For the birds
So I picked up Red Robin #2 thursday. I feel the strong need to rant about it.
Well, for starters, I'm in it. Or more precisely, my name. Which is cool, considering how unique my name kinda is.
However, that's really where the cool stuff ends. Not that I found a lot of bad things per se, but, well, let's just say it was lacking the expected awesome this issue.
For the majority of the issue, I was confused as to what order things were happening. Page one is 24 hours in the future, while pages 2-5 are "current time", 6-8 are "flash back in gotham" time (not to mention the numerous "scene changes" there), 9-12 are "current", 13-15 are an interlude (WTF?), 16 and 17 are "current", 18-21 are "gotham", and 22 is "current". Thats eight transitions in 21 pages, most of which take place without sharing pages and only little info boxes telling us its when/where. Even if we are living in an age where a person's attention span is equal to an insect's, the pace felt too fast and jumpy to me. Yes, its supposed to be "action-packed" and all that jazz, but #1 was successful in being so with only one major flash back after 8 solid pages of tim kicking ass. That issue had also shown how little tim seems to trust in his sanity while trying to find bruce. To put it simply, it felt balanced, while this one feels like its spinning out of control.
Hmmm... maybe this issue is actually better than originally thought. The pace could make the reader feel confused and frazzled, more like tim. Okay, this could work. Doesn't mean i like it though.
Straightening out the time line, its starts in issue #1 with Tim's fight at/with Dick (pages 10-13), everyone trying to find tim (#2 p. 6-8), tim beats up and yells at stephanie [btw, what was that about?](#2 p. 17-20), tim kicks butt in madrid (#1 p. 1-8), Ducati and glasses sex in toledo, spain (#1 p. 9), tim arrives in paris to kick butt, have some introspection, and gain some assassin friends (#1 p. 16-22), then tim goes to kick said assassin butt and chat with Ra's (#2 p. 2-5, 9-12, 16, 17, 22), which leads us finally to tim on a plane (come on, the train is way cooler!) to Berlin (#2 p. 1). Well, that makes it clearer, at least to me...
There are two little segments that i assume are going to be explained later on that don't fit into this time line: #1's Prague assassination and #2's Interlude. The first one has the Demon Trigon's signature 4-eyes in the shadows thing at the end of an assassination gone wrong [read: assassin died]. However, i remember the titans recently dealing with trigon and basically saying he's got a couple of centuries before becoming a threat again. And though it may be Raven-gone-evil again, I doubt it, as she and tim have only had minimal interaction through the teen titans (so if raven would go after anyone, it'd be gar or dick or the like). So this leaves me rather excited and guessing as to how a potentially new demonic threat is going to tie into tim's rather depressing life. The second issue has yet another assassination gone wrong, but this time there's no eyes. Instead, the assassin it burned to death caught up in a glowing red spiderweb. I don't know about anyone else, but i have NO CLUE what thats supposed to mean. We do get a hint that both assassins were League assassins, which I guess is something.
so at the end of #1 we knew that Tim was looking for bruce, had assassins on his trail, and some random assassin died via demon. at the end of #2 we find Ra's wanting to help(?) tim, another assassin dead via weirdness, and tim left a lot of burned bridges in gotham. Okay, i think i get whats going on now [lol i'm awesome...!]
I could draw a bunch of conclusions about where this is all going that i'm sure lil' timmy would be proud of, but i'll leave the fun to you guys ;)
One more thing that i'd like to note is the change in artistic direction. I know, i'm crazy! there wasn't any change in artist or anything. thats not what i'm talking about. what i am talking about are the poses! in issue 1, there were a dozen frames where tim was striking batman poses (p. 5 #4, p. 6 #2, to name a few). It was almost overkill, in conjunction with the cape and the cut of his mask/cowl thing. In #2, there were far fewer of these poses. In fact, i was struck by how tim he seemed on the splash page (p. 4-5). And yes, there were still some of those poses (p. 10 #5, etc), but i didn't feel beaten over the head with it. Which, in the end, felt wrong. I mean, if he is on a search to find bruce, and believes that bruce is still alive somewhere, then where better to find him than in his own actions? After all, tim spends half the time talking about how he's not robin anymore and doesn't want to soil the bat-family, uh, name, i guess, that i wouldn't be surprised if he missed the fact that his body is crying out for the man in every stance and action.
It makes sense to me, in a way, that out in costume he can have the posture of batman, but in his undies he collapses on the bathroom floor basically crying. Because in costume, the shadow of bruce is still there beside him.
suffice to say, i think i want to be hit over the head with more batman stances and poses from tim next issue. and maybe some more demon eyes!
tl;dr - lya needs to get a life or a boyfriend or something, because she shouldn't spend this much time analyzing a 2-d man-boy.
next up! jaime reyes/terry mcginnis comparison! (i'm not even kidding...)
<3 l
P.S. tim wayne? Wayne?! bruce, you have got to stop taking in under-aged hawt boys. someone may think you're trying to move in on MJ's king perv status.
Well, for starters, I'm in it. Or more precisely, my name. Which is cool, considering how unique my name kinda is.
However, that's really where the cool stuff ends. Not that I found a lot of bad things per se, but, well, let's just say it was lacking the expected awesome this issue.
For the majority of the issue, I was confused as to what order things were happening. Page one is 24 hours in the future, while pages 2-5 are "current time", 6-8 are "flash back in gotham" time (not to mention the numerous "scene changes" there), 9-12 are "current", 13-15 are an interlude (WTF?), 16 and 17 are "current", 18-21 are "gotham", and 22 is "current". Thats eight transitions in 21 pages, most of which take place without sharing pages and only little info boxes telling us its when/where. Even if we are living in an age where a person's attention span is equal to an insect's, the pace felt too fast and jumpy to me. Yes, its supposed to be "action-packed" and all that jazz, but #1 was successful in being so with only one major flash back after 8 solid pages of tim kicking ass. That issue had also shown how little tim seems to trust in his sanity while trying to find bruce. To put it simply, it felt balanced, while this one feels like its spinning out of control.
Hmmm... maybe this issue is actually better than originally thought. The pace could make the reader feel confused and frazzled, more like tim. Okay, this could work. Doesn't mean i like it though.
Straightening out the time line, its starts in issue #1 with Tim's fight at/with Dick (pages 10-13), everyone trying to find tim (#2 p. 6-8), tim beats up and yells at stephanie [btw, what was that about?](#2 p. 17-20), tim kicks butt in madrid (#1 p. 1-8), Ducati and glasses sex in toledo, spain (#1 p. 9), tim arrives in paris to kick butt, have some introspection, and gain some assassin friends (#1 p. 16-22), then tim goes to kick said assassin butt and chat with Ra's (#2 p. 2-5, 9-12, 16, 17, 22), which leads us finally to tim on a plane (come on, the train is way cooler!) to Berlin (#2 p. 1). Well, that makes it clearer, at least to me...
There are two little segments that i assume are going to be explained later on that don't fit into this time line: #1's Prague assassination and #2's Interlude. The first one has the Demon Trigon's signature 4-eyes in the shadows thing at the end of an assassination gone wrong [read: assassin died]. However, i remember the titans recently dealing with trigon and basically saying he's got a couple of centuries before becoming a threat again. And though it may be Raven-gone-evil again, I doubt it, as she and tim have only had minimal interaction through the teen titans (so if raven would go after anyone, it'd be gar or dick or the like). So this leaves me rather excited and guessing as to how a potentially new demonic threat is going to tie into tim's rather depressing life. The second issue has yet another assassination gone wrong, but this time there's no eyes. Instead, the assassin it burned to death caught up in a glowing red spiderweb. I don't know about anyone else, but i have NO CLUE what thats supposed to mean. We do get a hint that both assassins were League assassins, which I guess is something.
so at the end of #1 we knew that Tim was looking for bruce, had assassins on his trail, and some random assassin died via demon. at the end of #2 we find Ra's wanting to help(?) tim, another assassin dead via weirdness, and tim left a lot of burned bridges in gotham. Okay, i think i get whats going on now [lol i'm awesome...!]
I could draw a bunch of conclusions about where this is all going that i'm sure lil' timmy would be proud of, but i'll leave the fun to you guys ;)
One more thing that i'd like to note is the change in artistic direction. I know, i'm crazy! there wasn't any change in artist or anything. thats not what i'm talking about. what i am talking about are the poses! in issue 1, there were a dozen frames where tim was striking batman poses (p. 5 #4, p. 6 #2, to name a few). It was almost overkill, in conjunction with the cape and the cut of his mask/cowl thing. In #2, there were far fewer of these poses. In fact, i was struck by how tim he seemed on the splash page (p. 4-5). And yes, there were still some of those poses (p. 10 #5, etc), but i didn't feel beaten over the head with it. Which, in the end, felt wrong. I mean, if he is on a search to find bruce, and believes that bruce is still alive somewhere, then where better to find him than in his own actions? After all, tim spends half the time talking about how he's not robin anymore and doesn't want to soil the bat-family, uh, name, i guess, that i wouldn't be surprised if he missed the fact that his body is crying out for the man in every stance and action.
It makes sense to me, in a way, that out in costume he can have the posture of batman, but in his undies he collapses on the bathroom floor basically crying. Because in costume, the shadow of bruce is still there beside him.
suffice to say, i think i want to be hit over the head with more batman stances and poses from tim next issue. and maybe some more demon eyes!
tl;dr - lya needs to get a life or a boyfriend or something, because she shouldn't spend this much time analyzing a 2-d man-boy.
next up! jaime reyes/terry mcginnis comparison! (i'm not even kidding...)
<3 l
P.S. tim wayne? Wayne?! bruce, you have got to stop taking in under-aged hawt boys. someone may think you're trying to move in on MJ's king perv status.