The Good
The Robot Chicken variant cover is one of the best, coolest, most hilarious variant covers I have ever seen. It is pure awesomeness.
Tons of fantastic action in this issue as The Others take on Black Manta and his minions, but mainly Black Manta who shows them all how powerful the scepter, also known as The Seventh Relic, truly is. There's quite a few dynamic and unique characters on this team, so it's really cool to see how they all work together as a team, since they are so different.
I'm most interested in what is so amazing about The Seventh Relic. We get to see how powerful it is in this issue, but there has to be more than destructive power?
As always, Ivan Reis does a fantastic job on the art in this issue. He has several great looking splash pages here (almost too many for me... almost), and right away we are treated to a beautiful splash of Mera swimming looking incredibly mad, which she's great at doing. What I enjoyed most about his art in this issue is that it stays consistent. If he's drawing a splash page or just a small panel, the amount of detail is the same.
Geoff Johns, as always, does a great job at telling a single story during the issue while setting up something more. We get a much straight-forward tale in this issue, but nevertheless, the ending will get you extremely excited for the conclusion to this issue, but sadly, it's a two month wait to get there.
The Bad
It gets a tad spoily down below. I'm going to give away a couple things, but I won't give away the big details, just some of the overall events. You have been warned.
The death in this issue didn't impact me as hard as I felt it should have. Aquaman really loses it as well as a couple other characters from The Others over someone's death, but I didn't feel that same impact. Sure, the reader has only known this character for a few issues, but this death doesn't feel as big as it should. I don't feel for them or for Aquaman.
I don't like having to wait two months for the conclusion of this story.
The Verdict
Another solid issue by Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis. Did you expect anything less? I loved the variant cover to this issue. There was a ton of great action here, and I love seeing all the relics from The Others be a part of the mythos now. I'm very interested to see how powerful the Seventh Relic actually is.
Sadly, we have to wait two months for the continuation for this story, and also one of the final events in this issue didn't feel as impactful to me as it should have felt.
Overall, I highly recommend this issue.