“Voices from the sky say rely on your best friend to pull you through”
Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott have done many good comics, some of them as a team, and so DC thought, “Hey, let’s put them together again!”, which is a good idea, and so we get Cheetah & Cheshire Rob the Watchtower, a groovy heist story. Annette Kwok colors this, Troy Peteri letters it, and Rob Levin edits it. 
It’s $17.99 and it’s 132 pages long.
Rucka knows how to write a comic like this, so this is an entertaining comic. It’s not a great one, mainly because Rucka doesn’t really do too much to make it something a bit different or odd or something to make it stand out. It’s a clever scheme, certainly, but Rucka tends to stick to the “hits” of a heist story, so while it works quite well, it doesn’t rise above to become a great heist story. Cheetah comes to Cheshire with a plan — they’re going to steal the “power bank” of all the superheroes, because it’s one of the most valuable things on the planet, and it’s housed in the Justice League Big-Ass Satellite. That seems to be an issue, but Barbara Minerva has a plan, damn it! They need a team, so they get Hazard, Klarion, and Featherweight, who first appears here (apparently she’s the granddaughter of Ra’s al Ghul, but the weird thing is, is that that’s not really mentioned here, and for some reason we’re supposed to know all this — Rucka created her mother, too, and Rucka likes to do this, but it’s kind of odd that we’re supposed to know all this when it’s, you know, not in the text at all). I really don’t want to go into the plan too much, because, of course, it’s a heist story, and the plot is usually pretty important in those kinds of stories. They need to figure out how to get onto the JLB-AS and how to distract the heroes, and they do a good job of it. It’s a fine line to walk for Rucka and DC, because even in today’s world, there’s still a strain of conservatism running through a lot of popular entertainment, so Rucka has to have his heroes — technically the bad guys — get away with it, but they can’t actually rob the Justice League, can they? He gives us characters who aren’t completely evil — Cheshire is always kind of an anti-hero rather than a true villain (plus, her daughter with Roy Harper, Lian, plays a big part in the story, and she’s a nice kid), Cheetah has a tragedy in her past (writers have tended to ignore that Barbara Minerva got herself into her Cheetah predicament because she’s such a horrible person), Klarion is just a kid who doesn’t seem to be too evil, Hazard is just scamming big corporations, and Featherweight is fighting against cops who beat up protestors, so she’s all right. 
Rucka also makes sure that they’re not going to hurt anyone in their heist, and he introduces some other villains who actually are pretty evil, so they get contrasted with our “heroes.” All of these are pretty standard, and that’s one reason this isn’t a great heist story, because Rucka isn’t the first one to do it. He also hits some other standard notes — the misdirection in this comic leads to places that we can see coming a mile away, and again, it’s not a bad thing, it’s just a bit predictable. Predictability can certainly be comfortable and nice, but it doesn’t lend itself to great fiction. Rucka knows the assignment, and while there’s a pretty big change in this comic that I certainly hope will stick, for the most part, he just gives us an entertaining if not terribly superb comic.
Naturally, Scott is wonderful. She’s such an excellent artist and she’s so good at doing superheroes, and it’s fun to look at her work. She’s so good at making these outlandish characters look … not exactly “real,” but plausible within a superhero context. Her Cheetah looks like a real woman just with, you know, fur. Most artists make her look more cheetah-like (and I have no problem with that), but Scott does a very good job emphasizing her human part, and it’s clever within this book, as she’s part of the “good guys.” She does a great job making Klarion a kind of devilish scamp who doesn’t really mean any harm, honest! Hazard and Featherweight look like regular people — Hazard, who’s the Gambler’s granddaughter, has a kind of outgoing personality, while Featherweight, who’s bisexual and trans, wears a hooded sweatshirt and hunches a bit, which shows her youth and her discomfort with both her powers and what kicks them on (apparently she needs to be angry, but unlike the Hulk, she doesn’t change in any way), but also lets Scott show how she comes into her own over the course of the book. Once we get onto the satellite, Scott does an excellent job with the many, many characters she has to draw, but also with keeping everything clear about what’s happening and where. It’s a bit of a complicated scheme, but Rucka and Scott do a good job keeping us with all the pieces and what’s going on at any one time. 
Scott’s art is always fun to see, and she does a great job here.
This is a pretty cool comic. It doesn’t change anything too much, but it’s still a solid heist comic that looks very keen. Give it a look!
(I guess there’s a controversy over Featherweight, because she’s bi and trans. Trans people didn’t like her because she’s a bit of a stereotype, while old-school assholes think it’s hilarious because it’s a publicity stunt that didn’t work. I’m not sure why she needs to be bisexual and transgender, because there’s nothing in the book that needs her to be. Why does she need to be LGBTQ+ to fight for the rights of oppressed people? The only reason she mentions it is because Klarion has a crush on her, and she handles that very weirdly — if a 25-year-old man (apparently, Featherweight is supposed to be 25) did what she did to a teen girl, we’d call it creepy. Here’s the thing, though — why did DC and Rucka need to make her the granddaughter of R’as al Ghul, give her rage-based powers (which is never really a good look unless you turn green and have serious childhood trauma), and have her talk about her identity? The R’as al Ghul of it all doesn’t even come out in this comic except in the most oblique way, and it’s unnecessary. The powers … well, they could have done something different, certainly. And the identity … I hate to agree with the choads on this, but it does very much feel like Rucka and DC just wanted a trans person in their comic, so they had her confirm it in the weirdest way possible. Trans people who think she’s a stereotype have a point — I mean, it’s a superhero comic, so stereotyping is kind of par for the course — but she is kind of interesting in the book, as she’s unsure about her powers and seems to need someone to believe in her. Why she couldn’t be a teen like Klarion to make her interaction with him not as creepy, I’m not sure, and nobody seems to care that she seems to be bonding with Lian Harper, who reads as even younger than Klarion. Her being 16 would solve those problems, and it’s not like she has a long history of people writing her like an adult — this is her first appearance! Anyway, good for Rucka and DC for introducing a bisexual, trans character, but it was handled kind of oddly.)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
