Today’s Comic> Heroes Unleashed #2

They gave Wonder Woman a sword and shield, and now all the superheroes want them.

Heroes Unleashed #2

PD Comics (the date is missing from my digital copy, the downside of using layers in a PDF file, perhaps)

Captain Midnight: “The War To End All Wars” part 2

WRITER: Bryan Augustyn

ARTIST: Jay Piscopo

Commander X: “Allies”

WRITER/ARTIST: Jay Piscopo

Sword Of The Blue Scarab

WRITER/ARTIST: Jay Piscopo

Commander X’s sub is attacked by Britannia, mistaking it for the Nazi superweapon. I didn’t know this was set in the Marvel Universe. Fortunately, that’s sorted out quick and the three heroes, along with Captain Midnight (who is apparently a bit player in his own story), Airboy, and some lady pilot I am not versed enough in Golden Age heroes to identify. As it is, I only know Airboy as a title, not the character himself. They succeed in destroying the actual Nazi superweapon with Commander X’s electromagnetic weapons, and the guy from Atlantis gets out of there, leaving the Nazi to go blip with his ship.

Like I said, Captain Midnight is just there in what’s listed as his story. It’s more like a team-up story and that’s how it should have been billed. Otherwise, it’s not a bad introduction to the Golden Age heroes in public domain used by PD Comics (the “PD” obviously standing for “Public Domain”).

In Commander X’s actual story, he joins another hero named Sea Raider in trying to stop Red Octopus, secretly Baron Hydro from the last story. Outside of the fight, a lot is told in exposition to the reader rather than in the story, which is disappointing. There is a good story here, it’s just not presented well.

The Blue Beetle Scarab story starts with an odd pronouncement, that the spirit who chose Daniel Garret was Mary Magdalene. That doesn’t seem right, but I admit I’m not well versed in her story. This is all one big exposition dump, a running theme in this issue, as we’re just told “oh yeah, Daniel totally had a bunch of adventures but we aren’t telling you the details, instead noting that he got resurrected a few different times as a costumed hero, including the Old West and one of the World Wars, and there’s an apocalypse version, and someday we’re going to go over the time-traveling team-ups”. This is not either of the Dan Garret/Garrett Beetles I know and it makes me wonder why this story is even here.

So between the previous issue and this one, I’m not all that impressed with the presentation in this comic. That’s too bad, because there are some good story ideas, but they’re not very well presented. Hopefully they’ll get better but it depends on what happens in future issues. I don’t know if they’ll be freebies like these two were, but I may keep an eye on this series simply out of curiosity.