When comics were bad, Joe Casey was good. Specifically, Casey’s run on Cable in the late 90s portended the end of the bombastic era of X-books, marking a return to the character driven adventure books that have dominated the industry since Quesada’s ascent. Casey has continued to produce outstanding work for a multitude of companies, fusing modern story telling with the old myths that lurk in the origins of all these spandexed clad men; however, to me he’ll always be the guy who wrote 2009 quality books in 1999. How bizarre then to read this bizarre issue, a 1999 quality book written in 2009. The story centers around the Green Lama, a sort of environmentalist messiah (get it: “green” “Lama”—like the Dali Lama, but, y’know, greener). In this issue the Lama encounters some sort of ninja-haired villainess who blames him for some badness in her past and therefore must enact vengeance through a protracted, endless fight that takes up most of the comic. There are interesting ideas in the book: resurrection, vengeance, transcendence, and a few other themes are casually tossed at the reader throughout the story. That said, it’s all too hastily pasted together, all too focused on the fight instead of who is fighting, all too 1999 where art kept hammering story in the balls, resulting in pretty, nonsensical, and, at the end of the day, ball-wrenchingly uninteresting books. Some of the blame for the poor quality probably falls on Alex Ross, who appears to be guiding the effort and possibly hindering Casey’s choices on the title. Then again, maybe I’m the one who’s behind here, and ten years from now we’ll all be reading similarly forgettable books as we sit around and say, “Well, damn, Casey did it again.”

(New policy: If I give a bad review, I’m going to recommend a superior work by the same creator. For Casey, kind of obviously given the above, I’d recommend his Cable run, #51-70).