Talon 0

SO, WHY GIVE A HOOT?

The protagonist of this new ongoing series is a refugee from the Night of the Owls storyline which sprawled all over the Batman titles for 50 years, or so it seemed, earlier in 2012. The youngest recruit to the Court of Owls, an organization ostensibly devoted to rooting out crime and corruption, he was trained from childhood to become one of the assassins of the Court, known as a “Talon”. Having broken away from the corrupt Court when ordered to kill innocents, he’s striving to build a life of his own when his past abruptly catches up with him.

That’s all derived from context in this issue, as I couldn’t be arsed to read a single one of the roughly 247 crossover issues of Night of the Owls, so kudos to James Tynion IV and Scott Snyder for providing adequate infodump for new readers – that, after all, is one of the things these “Zero Issues” are supposed to be for.

What they’ve sadly failed to do is make us care about the subject of all this data. Calvin Rose is a by-the-numbers “rebellious tough guy”, all internal narrative exposition, but no character to speak of, and while he eventually takes down the former colleague sent to destroy him, I for one would have been more impressed if he’d managed to do so before the deaths of two bystanders. (Note to comics writers – having the villains snuff civilians doesn’t make the villains look badass – it simply makes your heroes look weak and ineffective; after all, if the heroes can’t protect the innocent, what the hell are they any good for?)

Put the blame on lame. Once again, our 'hero' fails to save the cookie-cutter bystanders offed to make our villains look "badass". Y*A*W*N.

Much of the issue is flashback to Rose’s horrendous childhood and training to become a Talon, which would have possibly been more effective if, the very week before, Batwoman  0 hadn’t strip-mined the same “brutal training” theme in genuinely unnerving ways, making the trials of Calvin seem positively refined by comparison.

Guillem March’s artwork seems to show less interest than his gig on the still-missed Gotham City Sirens; he’s got kind of a loose vaguely Kuberty thing going on, but as yet it’s not fully developed, and just misses the dramatic effect he’s striving for.

O bondage, up yours! Even gratuitous male nudity doesn't make Talon # 0 any more than bog-standard action fare.

Still, it’s a Batman tie-in, so I’ve no doubt that “The Littlest Owl” will “just keep moving on” for some time, until the novelty of, essentially, a Nightwing who will employ lethal force is exhausted.

But I’m afraid he’ll be moving on without this reader in his wake.