First of all, how crazy is it that the last Green Lantern #46 had Mongul in it as well during “Reign of the Supermen!”? Funny how that stuff happens.

I was wondering when the story was going to get back to Mongul, now that he’d fashioned those gigantic pieces of hate bling for himself from the rings of the fallen Sinestro Corps members. Indigo-1 showed up with Hal, fresh out of Blackest Night #3, and I was really hoping to see some more drama among Hal, Carol, and Sinestro before they formed their obligatory truce, but that was more or less a footnote before Sinestro finally confronted Mongul and the necessary status quo was achieved to put the big yellow dude out of commission so that the Black Lanterns can be dealt with.

The final confrontation between Sinestro and Mongul worked for me, but this issue really read like it was in a hurry up to that point, just fast forwarding and putting other plot points off to be dealt with later until the finale arrived. Mahnke’s art, of course, is gorgeous, and I liked Indigo-1 way better this issue — though I’m sure that’s because she didn’t have another epically awkward monologue.

The action scenes were fine, but the writing and pacing just seemed a little impatient — specifically when they skipped right through events like the big pink dragon getting loose. It’s probably going to take me a good day or two to figure out if I think the last scene balanced all of that out, but I don’t think I’m going to know that until I see which threads come back up in the next issue.

This is the kind of opening sequence I read B.P.R.D. books for. I mentioned in my Bayou review that Gabriel Bá does some of the most playfully terrifying work in these books that I’ve ever scene, and B.P.R.D.: 1947 #3 is a perfect example of those skills at work.

One of the really successful visual strategies I appreciated from this chapter were the elemental scene shifts going from fire to wind to water. Mignola, Dysart, and Bá set those up very effectively, and it’s a real testament to the many layers they built this series with.

The villains, meanwhile, still feel a bit flimsy for me as characters. The anecdotal details that pop out in conversation are interesting, but there’s a considerable amount of pressure on the fourth issue for me as a reader to really sell these witches. I’m a casual Hellboy universe reader and don’t have a whole lot of background knowledge about who they are prior to reading 1947, so I expect big things to come up as things play out.

I was half expecting this to be the series that brought Konig back into the limelight and turned him into a major villain, but without spoiling anything directly, that doesn’t seem like a possibility now. The historical explanation of the old B.P.R.D. guard was just as a brutal and horrific as I expected, but now the spotlight seems to have shifted to Hecate, so I’m anticipating a big coming out party for her in issue #4.

Here’s a story I began reading more than a year ago and was initially fond of, but as is often the case with ZudaComics.com and my consistently under-performing home Internet speed thanks to AT&T, convenience drove me away until my pal Rickey Purdin dropped me a hard copy. I really love a lot of the content on Zuda, and the quality of work that DC’s system there produces consistently impresses me. The issue occurs, however, because Zuda’s strips are formatted in a way that requires me to blow them up to full screen size to read them, but when I do this, each page takes 40-50 seconds or more to load, and when you mix in two-panel and one-page splashes, this means it can take two or three minutes just to read a couple of short sentences worth of script. It’s consistently been a roadblock for me getting into a lot of their comics, since they shoot for long-form stories that can be handily collected. The simple truth is that if I can read 24 pages of a comic book in 5 minutes, 4-6 months of non-Flash interface webcomics in 10 minutes or 30 1-5-panel pages in a half hour, I’m almost always going to to go with the first two options. It boils down to simple time and math, as well as the annoyance I feel spending more time watching the word balloon icon load (he’s basically the Microsoft Word paper-clip of the webcomics reading experience for me) than reading comics, which is what I want to do.

And Bayou by Jeremy Love is an instance where I really wish that wasn’t the case, because it features the best uses of magic realism in story telling that I’ve read in months. There’s a real sweet spot in truth-telling that comes from the gray area between folk stories and mythology where they bleed into real-world understandings. At a time when so many peoples’ politics and world views come from folk truisms and fragmented, re-contextualized religious teachings, this genre of story has been one of my favorites since I first encountered Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Setting this tale in the American South taps into the region’s rich folk history that rose up from atrocious institutionalized practices and one culture’s de-humanization of another while the other was forced to raise children under that persecution. For me, this first volume from the series had in its aesthetic innocence all of the tension I felt the first time I heard Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and a similar hellish carnival of coyly whimsical imagery to what deeply affected me the first time I read John Berryman’s The Dream Songs.

The coloring is lush and evocative of the Mississippi climate and environment of the real world, and the illustration is hauntingly cartoonish for its subject matter — similar to the way Gabriel Bá’s style works in B.P.R.D.. There are a lot of soft-penciled, sketchy moments, though, which tend to take me out of the moment in the same way a lot of Bill Sienkiewicz imitators shake me loose of from their unrefined moments in monthly comics. It wasn’t a consistent problem, though, so the biggest effect it had on my reading was sending me back to try to figure out if the style was trying to differentiate flashbacks from narratively current events. I don’t think that was the case, though.

The characters are brilliant. Most of them come across somewhere between Frank in Donnie Darko and the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Their designs come from history, established folklore, and historical race-based caricature, which underscores the tenser moments with a simmering note of horror. It’s a beautiful piece of work.

Here’s a case where I actually psyched myself out too much expecting a disaster and walking of the read pleasantly surprised. Some ominous tweets and blog entries over the last week had me all ready to mourn Grant Morrison’s falloff in Batman and Robin following Phillip Tan’s appearance and Frank Quitely’s temporary exit. Granted, Tan’s style isn’t quite as inventive and doesn’t carry the same breed of charm that Quitely musters, but Tan was totally serviceable here and definitely above average.

I know I mentioned this in my review of issue #3, but I really dig Morrison’s identity shell games behind the masks, dating back to his Xorn reveal in New X-Men. Now he seems to be doing it one case, if not two now that this fellow Oberon Sexton has walked into the party. How great of a name is that, by the way?

If he turns out to be the Riddler in disguise following that “riddle of the corn dollie” comment, though, my eyes are going to do a barrel roll back into 1998.

This series is going to get really gruesome really fast, too. I mean did anyone else notice Philip Tan mugging Darick Robertson in at least one or two scenes here? It occasionally felt like I was reading The Boys.

There’s another interesting element at work now, as well, since the Red Hood appears to be competing with Batman as a crime fighter, which tartens up of the mystery about his identity, since now we may be looking at Jason Todd out to improve upon his mentors methods or The Joker looking to corner the organized crime market in Gotham. His execution of the one mob boss on the table was a bit too similar to Heath Ledger’s pencil trick in The Dark Knight, though, and I have to wonder if that wasn’t extremely intentional. Furthermore, if Batman thinks he’s Jason Todd at first glance, I have to figure he’s The Joker, or else there’s one less surprise left to unveil.

Anyhow, nice to not feel nearly as cheated as I feared I would be. This series is still in great shape.

[¡Spoilers Alert!] Geoff Johns has been serving up K.O. moments since the “Blackest Night” event began, and despite being a longtime Firestorm fan with his original appearances protectively sealed several feet away from me right now, I have to preface this review with the fact that this was the weakest of the first three issues for me. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve watched Firestorm go through so many exhausting character and mental partnership changes since Dan Jolley wrote him in those early re-launch issues, but I just did not feel nearly the amount of shock or loss that I think I was supposed to when Gen got offed.

The same really goes for the final page, too, because I saw that coming a mile away. Granted, it was very cool to get to watch Black Lantern Ronnie Raymond unload on Jason, but at the same time, the fact that the Black Lantern incarnations have been identified as psychologically not their hero counterparts, their scenes feel pretty hollow since I feel like I’m just watching an unseen power use their bodies, which puts a lot more pressure on the action sequences to do the heavy lifting as far as the story goes.

The big important moment for this issue was the big reveal for the Indigo Tribe, and though it wasn’t terrible, Indigo-1’s monologue was one of the stiffest, most unnatural reads with the least amount of payoff I’ve had to endure in a while. And I expected more info than what was already more or less apparent, told in the abstract terms of the light and emotion colors. My biggest fear right now is that there’s no man or woman behind the curtain with the black rings and the ultimate moment of conclusion results in DC’s heroes defeating what amounts to a black hole with some ink dripping out of it. I’m pulling for Johns to deliver more than that, because I know he can, but the ambiguity of the color energies only works well thematically to a point and there’s going to have to be something tangible. Otherwise, I fear the best is already behind in this series, and there are still five issues left.

Ivan Reis though? Still killing it on Blackest Night, and while he hasn’t quite attained J.G. Jones status with me yet, he is drawing circles around this book’s humongous cast — especially those Black Lantern villains at the end that I can’t wait to see in the next issue.

Which brings me to my final thought: Maxwell Lord was buried in that vault with Wonder Woman’s lasso still tied around his neck? Do I understand that correctly?