DC Festival of Heroes: The Asian Superhero Celebration #1

This is a collection of vignettes (4-10 pages each) about some of the Asian heroes of the DC Universe, of whom I have to say there are more than I thought. The art is variable, as one might expect given the wide range of contributors, but part of the point of an anthology is to showcase different styles in this way. The stories are mostly pretty good, although they're too short to do anything very much, with many of them consisting of little more than a fight scene.

For me, the ones that stood out the most were those with Cheshire Cat (which apparently ties in with an upcoming story in the Catwoman comic, so that's good), the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, and Red Arrow. More notable, perhaps, is the introduction of new hero Monkey Prince. He's tied in with Shazam, so the story is largely in that mould. There's potentially some interesting stuff there, with the authors clearly making a lot of use of Asian themes... most obviously, of course, Journey to the West. Whether his new comic is going to work out is harder to say, but it probably depends on what you think of Shazam.

Mind you, given the ethnic mix where I live, I can't help but notice, that for all these east Asian characters (and, as I say, there's more than I thought), there's just one from the Indian subcontinent. Who gets a one-page art splash and a short paragraph in the appendix to remind us who he is...