ARC from Netgalley.
Another title from the "New Age of Heroes" stemming out from "Dark Nights" Metal"...
This time we meet Derek James, a high school student who fell into the Dark Multiverse while in Gotham during the Dark Batmen invasion, developing a power to open rifts through space. Dubbing himself "Sideways", due to stepping sideways through his rifts, this teen only wants to increase his social media presence. But can you ever just try to be famous when you have powers?
Fighting Killspeed (a speedster created during the Flash: Lightning Strikes Twice event, whose speed actually accelerates her cancer, killing her the more she uses it), interfering in a fight between Replicant and Hot Spot (two other new metas), training with Tempus Fuginaut (a huge golden cosmic being who offers to help Derek understand more about his powers), and dealing with a mind controlling bully at school who goes by "The Showman", Sideways is learning being a hero is hard.
How will he react when he finds out his adoptive mother has been killed by her company for digging too deep into their research into tracking and studying Derek and his new powers? Only Volume 2 can tell...
For a new title, I liked this one a lot and hope it continues. Great combination of unique art and humor. Love the twist of the best friend who is a cosplayer making his costume for him.

Derek James gained the ability to travel through created rifts in space after falling into the Dark Multiverse. Does he use his powers for good? Not really. Instead the high schooler is more interested in becoming a YouTube sensation, but that does not work out as planned. And then there is issues with his adopted mother not to mention the sinister corporation sneaking around. Some of the storylines are decent, but the art was off in a weird way. Have to wait and see if Sideways is worth following.

In Sideways Vol. 1: Steppin' Out, Dan DiDio and Justin Jordan succeed in creating a protagonist who's youthful and flip without being annoying and also making his world feel real. Sideways has a Snapchat quip late in the book that lands and reads like dialogue from the 2010s and not the 1980s. Kenneth Rocafort offers strong work in the book's first four issues, managing both far-out multiversal effects and also believable teen figures. Flash's Carmine de Giandomenico is a good substitute in one of Sideways' character-driven issues. Steppin' Out does well demonstrating the on-the-ground aftermath of Dark Nights: Metal. Most titles never acknowledged that a giant mountain opened up in the middle of Gotham City, but Sideways offers a strong regular-person's perspective on the events.

What a poor imitation of Spider-Man's origin. There is absolutely nothing to like about this series except for Sideways's costume design. A self-centered, entitled, a-hole of a teenager gets teleportation powers and tries to become a YouTube star. That's pretty much the entire extent of the first 6 issues if you throw in some cardboard cutout villains with zero character. This series makes Blue Beetle look good. I'll be shocked if this makes it more than 12 issues.

You know what DC failed to do in its initial brace of New Age of Heroes books – apart from exactly entertain us? It failed to justify the post-Dark Nights Metal badge emblazoned on the cover. Here we have a cocky teenager who was caught up in that claptrap, and as a result can BAMF anywhere he wants. At last – a tie-in to the non-event Event that killed off the latest DC reboot. This re-reboot re-launch re-ohwhatthefudgearewesupposedtocallit hasn't exactly shone. And neither does this book. In amongst all the self-doubt, self-interested yack and slim pickings on the action front, we get the sole delight of him BAMFing while holding on to someone. That provides the only blink-and-you'll-miss-it joy here. Elsewhere he faces a loathsome speedster, and one of those characters that nicks other people's powers. Oh and he doesn't turn up for an internship interview, which swallows TEN pages. There might have been other things to mention, but they all got forgotten when a new character that looks like the bastard son of a Guardian and Guinan turns up for a second time, and says 'sorry I wanted to kill you in issue one, now you're the saviour of everything. Please meet the Fuginauts.' And you know what? That was when I bailed. I bet they don't even look anything like Lauryn Hill or Pras, for a start.

This is inane claptrap of the highest order. He left me with the utmost sense of boredom and non-interest. He is supposed to hate his mother, ie we're supposed to hate her. She was the only character with any novelty and interest about her, damn her. DC do scrape the bottom of the barrel at times, but seldom do I DNF one of their books. This scraped the bottom of the barrel and then presented all the dregs for our delectation. No thank you. Oh, and for god sake stop calling the artist a "storyteller" – WTF is that childish bastardisation of the language all about?

I really had expected better - I was looking forward to a new DC title, but I should have set my bar lower.