Sunday, February 15, 2009

Faces of Evil: Kobra #1

The Faces of Evil books are generally kind of pointless. This book is going to be hard to review. The original Kobra was a twin brother to a guy trying to stop him, only this issue shows how the "good" brother was supposed to be the "evil" brother, and now he's accepting his fate. As he sends the entire Kobra organization underground, he also eliminates the snake-babies from Greg Rucka's excellent final arc in Checkmate. I suppose some house cleaning is in order if DC doesn't want that picked up, but all this did was make Checkmate seem like an ineffectual and corrupt organization. Maybe they are now, I suppose. As a plot device, the new Kobra is a pretty good one, since he can stand in for any religious extremist in any DCU title. The actual de-tangling of 30 year old plot threads is handled well enough by Ivan Brandon too. There is so much continuity cleanup being done here, it is hard to really think of this as Good, but I suppose it was competently done and it does leave Kobra in a place to be used later.

Julian Lopez's art was pretty nice. His Superman looked great, and the weird cracked mouth take on Kobra was suitably disturbing.

Fair

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