The original Rocket Red comes to JLI's rescue during their fight with his modern successors, all the while Maxwell Lord encounters a horrifying set-back to his master plan.
The Good
Since everything's firing on all cylinders with this book, I'm just going to list all the scenes I thought were cool. There was Maxwell Lord's sly approach to segueing conversation into mind control, his subsequent shock at the appearance of a Black Lantern, a swarthy Rocket Red coming to this loose team's rescue, the eye-rolling he gets from the modern Red Rockets, the unofficial reunion of the JLI that nobody wants to admit to, Batman's suspicions regarding Checkmate's confounding behavior and his own puzzling thoughts about Fire and then, the stand-out of the issue, was Booster Gold calling Lord out from nothing... and then actually getting answered. It's all good and Joe Bennett never misses a beat when it comes to rendering it all. His work here's a joy to look at. Even if you don't know anything about Brightest Day, it's still truly compelling to follow this gang of second-stringers knowing the truth about Lord when the whole world's been brainwashed against them.
The Bad
You know what? There really isn't anything wrong with this and, what the hell, I'm going to give it extra credit this week for being such a consistently-good read when I thought it was only going to be a superfluous Brightest Day tie-in.
The Verdict - 5/5
This has been consistently one of the best books I've been reading from DC and great companion piece to Winick's other great book this week, Power Girl. I've been enjoying it so much over the past few weeks that I'm looking forward to picking up a new issue every Wednesday. This puts a real human face on the fall-out of Brightest Day. There's been a lot of attempts at putting the old magic back in a bottle, but this is the one that manages to perfectly captures what was so appealing about Giffen's classic JLI while still updating for modern continuity. I highly recommend you go out and pick this up, now.
