If you had told me, when this series was first announced, that the issues focusing on Captain Atom would be consistently excellent and among the book’s best, I would have called you a liar and taken away your crack pipe.

Yet here we are. I’ve made no secret of how much I disliked issue 12, and I was kind of dreading opening this issue. I needn’t have worried. If you’re really excited to know the fallout of all the bullshit with Ice, sorry, there’s none of that here. Maybe there never will be. Hey, a girl can dream, right?

Like issue 11, most of this issue is taken up by a fight scene, this time between Captain Atom and Magog. The difference between the two issues is this: unlike 11, the fight in the current issue moves the story forward on a number of fronts. It’s not just the book spinning its wheels (which has been one of my major complaints with the series as a whole) by having the JLI fight mooks. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I can’t say much, but I will say that this issue is beautifully paced, exciting, and packs the kind of emotional wallop this series hasn’t seen since issue 2.

My one complaint is that near the beginning of the issue, there are a few panels of Jaime talking like a crazy person. I have no idea why, and he seems to calm down by the middle of the second page he appears on. It’s just weird, is all.

In a great bit of serendipity, just like last issue’s art mirrored its contents in badness, this issue has art worthy of its story. The first thing that clued me in that this would be a better issue than the previous one, we also open with a flashback, but it turns out that Joe Bennett, our artist this time around, can draw children who don’t look like scary dolls. His art was kind of cartoony overall, but his facial expressions were good, and I thought the art worked very well.

Unlike… Well, unlike pretty much every other issue, though, I have to take issue with the cover. (EDIT: I wasn’t paying enough attention to the picture on the site when I wrote this review. My copy of this comic has a variant cover. The one with Max is much nicer.) Not because it’s not well-drawn or graphically interesting, because it’s both of those things, but because it’s not really reflective of the issue’s content. Bea and Tora aren’t even in it, for one thing, and drawing a demonic-looking Magog standing over completely helpless heroes is, I feel, too reductive of the conflict going on in this issue.