For Great Justice – Review Of Vibe #1

Vibe #1 drops into stores today and, if you’re like many of my LCS’s core demographic, you responded with a polite, “That’s nice”, blinked nonchalantly, and then went looking for Hellblazer #300 because you are a SERIOUS PERSON, GODDAMMIT and that the LAST REAL JOHN CONSTANTINE ISSUE before DC further neuters him and…went on to some post traumatic whimpering before finally pulling yourself together to look through the spoils of this week’s stack. Turns out, once you put your wailing and gnashing of teeth over the the Constantine thing aside and read Geoff Johns and Andrew Kreisburg’s Vibe, it’s actually pretty good.

If you are like many casual, or perhaps not even so casual, comics readers, unless you were a fan of Justice League Detroit in the 80s your only real brush with Vibe was in cameos on the television show Justice League Unlimited and on Cartoon Network’s DC Nation shorts. Behold:

Yeah, you’d take that character seriously too. And, you wouldn’t be alone in your opinion. The original Vibe was killed off by J. M. DeMatteis to try and cap the end of the JLD era and George Pérez disliked Vibe so much that he refused to draw anything more than Vibe’s legs falling off a panel in the mega crossover JLA/Avengers – and Pérez knows a thing or two about teen superheroes.

So, why does this new iteration of Vibe work?

Warning – Ahead there be spoilers!