Blue Beetle #3

The Good: Ig Guara's artwork is just amazing. The fighting is so dynamic, and there's a thin sort of roundness to everything that's just spectacular. I get so pumped up about Ig Guara's artwork, but 3 issues in, its hard to find something new to gush about. Let's just leave it at it's spectacular.
The Scarab provides some interesting plot devices to drive the development of the story. He and Jaime have such a forced partnership, they're almost like enemies forced to work in tandem, but its so much deeper and more unconventional than that.
We get some nice character exploration on the home life front as well. We see the dynamic between Brenda and her aunt, and the development of La Dama as a villain. The juxtaposition between her 2 lives is amazing, and serves as an odd counterpart to Jaime and his forced superhero life.
Another counterpart enters in as well. The Reach in space, coming ever closer to the still confused and hapless Jaime. Jaime who still barely has anything straight in his head. The pacing for this arc is fantastic, and I don't think its slow in the least. It actually makes perfect sense.
Another angle here is Jaime's family. We see another edge to the realism, glazed over by their knowledge of the true identity of La Dama.
Basically, there's a lot of different elements with different representations, and while each of them is like a delicious ingredient on their own, they also blend to be an absolutely perfect smoothie.
It's hard to judge how I feel about La Dama. On one hand she's the kind of villain I tend to hate, who sacrifices underlings who fail her, but at the same time she's such a caring aunt to Brenda. She's a really interesting villain.
I was surprised that this is the end of the arc, as there's still a ton of unresolved plot threads, but its a really interesting way to split up the arcs. Its as if this is just a section of a bigger arc, which is made up of smaller arcs with proper dividing points, but not as long and convoluted as Morrison's Batman. Its an interesting appraoch to pacing.
For the mid-conclusion, we get a lot of great checkpoints. Jaime and The Scarab reconcile in an AMAZINGly tense scene that sent chills down my spine. Jaime meets his family, and we're left uncertain how he'll approach telling them or not. We get the fallout with the villains on both sides, and the introduction of a higher ranking villain within each hierarchy.
And Silverback is COMPLETELY AWESOME.
 
The Bad: Why are the covers so damn dull? This one's probably the best of the bunch, but its still not very good.
 
In Conclusion: 5/5
Blue Beetle is an impressively strong blend of all sorts of conflicting story types. And the artwork is among the cream of the cream of the crop. If you are at all a fan of the sci-fi superhero comics, this is not one to be missed. If you like Green Lantern, this would be a fantastic series to try to branch out into the rest of the DCU, and even if you don't like Green Lantern you might want to give this a shot. It is easily among my top 3 of the new 52, and among the highest of my recommendations.