Brave And The Bold #24

I'm not sure what the point of The Brave and the Bold is at the moment. It started as the vehicle for Waid & Perez telling team-up stories that shared (at some level) an over-arching plot and villain. Since that team left, however, it's seemed more than a little aimless, with none of the subsequent stories seeming very memorable. Perhaps, somewhere out there, someone has been dying to see the first meeting of Static and Black Lightning, but I regret that I'm not that person. The story seems really muddled, opening with the appearance of the villain Armageddon. (I still don't know who he is - Static's arch nemesis, perhaps?) As questions about what the hell's going on float around in the air, the action moves on to Jeff. Pearce giving the graduation address at Static's school graduation ceremony. Armageddon shows up and the usual slug fest ensues. To the casual reader, Black Lighhtning and Static seem to share so many similarities, but these issues are never explored. It's just one big battle, in which Black Lightning & Static seem to be able to use their lightning / electrical discharges to pick up and manipulate objects around them (how?); surely that's not what heroes with electrical powers should be doing - what's wrong with fritzing your enemy with a good old 10,000 volt blast of lightning? Apart from a few good one-liners, the dialogue is rather cliched, and the tediously long battle seems to fizzle out rather than reach any sort of proper conclusion. (Why does burying the bad-guy alive successfully defeat him, when wrapping him in steel and depriving him of oxygen doesn't?) Howard Porters art lifts the story, but his faces seem a little odd and 2 dimensional to me. I think this book is treading water until J. Michael Straczynski comes on board with the Red Circle characters. Frankly, It can't come soon enough...