A review on Green Lantern: New Guardians #2
Most probably saw this coming, what might happen should all the rings down the emotional spectrum be entrusted to a single individual. Well, Kyle Rayner's our special Lantern granted such a position by the theory of narrative causality. You would also think that the man's costume would take on a shade of white as a result. I proudly present to you the... Ultimate Lantern?
A review on Green Lantern: New Guardians #2
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As was last seen in the previous issue, the Dark Knight confronted a Hulkified Two-Face, or One-Face as he'd called himself, during the mass breakout at Arkham Asylum, a disturbingly frequent affair people should by now be able to get used to, before our insane fiend passed out with blood running out through the eyes. It was later disclosed a considerable number of patients previously confined within the asylum were injected with a dose of the same thing given to Two-Face, a few familiar and not so familiar variety of the city's rogues now running rampant across Gotham and keeping every vigilante around town with their hands full through the night. Further analysis of the serum courtesy of good butler Alfred Pennyworth revealed that it was intended to remove the element of fear from within those subjected to it, though with a few rather inconvenient side-effects, i.e. bleeding out of one's eyes, which reminded me of an episode in The New Batman Adventures, where the Scarecrow was seen distributing a chemical agent designated for the same purpose, so presumably the man was somehow implicated in the whole affair. The Joker was, as in the case of Harvey Dent, Hulkified as well possibly by the wench with the pink bunny fetish, or Venomified, if one wishes to be in line with the present context, the difference being that he was consequently driven to the point of insanity where he would murder his own cronies for no apparent reason, though no one would really expect anything different from him. The title was a bit misleading, so to speak, as Two-Face only appeared once trying to break the Batman in two, and later under hospitalization while the Caped Crusader attempted to interrogate our mentally addled patient. With Gotham caught up in the pandemonium, it's quite a wonder anyone even managed to retain the slightest bit of sanity.
Thor's Day, one day away from exclaiming after a long day's work, 'Thank God it's Friday!', the day Thor battled the mighty Serpent where both shall fall. It's a fight to the death as Earth's last defenses arrived at a final confrontation with the Serpent's forces, with the Thing and the Hulk being put out of commission and a slightly weakened Cain Marko, the previous avatar of the demon Cytorrak. While Thor dealt with the Serpent, armed with the sword Ragnarok and Odin's armor, the remaining superheroes took the fight to the hammer-wielding Worthies and the Serpent's supernatural army, supplied with magically amplified ordnance courtesy of Tony Stark and the Asgardian dwarfish blacksmiths in order to level the playing field.
Kuurth: Breaker of Stone looked rather the same as before he had Cytorrak's power stripped from him at one point, trivial a detail it might seem, and I still couldn't wrap my head around the logic behind Captain America's being bestowed Mjolnir when the man's trademark shield was shattered to pieces by the Serpent. Was it requisite to throw the hammer into a blaze of dragon fire in order that its ownership be passed on the first person it tried to land upon? In the end, both the Serpent and Thor fell, as the prophecy had forewarned, the hammers flew back to their native realms. Odin returned to Asgard with the body of his brother, where the inhabitants were evacuated to planet Earth. One of the Asgardians spoke for a moment without the typical Shakespearean italics, probably on account of the fact that such an exclamation that begins with 'What the' doesn't deserve this privilege. Finally, we have a view of the World Tree or a dimensional rift of sorts (if they could show a little more prudence in putting labels wherever necessary) standing out from the quite peaceful surface of planet Earth. The issue is also accompanied with previews of upcoming issues accounting the aftermath of the Fear Itself event, from The Fearless to The Defenders, two of which involved the Incredible Hulk, where in one the Hulk somehow separated himself from his weakling alter ego Bruce Banner, while in another the Hulk was forced to seek help from fellow Defender Doctor Strange in an effort to quell the supernatural threat that was Nul who was released when the Hulk, while still under Nul's influence, was deceived by one of the Forgiven to shatter the hammer during the Dracula tie-in. Anyone noticed that Sin had a full nose when she was Skadi? The issue begins with Frankenstein knocking the living daylights out of an old, apparently mad lady who'd claimed to be a caretaker of the children gathered alongside her in the chapel they'd taken refuge during the outbreak of monsters before demonstrating his lack of a sense of humor to his teammates. Apparently, someone had missed out a funny bone while putting him together.
The action was then taken to the lake where the unfortunate fisherman and his grandson and his dog in the last issue bore witness to the monster emergence before succumbing to their fates. As it was revealed, the lake not only contained a bed of bones once belonged to the children of the town, a dimensional portal lay open through which the monster invaders had emerged from their native dimension named Dead Space, a piece of reality composed of the stuff between atoms, whatever it was. As Frankenstein and the former SHADE scientist, now amphibious genetic blasphemy, Nina Marzusky took on the intruders beneath the lake, the issue insinuated the latter's otherwise unconventional journey to motherhood, which explained her presence as well as that of the other genetic anomalies in Frankenstein's team of abominations, with the singular exception of the mummy medic, who either had persisted through the eons since the time of Ramses or what oddly-named Egyptian king history had in store, or an embalming specialist fooling around in a Halloween costume. It was only a matter of time before the decision was established to put the whole team through the portal to wherever the creatures had been popping out from. Despite their... unconventional characteristics, nothing could prepare them for what lay in wait for them. This is as close we could get to the real thing for the time being, which will be released around 2012 and will only be postponed if there is a chance the world should stop existing at the end of the year and any attempt to pool all available resources into averting the world from a potential asteroid heading our way as we speak. But what the heck. Every Marvel superhero that ever graced the big screen in the past one, two... Tony Stark/ Iron Man, Steve Rogers/ Captain America, Donald Blake/ Thor coming together in the Avengers to stave off a threat beyond the capabilities of one superhero, with a few glimpses of a maskless Hawkeye and the shapely figure of Scarlett Johansson. I mean, Black Widow. Oh, and there's Thor's adopted brother Loki, who we last saw fell to his apparent death. Lots of explosion, gut-busting action, it's certainly something to look forward to. While we're at it...
The issue starts off with a vision of the pearly gates before which one of the Purifiers stood. It was revealed that Fantomex had the man believing that he was in fact now in heaven while Psylocke puts her psychic power to good use in an attempt to coerce information as to Jonathan Standish's location and plans out of their quarry's lips with Deadpool as the not so angelic attendant of the gates playing 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire'. Instead of a lollipop or some other confectionery dentists tend to give out to their patients, Fantomex granted the Purifier at the end of their therapy session salvation with a bullet through his head.
A ticking neuro-bomb on board Standish's plane was all it would take to send as many people, whether they want to or not, to heaven before the super-powered blasphemy could drag their sells to hell, or wherever they popped out from in the first place, and Wolverine's kill crew was all it would take to stop it from happening. With the widespread chaos and destruction around them, it's highly rational for normal human beings to regard everything with the potential to kill anything in its sight with exquisite, indiscriminating fear. The X-Force was no exception in this case. The issue depicted the recent Rapture affair with much violence and gore, which makes us somewhat grateful we only had a mob of normal narrow-minded human beings heralding the alleged end of times in everybody's faces, or rather, the instant those involved be raised to heaven, leaving the unbelievers to their demise with the destruction of the planet. The chillingly peaceful image of the Wolverine and his team standing in front of the cathedral where Standish was decapitated by Wolverine himself and after all that had transpired and was still in the process of transpiring was, for want of a better term, a poetic piece of imagery. After a brief run-in with the British secret service and holding the Queen hostage while at it, the Merc with the Mouth makes a house call to the love starved Dr. Whitby's abode. Instead of finding the psychiatrist herself, Deadpool had the fortune (or misfortune) of witnessing Dr. Whitby's attempt at emulating the mercenary's lifestyle and of course her disturbing collection of body parts disembodied over the years inside a fridge. When things couldn't seem any worse than they already had been, we have Dr. Whitby with the intent of killing the warden of the prison where she worked, only to be stopped by Deadpool himself, who knocked the warden out in time before anyone could shoot him in his own apartment, which blew up anyway. As Deadpool got rid of the psychiatrist's meat galore, in stumbled the obsessed woman, burned and maddened like the man of her obsession, before shooting herself through the mouth, which concludes Deadpool's time in England and being haunted by cosplaying psychiatrists who should know better. As it happens, in Deadpool MAX, there was also a psychiatrist, as obsessed with her mercenary boy toy as Dr. Whitby though with enough reason for Deadpool to be sleeping with, who turned out to be a patient in an asylum and capable of killing people in the name of love. But that's an entirely unrelated story. Deadpool's self-hatred was accounted for in this issue from his apparent distaste of even coming into contact with his own body parts to that of Dr. Whitby, who was trying so studiously to be just like him. To further fuel his own self-hatred, a new Deadpool will be running amok in the next issue, twice the original's viciousness, without the sarcasm and mercenary's charisma. If the last page of the issue isn't convincing enough, where Evil Deadpool was seen born from the discarded body parts of the original Deadpool in a dumpster complete with the mercenary's inner voices, this should be. From what I gather, while Deadpool loves to create, strangely enough, Evil Deadpool loves to destroy, so probably we'll be seeing a lot of senseless gore and violence in the next issue.
In the last issue we are given a one page serving of the Joker's face literally peeled off and nailed to the wall, and that's about it. From there, the trail ran cold, which left the Caped Crusader with idle hands, so to speak, as he went about the affairs of business and one particular Charlotte Rivers probing about the man's way of life. From Bruce's daytime playboy personality, it's pretty easy to predict what happened next at this point.
Still, as old habits die hard, Bruce's were seemingly immortal. In the man's haste to restore a girl once again kidnapped to whomever was responsible to her, he unwittingly plunged headlong into what most people with sufficient experience in the business would call a trap set by the Dollmaker's grotesque meat-wearing minions, including one wearing a nurse's uniform and a mask in front of her meat mask presumably and alleged to be the Dollmaker's daughter. Still, nothing was as shocking as Commissioner Gordon's face being replaced with one stitched up with pieces of skin together. The Joker's intent to have his skin surgically removed still had yet to be accounted for, as is the case of his presence in this issue, though there was a Jester looking character alongside the Dollmaker. There was also a monkey too of the organ grinder variety. Anyway, the Dollmaker doesn't seem to express any motive broader than giving people free makeovers, which I don't doubt coincidentally major advancements in plastic surgery would be able to fix, so we'll have to see what happens next. Just don't keep us waiting too long. Penguin, on the surface, may seem the least fascinating of specimens in the Caped Crusader's galore of the psychologically unstable; a typical mob boss, only meaner and physically distorted. Here, while Oswald Cobblepot tends to the goings-on of his illicit dominion, we also see how the man had come to be the Penguin. What would anyone expect, really, from the continuous tormenting commonly subjected to one since childhood for looking so different? The only human Oswald seemed to care for would be his mother as seen in this issue, while everyone else in the family had died away, and we all know where this is going.
As if the first few pages doesn't demonstrate how far the Penguin's power extends, we see him later attending to a man who'd bumped into him earlier, who'd also failed to sufficiently retract an insult towards the main antagonist. All that hate bottled up inside him and mounted on a few words, and the Penguin's guest was reduced to a curled heap, juxtaposing the man's otherwise diminutive constitution and the physical trauma he'd endured over the years against the Penguin's capacity for mental agonizing. Young Oswald saw himself in others, the not so physically deficient, the way a duck would in a swan, while conceiving that they saw themselves in him, their final destination as time took their toll on them, contrary to popular perception that people simply relished the taunting as they regarded themselves as superior over the occasional circus freak, and young Oswald wasn't popular, so to speak. Presenting the comic trailer of Gotham City Impostors, a first person shooter video game set in the city of Gotham, a name that puts most people in mind of its caped guardian, Batman. As the title would imply, the game will not comprise of the real deals as we've already had Arkham Asylum; rather, eight players at least will take up the guise of either Batman or the Joker, sworn enemy to the Caped Crusader, as they try to take each other out while armed with conventional and unconventional weapons, much as I've gathered. Certainly looks like a game worth waiting for, as it will be released probably next year.
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