By koppy mcfad
January 27, 2007 - 11:12
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The golden-age mystical hero, Ibis the Invincible, is seriously injured in a battle to keep the helmet of Dr. Fate from the evil god, Set. So he summons a young Egyptian-American boy to take over his mantle and become the new Ibis the Invincible. This self-contained story is rather serviceable with enough suspense and action to keep the reader interested although probably not enough to make the characters very memorable. The art is a nice combination of the mundane and the unearthly with Set looking very intimidating as a dark form in the shadows. What hurts this book is that it already sounds so old-hat. It offers just another teenaged kid with an ethnic background assuming the name and powers of an old superhero. This has been done in "Son of Vulcan," in "Firestorm" and "Blue Beetle" and this issue just looks like another re-hash of this theme. The writer plays up the fact that the hero of this story is an Arab (and presumably a Muslim) who is a victim of racist bullying but the story hardly shows the kid or his family doing anything that would make him different from thousands of bullied, white-bread kids that we have seen in hundreds of comics.