Giving Blue Beetle a hard reboot makes sense. He’s only been active for a few years anyhow, and he’s not such a popular character that new readers can be expected to know who he is and how he came to have alien power armor.

I’m not a new reader. Jaime’s first solo series was, in my opinion, one of the best teen superhero books ever, and I’m disappointed that this series is retreading ground that was covered in two-thousand-freaking-six. That’s less time than it took the Spider-Man movies to get rebooted!

Unlike Jaime’s other series, this one sets up at least three antagonists right off the bat. Two of them won’t come as any surprise to people familiar with Jaime, but the third…Brain and Mallah are back, you guys. Heck yes!

Unfortunately, with the increased focus on foreshadowing a bunch of bad guys, the book has fewer pages to focus on Jaime and his supporting cast, and I think it suffers for it. We get all of one page with Jaime’s parents, a scene that could have come from pretty much any teen movie ever and sets up the Reyeses basically as obstacles–well-meaning obstacles, but still.

Also, in case you were wondering, we saw the back of Milagro’s head, but she didn’t get any lines.

As much as I’m disappointed by the way Jaime’s family was handled this issue, though, they WERE only in it for a page, so hopefully once they get more panel time, they’ll break out of the restrictive-parents-the-teen-hero-has-to-sneak-around thing. Jaime’s friend Paco might be unsalvageable. Pre-reboot, he was a laid-back gamer who didn’t care about school. Now he’s an aggressive dropout who’s apparently in a gang. Great.

The biggest problem I had this issue, though, is the dialogue. Oh, man. That was some terrible Spanglish. It’s not QUITE as bad as Jaime was in the Teen Titans Wednesday Comics comic, but most of the Hispanic characters sound like El Dorado from Superfriends.

The art is a little too over-lined for me, but overall it’s quite good. This series on the whole seems to be trying to be more serious than the last Blue Beetle series, so the art actually fits really well.