Meet your equal.
The New Guardians take the focus in this chapter as they
come across a powerful enemy, while Carol Ferris continues her frantic search
for Kyle Rayner.
Justin takes a different perspective, giving us a touch of
the fellowship the new Guardians feel. Through having seen Kyle alive and well
in the last issue, Carol’s pleas for help in searching for the White Lantern
come across as more annoying than ever before.
The new antagonist seems to be connecting a lot of events
that have been plaguing the title group for the past many issues, so hopefully
a resolution to Kyle’s arc is coming.
Brad Walker is good as usual. He conveys the enormity of the
problems facing the Guardians well and remains consistent throughout.
SPOILERS FOLLOW………….
A New Guardian, Quaros, protects the inhabitants of Scrtara,
a planet in sector 2814 (which includes Earth) but fails and is captured.
Justin channels a lot of alien horror movies (the title of
this issue itself is homage) with his visuals of the natives being transported
by column beams.
The rest of the New Guardians soon catch up and try in vain
to locate Quaros. And this group of scenes starts what is probably one of most
irritating things in the current arc.
Even as panic stricken Guardians try to look for clues, they
are constantly interrupted by an equally panicked Carol Ferris who doesn’t know
where Kyle is, or whether he is even alive.
Now this would have been okay if the reader didn’t already
know Kyle is alive and well, but with that knowledge, Carol comes across as a
clichéd lover and a nag who’s selfishly trying to further her own desires
instead of looking at the bigger picture.
Even if we hadn’t known, Justin seems
to be trying too hard making a caring Carol, and instead devolves her back into
a dependent companion instead of the strong willed woman she was becoming.
I have big problems with how Justin has been neglecting and
misusing someone who should be one of the more developed women in the DC
universe by making her a reaction to Kyle’s new path.
Anyway, back to the plot, the Guardians decipher that the
technology used at the site was Oan in origin, tracing back to the previous
Guardians. Using their symbiotic bond, the New Guardians are able to trace the
place where Quaros is currently being held.
We again are subject to a quarrel of priorities between
Carol and the Guardians, as they arrive at the ship where Quaros is being
dissected very gruesomely.
As the group explore the ship’s exteriors, they encounter
living ‘experiments’, drawing that the previous space sharks seem to have
originated from this place.
We get another connection as upon entering, one of the
Guardians detects that X’Hal the ‘goddess’ has a lot in common with the current
environment.
They come across some of the captured natives from earlier,
having already been subject to the gruesome experiments. Carol starts to
understand that the Guardians are walking into something without proper
planning but her warnings fall on deaf ears.
The ship separates Carol from the Guardians and then attacks
her with one of the captured natives, before Kyle makes an expected return to
save the day.
SPOILERS END……………….
Through I’m still not comfortable with how Carol is being
handled, Justin has explored some interesting threads during this arc and
hopefully this is the start to the endgame for all that has come before.
The artwork is good, not that this book has ever suffered
from below par work in the recent past, and Brad is on form.
So, I give it 7.5 out of 10.
+The Guardians are better fleshed out
+Good artwork
+An impressive enemy
-Carol has become an unwanted aspect of this book
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