Our heroine is a hybrid of humanity and the Daemonites, who sent her to Earth to gather Intel on the superhero community, and circumvent the obstacles said heroes would present to a Daemonite invasion. And of course the most practical, least obtrusive way to achieve this is to make your sleeper agent a shapeshifting supermodel stripper who telepathically plucks secrets from denizens of the nearby New Orleans military base while she gives them private dances. Hey, don’t look like that; it could work …
Deadman wants answers. Rama Kushna, the goddess who tasked him with possessing souls in need, has told him that when he’s satisfied some karmic balance, he’ll find enlightenment.
For more than a decade, Aquaman has been the joke of DC Comics. Although mentions in TV shows such as Entourage and Big Bang Theory have helped keep him in the public consciousness, it’s been as a figure of ridicule, universally derided as the most useless hero in DC’s pantheon. Geoff Johns takes all the major Aquaman jokes and slaps each one soundly round the face as he dismisses it, hopefully forever.
Can we get a little more face time? No, seriously, it’s around page 4 before we get a good look at our heroine’s face, though we see plenty of the rest of her, predominantly boobs and butt as she throws together a few valued possessions before fleeing her home pursued by criminals whom she’s managed to piss off.
I was blindsided by this. Wonder Woman was the comic I fully expected to hate this week. But Red Hood I didn’t expect much of, and demanded less; I could handle Roy Harper being without a daughter as long as he had both arms and didn’t have the stupid and implausible relationship with the murderess, and this promised that, so I went in with low expectations.
Presumably whatever DC was hoping for with this slightly demented line-wide relaunch, it wasn’t to instil a feeling of dread in the reader. Yet that’s exactly what welled up within when gazing upon the first page of Hawk and Dove 1. In fact I had to put it down, make a cup of tea and try again later.
… Best of all, it avoids Morrison’s two greatest faults – weak piddle-away endings that don’t match the strength of his opening concepts, and a propensity for being up himself to an extent, well, usually seen only on very specialist websites…
Remember the underwhelming, yet massively-hyped Justice League 1? Well this is the opposite – in that the entire team gets together in five pages, they interact with each other and actually do something! Yes! That’s still possible to accomplish in a comic, in 2011!
I thought All-Star Batman was vile. It was vulgar, self-consciously ‘controversial’, and only borderline competent, despite some admittedly pretty illustration. It was the comic-book equivalent of monkeys in the zoo flinging poo at the patrons because they’re bored. But at least it aspired to some content… as opposed to the hollowed-out All-Star Batman that is Justice League 1.
