DCU Comic Book Reviews

BLUE BEETLE #7

Brother's Keeper

November 2006

Written by John Rogers

Pencils by Cully Hamner

Inks by Cully Hamner

Cover by Duncan Rouleau

Synopsis

Jaime Reyes (aka Blue Beetle) along with his family and friends returns to the site where he first landed back to Earth after disappearing for a year.  Jaime wishes he could recall what happened.  His sister Milagro suggests he try to go back to the beginning.  Peacemaker arrives on his motorcycle and also suggests the same thing.  Jaime remembers Booster Gold taking him to batcave and from there to outer space where he helped to defeat Brother Eye.  At the moment when they were about to return home, however, the scarab took Jaime into a pocket dimension as a defensive measure to get away from the Green Lanterns.  Time in that dimension move differently so that when he returned, to him it was only minutes, but for everyone else it was a year.  Peacemaker tells Jaime, they may know the scarab is alien, but there are still questions that need answers.  

Review by Binkley (e-mail)

“An evil, all-seeing artificial intelligence with an army of robots manned by innocent people kidnapped against their will?  What psycho-nut job supervillain built that?”

My first reaction to this issue as I was reading it was that this seemed to be a waste of time.  Indeed, there was no real big surprise and the questions Peacemaker raises at the end are the same questions I had before I started to read.  Yet, there is a small moment at the end which makes this issue worth it:  Jaime and his family reconcile.  The last we saw of the Reyes they had been freaked out by Jaime and essentially pushed him out the door because they feared what he had begun.  Through the process of the flashback, the Reyes gain a measure of sympathy for Jaime and at the end they embrace him and (perhaps) accept him.  Not only does this issue provide closure to the events of Jaime’s career as Blue Beetle but as provides emotional closure with his family and friends.  Of course, he is still looking for closure on what the scarab is and what it means, but that will be saved for future stories.

It is interesting to note that in the flashback sequences, Booster Gold is never shown.  All of the other characters that were part of the mission are shown, even if they had no speaking parts in this issue, but not Booster.  I am not sure if this means something or not.

Comic Connection

The events depicted in this issue occurred in the Infinite Crisis, issue #6 (May 2006).