In the debut issue of Black Lightning, Jefferson Pierce seemed to be on top of the world, serving as a top member of the Justice League and working alongside his family in the process. Black Lightning #2 serves as the flip side of that coin, exploring how Jefferson’s daughter Anissa, aka Thunder, is slowly losing control of her powers due to Absolute Power impacting the metahuman community. But that isn’t the only issue; it turns out that due to metahumans’s powers spiraling out of control, a new movement has popped up to valorize Amanda Waller.
That’s a lot to throw at the reader, but to Brandon Thomas’ credit, he manages to handle all these different plot threads with ease. Anissa’s plight takes center stage, as her power malfunction is revealed to be impacted in part by feeling abandoned by her father during Absolute Power. This leads to her butting heads with her sister Jennifer, aka Lightning, and Thomas relishes in writing their dynamic. Anissa’s feelings aren’t diminished, but Jennifer correctly points out that shunning Jefferson won’t help her heal. This nuance is extremely welcome, as is the way Thomas seeds the Waller Movement’s activities. Rather than feeling like a ripoff of how people approach mutants in the Marvel Universe, it feels like a genuine greivance about how superpowers upend normal people’s lives.
Fico Ossio’s art depicts how scary superpowers could actually be in the real world. Whenever Anissa loses control of her powers, blood-red lightning starts dancing around her body before unfurling in a massive, destructive explosion. Black Lightning also has to deal with the emergence of more metahumans, one of which takes the form of a massive kaiju sculpted out of lava and the other summoning a dinosaur out of thin air. Ossio makes these beasts feel terrifying, as they tower over Black Lightning and leave a swarth of destruction in their wake.
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On the flip side, Ossio also gets to draw some pretty heroic moments. We finally get a close up of Jennifer’s costume, which employs a similar design to her father’s but is more tailored to her own golden lightning thanks to Ulises Arreola. Ossio and Arreola save the best moment for Natasha Irons, aka Steel; when a trio of supervillains show up at Steelworks, the duo dedicate a full page to Natasha armoring up, with the final page showing her wielding a massive war hammer and covered from head to toe in gunmetal gray armor. (The takeaway I’m getting from this is that Ossio is really into anime.)
Black Lightning #2 continues the strong streak of the first issue, delivering family dynamics on top of the superheroics and more awesome art. This is a book that should be on your radar. It’s a little different from other DC books, but it’s doing something interesting and it looks gorgeous to boot.
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