The Green Team: Teen Trillionaires #4 – Review

By: Art Baltazar & Franco (story), Ig Guara, Robson Rocha, Travis Moore (pencils), J.P. Mayer, Júlio Ferreira, Jose Marzan Jr. (inks), Wil Quintana & Chris Sotomayor (colors)

The Story: Blue blood is thicker than water—and more expensive, too.

The Review: Well, never let it be said that I don’t give things a fair shake.  I never had much confidence in the premise of this series—the sur-title of Teen Trillionaires made me ever so slightly nauseated—but I was willing to place some trust in Baltazar-Franco and see if their offbeat vision could lead The Green Team somewhere unexpected and enjoyable.  Unfortunately, it may be a step above its sister title, The Movement, but that’s not really saying much, is it?

Both titles suffer from the superficiality of its characters, albeit from opposite directions.  While the members of the Movement always seemed to be trying too hard to fit into carefully constructed, oddball personalities, the Green Team started out more centered and credible, but never gained the distinguishing qualities which makes characters human.  Though occasionally displaying sparks of life when paired off, their dynamic as a group is flat and affected, leaving you underwhelmed by any declaration that “No matter what happens…we’re still friends.”

The Green Team #3 – Review

By: Art Baltazar & Franco (story), Ig Guara (pencils), J.P. Mayer (inks), Wil Quintana (colors)

The Story: Deathstroke refuses to be part of a buddy-idiot comedy.

The Review: I had a pal once who fancied himself an entrepreneur.  He had no scientific or business experience whatsoever—he was a fellow English teacher at the time—so he was often coming up with things that stood little chance of ever coming into existence, like a combination sprinkler/pesticide system for home use.  At the same time, he had so much love and enthusiasm for his own ideas that you couldn’t help feeling charmed by him.

That’s kind of the feeling you get from The Green Team, which at its heart is patently ridiculous (I mean, teen trillionaires—really), but so committed to its hyperbolic premise that it does end up pretty enjoyable.  While the idea of J.P. and Cecilia ordering crates of sparkling water to bathe in sounds silly-stupid, the idea of Commodore instant-purchasing a hotel and having it airlifted away by technicians in alien masks to save his girlfriend from bad press (and promote her latest alien abduction film) is silly-funny/clever.  When money is no object, this is exactly the kind of craziness it should be spent on.

The Green Team #2 – Review

By: Art Baltazar & Franco (story), Ig Guara (pencils), J.P. Mayer (inks), Wil Quintana (colors)

The Story: Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a cybernetic arm.

The Review: The way I see it, Baltazar and Franco really need to toe the line so as to make this title a success in one main area: the fact that hardly anyone really sympathizes with—can really sympathize with—the ultra-rich.  It may be fun for us as kids to play that classic scenario, “What would you do with a billion dollars?”  But as we grow up, the idea of any one person having that much money at their fingertips, solely for their own consumption, just seems appalling.

So while I’m sure Baltazar-Franco are just having fun coming up with increasingly outrageous expenditures for the Green Team, they’d be wise to keep it under control.  Not only do some of the transactions strain credibility (Commodore, in a fit of hunger, buys out a hot dog vendor’s entire stand*), but they can turn us off to the characters, period (J.P., unable to decide what to order from room service, says, “I don’t know…just bring two of everything on the menu.”).

The Green Team #1 – Review

By: Art Baltazar & Franco (story), Ig Guara (pencils), J.P. Mayer (inks), Wil Quintana (colors)

The Story: The best things in life are free—or, arguably, worth billions of dollars.

The Review: As I did with The Movement, its sibling title, I had my reservations about The Green Team.  Admittedly, the premise of a group of “teen trillionaires” trying to get into the superhero gig is pretty unusual.  At the same time, it’s one of those things where execution is really, really crucial.  Depending on how Baltazar-Franco handle the series’ development, it could prove to be very interesting or incredibly ill-conceived.

Big stakes, but Baltazar-Franco do seem to pull it off in their debut issue.  There’s certainly more credibility here than you probably would have expected.  It’s true that the characters’ wealth are hyperbolic exaggerations (“Hey, would you turn down sixty-four trillion dollars?”)*, allowing them to have some fairly exotic lifestyles (e.g., debating whether to jet to France or Quebec to satisfy a French food craving).  Despite that, the cast is self-aware and intelligent, avoiding the fate of becoming caricatures of the rich.

Suicide Squad #7 – Review

By: Adam Glass (writer), Clayton Henry & Ig Guara (pencillers), Scott Hanna (inker), Val Staples (colorist)

The Story: Shacking up with the Joker?  Where’s a disapproving mother when you need one?

The Review: Part of what makes Joker so compelling as a character is the question of how much of his behavior is genuine madness and how much is simply a twisted sense of the world and one’s place in it.  Not surprisingly, the same questions apply to his protégé.  Harley, however, has a bit more complexity to her because she was drawn—seduced, shall we say—into her craziness, and she had a deep understanding of the human mind.

So as you read through this issue, you have to wonder how much of her particular brand of insanity is innate, and how much of it was foisted upon her by the man she loves.  If we’re meant to believe Harley was always a little nutty deep inside, even when she was Dr. Harleen Quinzel, Glass doesn’t do the best job in giving weight to that theory.  It just seems unconvincing that she jumps from sympathy and gratitude to the Joker to all-out, enraged violence over her colleague’s illicit use of her Joker notes to write a book.  What would make her breakdown more convincing is if we had seen how she was overworked, disrespected, and mocked, as she accuses.  But that’s not what Glass chooses to show us, and so her lashing out feels sudden and a bit groundless.

Anyway, it’s pretty hard to deny how much Joker’s influence played into her current state of mind, considering he basically pushes her, against the last vestiges of her will, into a vat of the same stuff that turned him clownish.  However she came into her madness, that’s pretty much her default mentality from here on in.  It doesn’t make her any less dangerous, obviously; here she proves that even lacking Savant’s martial finesse, she can make up for it with unpredictable cleverness—and the help of a well-placed pressure mine.

All this insanity culminates in the final scene between her and Deadshot, where she, in a rather unconventional use of a common psychological method, uses him to speak out her unresolved feelings for her lately defaced lover.  Actually, the macabre nature of the whole sequence would be horribly over the top had Glass not written Deadshot’s reactions so well in that scene, keeping his tension somewhere between freaked out, angry, and professional.

Flashpoint: Green Arrow Industries – Review

By: Pornsak Pichetshote (writer), Marco Castiello & Ig Guara (pencillers), Vincenzo Acunzo & Ruy José (inkers), Stefani Rennee (colorist)

The Story: A corporation for the people?  Isn’t that like saying bacon for the vegans?

The Review: In my imagination, I like to see Batman hanging with the guys at a barbeque on Superman’s farm, munching on burgers made with 100 percent ground chuck from Smallville’s organic cattle ranch, and telling everyone (except the Flash—he’s run off to buy a refill for the keg, and taking his sweet time about it, too) how he’s going to use his civilian identity to really promote his agenda now.  Then Green Arrow says, quite roguishly, “Welcome to the club.”

Really, when you think about it, Oliver Queen has never hesitated to further his crime-fighting goals with his corporate and political resources.  So it makes a lot of sense that in the Flashpoint world, where Green Arrow merely refers to the super-powered missiles his company sells, Ollie ponders the idea of a corporation as superhero, though in such ethereally vague terms that you can’t tell how such a thing would ever work.

The idea actually originates with Ollie’s head of security, Roy Harper, who insists Green Arrow Industries can do more than simply reappropriate super-villain weapons for conventional military applications, some of which are rather ingenious: Trickster’s antigravity boots for flight, Folded Man’s suit to make the largest weapons portable.  And then you have the Top’s atomic grenade tops “with the power of five nukes”, which just seems like overkill.

There are a few overkill moments in this issue, where Ollie’s cocky dialogue just gets a touch out of hand.  Sometimes they come in eye-rolling jokes (“Gentlemen, and…uh, more gentlemen…”), but they really grate on your nerves when he gets into one of his self-righteous speeches that unfailingly reach gibberish proportions: “Because the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and in the right hands, money is a green arrow to the future.”  Yeahbutwhu–?

Flashpoint: Grodd of War – Review

By: Sean Ryan (writer), Ig Guara (penciller), Ruy José (inker), Stefani Rennee (colorist)

The Story: When it comes to conquest, these gorillas don’t monkey around.

The Review: Violence, of course, has its place in fiction.  It’s an undeniable part of reality, and stories have to reflect that in some way.  But just like with anything else you write in fiction, it has to be put to some purpose, though when excessive it quickly loses its shock factor and gets simply nauseating.  This is especially the case in comics, where too often writers use violence to inject the energy or drama their stories lack.

This seems the case here, as Ryan keeps Grodd’s purposes hopelessly simplistic.  You can sort of appreciate Aquaman sinking half of Europe as a (presumably) unexpected casualty of a volatile weapon of war.  Grodd slaughters half of Africa for apparently no reason other than for attention.  He seems his most melancholy in the first page, when he laments no one knows his name despite his feats of massacre, and he later emphasizes his sole desire: “I want violence.”
Consequently Grodd comes off rather one-note throughout the whole issue, a wasted opportunity on Ryan’s part to develop the gorilla’s character.  Despite Grodd’s fame as one of the DCU’s most notorious (and weirdest) villains, you still have no idea what makes him tick.  His conquest for power and his hatred of humans are constants, but the former quality is one shared by almost every comic-book mastermind and the latter is too superficial to set him apart from the pack.

World War Hulks #1 – Review

by Jeff Parker, Harrison Wilcox, Scott Reed, & Paul Tobin (writers), Zach Howard, Ben Oliver, Aluir Amancio, Ramon Rosanas, Ryan Stegman, & Ig Guara (artists)

The Story: As Fall of the Hulks transitions into World War Hulks, we pause for a moment to get glimpses into the recent pasts of some of the major players of the story-line.  And no, none of them are the Hulk.

What’s Good: Well, I’ve got to admit that I had low expectations for this one, and I was generally not surprised with what I found.  However, the two stories (out of the six) that I actually got some enjoyment out of were the two that I was convinced would be the worst.  Harrison Wilcox’s Red She-Hulk tale and Jeff Parker’s Deadpool yarn are hardly worth the price of admission, but they succeed at being illuminating and funny, respectively.  Parker’s introduction of Hulkpool in particular induced a few smirks from this reviewer, as did the return of Bob, Agent of… well, you’ll see.

Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #2 – Review

By Chris Eliopoulos (Writer), Ig Guara (Pencils), and Chris Sotomayor (Colors)

Some Thoughts Before The Review: The first issue of Lockjaw & The Pet Avengers was a solid serving of all-ages fun. While the pacing was a bit off (Throg’s drawn out origin hurt the whole book), I found myself impressed by how well the Pet Avengers concept was introduced and put into motion (even if the team assembly stuff was about as generic as it gets).

The Story: Lockjaw and the rest of the Pet Avengers try to locate the Infinity Gem that’s somewhere in the Savage Land. Lucky for them, the noble Zabu, the Saber-toothed tiger, is willing to give them some help. Unlucky for them though is that, at one point, they must deal with the Devil Dinosaur…

What’s Good: The second chapter of Pet Avengers is a great example of an all-ages comic done right. It’s fast, it’s funny, it looks very nice, and it does a lot of cool things with it’s cast of talking Marvel animals. The very best thing about Pet Avengers #2 though, is that it’s absolutely loaded with a personality that every member of the creative team helps to develop.

Chris Eliopoulos once again does a fine job of handling a concept that could easily fall apart because of how silly the whole idea sounds. The second part of the Pet Avengers’ quest to obtain the Infinity Gems is quite funny, but it’s also full of action, adventure, and a sense of importance. Thanks to Eliopoulos’ decision to have the pets feel a sense of duty and responsibility, it’s easier for the reader to have some emotional investment in the story beyond “oh look how cute all those animals are!” (or something like that). Also, Eliopoulos gives each Avenger a distinct voice and that contributes to a team dynamic that is a lot of fun to read about.

As for the visuals, Ig Guara does an outstanding job of giving the animals a wide range of emotion. It goes a long way towards getting the reader to invest in the Pet Avengers’ quest. Guara also creates a number of impressive action sequences that some slam, bang, explosion superhero action to shame. Also, how cool does Throg look?! Special mention must also go to Chris Sotomayor for vibrant color work that does a heck of a lot for the lively tone of Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #2.

What’s Not So Good: Criticizing the latest Pet Avengers comic is both very easy and extremely difficult. It’s easy because the book lacks depth, has a few jokes that fall flat (Poop jokes? Sure they get a laugh out of kids, but c’mon…), and a couple of panels that just look odd (why does it seem like it looks like Hairball is ALWAYS yelling? – If a cat could yell, I mean). It’s difficult because Pet Avengers #2 does exactly what it needs to do extremely well. And also… I really don’t want to sound like a pretentious prick. but it’s obviously not something as deep or complex as something like, Unwritten. But then again, it doesn’t have to be…

Conclusion: I know I’m not going to change any minds that aren’t open to giving Pet Avengers #2 a chance… But it is seriously worth giving a chance. It’s good, mostly clean (remember that there’s poop jokes) fun.

Grade: B+ (on the All-Ages scale)

-Kyle Posluszny

Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #1 – Review

By Chris Eliopoulos (Writer), Ig Guara (Pencils), Chris Sotomayor (Colors), and Colleen Coover (Frog Thor Origin)

Some Thoughts Before The Review: I’m not really sure what to expect out of the Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers mini-series. It’s based around a fun concept and features some nice-looking artwork, but experience has taught me that those things can only carry a series. That said, I highly doubt the mini will wear out it’s welcome in only four issues.

The Story: Mr. Fantastic meets up with Black Bolt and Medusa to find the infinity gems in order to keep them from falling into the wrong hands. However, Lockjaw happens to be the first to find one and so his adventure begins. The first step? Assemble a team that can help find the rest of the gems. Pet Avengers…ASSEMBLE!!

What’s Good: In order for something like Pet Avengers to work, the creative team working on the series has to strike a specific, somewhat challenging type of tone. Fortunately, the team succeeds in doing just that. Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #1 is lighthearted, funny, and fun without feeling silly or childish. It’s also interesting and compelling without being overly serious or embarrassed by it’s concept.

Thanks to Ig Guara’s expressive, lively pencil work, Chris Sotomayor’s vibrant colors, and Chris Eliopoulus’ enjoyable, adventurous script, Pet Avengers works surprisingly well. It’s like Homeward Bound: The Search for the Infinity Gems.

What’s Not So Good: While Colleen Coover’s Throg (Frog Thor) section looks nice, it definitely is something of a momentum killer. It goes on for WAY too long and gets in the way of the more important stuff…like introducing the other members of the fairly large cast. The origin (or BORE-igin) story probably sounded a lot more interesting than it turns out to be. (yes, feel free to snicker at my clever wordplay)

Another negative is that there is no escaping the fact that Pet Avengers #1 is pretty much just another “team assembly” book. You’ve read something like this before. And even though it’s charming and stars pets, it’s still extremely familiar and fairly generic.

Conclusion: Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers is off to an entertaining, though unspectacular start. I recommend that anyone curious about the series check it out. It’s a decent, solid piece of animal-centric entertainment.

Grade: C+

-Kyle Posluszny