Justice League: Generation Lost

The original Rocket Red comes to JLI's rescue during their fight with his modern successors, all the while Maxwell Lord encounters a horrifying set-back to his master plan.
 

The Good

Since everything's firing on all cylinders with this book, I'm just going to list all the scenes I thought were cool. There was Maxwell Lord's sly approach to segueing conversation into mind control, his subsequent shock at the appearance of a Black Lantern, a swarthy Rocket Red coming to this loose team's rescue, the eye-rolling he gets from the modern Red Rockets, the unofficial reunion of the JLI that nobody wants to admit to, Batman's suspicions regarding Checkmate's confounding behavior and his own puzzling thoughts about Fire and then, the stand-out of the issue, was Booster Gold calling Lord out from nothing... and then actually getting answered. It's all good and Joe Bennett never misses a beat when it comes to rendering it all. His work here's a joy to look at. Even if you don't know anything about Brightest Day, it's still truly compelling to follow this gang of second-stringers knowing the truth about Lord when the whole world's been brainwashed against them.

The Bad

You know what? There really isn't anything wrong with this and, what the hell, I'm going to give it extra credit this week for being such a consistently-good read when I thought it was only going to be a superfluous Brightest Day tie-in.

The Verdict - 5/5

This has been consistently one of the best books I've been reading from DC and great companion piece to Winick's other great book this week, Power Girl. I've been enjoying it so much over the past few weeks that I'm looking forward to picking up a new issue every Wednesday. This puts a real human face on the fall-out of Brightest Day. There's been a lot of attempts at putting the old magic back in a bottle, but this is the one that manages to perfectly captures what was so appealing about Giffen's classic JLI while still updating for modern continuity. I highly recommend you go out and pick this up, now.

Plot & Action: Max Lord's storyline takes an interesting turn as our heroes land in Russia to witness a fight between the Rocket Red Brigade and Rocket Red. Finally, storylines begin to collide, and readers are on the verge of getting some answers. The end of this issue sets up number five as the one that'll have a lot of reveals, but getting to that point shows that real progression happened.

Character Wise: Max Lord gets some more page time and is handled well. His scenes are pretty interesting as some unexpected side-effects kick in. It's quite interesting to see this master manipulator get shaken a little and set-up for a bigger role in issue five. The JLI feels like they take a bit of a backseat here, but that's just me.

The Art Team: Joe Bennett handles the pencils here. I don't believe he's done any issues so far, but I was impressed with his work. His backgrounds were a bit bland and lacking, but he put a lot of time into the character models as they were incredibly detailed. From the nuts and bolts of the Rocket Reds to Booster's shadow-eyes to Blue Beetle's armor to each character getting its own body design, I thought it was really well done. The JLI splash page and last page were really well done

Generally Speaking: I don't want to glance past the issue, but I'm definitely more excited for the issue coming in two weeks. The JLI and Max look like they're going to have a good ol' fashioned chat that may shed some light on Max's agenda. It's what I've been asking for so this issue set it up and got me excited again. I can already bet that issue five is going to score a five for giving me what I've been asking for. Four's not bad as it pushes the story along to get the heroes to realize that even without being mind-controlled they are doing what Max wants. I could've used a bit more punch from Booster and crew, but a solid issue that has re-energized my interest in this book.