This is going to be a weird week, thanks to a series I plan to start on Wednesday. The series should run through Saturday, and I think I may have a lot less time to review comics this week, so I’m gonna get a passel of reviews done now while I still can.

Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Cyborg Superman

Most of this is retelling the origin of Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman. It’s a very nice origin, but it takes up about two-thirds of the story. After that, Henshaw, the Manhunter robots, and the Sinestro Corps lay the smackdown on the Justice League, clean Superman’s clock, and knock down the Statue of Liberty.

Verdict: Thumbs up, but just barely. It’s entertaining enough, but there’s very little real story in there…

Justice League of America #13

The new Injustice League includes just about every supervillain in the world, and they give the Justice League a pretty thorough beat-down. And as nice as new writer Dwayne McDuffie’s plotting and dialogue are, they do not stand a chance against the utterly pukeworthy “art” provided by Joe Benitez.

Verdict: Thumbs down. Good grief, Benitez is just awful.

Supergirl #22

Supergirl is still hanging out with Karate Kid and Una from the (ugh) “Countdown” series, and they beat up a big government-owned super-monster. The fight is okay, but the story never manages to get away from the fact that it’s a tie-in with the much-despised “Countdown.”

Verdict: Thumbs down. Somebody get DC to quit inflicting “Countdown” on us!

The Search for Ray Palmer: Crime Society

Oh, okay, not all “Countdown” tie-ins are complete garbage. In this story, Donna Troy, Jason Todd, Kyle Rayner and one of the Monitors visit the alternate earth where the good guys are the bad guys, and vice versa. We focus almost entirely on the Jokester, a former comedian turned insane crimefighter, along with the mirror-universe versions of the Riddler, Two-Face, Robin, and the Joker’s Daughter.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Mirror universe stories are always fun, and I’m glad to see DC is expanding their Earth-3 to include more than just Ultraman, Owlman, Superwoman, Power Ring, and Johnny Quick.

 

Justice League of America: Wedding Special

I bought this expecting another fairly lightweight story — lots of stuff from Green Arrow’s bachelor party and Black Canary’s bachelorette party. And there is some of that, and it’s nice and amusing. But there’s a real serious side to this issue, too. Firestorm almost gets killed by Lex Luthor, the Joker, Cheetah, and Killer Frost, who are organizing a new Injustice League, which includes just about every supervillain on the planet and meets in an HQ that looks just like the Legion of Doom’s hideout in the old “Super Friends” cartoon. And the villains are already moving against the Justice League.

This is the first issue written by Dwayne McDuffie, and if you know Dwayne McDuffie, you’re already dancing around the room singing hallelujah. He founded Milestone Media and helped create most of their characters, including Static, Icon, and the Blood Syndicate. He wrote episodes of “Static Shock,” “Justice League,” and “Teen Titans.” He knows comics and is one holy heck of a writer. If anyone can return the Justice League to greatness, it’s him.

The story is first-rate and includes lots of the little details that can make character-driven comics so much fun. The dialogue and characterization are great, and they’re doing a great job of ratcheting up the pressure about the Injustice League.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Can’t wait for the next regular “Justice League” comic.

The Spirit #9

An uncommonly dead-serious issue of this comic. The Spirit runs into a crimelord named El Morte who appears to be completely unstoppable. Much of the story is El Morte’s origin, and it’s pretty darn bizarre, but wow, he seems really far more scary than Sprit villains should be. Crazy kooky crimelords are fine, but when they can’t be shot or beat up or anything else, what can a non-powered guy like the Spirit do to them?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Darwyn Cooke’s artwork is so excellent. I’m a bit worried about El Morte — I hope it’s not just going to be several issues of “Spirit gets beat half to death” followed by a deus ex machina ending.

Shadowpact #16

Well, it turns out that the evil Dr. Gotham didn’t kill all of Chicago last issue, like they claimed he did. In fact, he missed almost everyone, thanks to Nightshade teleporting multiple skyscrapers and people into the Shadowrealm at the last second. Other superheroes show up to help, but Shadowpact does most of the work. Enchantress teleports into Dr. Gotham’s transdimensional armory and busts up a lot of his stuff until Gotham gives up and runs away. Meanwhile, Blue Devil’s lawyer fails to win back BD’s soul, mainly because Hell’s lawyers are so very good at what they do. A very angry priest requires BD to take on 13 nearly impossible tasks before he can be forgiven for selling his soul.

Verdict: Thumbs down. All this stuff happens, and it’s still not pulling me into the story. And I’m still pretty unhappy with the complete lack of characterization going on. Most of these characters, aside from Detective Chimp, seem to exhibit the same personality, except for Nightshade, who has never really had any personality at all.

Justice League of America #12

Brad Meltzer’s swan song on this comic focuses on the JLA’s time on monitor duty. Hawkgirl meets Red Arrow’s daughter, Black Canary plays the harmonica, GeoForce and Black Lightning run sting operations.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Part of the reason so many of Meltzer’s previous issues met with such rotten reviews is that he seems to be better at personality profiles than he is at superhero action. Well, that, and his cast is way too large. But hey, it’s cool that Black Canary plays the harmonica.

Supergirl #20

I’m astoundingly late with this one. Basically, the new, more realistic Supergirl completely fails to keep Air Force One from crashing, then tries to fight off angry Amazons, magic giants, and distrustful humans.

Verdict: Thumbs up. The character’s new look is a winner — pretty much just like the original without the creepy maniquinism that plagued her before. Good personality work, too. I wish Tony Bedard and Renato Guedes could work on this comic longer than the three issues they’ll be here…

Mmmmm, giant Kryptonite monkey…

One thing you should know about comics fans: We really love monkeys.

“What’s so strange about that?” I hear you ask. “All red-blooded Americans love monkeys!”

This is indeed true. But it still must be said: comic book fans really, really love monkeys.

A lot of this stems from comics’ “Silver Age” in the late-1950s to ’60s. DC Comics had an editor named Julius Schwartz, who had a method for spurring writers’ creativity in which he’d send them some utterly outrageous cover (Green Lantern giving away free power rings to passersby, the Justice League getting turned into trees, the Flash being transformed into a life-sized wooden puppet), then tell the writers to come up with a story based on that cover image. As it turned out, the covers that had DC characters interacting with a gorilla or monkey nearly always sold more copies than other comics, so you saw more and more DC comic books with monkey guest stars, monkey villains, like Gorilla Grodd, Monsieur Mallah, and Titano, or even monkey superheroes, like Detective Chimp or Beppo the Super-Monkey.

So, based on this noble, banana-eating heritage, comic book fans really love monkeys.

There are, however, limits.

DC decided to really push the envelope of monkey-love back in 1999. Back then, all of DC’s annuals would revolve around central themes — one year, it was pulp fiction, the next it was “DC One Million” with new versions of DC’s heroes in the far flung future. Well, in 1999, the theme was “JLApe” after the evil Gorilla Grodd succeeded in one of his oldest schemes: he turned the members of the Justice League into gorillas.

The Justice League of Apes?

Someone’s made monkeys of the JLA…

Green Lantern channels Charlton Heston

All in all, it doesn’t seem that bad, does it? Well, unfortunately, despite all the funky monkey art, the series as a whole just wasn’t very well written, but then again, lots of comics aren’t well written. The biggest problem is that, rather than being a single comic with a bunch of gorillas in it, it was seven or eight comics, in the space of a month, with a bunch of gorillas in ’em. That’s like chain-smoking Cuban cigars for a month, or guzzling bottles of fine champagne for a month — when you over-indulge in a luxury, it stops feeling luxurious.

So to summarize:

A few super-monkeys = good!

A whole bunch of super-monkeys over a dozen comics all in the same month = Let us not speak of this again.