Naomi #5 Review

Talking in the Moonlight

Written by: Brian Michael Bendis and David F. Walker
Art by: Jamal Campbell and Wes Abbott
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: May 15, 2019

If you have been following my reviews either here and/or on the podcast for this book, you will know that I am a fan of Naomi as a character, but am frustrated at the glacial pace we are finding out about her.  Maybe it's that every cover keeps claiming the issue you are reading at that point is the biggest thing ever and all will be revealed, but there is a more innocent reason here...I want to know everything there is about Naomi!  I have loved so many of Bendis' young characters in the past and to be honest, I need a character to fall in love with in these dark times at DC Comics right now.  So, I am going into this issue with an open mind and heart just hoping to get more.  Do we?  Let's find out...


We open the issue with a site to see...Anna playing her Chello in the garage in the middle of the night.  Now that is a crazy start to a garage band, but I'm in!  I'll go grab my flugelhorn and we'll kick out the jams!  Again, as this series has progressed, Bendis and Walker have cut out a bunch of the extraneous characters that seemed to pop up just for issue #1, but I am okay with that for the most part since I liked Anna the most anyway.

The issue continues with Naomi laying it all out on the table.  She tells Anna about Dee, her parents and most importantly, herself.  Anna, being awesome as she is, believes Naomi and listens to it all.  So, what do she and the reader find out?  Well, unfortunately, it starts as a lot of recap from the last issue.  We do see a bit of Naomi's powers, but not enough and things don't get interesting until mid issue when Naomi lets us in on a message from her birth mother.

Like Superman, Naomi was sent away from her homeworld to avoid disaster, but instead of a planet exploding, it's a really evil guy who wants her dead.  That's some foreshadowing of who and what will be going on in next month's finale and I am good with that.  This is all told through a massive info dump of narration boxes which I am not so good with.  It does get the job done and I wouldn't mind as much if Bendis and Walker wouldn't have snail-paced this book to get to this point.

The other thing that keeps nagging at me is the idea that this book is supposed to reveal the "DC Multiverse you never knew existed" and while it's cool to find out that Naomi is not from our Earth, the reveal here isn't mindblowing in a DCU that does have a Multiverse intact.  Maybe we will get more and it will change my mind, but right now the whole thing is cool enough, but hardly knocked me out of my seat.

The issue does end with Naomi, Anna and myself wondering about what her power set is and a cliffhanger that was set up earlier and looks like it might kick things into high gear for the final issue of this "season one".

I continue to really like Naomi and Anna and the cliffhanger has me looking forward to the next issue.  However, it is now 100% obvious that this series was set up only to give you an origin in an entire trade.  These four issues could easily be condensed into two and maybe less and that is frustrating.  Frustrating for a lot of reasons, but for me, it's because I want to know and love this character and it shouldn't take half a year to tell me this whole story.  I am so conflicted with the cost/reward aspect of this book and that's not any fun.

I am not conflicted when it comes to Jamal Campbell's art, however, since everything looks spectacular.  Even with the overly narrated scenes and standing around looks great.  I do have to mention that some of the pages are crammed with a ton of text that takes away from the art a bit and I wish the font was a bit bigger to read easier...but that's a column A/Column B thing of who is more to blame since there might just be too many words per page at points to go bigger in the lettering.

Bits and Pieces:

While we do get some much-needed information in this issue, we are still left waiting for more.  The first half of the book is pretty much recap of the last issue, but by the end, I was excited for the next issue.  Jamal Campbell's art is great and if you have the patience to go through six issues for an origin story, you may like this a bit more than me.  I am a fan of Naomi, I just need to get more each issue to be able to recommend to everyone.

7.0/10