Friday, March 31, 2017

If you have to move the entire moon to beat Mirror Master, I don't know what you'll do against Darkseid.


My Wife keeps what she calls the "apocalypse closet," where she stocks emergency food like those freeze-dried bucket things. She also keeps regular food in there, but it set a good example for me, since I used to keep maybe a day's worth of food in the house at any given time. I don't have the full-on closet she does, but my pantry does have some back-up to it now. Like a ton of cereal, mostly bought for the prizes. Like today's book! From a box of Lucky Charms, General Mills Presents Justice League #2, "Dark Reflections" Written by Fabian Nicieza, pencils by Rick Leonardi, inks by Bob Wiacek and Scott Hanna.

If you eat a bit of cereal, you might've seen these little giveaway comics; which probably had a better print run than anything you'll find in the comic shop on Wednesday. This was the second of four, but the last one I found, and yeah, I probably have at least two each of the rest. Although they featured a large JL roster (including two Green Lanterns, Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz) each issue focused on one of the big names: Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and this issue was Batman. And despite a pretty solid creative team, there's a couple of missteps: one is an extended flashback to Bruce Wayne's childhood, when he has to confess to his mom that he got in a fight at school. (They called him "Richie Rich"!) That wouldn't be so bad, except young Bruce, despite still having parents, pulls a very Batman move by luring his bullies into a trap, then apparently walloping them in the dark. (I'd argue that Bruce was utterly normal before his parents' death; that seemed too competent and too dark there.)

Then, the villain of the piece is Mirror Master. Flash calls him a metahuman, rather than a crook with a gimmick, although Batman refers to him as such. I don't know if that was a New 52 change. MM maneuvers Flash into super-charging his "mirror matrix," and now alternate earth villains are pouring out of reflective surfaces all over the place. Batman, thinking back to his mom's advice, jumps to the solution of removing the mirror villains' need to fight, by removing their reflections, by forcing a solar eclipse to eliminate the daylight? Supes and the GL's move the moon, the reflections disappear, and Flash dismantles the Mirror Master's machine. I can't help but think moving the moon around all willy-nilly probably wasn't a good idea: couldn't the GL's have just blocked the sunlight with their rings? Not as dramatic, I admit.

So much cereal...and I was supposed to be going lower-carb, too. (EDIT: Per the Wife, it's the "'pocalypse closet." She was very insistent I let you know!)


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