. Deathstroke himself has wavered over the years from villain to pretty much outright hero during Titans Hunt to anti-hero in his own book, and is now back to bad guy. So the running thread seems to be corruption in many forms. Add in Ink, who was nearly a hero during Infinite Crisis, and then lost it, and Cinder, who seems to be a child abuse victim, and I think I may be on to something here.
Things turn ugly in “Broken Promises,” the newest storyline in Eric Wallace’s all villainous Titans group. The expected betrayal finally happens, as on a mission in the South Pacific, Slade’s band of misfits and villains finally show their true colors. They are supposedly on a job to bring down a man called Drago, who runs some kind of gladiator arena. What Slade soon learns is that it’s a set up from the start. Drago, in addition to being a skilled fighter, is telepathic, and evades Slade’s sniper shot. Cheshire and Arsenal also turn traitor, attacking Deathstroke from behind, eventually wearing him down with skill and poison. Cinder tries to help but is rather embaressignly defeated by men with souped up fire extinguishers.
Titans 32 finally follows up on Titans 31, which the Shazam one shot was supposed to do and utterly did not. The promised Osiris vs Shazam fight finally happens, and the surrounding property damage is astounding. Freddie tries to reason with Amon throughout the battle, and gets nowhere for most of it. Back at the Labyrinth, Ink follows up on the catharsis of killing the man who murdered his son by announcing he’s quitting. Back in Philly, the right rages on, as Freddie gets Amon to think, and wonder why his prior killings haven’t brought Isis back yet.
