Tangled Up: Blue Beetle #1 Review

This is the story of Jaime Reyes, a normal teenager living in suburban New Mexico with his best friends Paco – a gangbanger with a sense of humor and a heart of gold – and Brenda – a redhead who happens to be the niece of La Dama – a female crime lord with a stable of superpowered minions. Jaime finds himself fused with the Scarab – a piece of alien technology from something called The Reach – that bestows upon him a suit of powered armor that he doesn’t know how to use and might be operating under its own agenda.

Sound interesting? It should: it’s the plot of Blue Beetle. Written by Keith Giffen and John Rogers. In 2006.

It’s ALSO the plot of Blue Beetle #1, written by Tony Bedard and penciled by Ig Guara, released last Wednesday. And that’s the problem.

Don’t get me wrong: Blue Beetle is a well-executed and entertaining origin issue. It lays out where the Scarab comes from, it introduces all the main players, gets the Scarab on Jaime, all in 20 pages. Of all the New 52 books from DC, it probably meets the stated goal of the reboot, to create an entry point for new, non-comic readers, most effectively. Sure, there’s still a writing-for-the-trade feel since Jaime doesn’t become Blue Beetle until the last page, but Bedard tells us what we need to know without requiring any knowledge of continuity. It’s somewhat refreshing… or it would be if Bedard DIDN’T require a fluency in a second Goddamned language.

There are at least ten or eleven panels in this book that include Spanish or Spanglish – to the point where Bedard puts the ol’ footnote asterix next to the phrase “La casa de Amparo Cardenas” to tell us in caption that it is “Translated from the Spanglish”… except he NEVER FUCKING TRANSLATES IT. He might as well have wasted panel real estate with “Translated into Spanglish from Klingon by way of Helen Keller’s homemade tappity language.” For all I know, Jaime spend half the book saying, “You, reader, are a racist, provincial dingus.”

Guara’s pencils, while not flashy, are probably as good as you can ask for for a book that seems intended for people who might not have read a comic book in years. He has a clear, straight-ahead style with good facial expressions, he does different types of people and monsters well, and he certainly won’t turn anyone off by being overstylized. Sure, he probably won’t get people lining up for him at Artists Alley in San Diego… but then again, he might: Guara’s Brazilian, and people who don’t know that they speak Portuguese there might line up to get him to translate this book for them. And probably get punched in the face. But I digress.

This is a tough book to place a final judgment on, because I do believe that it’s a good entry point for people who haven’t read comics before. The problem is that I’ve been reading comics for 36 YEARS, and those comics include Rogers and Giffen’s run from just five years ago. And while I’ll grant that the 2006 run was much more obviously written for regular comics readers (It opens with Guy Gardner attacking Jaime with no preamble or introduction to either of them), that story had, even in the first issue, better and stronger characterization for the main players than Bedard was able to get into his first issue. Bedard tells you more, so if you don’t know who Blue Beetle is you can ramp up quickly, but I prefer the original.

And ultimately that’s the problem I had with this book: it feels unnecessary. This same story was told just FIVE YEARS AGO. So if you’re an old-school comics reader like me, give it a shot maybe, but personally? I’m gonna pull my old Rogers trades.

But I applaud Bedard taking the mission of the New 52 to heart, and for embracing a commitment to diversity. It’s refreshing, and I want to follow his example.

Pendejo.