Aquaman Volume 5

This....was not the story I thought it was going to be.  Aquaman Volume 4 left off with Arthur Curry's half brother being visited by the king of Xebel, who was reuniting the rulers of the seven sea kingdoms to take down Aquaman.  It had long been thought that Atlantis was the last one.  Turns out that's false.  So I was super excited to read that story. 

Hopefully it's in Volumes 6 or 7?

Aquaman Volume 5: Sea of Storms was kind of all over the place.  Aquaman discovers there's a human base in the sea.  He wasn't able to deal with it at the time though (for reasons).  The base is experimenting with a piece of the brain of an Atlantean monster that Arthur had to kill.  After that, Arthur and Mera attended his high school reunion (where he discovered that many of the people he went to school with are still okay with him, even though he ran off from high school).  While he was at the reunion, an archeologist stole Arthur's trident and used it to open a portal.  He thought it would go to Atlantis.  Turns out it just went to Hell, releasing the Giant children.  So Arthur and Wonder Woman dealt with most of them.  Mera and Wonder Woman dealt with the rest.  But then there was a giant algae monster that Arthur had to deal with because it was killing a reef.  He battled the green avatar for no reason (the green avatar kept telling him to stop, but apparently Arthur Curry is kind of dense like that).  Eventually the green avatar went and dealt with it (but was almost nuked by Atlantis in the process).

So yeah.  This was a super weird volume.  A different writer took over from Geoff Johns, so that might have made a lot of the difference.  Hopefully Volumes 6 and 7 will be more coherent!

Birds of Prey Volumes 1, 2, and 3

Well I totally should have read these first to save the Aquaman graphic novels for last (because Aquaman was a lot better).  Black Canary and Starling are trying to start their team (Birds of Prey).  So in Volume 1 (Trouble in Mind) they invite Katana and Poison Ivy.  That was a pretty fun team, but then in Volume 2 (Your Kiss Might Kill) Poison Ivy betrays them.  In Volume 3 (A Clash of Daggers), the Dagger clan is after Katana; after dealing with that threat, Katana decides to stay in Japan, so the Birds of Prey (who also include Batgirl, who didn't really want to join them but I guess did?) need to recruit another member.  At the end of Volume 3, their team includes Condor, a guy in a flying suit they met in Japan, and Strix, an assassin from the Court of Owls that has been plaguing Gotham City (I've never heard of it before these books). 

The story jumps all over the place, even within a single volume, making it a bit hard to follow.  And even though I wanted to like these graphic novels, I really didn't care at all.  I almost didn't even bother reading Volume 3 because I just wasn't interested, but wanted to see the aftermath of dealing with Ivy (which I didn't get because they just sort of skipped ahead to the girls having been basically cured by Batman). 

So all in all, this just wasn't for me.  I'll go back to reading more Aquaman instead.