The relatively charming, clean superheroics in the first half of the book (how much of that fun contributed by Geoff Johns and how much by Carlos Pacheco, I don’t know), are rather tainted by the unnecessarily gloomy, bloody second half of the book. It’s the sort of excessive, tasteless violence that Johns has been criticized for in the past, and it makes the book a take it or leave it thing.

I guess it was worth consuming, but it’s hard to say. There was a gap of a few weeks or so between when I watched the first four discs and when I watched the last two, and while I enjoyed the first four a lot more than I did the first season of the show, the last two felt considerably more painful.

On the whole, I at least enjoyed the first two acts of this season more than the first. It felt like they were using the major decompression of their real-time device to tell a major story rather than the comparatively small one that made up the first season, and not only did that make it more interesting, it felt like it moved a little faster. I was also, after watching the first season, a tad more acclimated to 24’s mildly infuriating manipulative techniques (if anything bad at all can happen, it will) and the cliffhangers that somehow manage to occur at the end of every sixty minutes of the day.

Despite all this, it pretty nearly falls flat on its face towards the end. Their obsession with snubbing every lead and making the situation as dire as it can possibly be before everything is solved in the final episode makes things less interesting rather than more interesting. It’s a stretch of maybe five or six episodes with no payoff whatsoever, or what little payoff there is, botched, and it sucks out all of the tension that’s been built up. They make good enough of it by the finale, but it doesn’t really make up for the aggravation that’s come before.

So, as it stands, I’m not really sure whether it’s better or worse than the first season, but it’s still a reasonably good example of the show’s particular brand of pulp action entertainment.

It’s a fun, unpretentious superhero book. The art is pleasing and effective. Sometimes, it tries a bit too hard to be funny, and it’s obvious when it does this, but it doesn’t sink the book.

It’s a fun children’s book that’s probably enjoyable enough for anyone who doesn’t take themselves too seriously. The art is nice and the story has a nice, leisurely pace that doesn’t feel like filler, either (as a lot of decompression in comics does). Also, it contains massive amounts of cuteness. You’ve been warned.

It’s reasonably fun, but it also drags its heels a little more noticeably this time, and I think it would have helped if they had had some degree of resolution to any of the plot threads at all. It’s not at all that I have a problem with a cliffhanger—those are all good and fine, but not a single storyline that’s opened gets closed by the end, and it doesn’t make it a very satisfying movie to watch.

Otherwise, my memory’s a bit foggy, but I’m pretty sure Johnny Depp wasn’t quite as entertaining this time around.

It wasn’t bad at all. It was light and entertaining, and often genuinely funny in a way few comics are, usually due to the artist’s skill at pulling off the kind bizarre, off-the-wall facial expressions that amuse me.

The problem is that it doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to be. It’s not gag-driven enough to be pure comedy, existing solely for the purpose of telling jokes, but there’s also no discernible plot or character development to give me any desire to keep reading.

In short, amusing, but 18 more volumes of this? I guess I’ll try to locate one or two more, just to see if it goes anywhere interesting, but I’m not counting on it.

I was watching via… somewhat questionable means on the internet, since I don’t receive any channels on my TV (and I could watch it if I did get channels), but I realized I just didn’t want to be tied down to watching something every week while Lost is on hiatus. Unfortunately, it’s been cancelled and it seems it doesn’t really matter anyways.

It was a pretty good show, the cancellation was utterly stupid, and I won’t say much more than that. I hope that ABC is at least good enough to let the show’s production team finish up the season and release it as a boxed set.

Interesting, I guess, for being the first Elseworlds story, and it’s not really a bad one. The mystery is pretty predictable, though there’s a certain amount of irony in the revelation at the end that I found amusing. There’s also a kind of glaring plot hole involving the ease with which a jailed character escapes.

That said, the real attraction, for me, is Mike Mignola’s art. It’s fun to have something pre-Hellboy that gives an idea of how his artwork has evolved.

It’s kind of fun continuity tweaking for the first three chapters, with pretty art, but the last segment is really forgettable, and it’s overall kind of passable.

Gail Simone seems to have a cult-ish following among comics fans, but if this was supposed to make me one, it didn’t. Byrne’s art is good, but I really don’t enjoy his art enough to read something just for the pleasure of seeing it outside of a good story, and there’s nothing here I would call good, exactly. It just seems like a bunch of stale, worn-out Superman stories. I don’t care about any of them, so much so that that’s about all I can write about this.