Comics! (Surprises And Not So Much Edition)
Batman #29: Nice. It's a Bruce thing, *not* a Batman thing, but it's a Bruce thing from the Bruce that built Batman, so it's smart and fearless and utterly pragmatic. This Bruce is the guy I read Batman to get glimpses of, in a way.
Batwoman #6: Color me utterly unsurprised. I mean, it's pretty much a multiversal fixed point by now. (This isn't a complaint.)
Dark Nights Metal #1: This, however, is a complaint. I prefer everything Bat to begin and matter after the above-mentioned guy came up with the idea. Anything that overdetermines that cheapens him IMHO. And, frankly, the whole idea about the freaking N-th metal being the core mystery of everything feels like the premise of a bonkers fanfic challenge, not something you'd like to built an official Event around.
Justice League #27: I get it that the children of heroes will tend to have non-normal lives, but it's lazy that in most futures there aren't heroes other than the descendants of the current ones. That's the laziest and most pre-modern kind of myth. Give me the entitled grandson of Superman being constantly vexed by somebody who got her powers during a nanofactory industrial accident or something.
Star Trek The Next Generation: Broken Mirrors #3: The forced parallelisms make everything in Mirrorverse stories quite predictable (exceptions: the original episode, quite a bit of fantastic TNG fic I must've read about twenty years ago, gods, and arguably some of the DS9 ones), but within those stylistic limits, I think this issue absolutely nailed the characters' voices. It wasn't just a mechanical reverse image of TNG, but you could also see the actors delivering those lines and with those expressions. Very often (I'm looking at you, Superman/Batman comics) symmetries are achieved only by breaking characterization.
Batwoman #6: Color me utterly unsurprised. I mean, it's pretty much a multiversal fixed point by now. (This isn't a complaint.)
Dark Nights Metal #1: This, however, is a complaint. I prefer everything Bat to begin and matter after the above-mentioned guy came up with the idea. Anything that overdetermines that cheapens him IMHO. And, frankly, the whole idea about the freaking N-th metal being the core mystery of everything feels like the premise of a bonkers fanfic challenge, not something you'd like to built an official Event around.
Justice League #27: I get it that the children of heroes will tend to have non-normal lives, but it's lazy that in most futures there aren't heroes other than the descendants of the current ones. That's the laziest and most pre-modern kind of myth. Give me the entitled grandson of Superman being constantly vexed by somebody who got her powers during a nanofactory industrial accident or something.
Star Trek The Next Generation: Broken Mirrors #3: The forced parallelisms make everything in Mirrorverse stories quite predictable (exceptions: the original episode, quite a bit of fantastic TNG fic I must've read about twenty years ago, gods, and arguably some of the DS9 ones), but within those stylistic limits, I think this issue absolutely nailed the characters' voices. It wasn't just a mechanical reverse image of TNG, but you could also see the actors delivering those lines and with those expressions. Very often (I'm looking at you, Superman/Batman comics) symmetries are achieved only by breaking characterization.