At this point we all know making a comic book is a team effort. If one person doesn’t hold his or her weight then an entire issue can suffer. Even if it isn’t intentional a writer or artist could hamper each other in a rare instance. When I was reading this issue all I kept thinking was that Geoff Johns did not do any favors to Ivan Reis. This might be the worst offering of Mr. Reis’s work in….well for the first time actually.

Johns gives Reis so little room to work here it amazed me this was the same duo from last month. Right from the start we have Johns putting way too much word balloons and exposition into each panel. Not much is really that interesting to read if I’m being honest and a lot of it is repetition. It really dampens Reis’s pencils because the word balloons make it hard for him to put a lot into each page. Now we do get a couple of double page spreads and they are a beauty. The one in particular where the army is coming out of the sea is poster worthy. How he can do that in only a month is also impressive. Then again there are some wonky layouts and character models so maybe he is taking some liberties in other pages to do these spreads.

The back up also isn’t as impressive as it should be. Gary Frank is a great artist but it looked like he also took some shortcuts with some of the panels. There are some great lighting effects in here though. Brent Anderson did a great job with the colors and the one moment where Captain Marvel accidentally turns off the power in the mall was a great sequence. Still, it is hard not to notice this isn’t quite the same level of quality from Frank when you see these pages.

Considering this is the halfway mark of this particular mini-event the pace is still going at slow. You wouldn’t know it is halfway though because Geoff Johns makes it so repetitive not a lot really happens here. His writing also made it difficult from Ivan Reis to get any real footing on these pages sans the double page spreads. I got into this series mostly because Ivan Reis is now on board and less because of Geoff Johns. If Johns can’t find that balance he did with Reis on Aquaman and let him breath a bit then I don’t know how much longer I’ll last here to be quite honest.