DC Universe Presents #6 – Review

By: Dan Didio (writer), Jerry Ordway (penciller), Ray McCarthy, Andy Lanning, Marlo Alquiza (inkers), Tony Avina (colorist)

The Story: We may be stranded on a freezing mountainside, but no one had better eat me!

The Review: If I have to explain my fondness for the Challengers of the Unknown, I think I can pretty much poach much of what I said about the Blackhawks last month.  Not only do I admire the concept of a group of people using their natural, baseline human abilities to overcome great obstacles, I also love the Challengers’ emphasis on exploration and curiosity.  It’s that same thirst to see the universe’s possibilities that makes me prefer Star Trek over Star Wars.

Unfortunately, it can’t be said that’s the feeling you get out of this series, or, at least, this specific issue.  Instead of focusing on the “challenging” aspect of the team, Didio chooses to emphasize their “borrowed time” premise, making them more sober and grim than the Challengers I loved in Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier.  You have to give credit to Didio for his enthusiasm, though, since in one issue he takes the crew to Nanda Parbat, then has them escape a living mountain.

Actually, the issue would be pretty good times in the hands of someone with greater writing chops, to be frank.  My only real experience with Didio as writer goes all the way back to his Metal Men feature in Wednesday Comics.  There, I found him again enthusiastic, clearly in love with his own ideas, but a very generic executor of words.  That’s pretty much the case here, especially with the dialogue, which sports every cliché you can imagine from a melodrama: “This is some sort of nightmare!”  “Stop this, please!”  “For the love of God…don’t do this!”  “This is all my fault!”  And not one, but two, “Noooo!”