What's Hatching?

Justice Society of America #29

It’s the first issue written by “Fables” writer Bill Willingham. The JSA has a new mystery on its hands when an oversized black egg appears and turns out to be Obsidian, the HQ’s caretaker. There are a couple of new underaged members of the team — the naive All-American Kid and the arrogant King Chimera. And the entire team gets ambushed and beat down by a mega-team of bad guys pulled from all over the DC Universe, including Eclipso, Dr. Polaris, Mammoth, Major Force, and Blackbriar Thorn. But why are all of the villains refusing to attack Stargirl?

Verdict: Ehh, not sure. On one hand, I wanna give Bill Willingham a chance to get his sea-legs on this book. But something about it just rubs me the wrong way. And dangit, this has been a problem for Willingham in a lot of his non-“Fables” comics — “Shadowpact” started off pretty strong, then took a nosedive, and “DCU Decisions” was off-kilter from the start, which I initially chalked up to co-writer Judd Winick’s involvement. I hope this series isn’t going to bite as hard as those others, ’cause this comic has developed into one of DC’s flagship titles…

Wildstorm Universe #0

This one was free. Yay! Basically, after several reboots in the last few years, Wildstorm is going to reboot their primary superhero universe again. That’s about all there is for this one — a few pictures, a few text descriptions.

Verdict: Thumbs down. Too many reboots, guys. And after their last reboot — blowing up a large chunk of the planet and setting all their superhero hijinx in the post-apocalyptic remnants — that’s not really something that the planet is just gonna recover from, which appears to be what they’re planning to do here. And a somewhat unrelated point — why are the Gen-13 kids running around in black domino masks? That’s a look that just doesn’t work for that team.