Phil Winslade

Put me in the 5% (of people who gave this 5 stars) because this was awesome! The first half wasn't as exciting as the second, it was more setup and I'm not sure at all why Blue Beetle was included or that "god" guy. But the Star Hawkins/Ilda stuff was amazing, their banter was hilarious and the Larfleeze stuff had me laughing the whole time too. The art totally rocked with random aliens walking around in the background all the time.

The serious stuff was cool too. The "Hunted" plot seemed show more like something you would see as a movie plot, the twist ending was amazing, and I LOVED K-Rot. More please. You can leave out the Lanterns if you want, except Larfleeze show less

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

Threshold was DC's first attempt at a "New 52"-era space-based ongoing comic, and The Hunted is its first and last volume. Threshold is the creation of Keith Giffen, co-creator of two 1980s space-based DC ongoings, The Omega Men and L.E.G.I.O.N. I don't know why it's called Threshold, but The Hunted is like the Hunger Games in space, sort of: it's a reality television series in Lady Styx's domain of Tolerance where show more political undesirables are forcibly enrolled. They have bounties placed on their heads, and are then let loose in Tolerance, and anyone who kills them gets the prize money. Anyone can take a shot, but popular groups of professionals have evolved. The longer you avoid being killed, the higher your bounty goes; L.E.G.I.O.N.'s Stealth appears as a long-time survivor of the games. The main character is Jediah Caul. Caul is a Green Lantern who sells out a trio of other "spectrum warriors" (purple, blue, and yellow) to The Hunted, but when they escape the game, Styx's people replace them with Caul.

Caul's not a very nice guy, and we watch him try to survive as he encounters 21st-century reworkings of a lot of old-school DC space characters, like Space Ranger and Tommy Tomorrow and Captain Carrot and Star Hawkins and the Star Rovers. Plus characters like the Blue Beetle show up, too. This was what made the book difficult for me: there was a lot to keep track of, and given that these characters were mostly created in the 1950s, most of them were generic white dudes. It seemed like there were too many for Keith Giffen to keep track of, too, as ideas and characters would be set up that went nowhere, or popped up sporadically.

I just could never get into the book as much as I would have liked. Too many characters, a premise that came across as both thin and overegged, a main character I never really enaged with, and too much sub-Firefly future slang that reminded me of the kind of thing Kris Straub parodied in Starslip. That's not to say it was bad: I liked Captain K'rot, and the whole Brainiac subplot was kind of interesting, but at times it was a slog that didn't seem to be going anywhere.

That said, there were two things I enjoyed. The first is the Star Hawkins backups, ten-page strips about what Tolerance's worst P.I. and his robot secretary (who has the mind of his ex-wife) are up to while Caul's on the run. They have some legit laugh-out-loud parts.

The other was the last issue, where Giffen provides a meta-commentary on the whole series by cancelling The Hunted. Blue Beetle even shows up to complain he didn't have anything to do with anything, and a spin-off is proposed, disposed of on the second-last page, a new spin-off is proposed and disposed of on the same page!

The sheer brazenness of the last issue made it hugely enjoyable, especially the way Giffen dovetails the last Star Hawkins backup into the main story, but I think if the best part of your comics series is the issue where you complain about being cancelled, you kinda had a problem from the very beginning.

DC Comics Space Heroes: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

Ostensibly a mystery, this story covers four time periods: 1890, 1940, 2014, and 2050, with each time period illustrated by a different artist, which helps the reader keep track. Detectives in each era discover a body of a naked man curled in the same position in the same alleyway in London. Each detective has a secret except for DS Hasan in 2014 who is dealing with being a female Muslim police detective at a time when Muslims come under suspicion. How these cases are connected forms the show more heart of the story and it wasn't what I expected. While things could be clearer, the story does take some interesting turns, and I found it entertaining. show less

I suspect I enjoyed this book's methods more than the story it thought I would absorb, but I'm okay with that and hope Spencer continues bending plot conventions with the aid of a posse of talented artists.