The Year of the Villain complicates Babs's life brilliantly in this issue, but those problems pale next to Oracle's plans. Against this backdrop, the story adds depths to Babs's character and Oracle's motivation. The art reinforced those character moments, especially for Babs, and served the story well despite a couple of glitches.

This issue is mostly a series of fights leading to a major development and the next stage of this arc. The individual battles are believable, if sometimes perfunctory, with Jessica's really standing out. She is the only Leaguer who really gets a chance to show her mettle. The story would've been better with less verbose narration from Darkseid and more internal reactions from the heroes.

I enjoyed this story a lot, which surprised me because of my problems with the prior issue. This time there was no excessive use of captions, wasted exposition, or stretching of the story by using more panels than a sequence requires. Even though we didn't see Darkseid or the Leaguers with him, the overall story feels as though it's moving along. And the ending is" dynamite.

Because of Jessica's development and the revelations in the story, it moved along without being boring. The visuals, however, were not consistent and so didn't support the developments with her character as they should have. I appreciated the revelations that make the coming confrontation with Darkseid even bigger, but I'm ready to get to it.

This issue continues to suffer from unnecessarily slow pacing due to extensive exposition and scenes that drag on far too long. There's too much narration that distracts from the action and far too much recap of a story that many fans just want to end.

The story has several solid action sequences, with dynamic art. Bea shows us her courage, yet another reason to root for her, and Talon is appropriately menacing. Unfortunately, Ric is an even jerkier ingrate than before, and that's a deal breaker.

This story is one long fight with Talon pontificating about his goals and Ric's place in the Court of Owls. The fight isn't choreographed well and doesn't flow logically. The one bright spot is Bea's courage, though she offsets that by doing something stupid during the fight. The visuals unfortunately also fail to flow logically in places, and the ending doesn't do much to raise anticipation.

All things considered, this was an interesting, engaging story with lots of fun character interplay, but the narration undercut it severely. If that had been on just a couple of pages, it would've been a relatively minor problem. Since it pervaded the book, however, it was a huge stumbling block.

This is an interesting installment in the multiversal odyssey arc in spite of some problems. I wasn't happy about the complete absence of two YJ members, but the portrayal of Teen Lantern and the interaction with Earth-3 villains and Batwoman still made for a solid, entertaining story.