Let’s go ALL IN with DC … Week 3!

Hey, it’s the third week of DC going ALL IN, so let’s see what’s what!

Batman and Robin #14 (“Memento Part One”) by Philip Kennedy Johnson, Javi Fernández, Marcelo Maiolo, and Steve Wands. $4.99, 24 pgs.

This came out last week, and I stared right at it … and skipped it. Why? NO MAN (OR WOMAN) CAN SAY!!!! I’m still not sure what I was thinking, but luckily, my store did not sell out and I was able to grab it this week.

I’m glad, because this is a pretty darned good issue. Johnson begins it with a flashback to 1892, because every bad thing in Gotham has to be linked to something in the distant past, but it doesn’t seem necessarily linked to the Waynes specifically or, Jeebus forbid, the Court of Owls, so ok. Then we zip to an exciting car chase through town, which takes up seven pages and feels a bit superfluous but is also tied into that ecoterrorism group that Poison Ivy was dealing with her own “mag” (I loved when Marvel used to call their comics “mags”), so I guess Johnson is setting something up? Whatever – it’s nicely drawn by Fernández, and it’s never a bad thing to show Batman and Robin just stopping crime in an exciting manner. Most of the issue is dedicated to the set-up, which means a lot of Bruce and Damian attending the opening of a medical center run by an old friend of Bruce’s (whom we’ve never seen before, or course), and Johnson does a nice job specifically with Damian, showing us why he’s the douchebag we love to hate and hate to love. Bruce has to fight bad guys without his costume on, too, which is always fun. Overall, it’s an intriguing start, what with the weird villain and the protestors and the old friend of Bruce’s who has to be somehow important. As I noted, Fernández does nice work with the art, especially with Damian being a douchebag – Johnson’s dialogue for him wouldn’t work quite as well without Damain’s holier-than-thou body language, which Fernández does very well. This arc is off to a pretty good start, so if you missed Batman and Robin PUNCHING OUT DINOSAURS in the last arc, you might want to go ALL IN with this one!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Catwoman # … 69 (“No Further Bets Part 1”) by Torunn Grøbekk, Fabiana Mascolo, Patricio Delpeche, and Steve Wands. $3.99, 22 pgs.

Here’s another solid first issue of an arc. We begin with Selina reading about a woman who was killed in Berlin who just happened to be using one of Selina’s old identities. Meanwhile, the cops have staked out her house because, we learn in a brief flashback, she was at a fundraiser earlier in the evening when the man she was scamming was shot in the head right in front of her (because this is a regular DC comic, good for kids “13+,” Selina’s face is maybe a foot away from his when he gets shot through the back of the head with a high-powered rifle, yet in the next panel, she has no blood or brain matter or icky eye fluid on her gorgeous face), yet she quickly figures out she was the target. Hence the dead woman in Berlin. She evades the cops and an assassin and briefly disappears, but by the end of the issue, the bad guys know she’s heading for Berlin. The chase is on!

Much like the Joker, I always think it’s a good idea to get Catwoman away from Batman as much as possible, so I have no problem with her heading out of the country. I also like seeing these characters in places that might be a bit unfamiliar to them, so that should be fun, too. The bad guys make the sad point that it’s difficult for people to disappear these days, what with all the surveillance, but Selina manages it for a bit, which makes me think she wants the bad guys to know she’s in Berlin. Grøbekk (whose work I don’t think I’ve ever read, even though he’s written quite a bit over the past few years … it was just always stuff I had no interest in) does a good job with the mystery and the set-up, although, once again, we get a huge part of a character’s life that has never been talked about before. I mean, I get it, but it always cracks me up: “No, I spent a long time in this other place doing these things, but it’s literally never come up ever!” It’s not a deal-breaker, but it does crack me up.

I like, but don’t love, Mascolo’s art. To be stereotypical, most female artists do better with civilian clothes than male artists, and her Selina at the party is a very elegant few pages. She does a nice job with some of the moody pages, and while I don’t love static splash pages, her Selina on the rooftop against the moon is terrific and clearly meant to be sold as a print, but it still works beautifully. Her art is a bit stiff in the action scenes, which is not the most surprising thing in the world, and I don’t love the faces of anyone who’s not Selina. It’s still pretty good art, so that’s nice.

This is another solid issue and a nice beginning to an arc. It’s almost as if it was designed to get you to go ALL IN!!!!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Green Lantern #16 (“Civil Corps I: World War”) by Jeremy Adams, Xermánico, Romulo Fajardo Jr., and Dave Sharpe. $4.99, 22 pgs.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to get this, because it’s the second part of a story begun in Green Lantern Civil Corps Special from last week and I’m only planning on getting the first part of these stories and waiting for the trade if I like them, but this is, technically, the first “Green Lantern” issue of the ALL IN thing, so I got it. Let’s take a look!

I do find it kind of hilarious that Adams and Johnson set up an apocalyptic thing at the end of the issue last week, and in this issue, Adams … skips right past it, to the aftermath of the apocalyptic thing. Way to make promises you don’t plan on keeping! I mean, I get it to a degree – the aftermath is horrific, so we can use – what’s that word? oh, right – our imaginations to figure out what happened, but it’s still kind of funny. Anyway, much like last week’s first chapter, this just feels like a perfunctory superhero story, with nothing much to recommend it but nothing much counting against it, either. It’s very forgettable – with the first two issues of this week’s batch, I remembered pretty much what happened, even if I had to check for details, but with this issue, I was struggling to remember, for instance, Carol Ferris using her power to save a spaceship, which was nice for her. It’s just kind of there. Hal and John do heroic things, Carol doesn’t think she can do heroic things but of course she can, a character who was killed in GLCCS turns out to be not quite dead yet, and Guy and Redhead Rando continue to rescue imprisoned GLs on Oa. It’s fine, and Xermánico knows how to draw, so it looks fine. It just feels like any other random superhero comic from the past 50 years. Mildly entertaining and instantly forgettable. Oh well.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Titans #16 (“Stitches in Time”) by John Layman, Pete Woods, and Wes Abbott. $3.99, 20 pgs.

Layman takes over Titans, and we get yet another good set-up issue. Thanks to the Justice League deciding that every hero who ever lived is now in the Justice League, the Titans are wondering what that means for them, and what it means for them is … Garth doing something stupid and getting yelled at by the Question, so the Titans get all whiny and go back to their tower to pout. That’s one way to handle it! Dick steps down as leader and endorses Donna for the role, and while Roy doesn’t seem too happy about that, it’s also clear that someone is manipulating the emotions of the team, so who knows if it’s just that? I hate to SPOIL things, but it turns out that the bad guy is the Clock King, who can now someone manipulate memories, which is how he freaks everyone out by making them experience bad ones? I mean, it seems odd for someone called the “Clock King” to be able to do this (he is, and I quote, “turning back the clock inside your brains,” which is pushing the schtick a little to the extreme, I think), but I dig the Clock King, so I’ll give it some leeway. The only one he can’t affect is Donna, because of … reasons? I guess we’ll find out in the next issue!

You might wonder why I like this book and Batman and Robin and Catwoman more than Green Lantern, since they’re all fairly boilerplate superhero stories, setting up new arcs. Well, sure, you could wonder that, and you could accuse me of liking this because I’m friends with Layman, but it’s more than that. IF you are going to do a standard superhero story (which I get – it’s DC, after all), you need to do something else to hook the reader. Layman, like Johnson and Grøbekk, is able to do that, while Adams really isn’t. There’s not a lot of personality in the GL book – the characters are just going through the motions. In this book, for instance, Layman devotes five pages to a fight against an alien creature that Garth accidentally antagonizes because he’s an idiot and then two pages to the follow-up to the fight. In those pages, we learn a lot about Garth, Roy, Renee, Donna, and Wally. Layman is able to reveal character through their dialogue, which not every writer can do. The attack on the Titans is well done, too, tapping into their vast reservoirs of emotional trauma, and while you might not know everything about what’s happening if you’re not a devoted DC reader, you can still recognize the horror they’re going through. Doing a lot with a little (this is still only 20 pages long, after all) is a skill, and not every comics writer employs it. I don’t know if Adams can do it, but in that issue of Green Lantern, he doesn’t. Layman does; therefore, this is a better comic.

Woods is a good artist, too, which does help. I don’t quite love Woods’s art, although it’s always fine – I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it seems like he has some trouble with quieter emotions. He can do rage well, but when the characters need to express something else, it always looks a bit wonky. He draws a fun alien creature and a stylish Clock King, and his storytelling is fine (although his Titans Tower looks far too small when the team is standing outside it), but his faces bug me sometimes. And I don’t think Woods redesigned Wally’s costume, but man, it’s dumb. What is it with people trying to redesign classic looks? It happens all the time in comics and sports, and you know what? it rarely goes well. The Flash costume is classic. According to Wally, Barry doesn’t have powers these days, so what’s stopping him from wearing the cool-ass classic Flash costume? Gah, redesigns annoy me. I should do a scientific breakdown of how often they’re better than the original design. I doubt if it’s very often.

Anyway, I’ve never been a big fan of the Titans, and this probably won’t get me to pick up the trade, but it’s a perfectly good issue. There’s nothing stopping you from going ALL IN with John Layman and Pete Woods!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Wonder Woman #14 (“What Is the Point of Steve Trevor?”) by Tom King, Daniel Sampere, Tomeu Morey, and Clayton Cowles. $4.99, 30 pgs.

Um, SPOILERS, I guess?

Ah, Wonder Woman. Darling of the cognescenti – why, even Bill Reed likes it! – and inspiration for one of my many rants. I’m back with it, hoping that it got better in the 8 issues since volume 1 ended. Here’s a nice, 30-page story. How can it go wrong?

Well … I’m not going to rant too much about this, but it’s still not a very good comic. King is still doing his “Monarch of the U.S.” story, because 14 issues isn’t long enough, I suppose (says the person who just read a 30-issue run on Detective with the same bad guy, so yes, I’m a hypocrite, thank you very much), and in this issue, King Wrinkly Old Guy shoots and kills Steve Trevor. Oh dear. He does this, he says, to piss Diana off. Well, that’s an excellent reason. I know I skipped the in-between issues, 7-13, because I read this in trade (not that I’m getting volume 2, because volume 1 was so enraging), but I still don’t quite get the king’s vendetta against Diana when he and his family have been ruling America for 300 years and no one really knows about them and now he’s doing all these stupid things? He’s an old man – is there a succession plan in place? Does he have a son and grandsons, because it seems like they might step in and tell the old man it’s time to abdicate before he loses them everything. I mean, yes, King is making the point that Giant BabyMen are lashing out because they’re not necessarily at the top of the food chain anymore, but let’s face it – they still pretty much are. I mean, they could easily continue to rule behind the curtain, allowing all these other groups to feel like they have a seat at the table while still running things, which is kind of how they’ve done it for a long time (I read somewhere once that the worst thing that happened to women as a collective in the past 150 years or so was getting the right to vote because they kind of stopped agitating for anything else – I don’t love that thesis, but it’s certainly intriguing). The King of America doesn’t need to fight this war against the Amazons, and even someone like Dr. Psycho (whose advice to the king is the highlight of this issue) knows that. So, anyway, he kills Trevor, and instead of attacking him, Diana goes to Greek Hell and finds him and talks to him and lets him go. Wunderbar.

This is a reason I hate that characters get killed in comics. Steve Trevor isn’t dead. Of course he’s not. He’s too ingrained in the Wonder Woman mythos to stay dead, and it’s always odd that characters act like these people will stay dead. I enjoy those moments in comics when a character points out the revolving door that is comic book death, but of course the “serious” books can’t do that, so Diana is all weepy with Clark and Bruce about Steve’s death, but it just feels hollow. Second of all, how involved, romantically, are they really? They don’t seem to be too romantically involved in volume 1, although there’s certainly an attraction. I hate to keep harping on the Pérez run, but it just felt so much more interesting that Steve was Diana’s platonic friend and was married to Etta Candy rather than being a romantic interest for Diana. It never seems to quite work, and in this issue, King really tries to sell it, and I don’t think he succeeds. Your mileage may vary.

Finally, we get to the last page, where the story has been leading us – Diana’s daughter. Once again, DC has a problem with Diana. I’ve said this for years – she’s too much of an icon to be a real character, and because DC has no comparable female characters, Diana has to bear the load of expectations for an entire gender. What does this mean? Well, in the current DC, has Diana ever gotten laid? She makes out Steve a little bit, but have they ever done the nasty? I ask this not to be puerile, but because on the last page, we find out that her daughter – the one who has been listening to this Creepy Oldster drone on about his war against her mother for 14 long issues – was created from clay, much like Diana was. Why? Diana was created that way because the original Amazons had no access to men, but that’s not a problem for Diana. I mean, yes, Steve is dead, so that’s a consideration, but it seems like King and DC are doing this because Diana must remain pristine. I know I think too much about this and it’s probably not a conscious decision by DC and King, but it still feels like Diana can never have sex. Or at least we can’t acknowledge that she has sex. Anyway, that’s my take. I’m sure I’m overthinking this.

Oh, and one of the Fates says “Oh, how I weeped at the cut!” Why doesn’t anyone know the language anymore? What the hell, Tom King? I thought you were supposed to be smart.

Wonder Woman #14: If you liked issues #1-13, you’ll like this one. It’s exactly the same! But is it enough for you to go ALL IN?

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Another week, another solid group of comics. They might not blow you away, but they’re getting the job done. There’s nothing wrong with that!