Let’s go ALL IN with DC … Week 39!

Yep, I’m still doing this! You know you love it!

Gotham City Sirens: Unfit for Orbit #1 by Leah Williams, Haining, Ivan Plascencia, and Tom Napolitano. $3.99, 22 pgs.

Ok, so I’m going to SPOIL this because I have a problem with the villain, even though Williams might pull a nice fast one on us about it. This is the internet, though, and if we can’t overreact to one chapter of a longer, as-yet-to-be-revealed story, then what are we even doing here? So, the “good guys” in this series are our three lovely anti-heroes on the cover: Harley Quinn (hits people with a big hammer … but it’s still just a hammer); Catwoman (steals things); and Poison Ivy (uses plants for various things). As revealed on the final page (and this is the SPOILER, in case you’re wondering), the villain of the piece is this guy:

(Oh, I’m kidding … although that would be kind of awesome. Just click the photo to see who it really is, because I didn’t want to SPOIL it with a big picture if you just happened to click on this post without realizing I would SPOIL it!)

Now, I have no problem with this. Despero is a pretty cool villain, and he doesn’t seem to have been overused recently, so fair enough. However … won’t he just blast all three of these women to ashes? I mean, Despero is pretty powerful, and despite their charms, Harley, Selina, and Ivy are … not. Now, Selina wants to steal something from Despero, and none of them knew he was the bad guy (and they still don’t at the end of this issue), so perhaps Williams will have them not try to fight Despero, but I worry. I worry because this is such a comic-book thing — the “good guys” (“good” is, of course, a relative term when you’re talking about a person who crunches a person’s face with a giant hammer in this very issue … and not a person who definitely deserved it, although they certainly might have) come up against a villain who’s objectively more powerful than they are, yet they win anyway because they’re the heroes. I very much hope that is not the case here. We shall see (or not, depending on whether you keep buying this). It does appear that Despero is expecting them, so perhaps he needs them, but eventually, he’s going to turn against them, because he’s the villain!

Anyway, it’s a pretty good set-up for a heist. I mean, Williams wastes some time in the beginning, as Selina breaks into Harley’s apartment because Harley wasn’t answering the door (she was in the shower), so we get a bit of unnecessary almost-fighting between them before Selina pulls off her mask and reveals who she is (she’s disguised and masked because there’s a price on her head). She wants Harley to create a distraction with her “destruction agency” so that she can break into a very high-end nightclub that — what a co-inky-dink! — Ivy happens to be researching because its carbon footprint is far greater than it should be. So while Selina finds what she’s stealing, Ivy can figure out how to destroy it, and Harley can distract people. Easy-peasy! Except, of course, that they figure out that the nightclub is a very weird place — it doesn’t seem like it’s terrestrial, and when they find what Selina is trying to steal, they’re faced with a conundrum — I won’t spoil that, because it’s kind of interesting, but it does present them with a conundrum! Then Despero shows up, and it’s clear the club is much weirder than our heroes thought. I mean, we could have figured it out by the subtitle of the issue, but Despero showing up just confirms that things are going to get spacey.

It’s not a bad set-up, and despite my objections to the weird way Williams begins things, she does zip along nicely. Harley isn’t jealous at all that Ivy is boinking someone new, which is refreshing to see, and the three ladies are good at what they do, so things go smoothly at the club until Selina starts having doubts about the nature of the building and then when she’s confronted by the conundrum. Despero makes a pretty dramatic entrance, too, so that’s nice. Williams knows what she’s doing in terms of putting a story together, so while I have reservations about putting these three against someone like Despero, it’s still kind of intriguing.

The art is pretty good, with that vague manga style that DC and Marvel dig these days, as they can’t quite commit themselves to going “full manga.” Haining (“Do you like Haining?” “I don’t know, I’ve never Hained”) is Taiwanese, so it’s not surprising she has a vaguely manga style, although I do like that, like a lot of manga but unlike a lot of the “manga style” that DC and Marvel dig, we get rough lines and a decent amount of well-done hatching. When you’re dealing with Harley, you have to make her manic without going too far into insane, and Haining does really well with that, plus she draws a terrific Despero, as you can see above. The page before we see our villain, Haining does a really nice job showing how evil he really is, which is nice. She’s also fluid enough to do some pretty good action scenes, so that’s nice. If you like that vague manga style so in vogue these days, you’ll probably like this art. If you don’t, you probably won’t.

Overall, this is a decent first issue. It won’t change the world or anything, but a Catwoman/Harley Quinn/Poison Ivy heist story in space has possibilities. You can go ALL IN with the Gotham City Sirens and feel pretty confident you’re going to have a good time!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

A few weeks ago, Tom King’s Trinity: Daughter of Wonder Woman came out, and keen readers of this blog might note I did not do one of these posts about it. Well, I was planning on it, but I guess the fustercluck that is Diamond is affecting everyone else, too, and my store did not get the “standard” issue for a few weeks, and I was not going to pay an extra dollar for one of the “fancy” covers, so I waited. By the time it arrived, it was no longer “timely,” so I decided to skip it, especially because it wasn’t that great. It begins with a young Trinity, but a teen Trinity and a young adult Trinity soon show up (from different points on the timeline), and time gets screwed up, and Tiny Trinity is looking for her father, who I guess is Steve Trevor even though … isn’t he dead? and then Trevor shows up on the last page demanding answers from the Three Fates about his daughter. Here’s the thing, though, which is sadly the case with far too many Tom King books these days: it’s stupid. King zips back and forth in time to hide the fact that it’s stupid, but that doesn’t change the fact. The entire plot hinges on the fact that Tiny Trinity is sad because she doesn’t have a father, and Teen Trinity remembers being sad at that very moment and goes back in time to cheer her younger self up. Now, Teen Trinity presumably knows that Tiny Trinity isn’t sad forever, because she, Teen Trinity, has not stayed sad forever! She also knew that Tiny Trinity wanted to find her dad, so instead of mucking up the time stream, why doesn’t Teen Trinity just go find her dad as, you know, a teenager? It’s so very stupid, and on it hinges the entire plot. Sigh. Ok, King satirizing Pariah and his predicament is pretty funny, but the rest of the issue is pretty stupid. Belén Ortega’s art is pretty good – it’s also in that vague manga style that DC and Marvel dig these days, with a softer coloring from Alejandro Sánchez so it’s not quite as hard-edged as Haining’s, but it does look nice. Although I would die a happy, happy man if I never saw an “X” where a dog or cat’s asshole should be again. That’s a recent thing, and I don’t know why. It’s not funny, it adds nothing to the story, and it looks stupid. STOP IT, ARTISTS!!!!!

Anyway, I did miss this one, so I wanted to go over it briefly. It’s like the rest of Tom King’s Wonder Woman work: bad. Feel free to go ALL OUT with Trinity!

Rating:

One totally Airwolf panel:

So that’s another week of DC’s ALL IN initiative. I’ve gotten three of the trades so far, and I’ll write about them, I promise! I figure I’ll do this with the first issues for a year, so maybe the end of September? The ALL IN Special came out in October, so the end of September seems a good time to stop. Of course, if DC doesn’t have new stuff, I might stop much sooner!

(By the way, there’s a new Superman movie coming out — you may have heard — and on this week’s issue of GCS, we find a big ad for the flick. I don’t know about you, but Not-Christopher-Reeve looks really, really freaky in this … are we calling it a photograph? Is the actor real, or just an AI construct and Warner Bros. is holding Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult’s families hostage so they won’t say anything? The world deserves to know!!!!

I dunno — it’s creeping me right out. Just remember what the great prophet said:

WE SHOULD HAVE LISTENED!!!!)