Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps #1 – Review

By Geoff Johns, Peter J. Tomasi (writers), Jerry Ordway, Doug Mahnke, Chris Samnee, Rags Morales (artists), Tom Nguyen, Christian Alamy (inkers)

The Stories: This three-issue limited series contains three stories. The first is about the Blue Lantern Saint Walker, and his sad origin and the nature of hope. The second story is an interesting father and son tale about Mongul. The third story is about a new group, the mysterious Indigo Tribe, and its encounter with a Yellow Lantern and a Green Lantern.

We are also treated with some great splash pages of the Blue Lanterns, the Green Lantern Corps, the Sinestro Corps and the Indigo Tribe. This means that Johns and Tomasi don’t need to do a whole lot of exposition during the story to keep new readers on track.

What’s Good: Saint Walker’s story is an intriguing look at hope, faith and religion in the face of terrifying disaster (think trials of Job). Walker’s faith is well done, compelling and it makes me want to read more about him. I obviously knew that Walker was going to get a blue ring and I expected a cliché ending, but Johns misdirected and surprised me. As for the story of Mongul’s son and how he perceived his father was interesting, and it ended neatly enough. And for the Indigo Tribe, the story was meant to tease and it succeeded.

Art: All the art was well-done. Ordway iss a strong, experienced penciller who did some fine work with Saint Walker against Larfleeze. All the images were clear, despite the fact that many panels had a lot going on. I loved Ordway’s take on a sun getting younger – a spectacular image of blue and red. Mahnke, Samnee and Morales were also strong visual storytellers in this book.

What’s Not So Good: The concept of a montage book of stories is good, but given that these are origin stories and character study stories, there’s a lot less incentive to collect this book. In fact, throughout, I was wondering why this was part of Blackest Night, when pretty much everything in this book could have fit perfectly into the Blackest Night preludes. Also, while Saint Walker had a complete arc, the story of Mongul’s son was not only brief, but I didn’t feel that anything changed for anyone enough to justify the story being told.

Conclusion: Did anything super-important happen in this book? Not really, which was a bit of a disappointment given the advanced excitement Blackest Night has been getting. This is a collection of back-stories with one teaser for the future. Well-executed, but if you don’t buy it, it shouldn’t get in the way of your enjoyment of Blackest Night.

Grade: C

-DS Arsenault

Angel: Revelations #1 – Review

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (Writer), Adam Pollina (Art), and Matt Hollingsworth (Color Art)

On sale 5/29/08

Before I get into the review, let me say that this series grabbed my interest when the solicitation revealed the unique, religiously inspired cover. Angel has always been an interesting character to me and the prospect of a series highlighting his religious connections definitely grabbed my interest. I admit that I have some hopes built up for this miniseries, but I find myself disappointed by how things have started. Angel: Revelations #1 left me with a number of mixed feelings due to the equal number of high and low points present in the issue.

The bulk of Angel: Revelation #1 has to do with Warren Worthington III’s senior year at St. Joseph’s Preparatory School for Wayward Boys. The guy who will eventually become Angel is a popular track star dealing with girlfriend issues, a jealous teammate, and a coach who is suspicious about how his student has improved so much in so little time. What makes this familiar story unique is Warren’s sense of confusion about the change his body is going through as he finds himself rapidly becoming more athletic. A letter to his parents offers some nice insight into the character and the confusions of growing up. This sets the stage on how Warren’s story will most likely progress. The issue also introduces a priest who seems to perform exorcisms and while his work is only shown briefly, it threatens to overshadow anything told in Warren’s portion of the story. Another issue or two will decide whether this subplot is a good or a bad idea, but at least I can say with certainty that the scenes are incredibly effective.

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s writing is quite strong at times, but overall I found it to be frustrating. The problem is that Warren comes across as a thoroughly unlikable, angst-ridden, teenage cliché at one point, than a sympathetic, complex character the next. I can appreciate the complex inner feelings of a character, but when every interaction that Warren takes part in leaves him looking like a moody jerk. It is hard to care about the guy.

It will be interesting to see how Warren is written in the coming issues. As I said, the letter to his parents was excellent, but outside of that, Warren came across as a tired cliché. The rest of the characters don’t fare much better; they come across as a generic stereotypes. The priest and his client are the only characters that truly grabbed my attention, but to avoid spoilers I will just say that the priests dialogue is incredibly effective.

Adam Pollina’s artwork also frustrated me because his people look like bizarre caricatures. The look is quite fitting for the surreal exorcism scenes and it actually adds quite a bit of atmosphere, but everything with Warren just looks incredibly odd. The look for the characters is unique, that’s for sure, but I found it to be more sloppy and ugly than satisfying. That said, Pollina knows how to create some nice scenery and architecture. The color work by Matt Hollingsworth is easily the visual high point as everything has an appropriate tone, especially the darker scenes. His use of color in darkness impressed me quite a bit and it helped create some interesting imagery.

Overall I found this issue to be quite disappointing and inconsistent. I’ll keep reading simply because I find the priest character to be compelling, but I don’t think I could recommend this to anyone that has little or no interest in Angel. This one is probably best for fans only. (Grade C-)

– Kyle Posluszny