Some thoughts about Blue Beetle #13

Can Blue Beetle save the future?

Teri has bring Jaime to her own time to save her Justice League but even their combined forces might not be enough to win this war.

I was right at not expecting anything here.

As you might recall, the series Justice League 3001 didn't receive a satisfying ending at all with multiple plot-points being dropped and a rushed conclusion in which Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis didn't even bother to show the fates of the characters that people were invested into (and some of them even died in pretty simple ways that makes things even worse). Some of their usual problems were still present during the course of this Blue Beetle series and for some reason, they thought it was a good idea to bring a kind of closure for their previous work in the conclusion of this series.

And it goes as well as you would expect.

For one, let's get this out of the way, this was a pretty bad idea to begin with. People who were initially interested in Justice League 3001 (and that includes myself) didn't want to see a proper conclusion in another completely different series, they wanted to see it in its book. Mind you, it would still be acceptable if this issue brought an actual ending for that title but guess what? That doesn't happen either! The war is still continuing and the only thing that this issue managed to do was to make us see some of those characters again and for some reason I don't understand, create more plot-points that I don't see continuing anywhere else but in these writers' next work (and I don't think I'm even interested at this point).

Second, and of course this doesn't work as a conclusion for Blue Beetle either because the connection between both series was never strongly made, no matter if Teri was part of the series since she might as well have been a secondary character that barely had a relationship with Jaime. Hell, you could have replaced Jaime with any other hero here (aside from some really forced justifications) and nothing would have changed, this doesn't bring any sort of closure for him whatsoever.

Third and worst of all, the writers forced yet another connection between the two books by making Lady Styx into La Dama! What? I mean, WHAT?! The problem is not only that this pretty much comes out of nowhere but also that the next Blue Beetle writer is going to be, repeat with me, forced to work with this new status quo that is completely out of place for the character and universe.

Scott Kolins' artwork is pretty average this time, not a lot of polish and the action scenes can look messy.

Seriously considering adding this into my Top Ten Worst list from this year, is that bad.