Team 7 #1
Written by Justin Jordan
Art by Ron Frenz, Jesus Merino, Marlo Alquiza, Drew Geraci, Jose Marzan Jr., and Nathan Eyring
Standard cover art by Doug Mahnke
Variant cover art by Jim Lee and Scott Williams
The short of it:
It’s time for the first mission of the newly recruited Team 7, and Lynch has a doozy in store for his team of covert ops experts. Facility 9 has gone radio silent, a prison designed with metahuman prisoners in mind. It floats, or flies, or whatever you want to say about a jail that is five miles in the air and constantly moving. Consider the tone set. Base defenses fire at them and they have to do a quick bail out, which almost gets Kurt Lance killed. Apparently his skill set does not include field work. Slade tears into him, people defend him, Slade isn’t wrong, eventually they get back to the mission.
Grifter makes a hole, they drop in, and it looks like the aftermath of a horror movie. Blood, destruction, no bodies. They find a civilian, but when they say they’re the good guys she goes feral and attacks. Our heroes, not really being heroes, take her down…only to be attacked by a few dozen more!
And when I see feral, I really mean moon faced.
What I liked:
- I can’t believe I’m leading off with this, but the book is funny. There’s wit, there’s one liners, and I would not have expected to laugh at anything other than dark humor in a book like this. It’s pretty refreshing, and really separates itself from Suicide Squad in doing so.
- Even doing black ops special government work, Slade brings a sword.
- Every team needs an expendable player that’s just inept enough that you expect their impending doom, but who squeaks by time and again up until you finally think they won’t eat it…and then they do. This book has Kurt Lance, who we know gets killed thanks to Birds of Prey.
- Any plot that screams “Black Diamond” is aces to me. One of my favorite villains is coming.
- Grifter and Fairchild make great comic relief, I mean, the humor is dark and sarcastic, but it’s my kind of humor.
What I didn’t like:
- This is two issues in a row where Jordan has tried to put over Summer Ramos as a top notch, one of the best in the world pilots, and that I just look at and say “she’s going to be the first member to die”. Yes, you need someone a little crazy and reckless to do outrageous things, but you don’t need someone who only knows how to fly a suicide run.
- We just did the intros of all of these characters last issue, did we really need half the book to be recapping that? The issue was pretty much stalled until the last eight or nine pages.
Final thoughts:
I can’t wait for Lynch to get out in the field and lose his eye.
For the most part I’m a fan of the characterization in this book. Everyone has their own personality, their reason for being there, their little quirks. It’s a nice touch.
I liked the zero issue, so the first half of this issue being spent just recapping that entire issue in the caption boxes made me wonder why I needed to buy it. Once that was out of the way the book was just fine, but the first half of the book was just painfully slow and redundant.
There’s a line early on about how there’s only one other pilot in the US military that matches her skill level, and while the pilot isn’t named….come on, it’s Hal Jordan. I would have loved to see that pitch, “Hey Hal, want to join Team 7?” followed by “Man, how does Green Lantern show up at all of our missions?”
Speaking of Green Lantern, I would have more respect for John Stewart if he were on this team.
You know who would have been an awesome addition to this team? Midnighter. Or Backlash.
Overall: 7/10
