Riot Act, b/w Eaten From The Inside Out

By Ayo

“Riot Act”
The Green Team, no. 1
Art Baltazar, Franco, Ig Guara
DC Comics, May 2013

For purely selfish reasons, I’m going to lean in heavily on this comic book. Off-brand DC comic books have a poor success rate in the comic book marketplace and I want this series to live. To “go viral,” pun intended.

I like co-writer Art Baltazar and I’ve enjoyed his work since the mid-1990s when he was exhibiting self-published works in the church-basement show Big Apple Comic-Con. I like superhero comics, especially when I don’t need to keep up with sister series and related tie-ins. I like off-brand series that don’t rely on encyclopedic knowledge of ideas that are older than my lifespan. Heck, I like those type of comics as well but walk with me. What I’m saying is that I like this comic book. The Green Team is light in tone, confident in its own momentum and the entire enterprise is performed with one eyebrow arched.

I’m not saying that Green Team is the best comic. I would understand if you, my reader, were to dismiss it and scoff at my insistence of its attributes. You wouldn’t be wrong for that. There are plenty of comic books–superhero comic books–that are better than Green Team. Some of these came out this very week. But I enjoyed this comic. I was chuckling on the train this morning while all of the other commuters were frowning into their immediate futures of downtown offices. Now I sit in my own miserable downtown office but that’s okay because I had a nice ride.

Baltazar, Franco and Guara put together a fun little comic that has its own Instagram hashtag #GreenTeam

So as I said, I need your help.

I need anybody who is inclined to read a lighthearted, silly comic about rich kid superheroes to lace up their sneakers and go to their comic book store and buy this. Then I need you to talk to me about how much you like it. And don’t get me wrong, I fully intend to make fun of this comic and beat the stuffing out of it. But out of love.

#GreenTeam
@darrylayo

~the record is not over yet~

“Eaten From The Inside Out”
The Movement, no. 1
Gail Simone, Freddie Williams II
DC Comics, May 2013

The Green Team doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Though unrelated, #GreenTeam was marketed with another new comic book called The Movement. Where The Green Team is about super-rich-kids who are buying their way into superheroics, The Movement is about an underground network of vigilantes loosely based on the real world’s Anonymous group. Loosely.

Described in the book as a hacker group, “Channel M” is intimidating on the page. Their method for policing their neighborhood makes for good visuals. My regret as a reader is that there is also a superhero team inside this story that undercuts the creepy kids in masks surrounding crooked cops. See, I like both things: teenage superheroes and vast networks of hacker troublemakers. Twenty pages per month might not be enough space to get too deep into the regular-people-with-smartphones aspect of crime-fighting. We shall see.

#ChannelM
@darrylayo