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After the long string of miniseries, DC has given its space heroes an ongoing with R.E.B.E.L.S., though it doesn't star any characters I'm familiar with. Vril Dox a.k.a. Brainiac 2 is the protagonist of the series, and he is an excellent one: a know-it-all jerk that you just love to hate. Or at least I did. Though the plot is slight, Bedard's characters and dialogue shine, and the book delivers rollicking space adventures in the extreme. I really enjoyed this; it's good solid fun, and I look forward to picking up future volumes of the series.

added July 2017; access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog:
I read this book over six years ago; it would have been, like, my fifth DC universe space comic. Now I'm rereading it in preparation for finally reading the three follow-up volumes, and these days I've read twice that many space trade paperbacks, plus tons of uncollected space comics like The Omega Men, L.E.G.I.O.N., the original R.E.B.E.L.S., and more. I really enjoyed it the first time around, when it was part of my introduction to the larger world of DC space; I still really enjoyed it now that it I'm familiar with that larger world. There's even a tie-in to Tony Bedard's run on Legion of Super-Heroes, which I coincidentally read shortly before this reread, so I got more out of that this time, too.*

Obviously this follows up on the events of L.E.G.I.O.N. and R.E.B.E.L.S. from the 1980s and '90s, as well as more recent space series. Adam Strange: Planet Heist and Omega Men showed that Vril Dox had reassumed command of a computer-controlled L.E.G.I.O.N.; now that computer has been taken over by Starro, L.E.G.I.O.N. robots are turning on their client worlds, and Vril Dox is on the run and has to build a team to reassert control over L.E.G.I.O.N. and defeat Starro. So far, the team includes old L.E.G.I.O.N. favorites Strata and Amon Hakk, plus some new characters too. Bedard has Vril Dox's voice pegged perfectly: he is the superintelligent master manipulator of old, even when he's on the run.

The art is great, too: both art teams have realistic styles that provide details facial expressions, which is good for adding to the character in a team-based book like this. The book moves quickly, operates on a great cosmic scale (we see Maltus, the Dominators, Earth, Cairn, and the Vega system), and has some fun action-- this is everything a space-based superhero comic should be, if you ask me.

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* Brainac 5 suggests his ancestor recruit a team based on the 31st-century Legion of Super-Heroes in order to take back L.E.G.I.O.N. Weirdly, this causes Vril Dox to recruit a new team member patterned on Dawnstar... who never appeared in the threeboot Legion that Brainiac 5 hails from!