Justic League: Generation Lost # 18 Review

"We're gettin' the band back together, man." Short of Guy Gardner, Crimson Fox, and of course Batman, the original JLI line up has been set for Justice League: Generation Lost. One of the great things about this is that Judd Winick took his time doing it. Too often at the beginning of a "Team Oriented" comic series the characters who will form the team are just thrown together haphazardly or just happen on to one another randomly. I have never heard of it taking 18 issues for a team to be set. Winick obviously has planed ahead here. The member to join this issue was Power Girl. She has been a fixture in this series so far but only as the outsider looking in. Trying to discover the motivations of her fugitive former teammates. She has also been in Captain Atom's "Flash Forwards" when he is blasted forward in time by absorbing too much radiation. Something that has happened twice so far in this run. In this issue Power Girl finally joins the team. Albeit at the end of the issue and after doing battle with her former team. She had been subjugated by Max Lord's mind control. Again Generation Lost balances an action packed issue with plenty of plot that makes this story so compelling. One of the aspects I love about this team building exercise is that it is being orchestrated by Max Lord, the villain of the story. Everything is going along according to his plan. While discussing this issue with one of the Owners of JP Comics and Games I realized that of the two "Brightest Day" bi-weekly series one deals with 12 of the resurrected characters. The other deals with only one. That may be the main reason why Brightest Day comes off as so disjointed while Generation Lost moves smoothly from issue to issue. Max Lord was a master manipulator with out using his mind control powers so now that he is unleashed how much more deadly is he. While the team fought Power Girl, Lord was busy secreted away in the bowels of Checkmate, an international spy agency he recently took over, torturing and experimenting the Blue Beetle. He sees himself working for a greater good of some sort. What that is remains to be seen but his actions show that the belief that the ends justify the means can lead to great evil even with the best of intentions. Max Lord's means are truly evil. It remains to be seen what his ends are.

Justice League: Generation Lost #16 Review

This issue of "Generation Lost" was one of the most action packed of a very action oriented series. Once again Maxwell Lord has used his mind control powers to throw our heroes up against an elite fighting force while he moves his plan forward from the background. This week the league goes up against "The Creature Commandos" a group of warriors engineered during World War II to emulate the popular horror movie monsters of they day. While the rest of the league battles these monster-warriors Fire and Ice are at the back of the battle where Fire has been shot in the stomach and is bleeding to death. This weeks great heroic moment goes to Blue Beetle. He singlehandedly saved Fire. Their was also a great moment between Fire and Ice where Fire laments the shadier things she has done in her life. Her Fear is palpable when she declares that she is thinks she is going to hell. Though there was a lot of great battles here this issue was more of a transitional one and therefore only gets a 3 out of a possible 5 stars. I really look forward to seeing this series collected in to a single volume. It probably will read much better as a single work then as installments. That said it does not suffer at all from the inconsistencies of its bi-weekly counterpart "Brightest Day" which has been hit or miss. I hold this series to a higher standard because it has been so consistently good so far. Transitional issues are invertible in any kind of serial storytelling but as a whole this story still excites me more than most of what I am currently reading.