Rob Liefeld. Deathstroke the Terminator. Lobo. This comic has everything that was great about the 1990s. With Hawk and Dove cancelled, Rob Liefeld moves over to Deathstroke starting with this issue.
I haven’t been following this title previously, and issue #9 establishes the Deathstroke-verse pretty quickly. Slade is at the grave of his deceased wife reminiscing, even to the point he is carrying a picture of her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone carry a picture of a loved one when going to the cemetery, but I digress. Anyway, this happy moment is spoiled.
Slade winds up dispatching some commando types and some teen meta-humans called the Omegas (I wonder if this is an allusion to the Omega Men), as apparently some sort of test by a new character named Maxim. His goal is simple: to hire Deathstroke to kill Lobo, who has escaped imprisonment. Along with the Omegas and Zealot from WildCATs fame, our mercenary hero is off to collect his bounty.
This story kind of reminds me when my younger brother and I would play super heroes as kids. We would mix all the toys together, and before you know it, Spider-Man and Batman would be riding a Wheeled Warrior vehicle against Krang from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Anyway, this was light enough to warrant waiting for the next issue. Typical super hero comics stuff. Art wise, the one thing that I noticed was that Liefeld’s backgrounds were kind of sparse. The colorists seemed to have improvised a lot to fill the pages.
Ridiculously Awesome 
I’m a 90s nostalgic as well, especially when it’s about comics, so anything that reminds me those years will always worth 2,99 $ for me. Anyway, I didn’t like this issue very much, for 2 reasons:
1) Too many dialogues;
2) Lobo’s characterization. I’m a huge Lobo’s fan, and I own every single comic book he appeared in (even as a guest star), so I think I can say that Liefeld never read any of them. If he had read at least an issue of Lobo, he would have known and respected the characteristic traits of this character: black humour, creative language, easygoing attitude, and so on. I didn’t see any of this in Deathstroke # 9. In this issue Lobo was so one-dimensional that he could have been replaced with any other DC villain, and there wouldn’t have been any difference.
I don’t know what to say about Liefeld. Sometimes he writes very good and enjoyable stories, and sometimes his tales are terribly inconsistent. For example, if you compare Deathstroke # 9 with Grifter # 9, you couldn’t believe they are written by the same writer: as I wrote in my last comment, Grifter is explosive, while Deathstroke… it’s not bad, but it has the big flaws I just mentioned. I had already noticed Liefeld’s changeableness during his short run as a writer on Hawk and Dove: the 6th issue was embarassing, and the last 2 were very good. Anyway, altogether I like him.