Rob's Picks:

Batman: Bad Seeds #1 Vandal Savage has declared war on Mayor Pamela Isley, but if she can’t control the city then no one can! This book launches the first major crossover event for the Fraction era, and all the groundwork laid in the pages of Batman and Poison Ivy really pays off. The story starts in full motion with Savage laying siege to City Hall, where Ivy is conspiring with the Parliament of Trees to destroy Gotham once and for all. The green hell they unleash begins consuming the city in minutes, poisoning the air and spawning monsters to attack the people. By the next sunrise, everything and everyone will be lost unless the Bat-Family, still in disarray from their own war with Vandal Savage, can save the day. Bad Seeds #1 emphasizes the city-wide scale of the event with a big cast of characters, most falling on one side of the central conflict or the other, but there are some interesting wildcards like Killer Croc and the Ventriloquist, who are pursuing their own agendas amidst the chaos. Batman and company are mostly in gearing-up mode for this issue, setting up their individual plot threads and leaving Poison Ivy to carry most of the actual dramatic weight for this chapter. Her time as mayor has left her even more cynical about the state of mankind, and the return to outright supervillainy costs her the few allies she has left. Despite planning a mass extinction, there are still some people Ivy cares about, but she will have to race against her own doomsday deadline to save them. Writers Matt Fraction and G. Willow Wilson blend well while still holding on to the distinct styles that have made their individual runs on Batman and Poison Ivy so compelling.

Next Level: One Shot #1 DC’s Next Level initiative begins a new arc in this one-shot special from writer Gerry Duggan. Through recent earth-shaking events like Absolute Power and Beast World, Floyd Lawton has stayed doing what he does best: popping heads for dollars. Now, in the wake of the King Omega tournament, the world has become an even stranger and deadlier place for a merc trying to make a quick buck. With time to kill between jobs, Deadshot takes a meeting with Rick Flag Jr., finding his former Suicide Squad chum has been driven to paranoia after uncovering clues to a global conspiracy. Floyd is the only man he trusts to join the investigation, and after shooting it out with a mutant SWAT team, he’s in. The globetrotting adventure leaps from one locale to the next with breezy efficiency, packing in cameos, with Deadshot providing wry commentary every step of the way. Fighting it out with increasingly bizarre metahuman/animal hybrids as he goes, Flag’s notes lead him to the last place he wants to be: Gotham City, where Batman is not the worst thing he meets on a rooftop. This book is so much fun, and if this is setting the tone for Next Level going forward, then this new arc is going to be the kind of wonderfully weird collision of characters and concepts that DC does so well.

Terminal #2 The shocking conclusion of issue #1 has changed everything for Alessandra Howe, AKA Crusher, super-powered soldier of the Activators. With her sister dead from a botched attempt at activating latent superpowers, Howe has lost her absolute faith in the organization’s mission and in its leader, the giant disembodied eyeball Maculox. Out of loyalty to her squadmates, she puts her grief and doubts aside when their next assignment comes, protecting famous tech tycoon Benjamin Wright from the forces of the Obelisk. In the rush to intercept the soldiers of Obelisk, Crusher uncovers a secret Wright has been keeping under wraps, one that makes his “good guy” status questionable at best. Robert Kirkman is still reveling in the moral ambiguity of it all, but makes the second issue of Terminal more action-oriented than the first. The fight between the Activators, Obelisk, and Wright’s private army puts more superpower abilities on display, and as we saw in #1, the aftermath ranges from gory to full-blown body horror. Maybe the most remarkable thing about this series is how realized and familiar the setting and characters feel after just two installments. Kirkman seems committed to outdoing his own reputation for shocking twists on comic tropes, and if that is the goal, then Terminal is already a massive success.