About Heroes

This Review was submitted by Knightwingbk:

Writers: Danny Bilson & Paul DeMeo
Artists: Ken Lashley, Andy Smith, & Art Thibert

Wow. What a way to kill your momentum. Since issue number 3, this book has been looking up, but this issue stinks. Bilson & DeMeo had started a story about Bart stopping his roommate from being a bad hero, and stepping up to the plate, while also creating a mystery and romance with Bart and a S.T.A.R. Labs scientist. All that is killed here. Griffin kills Jay Garrick, and then purposely wrecks a bridge so he can save the people on it and look like a hero. Bart restarts Jay's heart with the Speed Force? C'mon, at least make him do CPR super-fast or something! After saving Jay, who is extremely helpless in this series, Bart goes to stop Griffin. They save the people on the bridge, only to battle on it, and Griffin winds up dying. Over the past few issues, his powers had been aging him, and here he just ages himself to death. Great, except that it wasn't that clear when reading the book.

This issue also contains two pages that try to explain how Bart got back to Earth in Infinite Crisis, but it flies in the face of everything that happened in Infinite Crisis. In IC #4 Wally and Bart tapped into the Speed Force and took Superboy-Prime with them. They tapped into the Speed Force so much that Barry Allen and Max Mercury helped out a little too. At the end of IC, it was explained that Bart had spent 4 years in the Speed Force, over the course of a couple of days back on earth. In this issue, Bilson & Demeo say that the Speed Force took them to another Earth and Bart headed to our earth from there. But in IC, Bart stepped out from the Speed Force, and clearly said nothing about this other earth. Bilson & Demeo are clearly trying to shoehorn this into continuity, but it clearly doesn't match up.

Remember that romance plot and the return of Manfred Mota? Not resolved here, it’s left for the next issue, which is surely going to make for a confusing trade paperback. We need to refer Bilson & Demeo to Geoff Johns' Green Lantern and Teen Titans, for instructions on how to spin multiple plot threads correctly. In those titles Johns has begun a slow build to Titans East, and the Sinestro Corps over 8 issues in two separate arcs. He does this well by not letting these element take up more than 2 pages of story in 4 issues. They were small mentions, not whole sequences of an issue. Bilson & DeMeo meanwhile, gave almost a whole issue in the last 6 issues to the Mota plotline, only to quickly glance over to it here. The Inertia reveal last issue was the better cliffhanger last issue, and here he's relegated to exposition. Bilson & DeMeo could've done better with saving that whole segment for next issue, and giving those pages to more shoehorning of Infinite Crisis continuity. Maybe it would have made more sense. Save yourself 6 dollars over the next two months and wait to pick up this book again with issue #9, when Marc Guggenheim takes over as writer and wipes this mess away. D-