Jaime Reyes was an ordinary kid, until a piece of advanced alien tech shaped like a scarab attached itself to his spine, giving him superpowers, and the Justice League dragged him into space to fight an evil satellite. Now he’s back in El Paso, trying to put his life back together after being missing for a year – and trying to learn how to control the scarab in his back, which wants to turn him into a killing machine. Oh, and the scarab’s creators, the Reach, have arrived on Earth, and Jaime’s the only one who knows they’re here to take over. Can the new Blue Beetle stop an alien invasion, protect his family and his city, and survive a legacy that’s already killed both his predecessors?

In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit my bias here: Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle before Jaime and who Jaime spends much of the series fanboying, is not just one of my all-time favorite superheroes, but one of my all-time favorite fictional characters, full-stop. So is his best friend, Booster Gold, who makes a heroic appearance towards the end, and Guy Gardner, the Green Lantern who makes regular appearances in the book, is way up there. And Ted, Booster, and Guy all met in the pages of Justice League International, one of my very favorite comics of all time, and one which this series makes deliberate allusions to. And Supergirl, my absolute favorite superhero, makes a cameo, and I’m awfully fond of Dan Garrett, the first Blue Beetle, and…look, this comic has a lot of things I adore in it before you even get into the actual subject matter. I’m predisposed to love it.

That said, even if you’re not me, it’s pretty darn good.

(A side note: Ongoing superhero comics, particularly those by DC and Marvel, tend to presuppose a certain familiarity with up to 70-plus years of backstory. Blue Beetle is better than most in that regard, but there are certainly moments that are caught up in the history of the Blue Beetle legacy, or characters the previous Blue Beetle was friends with, or what was going on in the rest of the DC Universe at the time. If you pick up these books based on this review and are confused, feel free to email me; I can talk for hours on end about Blue Beetle. Just ask my long-suffering co-blogger, who after years of friendship with me can tell you where Ted Kord grew up (Chicago), his favorite book (The Brothers Karamazov), and what kind of underwear he wears (boxers).)

Blue Beetle is both hilarious and exciting, but the real strength of the book is the characters. This, of course, starts with Jaime, who is endlessly lovable. He’s certainly a teenage boy, awkward and impatient and goofy, but he’s such a good boy; he’s brave and smart and responsible and he doesn’t want to hurt anyone and he loves his parents and his friends and his little sister and he makes people better just by being around them. His dream is to become a dentist so that he can pay off his parents’ mortgage. And yet he never comes off like a too-perfect Gary Stu; he’s a believable, funny, kind of dorky, unbelievably sweet kid, in over his head but trying his best.

It’s very clear that this is in large part because of how he was raised. Jaime’s parents are fully realized characters in their own right, and wonderful. They expect obedience and respect from their son, but they also trust him – there’s a great scene where they lay down the ground rules for crimefighting at night (he doesn’t have to ask permission if there’s a natural disaster, but he does have to call). (Incidentally, the fact that Jaime’s family and friends all know his secret identity is extremely rare in comics, and very refreshing – rather than constantly lying to his loved ones, Jaime just trusts them, right away.) They believe in peace and the sacredness of human life, and talk to Jaime about forgiveness and turning the other cheek, but Bianca can back down a Green Lantern (one of the most powerful superheroes in the cosmos) like a naughty child, and Alberto will fearlessly face off against a mob boss who dares bring guns onto his property. The strength of Jaime’s upbringing is encapsulated in one wonderful panel: when a defeated supervillain asks why Jaime doesn’t just kill him, Jaime simply says “That’s not how my mother raised me.” Darn straight.

Milagro, Jaime’s much younger sister, is great, too – whiny and plucky and believable. One particularly sweet moment between her and Jaime led to me bursting into tears on the subway (which happened three times – between that and all the giggling, I must have looked like a lunatic). And Jaime’s best friends, Brenda and Paco, are pretty much everything I love wrapped up in a bow – Brenda is a smart, overachieving, determined and independent redhead who can flip a guy twice her size to the ground, and Paco is a big, lovably smug goofball who acts like an idiotic BMOC but is actually extremely smart and loyal. She fights aliens! He saves babies! Maybe they’re in love maybe? Shh, don’t tell them.

And the story! The series is brilliantly-plotted and paced; the second half of End Game had me on the edge of my seat. (It should be noted that the series continued after this for about ten more issues, but I haven’t read those yet.) The gradual development of the scarab is beautifully done, and the climatic battle, with all of Jaime’s allies coming together, is one of those moments that makes the reader want to stand up and cheer (the one crazy thing I actually did manage to avoid doing on the subway).

I also loved the art, which goes through quite a few artists but always has a modern, kinetic, urban feel that fits both Jaime’s character and his powers very well. It’s also refreshing that none of women are drawn in nonsensically skimpy outfits, or contorting their bodies into uncomfortable, “sexy” poses; though the teenage girls have a tendency to wear belly shirts, it comes off as oddly dated fashion more than creepy objectification.

Oh, and did I mention that the cast is almost entirely Hispanic and the setting within a Latino community is handled with taste, careful thought, and understanding? The characters never come off as stereotypes, the bilingual factor is handled well (one issue is almost entirely in Spanish, and it’s wonderful (don’t worry, there’s a translation in the back)), and – there’s that word again – it’s just refreshing to see a non-white hero leading a non-white cast in a story that’s about the character and not his race, since mainstream comics don’t often handle that well. (Jaime’s interracial relationship with his Asian – and incredibly competent and funny magical detective – girlfriend Traci is also well done and very cute.)

The only bad thing I can say about this series is that it was sadly canceled after 36 issues (the four books reviewed here cover the first 26 of those). (Don’t worry, Jaime’s still appearing in the sadly-dreadful Teen Titans and will be featured in the upcoming Generation Lost, and is a major player on the animated Batman: The Brave and the Bold, so the character, at least, isn’t going anywhere for a while.) Since I can’t fault the series for heartbreaking decisions made by the company, Blue Beetle gets the coveted five cupcakes, and a double thumbs-up from longtime Blue Beetle pal Booster Gold:

It doesn’t get much better than that, I tell you what.

Floating out in space like a miniature planetoid, Art’s hodgepodge house Larklight has always been rather isolated and boring, much to his social-climbing sister Myrtle’s dismay. But when giant spiders attack Larklight in search of a mysterious “key,” Art and Myrtle are quickly forced to adjust to a far less boring way of life – one that includes man-eating moths, sentient storms, a motley crew of aliens, the British Secret Service, and the dashing space pirate Captain Jack Havock. Now the siblings must figure out how to save the entire solar system – and, more importantly, the Queen – and the answers may just lie in Larklight itself.

This book probably has the best concept I have encountered since Active Voice began. Basically, in this alternate history, Newton’s discoveries paved the way for actual space travel almost immediately, and now it is the middle of the 19th century and the height of the glory of the British Empire, and Queen Victoria’s regime stretches across most of the solar system. Reeve plays fast and loose with astronomy here – there’s intelligent life on pretty much anything with a solid surface, and the treatment of the laws of physics and various astronomical details may not quite hold up to the white-hot scrutiny of my one semester of astronomy – but the world created thusly is so enjoyable I can’t complain.

Unfortunately, that’s where the awesome ends. See, setting a book at the height of British imperialism means that issues of racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia are going to be pushed to the fore; the presence of aliens adds another dimension to that. However, Larklight failed to treat any of those subjects in any meaningful way. Myrtle’s prejudice against aliens and the lower classes is pretty consistent for most of the book, while Art’s varies drastically depending on the necessities of the plot; he’ll have a long thought process on British superiority, and then scold Myrtle for her rudeness towards aliens, in a transparent narrative attempt to make Art seem like a better person than Myrtle. Most importantly, however, while the book makes some vague stabs at expressing the idea that bigotry on an individual level is bad and that you should treat everyone with respect, it never says that imperialism itself is wrong. British dominion over everything from Mercury to Saturn is unquestioned and even lauded.

This would be problematic if it was just the abstract idea of Earth lording it over the other planets, but it’s made worse by the fact that it’s explicitly linked to Earthly imperialism, which is still affecting racial and international relations in the real world. If it’s totally cool for the English to rule over the Martians, who are apparently not worthy of the full rights given to an English citizen, it must be totally cool for the English to rule over, say, India, right? Obviously I’m not going to say that a person cannot write a book for children about imperialism without expressly condemning imperialism. However, I think this gleefully oblivious treatment is incredibly irresponsible.

The poor attitude towards other races and classes is compounded by the equally poor attitude towards women. There are four in the book (not counting Queen Victoria, who shows up at the end): Art’s mother, who is entirely defined by her roles as wife and mother; Ulla, a Martian who married an Englishman and joined the British Secret Service with him (which is another morally complicated imperialistic issue that’s never really discussed); Ssilissa, a blue anthropomorphic lizard of indeterminate origin who is a member of Jack’s crew and hopelessly, tragically in love with him; and Myrtle.

I really, really wanted to like Myrtle. I generally enjoy the prim young lady who loosens up over the course of the adventure and teaches her confederates that cleanliness and manners really are helpful, but unfortunately, Myrtle doesn’t really get an arc like that. She doesn’t really get an arc, in fact. She’s kind of obnoxious, and not in a cute way, and then she summons up courage in adversity by thinking of Jack (because of course a woman must be shown the way towards heroism by a man), but it doesn’t make her any less obnoxious. A lot of that is because most of the book is narrated by her little brother, who thinks of her as a bossy girl, but she’s both forbidden to be anything but traditionally feminine and constantly metatextually criticized for it, which hardly seems fair.

Plus the “romance” between Myrtle and Jack has some very unsettling underpinnings. Soon after they meet, the pirates and the siblings find themselves running for their lives from the Navy. Myrtle has fainted, of course. Jack is about to sacrifice himself in order to get the Navy to let the rest of the crew go, and Art asks if there’s anything he can do:

“You?” He glanced at me, incredulous. “Of course there ain’t!” he scoffed. But then his eye fell upon my insensible sister. Myrtle is always at her best when she is unconscious. Her spectacles had fallen off, and she looked almost pretty, lying there all pale and swoonsome. Jack Havock frowned thoughtfully, tugging at the brim of his wideawake hat. “Or maybe there is,” he said softly.

He then grabs Art, has another crewmember grab Myrtle, and shows them to the Navy as hostages, which allows them to get away. They even shake Myrtle so that it looks like she’s awake and struggling. The whole thing is incredibly distasteful and upsetting. She’s at her best when she’s unconscious? She looks kind of dead, so that makes her pretty and useful? Of course, the loss of her glasses stops her being a someone who looks and turns her into a something that is looked at, and the word “insensible” implies that the dumber Myrtle is, the more palatable she is. The invasion of Myrtle’s privacy and personhood continues throughout, particularly with the three chapters that are made up of large sections of her diary, used, Art tells us, without permission.

So. Great world, decent swashbuckling, really unsettling treatment of…um, everything else. The truth is, I am probably going to pick up Starcross, the sequel to Larklight, which would ordinarily mean this book gets three cupcakes, but my weakness for adventures in space does not change the poor treatment of –isms in Larklight. Two and a half cupcakes, and not a sprinkle more.

Austar IV used to be a planet-wide penal colony, but these days it’s a gambling world—people come from all over the galaxy to bet on the dragon fights. For Jakkin Stewart, a bond servant, those fights hold his hope. He’s managed to steal a hatchling from his Master and is raising and training it in a secret desert oasis, hoping that when it’s big enough, he can take it to the fights and win enough money to buy his freedom.

First off, forgive me—I read this about a month ago, and didn’t have the time to blog it; now some of the details are fuzzy. But what really stands out as excellent is the world building. I picked up the book expecting it to be high fantasy; instead, it’s science fiction that happens to feature dragons (as well as electricity and space ships). The development of the planet is vital to the story itself. The planet was originally a penal colony, and what began as the hierarchy of guards over prisoners has, generations down the line, became a caste system. The majority of people living on the planet are bond servants—either born into the caste or they sold themselves (or were sold by a parent) into it. Bonders only serve until they’ve earned the money (an amount never specified in the book) to buy their freedom, but most seem to spend their money frivolously instead. But that’s considered acceptable—there’s no cultural shame attached to being a bonder, since it guarantees you room and board. So rather than shameful to be a bonder, it’s impressive to buy yourself out of bondage.

It’s implied that the only way—or at least, the most common or best way—to earn the money to buy yourself out is to steal a dragon egg from one of the Masters, in order to hatch, train, and raise it yourself. It’s rare that someone manages to do this (thus my assumption that it isn’t the only way, just the most notorious), and Jakkin—our hero—goes a step beyond. He’s in the infirmary when the dragons hatch and loses his chance to steal an egg, so instead manages to steal a hatchling. The book progresses almost exactly how you’d expect: he steals the dragon, trains it, has some adventures, enters his dragon in its first fight and wins dramatically. It’s a pretty simple story made interesting by the excellent world around it.

That said, the thing about the world (and the books) that mildly disturbs me is the women. We only see two in the whole book; one is the cook (a former bonder who bought her freedom), and Akki, a female bonder who befriends Jakkin, learns of his secret, and helps him keep the dragon safe. The cook is an ally herself, though she doesn’t know what he’s up to; I liked that the book went out of its way to explain that she didn’t become the cook because it was a female role, she did it because she loves cooking, she’s quite good at it, and she considers keeping the kitchen running smoothly to be an important job and worthy of respect. Cool.

But then there’s Akki, who’s an anomaly. She’s an anomaly because she’s not a whore. Everyone thinks that’s odd—because apparently all female bonders are prostitutes? The cook was when she was a bonder, and everyone is clearly amazed that Akki isn’t. There are no female bonders on the (dragon raising) farm, only boys. Which…seems really odd to me. First off, it makes no sense that half the population would do a single job that doesn’t really contribute much to society, leaving only half the population to do literally everything else; second off, how many whores does a world need? Fifty percent of the population seems like a whole lot.

That weirdness aside, Akki herself is fairly awesome. She’s level-headed and intelligent; she saves Jakkin once and acts as his nurse a few times. She helps him come up with the food he needs to feed the dragon and provides cover for him to sneak off and train the beast. And she often openly defies their Master—the rumor is that she can only do that because she’s his new mistress. Which is a disturbing rumor, as she’s only fifteen, made more disturbing when Jakkin notes that she’s been on the farm with their Master since she was twelve, and he just sort of shrugs it off because hey, some people are into that. Which is unspeakably gross. She’s not his lover, Jakkin eventually discovers—she’s his daughter. Her mother was a whore he’d fallen in love with, but she died in childbirth; Akki was raised in the brothel. He says he wants to buy her freedom and acknowledge her as his daughter, but she won’t allow it—when she assists Jakkin in a daring stunt that earns him a lot of money, she’s given half but refuses it, apparently for the same reason. She has declared she won’t take money from a man to buy her freedom, but in the meanwhile also doesn’t care what kind of orders her owner gives her and behaves as though she were free. (Jakkin notes that for sure that’s only allowed because the Master is her father.)

Okay, so the book shows an interesting relationship developing between Jakkin and Akki. After she saves him, he respects her a lot and they come to be friends and enjoy each other’s company, and he can’t decide whether or not he’s attracted to her…until the end, when he is. He wins enough money to buy his freedom, and after that, Akki’s father gives her to Jakkin, saying she needs a master. Needless to say, Akki is having none of that; she says goodbye to Jakkin and walks away, not interested in that kind of relationship at all. His reaction? To swear he won’t remove his symbol of bondage, “until he could pour out the gold from the bag into Akki’s hands and she accepted him as a master and a man.” I had been entirely indifferent to Jakkin’s character until that point—he’s a standard brave, fair-minded, determined hero type. After that? I don’t like him. Because the excellent thing about their potential relationship is that it would have been based on trust and equity, and he clearly doesn’t seem to want that; he doesn’t even want her to accept him as a lover, but specifically as her master.

This is the first book in a trilogy, so it’s entirely possible he sees the error of his ways later on. But if I ever do pick up the rest of the series, it would definitely be to read about Akki, who is intriguing and awesome, and not Jakkin, who I find to be kind of a jackass. So the book gets three cupcakes; it’s a quick, easy read, with some good set-up, but incredibly typical in terms of plot and disappointing at the end.