Cheetah & Cheshire Rob the Justice League #1 is by Greg Rucka, Nicola Scott, Annette Kwok, and Troy Peteri. Hey, it’s Rucka and Scott! Good times all around! This is $3.99 and is 22 pages long.
Rucka and Scott are good creators, so of course this is an interesting comic. The biggest problem is that it’s clearly a set-up issue, and I’ll have a good rant about it in a bit. Basically, Cheetah enlists Cheshire to rob the Justice League. I know, what a shock! Cheetah begins the issue by having some problems — she’s eating corpses in a hospital that she pays the M.E. to save for her, but after that, she’s tempted by a living dude because her plant god wants fresher blood!!!!! Then we shift to Cheshire, who’s invented some sort of toxin that she has on her funky green nails that causes anything she scratches to … well, explode. I mean, that’s fun. She heads off to “Wolfman & Co. Chemicals” (which is next door to “Peter Marston Electrics”), where she finds a bunch of flunkies, to whom she gives a chance to leave her alone, as she’s only there for their boss. They don’t listen, of course, which means we get some nice mayhem, which delays her long enough for Cheetah to get into the office and hold down the boss, so Cheshire lightly scratches him on the cheek and they leave the office, which, you know, ‘splode. That is the first 15 (!!) pages of the issue, and I imagine that it might come back around, maybe, because if it doesn’t, it feels like a lot of wasted space for characters that we know fairly well. The two ladies go to a diner, where Cheetah tells Cheshire they’re going to rob the Big-Ass Justice League Satellite, which Cheshire thinks is crazy, but then Cheetah tells them what they’re stealing, and that gets Cheshire on board (I won’t spoil it, but maybe you can find it somewhere). It sounds very MacGuffin-ish, but who knows. Anyway, once Cheshire is in, it’s time to gather a crew, which will come next issue! Huzzah!
The art is phenomenal, of course – beautiful inking, an excellent sense of movement during the fight, and Scott’s wonderful facial expressions as the two main characters interact with each other (and others, too, but mostly each other). Scott is a great artist, and she always makes Rucka’s scripts look great. Rucka does a really nice job with the two principals — they respect and like each other, and Rucka does a good job with the conversation at the end, when Cheetah convinces Cheshire to join her. It’s a good set-up that looks amazing. So, that’s nice.
However … it is a set-up issue, and it’s making me a bit grumpy. It’s a six-issue mini-series, and Rucka will, I’m sure, make it work well as a six-issue mini-series, but he also “writes for the trade,” and this is definitely written for the trade. It’s frustrating, because I still don’t understand why this is released in single issues. I mean, I know why DC does this — they’ll make more money because we’re so conditioned to get comics this way, even though everything gets collected these days and it’s so much easier to get things in trade. I know that most comics these days are written for the trade, but Rucka really seems to lean into it more than others, and the action in this feels so perfunctory that it just feels like Rucka wanted to give Scott something fun to draw. Why do we always fall for it? Nerds are supposed to be good at math, but buying single issues is bad math, man! This thing will cost $24 if you buy it in single issues, while DC will have a softcover trade for $20, tops. They might do a hardcover for $25, which is still a good bargain because it’s basically the same as it would be for the single issues but in a nice hardcover! This is very much going to read better in collected form, as Rucka’s stuff always do — one of the reasons I think people don’t consider him a good superhero writer (which he’s not, really) is because he doesn’t really do slam-bang big-ass action issues, preferring instead the nice slow burn. This is a very intriguing beginning, but it doesn’t work too great as a single issue. Yet, we’ll keep falling for it. Come on, people, let’s all switch to trades!
Or … maybe you’re addicted to single issues. Maybe you want to go ALL IN with Cheetah and Cheshire!
One totally Airwolf panel:
As always, I don’t know what else is coming down the pike, but I’ll be there for it!
Fun comic, which I’m happy to support in floppies solely because Rucka and Scott, haha!