Blue Beetle #3 Review and *SPOILERS*

Get Off My Back!

Written By: Keith Giffen
Art By: Scott Kolins, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Josh Reed
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: November 23, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

This series has not been what I wanted it to be and what I wanted it to be was just plain, honest to goodness fun.  Instead, we've gotten Jaime and Ted Kord bickering back and forth and acting like an old married couple and that's not fun to me, especially because the panels are just littered with dialog balloons that are filled with back and forth quips that don't do anything for the book except for exhaust the reader.  Maybe that's just me, but I expected more out of this, especially since it just throws Ted Kord at us without so much as an explanation about why he's so interested in Jaime and how he was once the Blue Beetle even though we've never seen him as this heroic persona.  When we last left our hero, we saw him investigating some kidnapped "Posse" members and finding out that his mother has been hired by Kord to be the "Posse's" physician.  So yeah, Jaime's not too happy about that; let's see what else develops with this issue.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with Jaime being carried away by the scarab to a hole in a ground....... kind of similar to the ones that show up where meta human "Posse" members disappear and waking up right in time to see that he's surrounded by a whole swarm of nasties calling themselves The Horde.  It turns out that these baddies have the ability to rip Jaime's armor right off his body and have a sort of vehicle looking thing that can speak an unknown language and make Jaime speak the language as well........... I don't know how this helps them, but it's one of the most interesting things that have happened in this book so far so I found myself enjoying it.  Too bad it doesn't last too long because while Jaime seemed tranced out, the Horde tried to grab his scarab and it reacted by blasting a lot of them to hell and pulling Jaime out of this situation, that the scarab seemed to put him in out of nowhere in the first place.  That's all we really get out of this and nothing else is explained. 

The rest of the issue seems to be Jaime going around and telling people about what happened to him and the most we get out of this is Ted Kord going into further detail about what Doctor Fate told him, only not to Jaime.  Yeah, Jaime is still kept in the dark about what's in store for him, but we get to see that Doctor Fate is scared of the scarab and suggests to Ted Kord that Jaime should be killed before something terrible happens with the scarab and it becomes the destroyer that Doctor Fate believes it to be.  Which is messed up as hell and thankfully Ted doesn't go for it, but all of this leads to Jaime finally giving in to Ted's tests so that he can hopefully find a way to remove the scarab from his back and get back to having a normal life.  

In the end, we see Jaime go on to tell his father and Brenda about what's happening to him, but ultimately we don't get anything out of these interactions besides for the clarification that Jaime's parents know that he's the Blue Beetle, which was some important information to have as a reader.  As our issue closes, we see a big ass armored dude walking through an airport and by the look of him I have to assume that he's some kind of Green Beetle, but I really have no idea who he is.  All I know is that a kid ran into him, he became normal looking again (even though nobody seemed to notice a big ass armored dude) and the kid quickly died afterwards.  

That's it for this issue of Blue Beetle and while I thought this issue started out strong, it quickly became the book I've come to know and that's just dialog balloon after dialog balloon that at some places seem like their placed there for no real reason than to fill up a panel, especially since the majority of the issue then played out to be Jaime just telling everyone what we saw at the beginning of the issue.  Yeah, I understand that the beginning was pretty damn cool, but you don't have to go on and talk about it for the rest of it.......... that's just lazy.  The art in this issue was decent, but all in all this is just another issue of Blue Beetle that just doesn't do much, even with it giving us a little more background about what Doctor Fate told Ted Kord and including Sugar and Spike into this series........ for some reason.  I just find myself not interested in everything that's being given to us and that's a shame because I really enjoy the character.

Bits and Pieces:

Yeah, we got a cool opener to this issue and a little more background about what Doctor Fate was up to previously in this series, but ultimately this is just anther underwhelming issue of Blue Beetle that leaves me wanting more.  The art was decent throughout, but the dialog just isn't that great and the majority of this issue just feels like filler.

5.5/10