“He tells me tears are something to hide and something to fear”
Look, I know it’s ridiculous, you know it’s ridiculous, my 83-year-old mother who’s never read a Batman comic in her life knows it’s ridiculous, but I’m still going to write a little bit about “Hush 2”! You can’t stop me! This is, of course, from the dream team of Loeb / Lee / Williams / Sinclair / Starkings (with Rob Levin editing), and it comes in at $29.94 for the six issues, which is just painful, and it’s 132 pages long. But wait! while Loeb got bored waiting for Lee to finish penciling this, he and Jim Cheung (with Jay David Ramos coloring, Starkings lettering, and Brittany Holzherr editing) cranked out Batman/Wonder Woman: Truth, which was actually marketed as “set in the world of Hush” … which is, you know, the regular DC Universe. This bad bear is $5.99, and it’s 48 pages long and presented in that glorious “Prestige Format” that DC used to do all the time. It really hits the nostalgia bone for me.
Loeb is not a terribly good writer, and he’s gotten a bit worse over the years, as his formula has become more and more successful. As we know, he writes stories that look good visually, which is great in a comics milieu, certainly, but gets in the way of any desire by Loeb to write, you know, well. Batman #923-928 (I really want most comics to go back to “legacy numbering”) is not an exception to this decades-long trend, as it’s kind of a mess. I mean, it’s strange how little actually happens in this comic. I know it’s only the first part and in three years we’ll get the rest of it, but it’s six issues of very little plot. Comics writers from the 1960s and 1970s are rolling over in their graves or gnashing their still very alive teeth when they consider how decompressed this is, while Bendis probably read this and then rubbed the issues all over his naked body in ecstasy. Basically, Tommy Elliot captures and tortures the Joker, Batman rescues him because he’s Batman and he doesn’t want to let anyone, not even the biggest mass murderer in history, die, and everyone in Batman’s orbit gets butthurt about it. That’s about it. Loeb makes sure that a lot of people get to punch other people, but that’s the plot. What’s Elliot’s end game? We don’t know, and at the end of the six issues, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. I guess we’ll have to see what’s going on in the second half of the story, which should come out about the time the sun goes nova. Meanwhile, in Truth, Wonder Woman allows Bruce Wayne to display the lasso of truth for no discernible reason whatsoever (I mean, it glows, sure, but it’s still just a damned rope), and it’s immediately stolen by Catwoman, who does it to test the security system? Really? It then gets stolen by Harley Quinn, who wants to … test the Joker’s love for her. Really, Mr. Loeb? But that’s the story. Yawn.
Of course, none of this matters. Jim Lee is drawing “Hush 2” and Cheung is drawing Truth, and Loeb knows that that’s what we’re doing here, and they do not disappoint. Lee has lost a step a little bit over the years (he is 61, after all), but he’s still very good, and he and Williams do their typical excellent job. There’s always a bit too much hatching when we get Lee and Williams (I’ve never been able to determine who puts all the lines in there), but it does seem to have lessened over the years, which is nice (Williams himself is 66, so maybe he just doesn’t have time for that shit anymore). As he’s done in the past, Lee does the flashbacks in that thin line, lightly inked, watercolor style, which is beautiful when he does it. It’s always impressive when Lee does this, and it provides a really nice contrast to his “normal” work. You very much know what you’re getting with Lee’s pencils, and if you like it (and I do, as do many, many other people), this is fun to look at. It’s very frustrating that it’s illustrating such a weak plot. It’s the same thing with Truth, which Cheung draws the hell out of. His inks are stunning, as he uses marvelous spot blacks to create shadows and thick brushwork to add lushness to the work, while Ramos’s rich coloring is gorgeous. There’s a very weird spread implying that Diana killed a bunch of Amazons in order to become Wonder Woman, unless I’m very much misinterpreting it, but other than that, it’s a beautiful comic. If you’re going to have to wait several months for Lee to finish the arc, you might as well get Cheung to draw a story set in the same “universe.”
I mean, come on, this is just a dumb story that looks pretty. I can’t defend myself for buying it or reading it, and neither can you. But that’s ok! It’s your money, after all. If you haven’t picked it up yet, I can’t really recommend you do so unless you, like me, are stuck deep in the nostalgia hole for when Lee was drawing the shit out of Psylocke and Black Widow in the pages of Uncanny X-Men. Other than that, this is a kind of pointless exercise. I knew it would be, but I just wanted to confirm it!
Rating (on its own terms): ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Rating (on nostalgia’s terms): THROUGH THE MOTHERFUCKING ROOF!!!!
