My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
The Wicked +Â the Divine #4
Laura and her “friend” Cassandra meet up with Baal, who’s basically classic-era Kanye West — incredibly arrogant because he’s incredibly good. He tells them he’s not Baal Hammon, the vengeful fiery sky-god — he’s Baal Hadad, who’s less vengeful and more electrical. He insists that Lucifer has to serve her time in jail because the gods are ultimately powerless to free her. He leaves Cassandra behind and brings Laura to meet a contingent of the gods, including Amaterasu, Sakhmet, Minerva, Woden, and the mysterious Ananke. They tell Laura that any of them could be the killer, but Lucifer has to stay in jail ’til the real killer is found — if she’s not the real killer anyway. If the rest of humanity realizes all the gods could be as loose-cannon as Luci is, the gods might never be able to return again. Lucifer doesn’t react well when Laura tells her what the rest of the Pantheon had to say.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal
Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a gorgeous story full of gorgeous people. Still loving the interpretations of the gods. I do wish the explanation for why the gods couldn’t interfere to free Lucifer, and why they were so uninspired to find the real killer — after all, he or she could kill again and leave them with the same problem all over again.
George Perez’s Sirens #1
Quite honestly, this one was a maze of nonsense. There’s tons of time-jumping, tons of different characters, most of them unidentified, with the ultimate goal being to bring these timelost heroines to the distant future to stop some cosmic threat.
Verdict: Thumbs down. Like I said, it’s a maze of nonsense. Gorgeous art, but not much else to recommend it.
Trees #5
A small African nation has gotten some serious international attention by placing weapons on top of one of the Trees so they can threaten a neighboring state they want to take over. In China, repressed young artist Tian Chenglei gets a bit less repressed — all just in time for the government to make a move on the city he’s in. In Cefalu, Sicily, the older man, with an unexpected knowledge of historical occultism, takes a younger rebellious woman as an apprentice. And in the Arctic, the flowers that sprang from the Trees are more persistent, infectious, and dangerous than anyone expected.
Verdict: Thumbs up. We’ve got a lot of different storylines, and they’re all right on the edge of jumping to the next segment of rising action. This seems to me that it’s going to be a very exciting and interesting story.