YMMV / The Human Target (2021)

• Awesome Art: Greg Smallwood's artwork is nothing short of phenomenal, earning him a well-deserved Eisner award for Best Penciller/Inker, and no doubt a big reason for the whole book receiving the Eisner for Best Limited Series. Heavily evocative of artwork found with classic 60's-70's detective novels, the visuals of the comic are stylish but never distracting, colorful but never campy, expressive yet never exaggerated, being a pitch-perfect mix of warmth and grit to complement the superhero-noir atmosphere of the story.
• Bizarro Episode: Issue #5 is by far the series' most unusual, consisting largely of a cerebral depiction of a psychic duel. The issue is important and features many important revelations (sharing Chance's origin story as well as revealing J'onn J'onzz's affair with Fire), but the lack of immediate context, Anachronic Order, and vague blurring of various backstories makes for an uncharacteristically confusing first read, and may require further front-to-back reads to fully understand what just happened.
• Broken Base: Once again, Tom King's loose approach to characterization of preexisting characters proved immensely divisive, where you'll either love the series for how it recontextualizes and adapts popular characters for the stylish Film Noir story being told, or you'll hate it for its lack of faithfulness to how they "should" be represented. The approach to Guy Gardner as making him an out-and-out asshole has especially been controversial, tying into the age-old conversation on whether him being a jerk is itself the point of the character or not.
• Character Rerailment: Tom King has had a notoriously fraught history with writing Booster Gold, having been criticized in his run of Batman and especially in Heroes in Crisis as flanderizing him into being a lethally and frustratingly incompetent idiot. Fortunately, the version of Booster that appears in this comic has been much better-received for being more in line with the expectation of him as an endearingly incompetent idiot, with his antics of running a bagel shop named after himself being properly funny and something he'd cook up in Justice League Action.
• Like You Would Really Do It: While it makes for a shocking moment, a lot of fans were in denial that Chance and Ice really murdered Guy Gardner in issue #6, mostly coming down to just how insane of an act it was for the main leads to kill a member of the Justice League halfway through the story without there being some kind of twist. Consequently, this led to some readers catching on early that Fire's pinning of Guy as the would-be-murderer in issue #7 was hokum, and that there was a bigger conspiracy intended to throw Chance off suspecting the true culprit.
• Padding: Issue #8 gets often criticized as being the series' most blatant filler issue, as it largely consists of Chance getting interrogated by Rocket Red over the disappearance of Guy Gardner, with not much in the way of Character Development or furthering the mystery, especially since it was ostensibly solved the previous issue (at most, we just learn that Chance is in deep shit with the Justice League for what he and Ice did to Guy in previous issues). Even Chance gets annoyed at the end of it on how one of his last remaining days alive was wasted over nothing.

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