Mania Grade: C+

8 Comments | Add

 

Rate & Share:

 

Related Links:

 

Info:

• Title: Brightest Day #7
• Writers: Geoff Johns & Peter Tomasi
• Artists: Ivan Reis, Patrick Gleason, Ardian Syaf, Scott Clark, Joe Prado
• Inkers: Vicente Cifuentes, David Beaty, Mark Irwin
• Color: Aspen MLT’s Peter Steigerwald w/John Starr
• Cover: David Finch, Scott Williams & Steigerwald
• Publisher: DC Comics
• Publication Date: August 4, 2010
• Price: $2.99
• Series:

BRIGHTEST DAY #7 Review

BRIGHTEST DAY #7 Review
© Mania

While eating a cheeseburger, Boston Brand, the former Deadman, finally starts piecing together the mystery of the white lantern and the reasons why twelve heroes and villains were resurrected on the Brightest Day. How no one notices a man in a full-body red leotard under his filthy trench coat in a crowded diner is something of a mystery to me, but these are comic books, so I’m willing to run with it.

Anyway, the white lantern, which at this point, no one has been able to lift (not even Hal Jordan or Sinestro) teleports Boston, Hawk and Dove to Silver City, New Mexico and blasts him with some white light while passing along some instructions. It seems that Uatu is dying … er, that is “the Entity who has watched over this world since the beginning of existence” is dying and a replacement needs to be found. Until such time, these people were brought back for a purpose and each will play an important part in this puzzle of life – even the ones you forgot about because they haven’t been mentioned in the past 5 issues, like Maxwell Lord, Osirus or Jade. Yeah, remember them?

Brightest Day seemed like it was going to follow the lines of Star Trek films, where every other movie (or in this case, issue) was good while the others were lackluster, but it’s definitely been on a roll for the past few issues and now that we’re finally getting some revelations as to why these characters have returned from the dead, it’s getting even better. The only problem is that each of these revelations is pretty predictable. The angry guy has to learn compassion, the evil schemer has to prevent a war, the troubled girl has to find purpose and the man with no life has to learn to live and love it while the smarty-pants gets his head out of the books in order to teach the frat boy how to study.

It’s a perfect example of a story not being about the destination, but the journey… but is the journey worth taking? You know, it’s hard to say. We’re seven issues in and the book still feels quite disjointed. I find myself interested in the overall story but ambivalent about over ½ of the characters.

Cover art to BRIGHTEST DAY #7 by David Finch

Deadman, Aquaman and the Hawks have pretty interesting stories going on, but Hank Hall (Hawk) is about the most one-dimensional stereotype I’ve ever read and I’ve never been able to find it in my heart to care about J’onn J’onzz in the least. And that’s only 5 out of 12 characters. Everyone seems to be fighting for space in this story and as a result, the book doesn’t have a very good flow at all. I find myself forgetting about the majority of the characters and it feels like we’re rehashing a lot of the same territory. Deadman needs to embrace life… yeah, I figured that out three issues ago.

That being said, it isn’t a bad story and this isn’t a bad issue. In fact, it’s finally starting to feel like the story is actually getting somewhere. Rather than featuring a bunch of random short stories, there is now a thread tying the whole thing together and all of these characters finally seem to have a purpose.

On the whole, I guess I am enjoying Brightest Day. It’s not a “A” story, by any means, but it’s serving its purpose and keeping me entertained and relatively interested. Probably not worth 3 bucks every other week, but not so bad that I’ll give it a poor grade. It’s worth a C+, which might be the “low end of good” but certainly isn’t terrible. This issue has given me hope that the story is actually going somewhere and that I might actually find some interest in these characters, which seems to be the point of the series. Let’s hope it holds up from here on out.