"Reviewing: Blue Beetle-Part 2"

To fully appreciate the current DC Comics version of "The Blue Beetle", one must first try to make sense of his first app. in the DC limited series Infinite Crisis, which ran seven issues from Dec.'05 - June, '06, plus a "Secret Files & Origins" issue.

The new BB's alter ego, "Jaime Reyes", first appears in issue #3 of this series (Feb.'06) where he finds the "beetle scarab" while he and his friends are walking through a vacant lot (a tale also related in the first issue of the current series). It isn't until #5 (April'06) that we first see the new BB actually in costume when "Booster Gold" takes Reyes to "The Batcave" and recruits him to help the various JLA members to detect the presense of a machine being built by Alex Luthor (of "Earth Three") to seperate and reverse the multiple worlds which had combined during the 1985 DC l.s., Crisis on Infinite Earths.

This entire storyline is pretty confusing, and probably just another needless attempt to try to correct all of bs that's gone on since 1985 with the various DC characters, but its end effect was the reason "why" we saw the disappearance of such major players as Superman, Batman & Wonder Woman for a year as they tried to take time off from the customed activities and get back to relating what being a hero is all about.

Along the way in Infinite Crisis, we saw the return of the original Golden-Age Superman and Lois Lane, the latter of whiuch dies of old age and the result being that the original Supes had a hard time taking that. We saw the last of Alex Luthor and the "Superboy-Prime" character was inprisoned (at least, for the time being). The Spectre goes a bit nuts due to the influence of "The Psycho Pirite", and finally a new DC hero, albeit a far cry from the original GA BB , or even the later Ditko version.

Let's hope to God that DC is finally out of "Crisis" ideas. You can only beat a dead horse so long until what you end up with isn't just a dead horse but a messy, bloody and unrecognizable pulp. They don't need a gimmick storyline to create new characters. They've created thousands of them over the years that had absolutely no connection to such a silly theme, and I as a long-time reader was much more satisfied with a simplier explanation of the acquisition of various powers and origins of their heroes and heroines without that.

I still stand that the new BB character is a good one even with the before published l.s. as an introduction, and well-worth the buying and reading. The IC l.s. is one of those C- to D+ things though that we'd been better off without.


(Stay tuned for some future post when I present "Reviewing: Blue Beetle Part 3-Conclussion"!)