In Soviet Russia, Demon Summons You!
The Good: THERE'S a good cover again. The simplicity of the concept is very effective, with lots of heavy shadows to convey a very intense tone. And there's actually a background, a storm that represents the tension and intensity as well as the symbol of the Marvel Family. SHAZAM! indeed.
Winick nails the tone setting again with yet another different style of narrated exposition as a framing device. This one actually gets us some very interesting information about some of the day-to-day police functions in a world where superheroes are a daily occurrence.
Black Lightning and Thunder actually manage to have an interesting dynamic between them, and Thunder starts to recover a bit of that non-copy-pasted personality she almost lost last issue.
We get a nice balance of combat between the nice usual smooth flowing variety hour against the demons, and a bare knuckle brawl fest against Sabbac.
Is Tom Raney on artwork? Yes. Are the facial expressions excellent? You bet.
It's kind of interesting the way they just sort of stumbled upon this story, becoming Outsiders to their own arc. Furthermore, with Arsenal in the hospital, he can't contact his usual shadowy figure, so they can't get a concrete mission like that.
Black Lightning actually manages to give a more interesting and thought out expression of his distaste for Thunder's decision to follow in his footsteps, and it leads to a bit of reconciliation between the two. Hopefully that means Thunder can start moving on in her character development.
The Bad: There's this big subplot at the end that kind of comes out of nowhere, and twists sharply away from what some of the foreshadowing appeared to be setting up. It also doesn't feel like something that would have any huge effect on the series.
As Thunder starts to develop a personality, I'm starting to notice more that Jade doesn't really have one either. She doesn't seem to bring anything to the team, emotionally.
Sooooo.... is this arc over? Because Sabbac totally got away. Aren't they supposed to, I don't know, ACTIVELY HUNT HIM DOWN? After the unique premise was established, the team doesn't seem to be following it too much.
In Conclusion: 3.5/5
This issue was pretty solid as most, but it was mostly a lot of fighting. There was definitely some great stuff going on, but I'm starting to notice some larger cracks in the seemingly strudy structure of this series.