“When will you see the funky side of me? Baby, you’ll see that rhythm is the key”
I got the first issue of Gotham City Sirens: Unfit for Orbit and enjoyed it enough to get the trade, which is by Leah Williams (writer), Haining (artist), Alex Guimarães, Ivan Plascencia, Hi-Fi (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer), and Arianna Turturro (editor). 
It’s from DC, it’s $17.99, and it comes in at 110 pages.
Look, I like Despero. He’s not the greatest bad guy in the world, but he can be pretty interesting. He has that whole “third eye” thing going on, which gives him psychic powers, which you don’t usually associate with big hulking thugs, and he has a pretty cool visual. But creators Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky didn’t seem to think too much beyond the visuals, and Despero’s been in a kind of super-villain rut ever since, as subsequent writers bring him in when they need someone to conquer the Earth but they don’t seem to give him much motivation beyond that. Leah Williams doesn’t do much with him in this series, either — he’s there to conquer the Earth, but he doesn’t tell us why, nor does anyone ask. As I noted when I first reviewed this, putting Selina, Harley, and Pam up against him is ridiculous because he’s so powerful (in the first Despero story I ever read, J’onn J’onzz — the friggin’ Martian Manhunter — 
had to trick him to beat him), and Williams has to pull the old “he’s so powerful he underestimates them” thing, where instead of killing them, he tries to enslave them, while not even taking them to the transformative Flames of Py’tar himself, but separating them and messing with them because he’s so arrogant. Come on, Despero, don’t turn into a Bond villain! Meanwhile, there’s an ill-defined MacGuffin in the book, which, because it’s a MacGuffin, shouldn’t matter that much, but it does seem to be more important than these things usually are, so Williams should really do more with it. Instead, this is basically an excuse for our three heroes to run around bashing underlings. I mean, that can be fun, sure, and Williams does a nice job putting them in bad situations and then getting out of them, but this is really the emptiest of caloric treats. Williams does have one clever trick up her sleeve, and it’s fine, but again — Despero has been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and he’s supposed to be a genius as well as powerful, so I can’t believe the Sirens’ gambit would work, especially as he finally stops underestimating them. Oh well — it’s a fun read, I guess, I just don’t love writers using villains whose power set does not really work in the story. Despero, despite getting defeated by our heroes, is still far too powerful for them. Williams has to twist the story too much to make it work. 
But that might just be, you know, like, my opinion.
I mentioned that Haining has that kind of Americanized manga style that DC and Marvel like these days, and her art is quite enjoyable. She has a nice, loose style that works well on big ol’ superhero slugfests, and her line isn’t as thin as some art in this style, so it has some nice heft to it. She draws a mean-ass Despero, too, which is nice. She has fun with the interiors of the nightclub where Despero is hanging out, making it a weird, almost silly place that hides some dark places, and the special effects — some of which are drawn and some of which appear to simply be colored in — are quite neat. It’s a frenetic comic, and it’s unclear exactly how big this club is (it seems gargantuan), but we won’t worry about that, because despite the pace, it’s never unclear what’s going on, which is keen. I have issues with the comic, sure, but none of them are with the art.
The Sirens comics are often fun, I assume — I don’t read many of them — as is this comic, but I just wish it made a bit more sense. Oh well!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
