The Week's Comics: GA/BC #19, Oracle #2
Much of this week's Green Arrow/Black Canary takes place in the Star City Museum of Natural History. There's a panel in which a mounted allosaur is is blown up, and the skeleton has been pencilled with adoring detail; it even has recognisably Saurischian hip anatomy and is lit really dramatically by the explosion.
I mention this because I always like to start a review with something positive, and this dinosaur was the only thing I liked. The only thing.
Actually, I will say that I didn't hate the interior art in general. Norton's pencils are pretty good, and his facial expressions are great; the characters are only distinguishable by hairstyle/clothing and in the case of the men, beards, and he appears to suffer from that artist delusion that women don't need to digest food and therefore have no internal organs below their ribcage, but it's much better than looking at say, Benes.
The cover art I do hate. Because good god that thing's ugly. Black Canary and Poison Arrow involved in what appears to be a slap fight, in which Dinah's costume has come undone again (what is it about cover artists and Black Canary's costume? Batman's flies never come unzipped on covers), they both have pornface and neither has eyes. And for some reason, Dinah's hair looks like a wig again. It's just bad.
And as for the writing - if you don't mind that the plot is 'woman is rescued by Green Arrow, woman falls in love with Green Arrow, woman turns into homocidal stalker and that's your scary villain', then you still have to deal with the idea that Kreisburg appears to have not read anything with Ollie or Dinah in it before. I mean, it's marginally better than Winick - I'll credit Kreisburg with having at least checked their Wikipedia pages, but the slap fight on the cover is still in the plot - the Black Canary, one of the DCU's top level martial artist, takes three whole pages to fight with an unarmed, unpowered unskilled woman and still doesn't defeat her, Ollie has 'allowed something dark to grow' in him, despite being a complete wuss in comparison to Grell's version, and oh, Dinah hits him.
I'm kind of sick of this, now. Why is everyone who writes Ollie or Dinah now somehow under the impression that she's a spouse abuser? Really?
This is the second time in as many writers I'm cancelling my subscription for this title.
As much as I hated GA/BC's cover art, I think it's only fair to say that I do like the cheesecake aspect of the Oracle: The Cure covers. Yeah, I know this whole cover is about peering down the top of the greatest information mastermind in the DCU, in an aspect that says little about her abilities, character or the plot of the book, but it's so pretty. This is cheescake comic covers the way cheesecake comic covers should be done. And the interior art is good too. Artwise, I like it.
The writing lets it down, partly by the omnious thrid person narrative informing us how obsessed Babs is becoming with her disability and how bizarrely aggressive and 'dark' she's getting - I in no way blame Vanhook for the weird turn her personality has taken; that appears to be editorial mandate that was making the last few issues of Birds of Prey particularly jarring as well - but this story is two thirds of the way through and it's still not gripped me yet.
I'll say this, though; I'm not sure why there's all this speculation about 'will Babs get her legs back', when it seems clearly obvious to me that in a plot which is 'disabled hero races for cureall in competition with villain whose daughter is dying', there's really only one outcome. Well, unless they pull a 'hero is cured and then broods over the fact she 'let' an innocent girl die', which would annoy me greatly to say the least. And as there's no patricular satisfaction from a 'good story well told' in this mini, I can't shake the feeling that this 'big event tie-in' wasn't particularly worth it.
But then, in this case, I'd rather be disappointed than have two redheaded able bodied batheroines running around Gotham, especially if Babs is not going to be the one headling the company's flagship title. Let's give Kate the chance to become an actual character before we start filling her niche with the most famous woman ever to wear the batlogo, shall we?