Tpull's Weekly DC Comics Review – Part 1

Action Comics 878

by Greg Rucka and Eddy Barrows

Nightwing and Flamebird do not have the best scorecard so far, but here's where they start to make up for it. Two Kryptonian lovers are on a not-so-subtle rampage, and their Bonnie and Clyde antics immediately attract the attention of the heroes. One element that they spend some screen time on that I did not expect was the parsing of information to General Lane. It should be expected that the US government in the DC universe has access to some interesting capabilities at this point, but their correlation of the older-appearing Nightwing to Chris was accomplished very fast.

The backgrounds are fairly simplistic, with the creative team mostly leaving things up to the colorist to play around and make it seem like there's something going on, and that feels a little like a cop-out to me when I'm trying to find a good quality comic. Olmos doesn't have the greatest consistency for drawing characters, so it would be wise for him to practice drawing cars, buildings, landscapes, etc. Too many artists concentrate on the characters alone, and exclude all the rest of the environment that can help to paint a picture and tell a story.

This is perhaps the first time I missed Superman in the title, because although Flamebird and Nightwing get the upper hand on the other Kryptonians, it's taking a long time for all the pieces to come together. What we have seen so far is okay, but the picture that forms is not going to end in an awesome finale. There is an element of excitement missing currently from a title named "Action."

Batman 687

by Judd Winick and Ed Benes

At least I get to see Ed Benes drawing Batman. The inks and pencils are good, but Winick starts off with a cliché flashback that betrays the respectful way that Grayson used to behave around Batman in the old days. The transparent attempt is to do a retroactive foreshadowing of Grayson thinking of filling the big Bat-boots someday, but Winick seems to have forgotten an important point: Robin was a wise guy with the villains, but he always gave respectful deference to Bruce. Some of these are nitpicks, and not anything major, but they never stop, so their sum reduces this initial attempt at "Batman Reborn" to a mediocre retread. Should this even be "Reborn?" Bruce didn't come back yet, so it's more like "Legacy Continued," or "Batman Substituted." Intermingled throughout the entire issue is the problem of whether Grayson would assume the mantle, but we just went through months of Battle for the Cowl, in which we all knew he would be the final choice. So why, after months of this, is Winick doing his own version of the story, with Grayson still questioning whether he will don the cowl?

Other small bits are out of sync, such as Alfred using the name "Richard" too often; granted, this is a debatable point, but Alfred only breaks his composure and decorum for a good reason, and a normal conversation was no place for him to go from addressing the kid as "Master Damian," but calling Richard by his first name twice. Add in the cussing, and you've got a comic going slowly down the drain. The cussing is nothing new to Winick; he turned Nightwing into a cursing fool when he tried to reboot the Outsiders (another mistake to include Grayson there, because now he has membership elements in the Teen Titans, the Titans, the JLA, and the Outsiders). Alfred does not need to be cussing, and neither does the new Batman. It's a pure choice of the writer's voice interrupting the natural, known quality of these long-standing characters' own voices, and it is inappropriate. In the old days, an editor would have questioned all of these choices.

It's not a pure train wreck. The villain choices are good, and Grayson's "teaching" moment with Damian was good. Benes knows how to craft a dramatic confrontation, so the art is good the entire way. However, we've already seen the debut of Batman and Robin under Grant Morrison, with none of the little drawbacks seen here, so this title comes up a definite second place in a competition. It's hard not to compare and contrast the two titles, but unless Winick learns to let the characters use their own voices, and stops interjecting his own personal voice too often, this title will suffer.

Booster Gold 21

by Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund

Rip Hunter is on a mission and it looks like he's trying to get a glimpse of things to come to give him ideas of what else needs doing. The "death" of Batman takes center stage, but only so far as it affects Rip's own secrecy. His mission to Booster is to infiltrate the Batcave and recover the photos that helped Bruce Wayne to learn that Booster was involved in more than everybody else thought.

Jurgens draws as well as writes, and Rapmund does the finishing inks, as they have for a while now. The Batcave looks cool, although the one permitted inconsistency is that anybody can draw the Batcave any way they want to. There must be a hundred variations I've seen in the past couple years, all of them with a different layout. Grayson is already active as Batman at this time, and confronts Booster, but according to the villain who appears, the Black Beetle was aiming to take out Grayson for some unknown reason. There is still a bit of mystery to this character, and no one is sure which century he really comes from in the first place.

In a fun bit, Grayson disappears in a split-second, and another Robin suit appears in a memorial case, signifying that Grayson died while being Robin, leaving Booster with the problem of going back to prevent Black Beetle from killing Grayson. The last line is a little hokey, with Booster telling Skeets, "this time... we dare not fail." With time travel, you always have to wonder things like why Black Beetle bothered to try to kill Grayson at the exact moment he took up the cowl, when he could always have killed him as a boy in the first place. I'm guessing he wanted to avoid unforeseen consequences and just disrupt the mantle of the Bat right at the point of change, because who knows how a dead Grayson affects everything else.

The second feature really is a backup feature. I understand DC's point about these characters being worthy in their own right, and they don't want any negative connotations of "backup" or "second string" in people's minds when they read that part, but unless you're splitting the comic equally, an eight-page story is a backup. Mike Norton does the art, and Matthew Sturges writes a light-hearted Blue Beetle adventure that reminds of us his supporting cast. The humor of the situation is conveyed well, and the teenage friends that used to date is a situation we don't get much of in comics, so it's good to see a little variety like that. I'm not sure how successful the "second feature" concept will play for the price increase, but it's a big improvement over Marvel's policy of including reprints of old stories.

Green Lantern Corps 37

by Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason

One thing that is absolutely not this creative team’s fault: every time I see Mongul Jr., I fail to see anything significant to distinguish him from Mongul the first, making me wonder why anyone bothered to kill the guy off in the first place. The story almost tells itself at this point: Sodam Yot has donated his power to Daxam’s sun, turning it yellow. Arisia is able to address the suddenly-powerful Daxamites and harness them to use their newfound abilities wisely, rather than just run off in a rage-fueled rampage.

Lanterns Ash and Saarek link up to learn the scarred Guardian has sent them both on the same mission in search of the Anti-Monitor’s power. Gleason’s art works well in space, but I still find the mouths he draws to be distracting sometimes. The imprisonment of Lyssa Drax of the Yellow Corps inside the scarred Guardian’s book is both dramatic and well-drawn.

Back on Oa, the fight is anyone’s guess until the Alpha Lanterns show up, appropriately aloof and imposing. The scarred Guardian finally hatches her plan, and the sky of Oa is ripped asunder, starting the transformation that will conclude the Emerald Eclispe storyline and finally usher in Blackest Night. All this and Kanjar Ro too!

Red Robin 1

by Chris Yost and Ramon Bachs

Ramon Bachs gives life to Tim in his new guise, that of the Red Robin. The costume design is good, although a little reminiscent of Dr. Midnight. Tim is on a mission, but constantly distracted by crime that he can't walk away from. He feels the responsibility to act. Yost has some good story beats in here, such as reminding us that he has been adopted by Bruce Wayne, and the rationale behind choosing the tainted Red Robin persona. I like how Damian is portrayed as well: he's back to his bratty self, but already dressed in the Robin costume as he is, he seems to have inherited the costume's propensity towards mockery and sarcasm. Anyone who puts that costume on turns into a wise-cracker.

The one big failure of this entire Bat-universe drama is the stripping of the Robin identity from Tim without consultation. I cannot imagine any universe where Grayson would arbitrarily take the uniform and give it to someone else. If Grayson wanted Damian by his side, he could have created some kind of Bat-Junior costume. I had imagined that after reading Morrison's Batman and Robin, Tim had given the costume up voluntarily, but the insult to Tim was unnecessary and out of character for Richard Grayson. It almost ruins the entire book for me.

Tim has an epiphany that Bruce is still alive. Although this was a good choice, it was poorly portrayed. Sitting around staring at nothing, we have no real insight into Tim's thinking process. For someone who might possibly be one of the world's best detectives some day, this was a brilliant opportunity to showcase his reasoning, but instead we are given a lemon. Yost's writing makes other slip-ups, such as Tim narrating how he "didn't find out the details until later" on one page, and then on the next page, remarking, "I didn't know any of this at the time." We get it already! Learn how to write better for a 22-page comic, please?!?! There's nothing worse than picking up a limited number of pages with fewer words than there used to be in them, and having to read essentially the same words over again. If there is any place where you want to focus your writing and explain things in the least amount of words with little repetition, it's in a comic book.

Finally, we learn that al Ghul is tracking Tim's movements, but the depiction is lousy. We see three bad guys spying on Tim through an open window. Where Tim is staying, he's still half-dressed in his uniform. As paranoid as Batman is and would have taught him, there's no reason for Tim to display this poor a sense of operational security; it's a good way to wind up dead. Damian might do it, but Tim wouldn't. They should have found a better way to show us the bad guys tracking him.

The series has potential, and Ramon Bachs does well with the pencils; I much prefer him to Freddie Williams' style, personally. My biggest concern is that the single identifying element of this title may prove to be Tim's obsessions with finding Bruce Wayne. If so, then it could devolve to be a place-holder until DC is ready to bring Bruce Wayne back, and I think in order for Tim's character to grow, it will have to be about more than that. We'll find out in the next couple of issues which direction they are going to choose.

Tpull is Travis Pullen. He started reading comics at 5 years old, and he can't seem to stop.

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