Stormwatch #11

When is J’onn going to get the spotlight?

Milligan begins this tale describing a Neanderthal super team.

This takes place in the 1100s.

Somehow, the Neanderthals have managed to keep a pure bloodline existing throughout tens of thousands of years. They’d become known as The Hidden People, just trying to stay out of Homo Sapiens way and trying to keep their culture intact. Now, in the time of the Demon Knights, one Neanderthal priest has gathered to him three young Neanderthals to become fighters against humanity. He has named them Bloodline, Flame, and Soul. It is their mission to keep the pure Neanderthal blood going and to find a way to create that weapon above so they can defeat the humans. But it will take generations for them to succeed. Which means the story will probably continue in the 21st century.

Oh, I’m getting ahead of the comic! First it needs to spend a few pages pointing out how Stormwatch has been fighting against The Hidden People to keep them from activating their Devolver.

A few thousand years? That seems a bit drastic. If I believe that then I have to believe the effects of the Devolver wear off over time or after it is shut off. I’d believe maybe a few hundred years if the effects remained. Maybe.

Okay, now a few more pages in and the comic returns to 2012 stating that Stormwatch is still fighting The Hidden People! I guess Milligan was tired of Stormwatch always fighting alien threats. It makes sense to give them an earthbound threat to humanity that they could have been fighting throughout the years. And he mentions The Hidden People become organized in the 12th Century. I estimated that Demon Knights is taking place sometime very close to but before 1066 since it doesn’t seem like the Normans have yet to invade Britain. And I believe Merlin has yet to create Stormwatch but I suspect that the Demon Knights will be the first incarnation of Stormwatch. Except that it’s already been stated, The Hidden People would make a far better reason to form Stormwatch than the Daemonites. Having the Daemonite “Scouts” scouting Earth for over 2000 years seems a bit improbable and really seems like something that won’t ever be explained very well. Unless I missed the explanation because I fell asleep while reading about Daemonites because they’re the most boring galactic threat ever.

This comic is reminding me I need to reread Planetary. Fucking Neanderthals!

Well, fuck, wherever my train of thought went, I hope it’s happy. Back to Stormwatch 2012!

The three Neanderthal “Super Heroes” created back in the 12th Century are still the personalities inhabiting the current generation’s bodies. Soul is continuing to use the Mind Gun given to him by the Priest. Flame is sucking down gas on the Natural Gas Drilling Platform they’re attacking in order to fuel the Devolver. And Bloodline looks like he’s getting his ass kicked.

He’s just a diversion anyway!

The Hidden People get what they came for and disappear. They don’t go through giant orange doors. They just dissipate. Even though Martian Manhunter is a powerhouse in so many different ways, his main objective during the battle was to gather as much information from them as he could by reading their minds. He seems to have a bit of trouble reading Neanderthal minds, of course! Can’t make it too easy! But he did sense memories of theirs related to The Engineer and the entirety of Stormwatch being dead.

Angie (the Engineer!) finds some records on the Eye of the Storm which indicate a Stormwatch Team in the mid to late 20th century were all killed in a single day. But she doesn’t find out how or where.

Meanwhile in Antarctica, Harry Tanner is treating The Projectionist and The Fox like crap on a crappy cracker.

Although she seems to know how to fuck with him as well.

Angie finds the remains of the old Engineer on board the Eye of the Storm and accesses his memories from what is left of him. She learns that in 1944, a Stormwatch team was completely wiped out from being in the proximity of an active Devolver. But she realizes this just as her team are closing in on the location that J’onn picked up from The Hidden People. And, yes, they’re waiting for them with their fueled up Devolver.

Why would it have any effect on Martian Manhunter?

I want to see more of Jenny Quantum’s devolution! She’s immediately shunted into Jenny Sparks! What’s before that? Jenny Steam? Jenny Horses? Jenny Wagon Wheel? Jenny Lever? Jenny Fire?

Angie manages to Teleport Door down to Earth and absorb the Devolver in much the same way she absorbed the old Engineer. The Hidden People disappear and Martian Manhunter makes a horrible, horrible joke that I won’t repeat nor scan. Go read Stormwatch #11 if you’re curious to see a moment where one panel can just ruin the entire flow of a story. But back on board the Eye of the Storm, Angie is facing the consequences of having absorbed the Devolver.

I’ll bet Milligan wrote in the script that this was coming out both ends.

Oh! So the Devolver must only work while turned on since the rest of the team seem fine and dandy after Angie absorbs the Devolver. The old Stormwatch team were killed by The Hidden People while they were confused and slowing down from devolving. Except for the old Engineer who tried to escape via Stormwatch’s 1944 plane and couldn’t remember how to fly it due to being stupidified.

While Stormwatch believes they won this round, The Hidden People have a different take on things.

If Angie had expelled the Devolver from both ends, maybe she’d be safe.

Stormwatch #11 Rating: No change. I like the introduction of the Neanderthal threat because Stormwatch simply could not have been protecting Earth from alien invasions for a thousand years. There needed to be an ancient enemy from Earth with which they would be at odds. And it’s an enemy that isn’t necessarily the bad guy. They’re just the species that lost out and have been fighting to change that outcome for centuries. Perhaps millennium! This was a good history building issue for the team but I need more character building to raise it in the ranks.

Stormwatch #10

The weirdest thing about the creature attacking Apollo is its haircut.

Stormwatch is currently researching Super Heroes. After Red Lanterns #10, they feel like they’ve got a pretty good handle on ways to defeat Green Lantern. Now they’re investigating the other big names. If Stormwatch is so good at watching and controlling everything, they should have already stolen all of the information Voodoo stole from the Black Razors about the super heroes. Maybe the Eye of the Storm, Stormwatch Headquarters and a Daemonite ship with a Daemonite A.I., has been protecting Voodoo from the prying eyes of Stormwatch. But since they don’t have access to every form of media anymore because Harry Tanner kidnapped The Projectionist, the team needs to hit the streets to do their research.

In the middle of a spat about secrets while researching Superman’s secret identity in Metropolis, Apollo and Midnighter are interrupted by The Engineer to declare there is trouble in France. Apollo’s spandex is bunched up about all the secrets going on. Perhaps he has never come out to his family, so the whole secret organization and secret identity crap is weighing heavily on him since he’s also living a secret sexual life. Although, it could just be that Apollo is the bright light, day, optimistic and open side of the duo, so secrets just rub him the wrong way. But that’s the kind of rubbing Midnighter likes, being the dark, dirty, realistic, shadowy half of the pair.

An archaeologist in Northern France has dug up a strange, futuristic device in an 18th century battlefield.

I see he’s a fan of David Graves.

As he’s examining it, he presses a button and the device zaps the fuck out of him. It probably turns him into some rampaging creature (like the one with the bad hair on the cover?!) but the comic cuts away to Stormwatch coming out of a Teleport Door nearby. Although two hours after the archaeologist is zapped.

My guess is this guy unwittingly activated a phreno-module! Although that hasn’t happened in 250 years!

Oops. I meant 248 years! By the way, what the fuck is a phreno-module?

As you can see, I’m pretending to know stuff I only really know by having already read it. It’s a trick that a lot of people use, like those jerks who pretend to talk to the dead and psychic phone advisers. I mean psychic advisers you talk to over the phone, not psychics who advise phones of their love lives.

I also could pretend I know what a phreno-module might be but I only know the prefix phreno from phrenology which is, I think, the study of the head to predict shit or something, like palm reading. Looking up “phreno”, I see it also means diaphragm! That’s confusing!

Doctor: “I’m sorry but you’ve got a severe case of Phrenoitis.”
Patient: “Oh my God, Doctor! Will I lose my uterus?”

Okay, that was a bad example since the patient in my little play didn’t know any meaning of phreno. But I bet if I keep reading Stormwatch instead of rambling like an idiot, Peter Milligan will tell me exactly what the Phreno-Module does! I bet it turns people into raging black skeletons with bad hair cuts!

That guess wasn’t as surefire as it may have seemed! DC rarely gets the cover art correct.

While Apollo keeps this creature busy, Midnighter searches for the phreno-module that created it. The P-Module was created for an older version of Stormwatch in a time of crisis. That’s what Engineer says and it doesn’t really explain anything about the stupid things. How about some useful information, Nanotits?

Midnighter finds the P-Module but he gets too close to it even though Engineer specifically told him, “Don’t get too close to it!” The Phreno part of the P-Module seems to have to do more with the mind than the diaphragm because Midnighter starts flashing back to being abused as a child and then he completely freaks the fuck out. Do I use that phrase too much? I’m going to make it my catch phrase.

Meanwhile somewhere under Antarctica, Harry Tanner and The Projectionist are making their first appearances since they disappeared in Stormwatch #5 (or #6. Or somewhere around there).

You can tell it’s Antarctica because penguins are watching instead of snow bunnies. Also, the tag that says, “Antarctica.”

I wonder if Harry Tanner knew the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E.? He’s lucky his base wasn’t destroyed when NOWHERE’s headquarters blew up and everyone escaped by tunneling through the Earth in every direction.

Harry Tanner has a pet project he’s working on to destroy Stormwatch. I forget exactly why he wants to kill them. Maybe because he’s just a power hungry liar who made a deal with some moon beast and then stole the creature’s knowledge to help him defeat everything. The Projectionist doesn’t really want to help him but she wants to die even less. So, you know, she teams up.

Meanwhile in Iron Heights Penitentiary, I’m reminded why I love writers like Peter Milligan. The Fox is busy mumbling to himself about the moon. Remember The Fox? He was the guy The Projectionist pinned all of the weird moon nonsense on. He had a single panel back in Stormwatch #2 where Booster Gold was busting his ass. I really liked the idea because Stormwatch was manipulating the heroes of Earth in ways they barely even noticed in order to keep themselves secret. But The Fox was now wrongly imprisoned by real super heroes that think they’re helping keep the world safe. It’s all such a clusterfuck and a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. And the fact that Peter Milligan remembered and decided to use that throwaway panel with the big idea is what great writers do.

Great writers: Turning obscure moments in comics into major plot points.

After Harry Tanner breaks The Fox out of prison, the action returns to France to find out what the P-Module did to Midnighter. I bet whatever it did, it will somehow prove that Apollo was right that secrets are bad news!

Midnighter is struggling to keep control as the P-Module accesses his inner demons when Jenny Quantum enters.

Even to Apollo? Maybe that’s why Apollo’s been so pissy this issue.

Jenny Quantum: Deus Ex Machina. But in a fun, light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek way.

Shutting down the machine also shuts down the Archaeological Monstrosity. They take him back up to the Eye of the Storm to examine him before setting him loose back on Earth. The only side effect from the experience is a 68% greater chance that he’ll develop paranoid schizophrenia. Oh, okay. No big deal! Everything is good.

Engineer also reveals that she knows more about the history of Stormwatch than she’s been letting on.

Apollo must have been studying up on his Stormwatch history as well since he joined five minutes ago.

When Stormwatch went public, it was a disaster. Nations fought over whose side Stormwatch was really on. I’ll let The Engineer do all the ‘splainin’.

Who is Helix Bubble Head?

Please. Remembered history is the easiest thing to change!

Looks like I was wrong about Midnighter learning a lesson about the danger of keeping secrets. It looks like Apollo is going to learn a lesson about why secrets are sometimes necessary. But I now think Apollo is angry at Midnighter for keeping a secret from him. He’ll probably tell Midnighter in the last few pages and then Midnighter will do that thing he never does: apologize.

Oh, looks like my first supposition from the beginning was correct.

And Midnighter’s fatal flaw is he can’t be emotionally close and give Apollo the great big hug Apollo needs right now. Awww.

Stormwatch #10 Rating: +2 Ranking. I think Peter Milligan taking over Stormwatch has been a great success. He hasn’t come on the book and changed everything. He’s using what Paul Cornell and Paul Jenkins wrote before and weaving it into his stories. And he’s doing it really well. Characters in Stormwatch (and this goes for all three writers that have worked on this title) can easily become flat and one-dimensional but this hasn’t happened. Their group dynamic just continues to get better. I really like this group. Oh, and they’re from the Wildstorm Universe, so, yeah, I can like Wildstorm characters too! Just write them well and I’m on board!

Stormwatch #8

So that’s Jenny Quantum’s major power now? Doing equations in the air?

This issue begins with Martian Manhunter relating everything he knows about the Gravity Miners. Apparently he was lying last issue when he said they were an ancient enemy of his people. In this issue, he states that his people believed the Gravity Miners were a legend. That they were “propaganda created by the Daemonites to justify their position in the galactic hierarchy.” He explains how they first came to the Daemonites’ homeworld because the Daemonites were experimenting with Pradesh Gravitons. Within ninety days, they had destroyed one-third of the Damonite Galaxy. I guess they also moved on to destroy a bunch of other galaxies as well since Manhunter said last issue that the last time the Miners arrived in our universe they destroyed a bunch of galaxies. And apparently, the Martians never encountered these “ancient enemies”. What a big fat liar J’onzz is!

Now come on! That’s not exactly true either, is it J’onn? Being extra-dimensional doesn’t presuppose those things! But being extra-dimensional, there is no way we could interact with them to find out their language or ethics or motives. And why would they want to interact with us? We’re less to them than ants are to us! We’re probably more like breezes or non-existent ghosts you can’t even see. Or creeping stick figures. I don’t know!

But since the Daemonites defeated them before, Manhunter suggests they try to find out how they did it so that Stormwatch could duplicate the process. Duh! That’s where I said the hope would be! Also, Jack might know something more from speaking with Pripyat. Although it doesn’t really look like he learned much.

The Gravity Miners have created a portal in Pripyat. Apparently they needed to kidnap a living, three-dimensional being to maintain contact with the three-dimensional world. This enabled them to open a portal so they can invade. Although if they’re fifth dimensional, I’m not sure how we see them as three dimensional tentacles. I would suppose we would just see weird floating shapes, like cubes or spheres, as certain pieces of them passed through our three-dimensional perception. But what do I know? I’m just a comic book reader!

The plan to defeat the Gravity Miners is to send Midnighter and Jenny into the portal to retrieve Apollo. But I guess just getting back the three dimensional key to their portal isn’t enough. Jenny also has to introduce “Golbach’s Conjecture” [sic] into the portal to destroy it because introducing an impossible mathematical equation will cause the portal to collapse.

I see a number of problems with this! First off, it’s Goldbach’s Conjecture, not Golbach’s Conjecture. Secondly, it’s not an impossible equation! It’s just an equation which has yet to have a mathematical proof written for it. I guess that’s near enough an impossible equation? But they need to remember that they’re just three-dimensional beings! These five-dimensional beings probably laugh at Goldbach’s Conjecture as being as easy as 2+2=5 4.

But, you know, I’m probably just being picky.

Oh no he di’n’t!

Once inside, Midnighter tries to leave Jenny for dead while he escapes with Apollo. But she, being the manifestation of the 21st Century, actually makes it back on her own five minutes before Midnighter does. Oops!

The portal is closed and the Gravity Miners defeated. Maybe.

Who the fuck cares about other dimensions? Let them deal with the problem because they’ve already had to deal with the problem one way or another! You can’t protect every dimension based on our reality because of the way dimensions work! For every dimension you save, a dimension exists where you didn’t save that dimension. So fuck it! Take care of your dimension and try not to think about it.

The issue ends with Jenny confronting Midnighter. Her powers are so inexplicable that she mentions to Midnighter that she made some decision concerning him which must mean, like Billy Mumy in that Twilight Zone episode, that she’s changed something about him that he won’t like. But of course she doesn’t tell him! She just lets him freak out about the possibilities. And since Midnighter can figure out all the possibilities in any given situation, he’s probably super freaking out right about now!

I think Jenny just figured out Midnighter’s weakness! Turn his mind against himself! It’s like introducing a hypochondriac to WebMD!

Stormwatch Issue #8 Rating: +1 Ranking. The overall plot to battle the Gravity Miners was as mediocre as it gets. A vague threat. A techno-jargon plan of attack. Threat defeated without any fireworks at all. But the other stuff is pretty entertaining. And this +1 Ranking is really +1/2 for this comic and +1/2 for Issue #7. Stormwatch is managing a very slow and steady rise up the ranks.

Stormwatch #7

Batman can!

Last issue ended Paul Cornell’s run on Stormwatch. I wonder if Demon Knights and Stormwatch will retain the connection that Cornell was setting up? Or if this Jenkins guy will just drop the whole idea that Merlin formed Stormwatch centuries ago and we’ll never hear another word about that? Writers are so narcissistic. They always have to write about their own ideas instead of taking creative input from other writers!

Does anybody out there remember DC Challenge? Holy shit what a train wreck that was! I think I have it lying around somewhere. I should do a special commentary on that series. It was, ostensibly, a round robin comic where a new author would take over the story each issue after the previous issue ended on a cliff-hanger. But most of the authors just started new storylines when their issue came out and I believe many of them just ignored the cliff-hanger endings of the previous author! It was absolute batshit.

Sorry! I didn’t mean to compare Stormwatch to DC Challenge! That was just a random aside! Stormwatch is much better! But maybe not this issue! I don’t know since I haven’t started reading it yet! I’ll start reading it next paragraph.

Idiot! When it goes crazy, you’re walking through radiation! Sheesh!

The opening scene is in the Ukraine in, I guess, some sort of nuclear disaster. I don’t know why the guy with the Geiger counter would think it’s going crazy for no reason! It goes crazy for a very specific reason, stupid! Read my caption! Maybe that guy thinks it is supposed to detect Firestorms. So it goes crazy and he looks around but doesn’t see anything, so he ignores its readings. I hope he dies!

OH MY GOD! I TAKE IT BACK! I TAKE IT ALL BACK!

I think I have a super power that allows me to curse people with my words! One time, I was walking home from Fred Meyer. This kid is riding towards me on his bike on the sidewalk and he’s talking on a cell phone. But he’s got the cell phone in his hand that would pull the back brakes. So as he passes me, I think, “I hope he fucking crashes.” And immediately after that, I hear a loud smash! I turn around and he’s splayed out on the ground. Serves him right! He probably panicked and pulled the front brake and lost control! Another time, I cursed my cousin with the hiccups and he had them for practically a whole day! So don’t piss me off!

Back on board the Eye of the Storm, the ending to Grifter #7 is immediately spoiled for me as I learn that Midnighter “uses enough explosives to kill it” and then the editor gives me a note to read Grifter #7 to find out what they’re talking about. And in the editor’s note, it says Grifter #7 will be on sale March 14th. So even if I wasn’t behind in my reading, this comic would have spoiled Grifter for me anyway! Thanks, DC!

Well, I guess if Midnighter is on a mission, he’s going to win out and kill the enemy in an exaggerated fashion. So I guess nothing was spoiled. As soon as I saw Midnighter in the comic, I would have known what was in store for the antagonist.

Stormwatch detects some weird shit happening at the Chernobyl site so Apollo heads down to check it out.

Looks like the artist used the pictures from the site I linked to as reference. Every couple of years, I find myself rereading that site. Simply a fantastic piece of work.

Something weird begins to happen to Apollo (I think it might be the Gravity Thieves!) and the ship’s alarms go off. Engineer appears to yell at Midnighter and bitch about being leader and tell her everything and blah blah blah. Shut up already! She’s got a serious case of I told you so’s!

Oh! Speaking of “I told you so”, I remember seeing this video from one of those crazy Fox television shows about people nearly dying or some stupid shit. And it was of a group of Australian school kids out hiking with some teachers. And the teacher is filming a couple of girls out over a canyon walking along a thin and dangerous trail. So you hear him as he’s filming say, “Don’t go over that way, girls. It’s too dangerous.” And then one of the girls slips and falls! And he follows her fall to the bottom of the canyon with his camera while shouting, “I told you not to go over there!” Man, what a dick!

So The Engineer sends Jack down to the Ghosttown to speak with it. I can’t imagine that’s going to go very well! It may have been a city once but now it’s definitely just a dead place. The way Stormwatch has Jack speak with the Avatar of the cities, though, means he’ll probably speak with a radioactive mutant beast creature. I think Jack should arrive and just start dying from radiation sickness himself since that’s really all the city is at this point. Just a bloated mass of wood and stone covered in radioactive fallout.

BLAH BLAH BLAH RANDOM QUANTUM THEORY BLAH BLAH BLAH

Martian Manhunter recognizes the things attacking Apollo and takes Jenny Quantum down to save Apollo with a bunch of jargon. It works! They fluctuate the Feynman State and turn space/time back on itself while removing the higher supercharge particles! But first Jenny had to reverse the polarity of the quantum field, of course! That way, she was able to save Apollo AND capture one of the creatures in a Compton scatter field! Easy peasy!

No idea what happened to Jack Hawksmoor, though.

Oh, there he is. Why aren’t Hiroshima and Nagasaki taking care of Fukushima as well?

If Jack Hawksmoor is the God of Cities, I really wish he would become a city and not have the cities’ avatars become human. Why’s everything gotta be so Homocentric? (Look at how I’m avoiding an Apollo and Midnighter joke here because I’m not in Junior High anymore!) Anyway, Jack finds out that Pripyat thinks he’s been attacked by demons. Well, that should help Stormwatch! Jack can return to the ship and say, “Hey everyone! I found out the problem! The city is being attacked by demons!” And then the rest of the crew will step to the side and Jack will see that they’ve already caught one of them. And then he’ll look down at his super-callused feet and mutter, “Oh.”

But before Jack can return, the Daemonite ship (which they refer to now as “Charlie” although they really should be calling it Shodan) tries to kill the creature. The creature reacts oddly to being killed.

It’s yelling, “Guacomole!” in Old Portuguese.

The ship is unable to kill the creature and instead it escapes and zaps Apollo. Both Apollo and the creature disappear. The Engineer decides it’s time to yell at someone else and she turns on Martian Manhunter since he seemed to know what the things were.

“What are those things!?” she yells! See? That’ll get some answers!

How much do you want to bet they find a way to stop them? Hey! Here’s a suggestion! Use whatever was used to stop them the other time they came to our universe!

These Gravity Miners are an ancient enemy of the Martian people. Even though they usually sit in a parallel dimension not causing anybody harm. I mean, except for that one time. And they destroyed countless galaxies that one time. And since Mars wasn’t destroyed, they didn’t destroy our galaxy. So I’m really wondering how they’re an ancient enemy of the Martian people?

Stormwatch Issue #7 Rating: No change in rank. This issue was more fun than not fun! Is that a decent review? I know I didn’t pun appropriately like a real reviewer. “Reading Stormwatch is more fun than watching a real storm!” No, no, that sucked. “The Tale of the Gravity Thieves really sucked!” Maybe this issue would have received a rise in the rankings if it wasn’t for all the techno-jargon. Some of it is okay because we know the whole situation is bullshit. But geez! He just wouldn’t shut up with it! I’m pretty sure he just kept opening a Quantum Physics text book and randomly pointed to different words for his explanations. But none of that really took away from the book! The MAIN reason it didn’t get a Plus One rating was because it ended with one of the Stormwatch team saying a major threat was coming and there was no way they could prevent it. Oh, come on! Stop giving up already! I bet by the end of the first page of Issue #8, you’ll begin to have a plan! And I’ll bet Jack Hawksmoor will be behind it! And I’m not even psychic!

Green Arrow #6

Is one of Rose’s powers ‘Pigeon Shield’?

Finally back to Green Arrow, the worst comic book of the New 52! That’s just my opinion and I could be wrong about that since Captain Atom is really, really bad as well. And that comic is still being written by J.T. Krul who sucks at writing. I should have allowed Green Arrow to climb up a rung just because J.T. Krul left the book.

At the end of the last issue, Green Arrow had knocked Midas unconscious but was then left with Blood Rose holding a gun to his head. Will she pull the trigger? According to the cover, they’re going to at least have to change scenes to an abandoned apartment full of birds before anybody dies. So my guess is that Green Arrow isn’t killed in the first panel of this issue.

How exactly are these costumes designed to show every single ripple of muscle on the human body but never show a single nipple, cock, or camel-toe?

Green Arrow seems to think he’s immortal because he’s pretty damn glib with a gun stuck to the back of his head. And why wouldn’t he think he’s immortal? He came back from the grave at least once! It’ll probably happen again. Although being shot in the head seems to make you dead forever if Ted Kord is proof of anything. And Green Arrow doesn’t have Flash’s instinctual super speed to allow him to move at just the last second if Rose decides to pull the trig….

Er. Um. Well, that sucks. For the few people who like Green Arrow!

Luckily for Green Arrow, Blood Rose doesn’t shoot to kill. She’s after Oliver Queen and doesn’t want to bring down the wrath of a real super hero like Superman by killing Green Arrow. You know what? That may be the best excuse used by a villain ever to not kill a hero they had the drop on. “Green Arrow sucks! He uses a bow and arrow! No reason to piss off Batman or Stormwatch (who?!) or Superman by offing this chump!” Although if they only knew his secret identity! Oh, the sarcasm! Er, I mean, irony!

Blood Rose and Toxic Waste Dump (or Midas, I guess) leave Green Arrow on the ground and walk away to plan how to kill Oliver Queen. Since Green Arrow is wired and the next page shows that Naomi heard how they wouldn’t kill him for fear of bringing Superman down on them, I also wonder if Naomi could still hear them as they walked away talking about Oliver Queen being the real target. Of course, this may have already been revealed in one of the past comic books and I just don’t remember it.

And then Page Four all by itself makes me like the Green Arrow comic so, so, so much more. With Giffen and Jurgens doing the co-plotting, the characters sound real. They’re having real discussions instead of spouting rhetoric and fascist bullshit. By Odin, they’re actually making me like them!

Spoiler for Justice League #8!

I skipped a panel in-between these two sets of panels where Green Arrow just stares blankly in response to Naomi’s “Of course he did, you did, right?” bubble.

Green Arrow has some sort of bio-scan thing set up into his glasses and it took readings of Midas and Blood Rose during his encounter with them. I wonder if Green Arrow walks around irradiating everyone with his scanning technology. Or is it some kind of magnetic resonance thing? Does he go around screwing up every electronic item he looks at?

The scans show that Blood Rose isn’t human. She has no organic traces in her body. Green Arrow asks, “A robot?” What the fuck else is she going to be? Oh, maybe a ghost? Nobody discusses what the fuck Midas was. But Naomi was able to lock on to Blood Rose’s energy signature (does she leak Plutonium?) so that Green Arrow can track her down.

After the ad, Green Arrow breaks into Blood Rose and Midas’s secret hideout. Green Arrow seems to be able to fire arrows as fast as Blood Rose can shoot bullets. Maybe Green Arrow is that elf from the movie, Hawk the Slayer? He eventually shoots Blood Rose with an electric arrow which seems to shut her down for a few seconds. But during that time, Green Arrow is scooped up by Midas! But Green Arrow stabs him in the leg with an unexplained arrow and it burns Midas and forces him to drop Green Arrow and retreat. Green Arrow’s in-house tech guy came up with the idea which isn’t explained immediately.

The chemicals in the arrow are used to clean up toxic waste.

Green Arrow shoots another arrow which explodes in a cloud of the toxic clean-up chemicals. Midas heads for cover while Blood Rose chases after Green Arrow. But now that Green Arrow knows he’s facing a robot and not a person, he doesn’t need to hold back. He blows her up with an exploding arrow.

After that, Oliver tracks down Midas with a small gift.

Dude. That’s messed up. Super villains have feelings too!

Green Arrow asks Midas, “You built her?”
Midas says, “No. I love her. Go Now. It is over.”
Green Arrow: “I’ll be the judge of that.”
Midas: “No, you will not.”>

And then a self-destruct sequence begins counting down and Green Arrow gets out before he goes up in a ball of flame with Midas and what’s left of Blood Rose.

Afterward, Naomi wants to know what Blood Rose’s grudge against Oliver Queen was and how Ollie knew her. Ollie has no idea since, as he says, he’d remember meeting a robot.

Yeah! And maybe we’ll find out who she was in a later issue or in a one page epilogue at the end of this issue!

Looks like it’s a Stormwatch moon out tonight!

While Green Arrow is drinking his energy drink (or beer?) on the roof, he’s being spied on by a group of people. I don’t know who they are because the panels are just the view from their high tech binoculars. But they’re talking with each other about how hot Green Arrow is. So they must be the girls on the cover of Issue #7 who are swarming Green Arrow. The seem to be called The Skylarks.

And then an epilogue just like I guessed because I know comic books!

Except this epilogue was two pages instead of one.

The epilogue doesn’t explain who Blood Rose and Midas were. But it does show that they’ve survived. And that they’re headed to Metropolis. Hey! That’s a coincidence! Because Dan Jurgens and Keith Giffen are also going to Metropolis as the creative team of Superman! So I guess we’ll learn more about these characters over there.

Holy shit. This Green Arrow issue was hundreds and hundreds of percentile points better than J.T. Krul’s crap he crapped out all over his crappy scripts to have the artists draw. I don’t know if the good Green Arrow stuff will continue since a new creative team heads up the next issue. But at least I’ve got some hope! I’ll even raise Green Arrow up two ranks because this issue was so much better. Plus it gives the new creative team some room to fall without having to drop down beneath the steaming pile of Captain Atom.