Good Time (2017)
Written & Directed by Benny & Josh Safdie
Connie Nikas is convinced that his brother, Nickie is just fine. This is despite the fact that Nickie is deaf in both ears and lacks some essential cognitive functions. Connie pulls Nickie from the program their grandmother enrolled him in. The young man has plans to rob a bank so he and his brother can run away from the city and be free of what he perceives as authority crushing them. However, many details are overlooked in this plan, and Nickie ends up caught and sent to Rikers Island. Connie spends the next day desperately manipulating, lying, and stealing to save Nickie.
Jaime Reyes continues his tenure as the Blue Beetle, but this time he is given a mentor in Ted Kord, the former Blue Beetle. Over the course of this volume, Jaime investigates but fails to resolve the mystery of kids from his high school disappearing. He also learns his mother is providing medical services for The Posse, a gang of teenage metahumans that are sometimes antagonists for Beetle. In the background, Dr. Fate issues enigmatic warnings to Ted Kord about the true nature of the Scarab, the object which gives Beetle his power. Everything Jaime thinks he knows about this item appears to be wrong.
Harley Quinn is living on Coney Island, New York with the former members of a traveling carnival and apparently, Egg-Fu’s son and a Deadpool knockoff? Well, an alien lands on Earth and gets chopped up into some ground meat causing a zombie apocalypse to break out. Poison Ivy shows up to help with that one. Then a gang of armored medieval knights attacks a mailman which leads Harley to put together a punk band. All of that is done by order of the New York mayor. Yeah, this is Harley Quinn.
Who is Cyborg? The first reaction to this question would be to say he’s former NFL hopeful Victor Stone, but this opening volume of the Rebirth revival asks us to think about that for a second. Cyborg is still operating under the watch of his father, Dr. Silas Stone, partnering with STAR Labs colleagues Dr. Thomas Morrow and Sarah Charles. In the shadows, a dark cybernetic being watches Cyborg and other robotic denizens of the DC Universe (Red Tornado, Amazon, Robotman, etc.). This being unleashes the alien technological entity Kilg%re on Cyborg as a test which leads to a behind the scenes shake-up in the protagonist’s personal life.
The Titans begin to form stronger bonds in this second collection of Wolfman and Perez’s legendary run. There are two core story arcs presented here: Donna Troy’s temptation at the hands of the Titans of Myth & Changeling’s quest to avenge the fallen Doom Patrol. Both stories set in stone a lot of future Titans mythos, particularly the Doom Patrol storyline. This volume also serves to further connect the Titans with the DC Universe, and it’s very complicated history.
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