DC Nation Super Sampler: Beware The Batman #1

From Free Comic Book Day 2013.

Title: DC Nation Super Sampler: Beware The Batman #1
Issue: #1
Date: July, 2013
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Mitch Watson, Scott Beatty, J. Torres
Artist: Luciano Vecchio, Todd Nauck, Larry Stucker
Colorist: Heroic Age
Letterer: Wes Abbott, Phil Balsman
Cover: Dave Bullock
Editor: Alex Antone, Sarah Gaydos, Jeanine Schaefer, Tom Palmer Jr.

This is DC's all-ages offering for Free Comic Book Day 2013. The main story here is a fairly typical Batman tale, with the Batman taking on a gang led by a villain named Tobias Whale, who looks like Marvel's Kingpin and talks with the same random scattering of nautical terms as the Penguin in the 1966 Adam West Batman film.

The Batman takes on some thugs, they get the better of him for a brief time, then he uses his various skills and devices to turn the tables, with Alfred and the Bat-Sub(!) lending a hand to (literally) torpedo Whale's weapon-smuggling plot. At the end, a new threat is revealed, which turns out to be a new look for a familiar villain.

Luciano Vecchio gave this a very nice look, and the pacing and action were good. The dialogue could have been better, and there was nothing particularly groundbreaking plot-wise, but it served its purpose as a good introduction to Batman action and the Beware the Batman series.

The backup story was a Teen Titans Go! reprint featuring the team doing battle with a villain with a stage magician gimmick and real magical powers. The action was a bit confusing, and the villain's plot seemed a bit uninteresting. He could do all of this nifty stuff and chose to use it to rob a bank. Robin gets hit with a spell that makes him speak in Zatanna-speak (but without her powers; he just says everything backwards), and a fair amount of the story is just jokes around nobody being able to understand Robin. One interesting gimmick that I had never seen before: A maze and a connect-the-dots puzzle incorporated into the artwork. Clever.

There were a couple of other short backup features: A character profile of Cyclops, and a two-page introduction spread featuring the characters of Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld. I don't know much about this character, but I did like her origin as an introverted video game designer. Might have to give this version of Amethyst a look sometime.

Rating: 6/10

Avatar: The Last Airbender / Star Wars: The Clone Wars

This is one of 2011's crop of Free Comic Book Day giveaways.

Title: Avatar: The Last Airbender / Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Date: May, 2011
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer: Ryder Windham, J. Torres
Artist: Ben Dewey, Gurihiru
Inker: Dan Parsons
Letterer: Michael Heisler, Comicraft
Colorist: Mae Hao
Editor: Samantha Robertson, Dave Roman
Cover: Brian Konietzko, Hye Jung Kim, Bryan Evans, Lucasfilm

Wait for it... Flip book!

The bad news first. The Star Wars: The Clone Wars story serves to introduce Savage Opress, a new villain (You can tell he's a villain by his name! Isn't that clever? Also by the fact that he looks like a yellow version of Darth Maul). Opress shows up at the lair of Noggox the Hutt. He has been captured without a fight by Noggox's (clearly incompentent) guards. It's all just a plot so he can get inside and kill everyone in sight. This actually pretty violent considering that the introduction proudly proclaims that comic to be suitable for all ages. I guess decapitations are okay if the victim is a hutt. Anyway, that's about all we get. The heroes make a brief appearance at the end to survey the carnage. I'm not entirely sure what the point of that was, but as far as I was concerned, Opress definitely failed to impress.

Flipping the book over, we have Avatar: The Last Airbender. This was my first exposure to this series, and wow. This was good storytelling. It did take a little bit to hook me in, but considering that the beginning of the story was pretty light in tone, it really built to a pretty intense ending. I thought that Avatar worked better when it was being serious than when it was trying to be a comedy, but the comedic stuff was still at least as good as most of the comic relief you see in comic books these days. This was an effective introductory story that had a complete plot. There was also a four-page backup story that was all comedy, but gave a chance to introduce another character. The art is a good mix of cartoony and realistic and the characters are very expressive. The action in this one really did seem all-ages suitable. If I was rating this story alone it would probably get an 8.5. Instead, the opposite side of the flip book drags that whole thing down a bit.

Rating: 7/10