A few more. (The Nerdiest Thing I've Written So Far)
I don't really know if any of these are up to the nerdiness standards of my previous reviews, but it works as a tagline.
Teen Titans
I started reading DC Comics when Tim Drake was already Robin, so for me the moment when he first crystallized as a *particular* Robin and not just Robin was during the Zero Hour event when he met a time-displaced Dick Grayson and his more analytical, Encyclopedia Brown "fun fact"-based style stood out from Dick's two-fisted chase-the-bad-guy approach. When I later learned Tim's origin story (plucky boy detective deduces Batman and Robin's secret identities), that sort of coalesced into part of my image of Tim as the thinking boy's wonder... the one who apprenticed himself to Batman to be the next master detective rather than the next Batman.
My fondness for Tim evolved into love in the recent-ish incarnation of Teen Titans that was basically a Young Justice/Titans mash-up, with Perez/Wolfman-era Titans standing as mentors to the new generation of teen sidekick heroes, including Tim. When the teens were ordered to stand down while the more experienced heroes went to fight veteran capekiller Deathstroke, Tim played the part of the good soldier that everyone expected Batman's sidekick to be and promised Starfire that he and his friends would stay put. Once the older team left, Tim promptly cut a Bat-shaped hole in a window and led the others into battle, prompting this memorable dialogue:
"You lied to Starfire?"
"Why not? I lie to Batman."
(Let's pause for a moment to mourn the passing of Starfire as a character that anybody would be afraid to lie to, or would even need to.)
There was some great dialogue that came out of that series ("Why does the telemetry show one of my Batmobiles in San Francisco? And why is it upside-down?"), and the blending of multiple generations/incarnations of a team into one was pretty great. So I had kind of mixed anticipation for the new series.
So far, so good.
It's another gathering of heroes story, but one that shows us that this kind of story can be done right. We're given a fantastic opening sequence of Kid Flash being reckless and daring, which leads us into the high concept of this book: kids with superpowers are trying to be superheroes and failing in dangerous ways. They don't understand their powers, they don't understand the consequences of their actions. A shadowy multinational organization called N.O.W.H.E.R.E. (old Doom Patrol foe who basically wanted to save the world by murdering anything weird... here, for all intents and purposes, the initials might as well stand for Ncheckmate Ocheckmate Wcheckmate Hcheckmate Echeckmate Rcheckmate Echeckmate) has started scooping them up for some mixture of protecting the public, teaching them some control, and turning them into weapons.
Tim Drake comes in because of his analytical nature, which naturally gets good marks from me. In this book, his Red Robin persona seems to have come about because he wanted to step out of the limelight and become less hands-on as a hero. His costume is more stealth-and-infiltration friendly than the traditional Decoy Wonder garb. It seems like he's been running a one-man "Bird of Prey" outfit (again, pause to mourn what's passed) for a while when we catch up to him; he's squatting in splendor in a luxury suite in a Luthor-owned building, connecting the dots on both the metas gone wild and the metas gone missing. There's an interesting side bit where he blames Batman (or possibly the Robin persona that he participated in) for the problem of young heroes, but he's mostly focused on the solution.
The story ends in the same place that Superboy #1 ended, with N.O.M.A.T.E. deciding to unleash their own homegrown superhero as a mole in Tim's new operation, after their more direct attempt to co-opt it failed. It's a much better way of tying the stories together and sewing up the universe than the bizarre little aside in Superman where it cuts to the Himalayas for a few panels so we can watch some kind of alien fish-beast blow a horn and we're told to pick up Stormwatch if we want to understand what it's all about.
By the issue's end, we have met Kid Flash, Red Robin, and a Cassie Sandsmark who doesn't want to be called Wonder Girl, we've seen them all in action, and we have a pretty good idea of their personalities. We've also glimpsed the other members of the team. Even if we haven't reached a destination yet, we can see the wheels are in motion.
Voodoo
I really only read this one for the articles because I was curious if it would tie into Grifter, and how.
Well, the jury is still out there. There is no resemblance between Priscilla's alien monster form and the "demons" that possessed people around Cole. The alien race that Priscilla belongs to is said to be scoping out the earth for invasion, so if they split the Daemonites into two separate things for the surviving Wild C.A.T.s then that means there are two different flavors of pod people/bodysnatchers infiltrating the earth at the same time which could lead to awkwardness and hurt feelings down the line, or an embarrassing game of "assimilated you last".
However, at the end of the book we do see Priscilla shapeshifting into another human form, which I don't believe was among her powers in the Wildstorm version. If she can assume any form she wants, this could mean that the "battle form" she assumed is not actually her "natural form", just something that's useful for combat with all the scales and claws and things. This not only leaves open the possibility that Priscilla is related to the aliens that are chasing Cole, it strengthens the possibilities that the White Martians are standing in for/merged with the Wildstorm Daemonites.
As for the book itself...
I hope the writer sends Scott Lobdell a cake or something for making him look good. Here there is at least a plausible reason for why the scantily clad alien sexbomb acts and dresses the way she does; if the male agent (of N.O.W.H.E.R.E.? I don't recall if they said, but that's the impression I got) is right about her mission, then putting a mildly telepathic shapeshifter in a nudie bar near a sensitive military base makes a kind of sense. Less risk of exposure than infiltrating the base itself, men get drunk and focus their attention on the visuals, etc.
But something can be an in-universe reason and an out-of-universe excuse at the same time, and there can be no doubt that this is very much an excuse for spending half the book drawing an edited-for-TV strip club. What could have been done with a single establishing panel or page is lingered over. The most interesting part of the book is the backstage conversation, which is the only place we get an actual glimpse of the title character's personality, any sense that there's anything to her but boobs and scaly death... a hint of an internal conflict, which tells us there is motivation lurking inside her head, even if we're being kept in the dark as to what that motivation is.
And to be fair, it's valid to keep us in the dark. She's been positioned for us as the vanguard of an alien invasion. Naturally the truth should be something more complicated than that, or we should be left thinking it might be if they're going to fake us out and yes she really is a bad guy.
But the problem is she's such a cypher because we have like five panels showing us anything of her in terms of real characterization amid about fifty panels of her operating her cover identity, which happens to be a stripper. Those panels aren't great. They happen backstage among her co-workers who are given even less characterization... they're pure ACME Instant Respectful Portrayal of Exotic Dancer 101; i.e., Young Women Working Their Way Through College and Single Mothers Just Trying To Get By. If the creators had been told they had to add two more panels to the comic and they had to be in the backstage scene, we'd have the Junkie Supporting Her Habit and someone would be draping a jacket over her shoulders.
Understand, I'm not criticizing the idea of a single mother trying to get by. I'm critiquing it as a sole character point, as the sole point of a character. This is all we know about any of the characters we see in the strip club, and the fact that we're basically told that everyone there except Priscilla is a single mother trying to get by or the equivalent makes it feel a bit like a bit from one of those horrible "______ Movie" parody movies where people stand up and explain what stereotype they represent as they're representing it.
As I did with Red Hood & The Outlaws, I'd like to highlight again how bad writing arises organically from the creative choice. By committing to spend as much page real estate as possible on asses and boobs, there is less space left over for things like plot and characterization.
I'm not complaining that she's a stripper or even that we're treated to the mainstream comic version of pornography. I expected that. At this point I'm pretty sure that the fact that she's a stripper is one of the reasons she of all the Wildstorm characters was tapped for a solo book, because while DC is not catering their entire line to the "core audience" of 18-34 heterosexual men who like sex with women they are definitely making sure there are books "for them".
But the thing is, the people who wanted to see her boobs would have bought the comic for one page focused on her boobs and then enjoyed seeing those same boobs popping up again in the course of 19 pages of story. At the end of the day they're not getting anything more out of the pages and pages that linger on "sexy" imagery. This is the strength of sequential art: you show that she's a stripper, you show her boobs, and the imagination does the rest. We understand that it happens, and adding a bunch more of disconnected panels along the way doesn't actually improve the experience. In fact, the more panels you show without showing anything, the more you just drive home the fact that you're not showing anything.
There is actual plot here, intercut with the boobs. It's just hard to care about it or engage with it. The only real exposition is shoehorned into a lapdance in a way that makes no sense, and I mean it fails to make sense in a way that goes beyond shoehorning exposition into a lapdance. The guy who's telling Priscilla (and the audience) that he knows she's a shapeshifting alien infiltrator reading the minds of the strip club patrons says he's telling her this because he's a "results guy, not a rules guy"; well, the result is that he blew his cover, got killed, and now the target knows she's being tracked and has gone on the run.
We get it. He took a cocky gamble and paid the price. But it's a gamble that made no sense and wasn't even necessary given that the whole idea is that she can read the minds of the men she dances for, and this is the second time she dances in front of him in the issue and we're given to understand that he's been stationed watching her for a while.
Better way to do it?
He and his (female) partner have a conversation about their training in resisting psychic probes. The partner mentions the importance of concentration and warns him against getting too close and letting his guard down. (This jibes nicely with one of Priscilla's few lines.) He gets cocky and/or horny, and slips up. There's a moment where she freezes or gives him a look, and he's like "OH SHIT". But then she recovers her cool leaving him to wonder if he imagined it. She invites him back for a private dance; his cockiness leads him to accept it, either to see what move she makes or to not risk blowing his cover as an appreciative club patron or whatever.
And then it turns into an interrogation... her interrogating him, of course.
We get the same information, but you know what the difference between this version and what actually happened is? Agency, for one thing. It makes the title character an active participant in the story bearing her name... which here is a stage name that doesn't even belong to her, it's just awarded to the highest-earning dancer in the club at the moment.
So again, I'm not complaining that the character is a stripper. I'm complaining that a shallow and exploitative version of "sex appeal" has once more been used as a substitute for good writing. There could have been so much more here, in the space otherwise occupied by lovingly rendered porn poses. "Priscilla Kitaen" is a dark-skinned woman who refers to herself as biracial. She's also an alien or alien/human-hybrid. Did she choose the form, or does she have mixed-race (mostly) human parents? Does the form mean something? Does it say anything about how she feels? I wouldn't feel cheated that they didn't explore this or any other particular thing in the very first issue, if said issue had a lot of other things going on.
But it doesn't.
It just has a lot of stripping.
I have a prediction about Priscilla's actual motivation/situation that arises from those tiny glimpses we get, but I'm not going to share it because that would suggest I'm invested in what happens next and I'm not. I don't want to skim another 20 page comic for 5 pages of story. At this point I'm actually hoping that she has nothing to do with Cole's "demons" because I might like to see what happens to him next and I don't want to reach a point where I have to follow her to keep up with him.
Batman: The Dark Knight
I don't have much to say about this one. It's another "Now Back To Your Batman Already In Progress" book, with a sexy White Rabbit, a lot of talk about fear and confronting fear in the midst of a bunch of Arkham inmates having a berserk freak-out that doesn't thus far lead to Dr. Jonathan Crane, a hulked-out Harvey Dent, and narration boxes that feel a bit like The Tick is talking to Bruce. This book seems to zig where Detective Comics zagged. If I cared about it more I'd do a side-by-side comparison explaining that, but suffice it to say that it just doesn't work for me, and the reveal at the end is everything that the splash at the end of Detective Comics wasn't. It's a cheap "dun DUN DUNNNN" rather than a visceral "WHAT THE FUCK?"
Now, if the Scarecrow showed up every time Batman's narration mentioned "fear", the book would be called Batman and Scarecrow. But the prevalence of the theme and the fact that it's overlaid on the scenes of a panic at the asylum makes it feel like this isn't just a heavy-handed rendition of Batman's usual leitmotif, all this talk about "fear" means something.
And then it doesn't.
And then there's Giant Harvey, screaming "CALL ME ONE-FACE".
DC Comics, what did I just read, and why should I want to read the next issue?
This entry automatically cross-posted from http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/316548.html. Comment hither or thither. Void where yon.
Teen Titans
I started reading DC Comics when Tim Drake was already Robin, so for me the moment when he first crystallized as a *particular* Robin and not just Robin was during the Zero Hour event when he met a time-displaced Dick Grayson and his more analytical, Encyclopedia Brown "fun fact"-based style stood out from Dick's two-fisted chase-the-bad-guy approach. When I later learned Tim's origin story (plucky boy detective deduces Batman and Robin's secret identities), that sort of coalesced into part of my image of Tim as the thinking boy's wonder... the one who apprenticed himself to Batman to be the next master detective rather than the next Batman.
My fondness for Tim evolved into love in the recent-ish incarnation of Teen Titans that was basically a Young Justice/Titans mash-up, with Perez/Wolfman-era Titans standing as mentors to the new generation of teen sidekick heroes, including Tim. When the teens were ordered to stand down while the more experienced heroes went to fight veteran capekiller Deathstroke, Tim played the part of the good soldier that everyone expected Batman's sidekick to be and promised Starfire that he and his friends would stay put. Once the older team left, Tim promptly cut a Bat-shaped hole in a window and led the others into battle, prompting this memorable dialogue:
"You lied to Starfire?"
"Why not? I lie to Batman."
(Let's pause for a moment to mourn the passing of Starfire as a character that anybody would be afraid to lie to, or would even need to.)
There was some great dialogue that came out of that series ("Why does the telemetry show one of my Batmobiles in San Francisco? And why is it upside-down?"), and the blending of multiple generations/incarnations of a team into one was pretty great. So I had kind of mixed anticipation for the new series.
So far, so good.
It's another gathering of heroes story, but one that shows us that this kind of story can be done right. We're given a fantastic opening sequence of Kid Flash being reckless and daring, which leads us into the high concept of this book: kids with superpowers are trying to be superheroes and failing in dangerous ways. They don't understand their powers, they don't understand the consequences of their actions. A shadowy multinational organization called N.O.W.H.E.R.E. (old Doom Patrol foe who basically wanted to save the world by murdering anything weird... here, for all intents and purposes, the initials might as well stand for Ncheckmate Ocheckmate Wcheckmate Hcheckmate Echeckmate Rcheckmate Echeckmate) has started scooping them up for some mixture of protecting the public, teaching them some control, and turning them into weapons.
Tim Drake comes in because of his analytical nature, which naturally gets good marks from me. In this book, his Red Robin persona seems to have come about because he wanted to step out of the limelight and become less hands-on as a hero. His costume is more stealth-and-infiltration friendly than the traditional Decoy Wonder garb. It seems like he's been running a one-man "Bird of Prey" outfit (again, pause to mourn what's passed) for a while when we catch up to him; he's squatting in splendor in a luxury suite in a Luthor-owned building, connecting the dots on both the metas gone wild and the metas gone missing. There's an interesting side bit where he blames Batman (or possibly the Robin persona that he participated in) for the problem of young heroes, but he's mostly focused on the solution.
The story ends in the same place that Superboy #1 ended, with N.O.M.A.T.E. deciding to unleash their own homegrown superhero as a mole in Tim's new operation, after their more direct attempt to co-opt it failed. It's a much better way of tying the stories together and sewing up the universe than the bizarre little aside in Superman where it cuts to the Himalayas for a few panels so we can watch some kind of alien fish-beast blow a horn and we're told to pick up Stormwatch if we want to understand what it's all about.
By the issue's end, we have met Kid Flash, Red Robin, and a Cassie Sandsmark who doesn't want to be called Wonder Girl, we've seen them all in action, and we have a pretty good idea of their personalities. We've also glimpsed the other members of the team. Even if we haven't reached a destination yet, we can see the wheels are in motion.
Voodoo
I really only read this one for the articles because I was curious if it would tie into Grifter, and how.
Well, the jury is still out there. There is no resemblance between Priscilla's alien monster form and the "demons" that possessed people around Cole. The alien race that Priscilla belongs to is said to be scoping out the earth for invasion, so if they split the Daemonites into two separate things for the surviving Wild C.A.T.s then that means there are two different flavors of pod people/bodysnatchers infiltrating the earth at the same time which could lead to awkwardness and hurt feelings down the line, or an embarrassing game of "assimilated you last".
However, at the end of the book we do see Priscilla shapeshifting into another human form, which I don't believe was among her powers in the Wildstorm version. If she can assume any form she wants, this could mean that the "battle form" she assumed is not actually her "natural form", just something that's useful for combat with all the scales and claws and things. This not only leaves open the possibility that Priscilla is related to the aliens that are chasing Cole, it strengthens the possibilities that the White Martians are standing in for/merged with the Wildstorm Daemonites.
As for the book itself...
I hope the writer sends Scott Lobdell a cake or something for making him look good. Here there is at least a plausible reason for why the scantily clad alien sexbomb acts and dresses the way she does; if the male agent (of N.O.W.H.E.R.E.? I don't recall if they said, but that's the impression I got) is right about her mission, then putting a mildly telepathic shapeshifter in a nudie bar near a sensitive military base makes a kind of sense. Less risk of exposure than infiltrating the base itself, men get drunk and focus their attention on the visuals, etc.
But something can be an in-universe reason and an out-of-universe excuse at the same time, and there can be no doubt that this is very much an excuse for spending half the book drawing an edited-for-TV strip club. What could have been done with a single establishing panel or page is lingered over. The most interesting part of the book is the backstage conversation, which is the only place we get an actual glimpse of the title character's personality, any sense that there's anything to her but boobs and scaly death... a hint of an internal conflict, which tells us there is motivation lurking inside her head, even if we're being kept in the dark as to what that motivation is.
And to be fair, it's valid to keep us in the dark. She's been positioned for us as the vanguard of an alien invasion. Naturally the truth should be something more complicated than that, or we should be left thinking it might be if they're going to fake us out and yes she really is a bad guy.
But the problem is she's such a cypher because we have like five panels showing us anything of her in terms of real characterization amid about fifty panels of her operating her cover identity, which happens to be a stripper. Those panels aren't great. They happen backstage among her co-workers who are given even less characterization... they're pure ACME Instant Respectful Portrayal of Exotic Dancer 101; i.e., Young Women Working Their Way Through College and Single Mothers Just Trying To Get By. If the creators had been told they had to add two more panels to the comic and they had to be in the backstage scene, we'd have the Junkie Supporting Her Habit and someone would be draping a jacket over her shoulders.
Understand, I'm not criticizing the idea of a single mother trying to get by. I'm critiquing it as a sole character point, as the sole point of a character. This is all we know about any of the characters we see in the strip club, and the fact that we're basically told that everyone there except Priscilla is a single mother trying to get by or the equivalent makes it feel a bit like a bit from one of those horrible "______ Movie" parody movies where people stand up and explain what stereotype they represent as they're representing it.
As I did with Red Hood & The Outlaws, I'd like to highlight again how bad writing arises organically from the creative choice. By committing to spend as much page real estate as possible on asses and boobs, there is less space left over for things like plot and characterization.
I'm not complaining that she's a stripper or even that we're treated to the mainstream comic version of pornography. I expected that. At this point I'm pretty sure that the fact that she's a stripper is one of the reasons she of all the Wildstorm characters was tapped for a solo book, because while DC is not catering their entire line to the "core audience" of 18-34 heterosexual men who like sex with women they are definitely making sure there are books "for them".
But the thing is, the people who wanted to see her boobs would have bought the comic for one page focused on her boobs and then enjoyed seeing those same boobs popping up again in the course of 19 pages of story. At the end of the day they're not getting anything more out of the pages and pages that linger on "sexy" imagery. This is the strength of sequential art: you show that she's a stripper, you show her boobs, and the imagination does the rest. We understand that it happens, and adding a bunch more of disconnected panels along the way doesn't actually improve the experience. In fact, the more panels you show without showing anything, the more you just drive home the fact that you're not showing anything.
There is actual plot here, intercut with the boobs. It's just hard to care about it or engage with it. The only real exposition is shoehorned into a lapdance in a way that makes no sense, and I mean it fails to make sense in a way that goes beyond shoehorning exposition into a lapdance. The guy who's telling Priscilla (and the audience) that he knows she's a shapeshifting alien infiltrator reading the minds of the strip club patrons says he's telling her this because he's a "results guy, not a rules guy"; well, the result is that he blew his cover, got killed, and now the target knows she's being tracked and has gone on the run.
We get it. He took a cocky gamble and paid the price. But it's a gamble that made no sense and wasn't even necessary given that the whole idea is that she can read the minds of the men she dances for, and this is the second time she dances in front of him in the issue and we're given to understand that he's been stationed watching her for a while.
Better way to do it?
He and his (female) partner have a conversation about their training in resisting psychic probes. The partner mentions the importance of concentration and warns him against getting too close and letting his guard down. (This jibes nicely with one of Priscilla's few lines.) He gets cocky and/or horny, and slips up. There's a moment where she freezes or gives him a look, and he's like "OH SHIT". But then she recovers her cool leaving him to wonder if he imagined it. She invites him back for a private dance; his cockiness leads him to accept it, either to see what move she makes or to not risk blowing his cover as an appreciative club patron or whatever.
And then it turns into an interrogation... her interrogating him, of course.
We get the same information, but you know what the difference between this version and what actually happened is? Agency, for one thing. It makes the title character an active participant in the story bearing her name... which here is a stage name that doesn't even belong to her, it's just awarded to the highest-earning dancer in the club at the moment.
So again, I'm not complaining that the character is a stripper. I'm complaining that a shallow and exploitative version of "sex appeal" has once more been used as a substitute for good writing. There could have been so much more here, in the space otherwise occupied by lovingly rendered porn poses. "Priscilla Kitaen" is a dark-skinned woman who refers to herself as biracial. She's also an alien or alien/human-hybrid. Did she choose the form, or does she have mixed-race (mostly) human parents? Does the form mean something? Does it say anything about how she feels? I wouldn't feel cheated that they didn't explore this or any other particular thing in the very first issue, if said issue had a lot of other things going on.
But it doesn't.
It just has a lot of stripping.
I have a prediction about Priscilla's actual motivation/situation that arises from those tiny glimpses we get, but I'm not going to share it because that would suggest I'm invested in what happens next and I'm not. I don't want to skim another 20 page comic for 5 pages of story. At this point I'm actually hoping that she has nothing to do with Cole's "demons" because I might like to see what happens to him next and I don't want to reach a point where I have to follow her to keep up with him.
Batman: The Dark Knight
I don't have much to say about this one. It's another "Now Back To Your Batman Already In Progress" book, with a sexy White Rabbit, a lot of talk about fear and confronting fear in the midst of a bunch of Arkham inmates having a berserk freak-out that doesn't thus far lead to Dr. Jonathan Crane, a hulked-out Harvey Dent, and narration boxes that feel a bit like The Tick is talking to Bruce. This book seems to zig where Detective Comics zagged. If I cared about it more I'd do a side-by-side comparison explaining that, but suffice it to say that it just doesn't work for me, and the reveal at the end is everything that the splash at the end of Detective Comics wasn't. It's a cheap "dun DUN DUNNNN" rather than a visceral "WHAT THE FUCK?"
Now, if the Scarecrow showed up every time Batman's narration mentioned "fear", the book would be called Batman and Scarecrow. But the prevalence of the theme and the fact that it's overlaid on the scenes of a panic at the asylum makes it feel like this isn't just a heavy-handed rendition of Batman's usual leitmotif, all this talk about "fear" means something.
And then it doesn't.
And then there's Giant Harvey, screaming "CALL ME ONE-FACE".
DC Comics, what did I just read, and why should I want to read the next issue?
This entry automatically cross-posted from http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/316548.html. Comment hither or thither. Void where yon.