Eyecandy.

I like it. But it’s tough to have nothing but eyecandy. There needs to be a structure, a frame, a skeleton for the flesh to hang upon.

Unfortunately, the skeleton of this week’s Batwoman is sort of wimpy and dull. Which is too bad, because the art continues to be very very nummy.

In this episode (#855, Sept 09), Batwoman fights the loli-goth villainess, Alice. It should be tons of fun, but Alice is just regular old crazy instead of being interestingly batshit insane. The two tussle and Batwoman disarms her and then Alice slashes Batwoman with a razor hidden in her mouth. It’s laced with poison, which is also sort of boring, really, as villainous feints go, but it does give the artist a chance to do this, which makes is worthwhile:

Isn’t that pretty? I love the scrollwork and the design elements and the way everything becomes lush and strange.

So Batwoman has sad but very pretty insane imaginings and then we get to see Alice go back to her minions. Again, there’s some interesting play with the layout:

Then there’s another little tussle. It’s kind of stock and there’s a cliffhanger where what seems to be werewolves and octopus creatures show up. I had hoped that maybe they’d do something with the Alice theme, because I’m bored with stock weird monsters. It would be so much more fun if the werewolves were wearing top hats and vests with pockets and if the octopuses had to wear red and white livery. But oh well. Maybe things will be brought to an exciting climax in the last issue, but I’m not holding my breath.

In short: Beautiful art but boring story.

Batwoman Reborn: Batwoman in Detective Comics; 854 August 2009 (Part One of Three)

Greg Rucka ,writer

J H Williams III, art

This….This is art.

Beautiful, interesting, compelling art.

I picked this comic up because I heard it featured Batwoman, lesbian socialite by day and crime fighter at night, and I figured that I couldn’t go too far wrong there.

The story isn’t that exciting, so far, but I don’t really care. The art is absolutely exquisite. *flails hands around*

The plot is pretty much this: Batwoman is trying to find the person who is leading this religion of crime in Gotham. They’re organized by covens, and sometime in the past they caught her and tried to kill her. The leader is coming into town, and Batwoman plans to be there. Dun dun dun. Or whatever. I don’t even care.

The episode starts with a lovely little fight slash victim interrogation. Just look at this page:

The top panel is especially nice. The body torsion is correct and the leg is right, unlike my last foray into current comics, and the pose works well with the page as a whole. There’s kind of a weird, bat shaped panel thing going on, which is clever, but which I liked rather than hated. The comic takes some odd approaches to panels in general, but I very much like the way the artist moves into and out of the frames, zooming and then pulling back, choosing key bits—like her hand—to focus on.

What I like about this page is the movement. It goes from frenetic, chaotic, to quiet, wham, focus on her hand and his face, and the whole mood changes.

The comic deals with both sides of Batwoman’s identity. Her crime fighter night life, as above, and her daytime self. This is a page where she’s talking to Pop (her father I assume, but haven’t really read far enough to know for certain).

There are several fascinating things about it. One, she’s wearing crummy sweats that make her butt look big. This is not an attractive outfit; it’s the kind of thing a real woman would wear to workout in, though, if she was at home. It’s intimate and real; showing a different and fallible, human, breakable side of her.

The colors are all of a piece in the home scenes: her bright red hair fits in with the rest of the landscape of skin, wood floors and warm walls, sunlight. Very alive.

It’s quite a contrast to the fight scenes where she looks like a fetish dom.

There’s a heavy sexual element to this comic, and so far I’m finding it both sexy and well done, rather than skanky (unlike, say, Amazing Spiderman, which I picked up and would have stomped on except then I would have had to buy it). The villain—but maybe I should talk about the villain next week. No, I’m sorry, I cannot resist talking about her now:

Look at this villain! What a fantastic and fun artistic contrast. The previous pages (which I have resisted scanning, but only barely) often focus on Batwoman’s dark red lips. The villain also has painted lips. And a fetish outfit. White and innocent, very frilly and girly compared to Batwoman’s butch femme dom outfit. The boots, too, are a contrast. These boots are white and tightly laced; Batwoman’s boots are red red red with a bat in the sole.

The villain is a beautiful foil for Batwoman. When they fight—Ah, but that is a tale for next week.

In short, I thoroughly enjoyed this comic and I do not care that it was 3.99 and I do not mind the ads or the weird and badly drawn extra or the fact that I had to drive someplace special to get it. I only hope I can talk lots and lots of you into reading it and discussing it with me. My only real complaint was some truly random bolding in the dialog. Nobody would have emphasized those words in speech, but that’s kind of a quibble.

X-Men Legacy issue 226
Carey, Weaver, Tadeo, Reber

You know those people who read just the words in comics and kind of ignore the art? Yeah, I’m the opposite. I like the pretty pictures and often ignore the words.

So I’d been wanting to read some American comics and I circled my options at the Borders. I wanted superheroes (including female superheroes), some action, not too much gore and no zombies. This episode looked promising: Rogue on the cover, decent art, explosions in the background. Neat!

I picked it up and read it over coffee at the Squid Cafe, and I was….disappointed. First of all, this sucker cost me four bucks. It’s full of ads for cheesecake statues and Spiderman toothbrush holders. There’s a large excerpt in the back for some other comic. All of which is fine, except–there’s only twenty two pages of comic. For four dollars! That’s seventeen cents per page.

Well, it seemed a bit steep to me, considering I can get nearly two hundred pages of manga for 8.95 (or 5.37 if I have my Borders coupon).

Regardless, I persevered and read the art. The story isn’t that complicated. There’s this sort of riot on Castro Street (no, I don’t know why it’s there–go with it), and Rogue and company are trying to stop it from being bad.

Some of the art is really fun. Check out this page below. The colors shift from earthy and dark to this sexy, girly pink. The woman’s pose is tough, hot, and feminine. Those earrings! That attitude! I wanted to know more about her right away.

Unfortunately, most of the pages are just not this good. And she’s not in the rest of this issue.

So we switch to another scene, where Rogue is supposed to battle the big female baddie. This should be a fun scene–the big payoff for the issue. Rogue gets to strut her stuff, the baddie gets to be tough, and….

It’s weird, is what. I wanted to mail the artists a copy of a simple anatomy book. Take a look at this page:

In the top right panel, the torsion is just wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. Yes, she’s moving through her body, but the arms and body don’t add up properly. Then there’s the competing speed lines in the next section. Speedlines go one direction from the punch–Rogue is thrown. And then we have speedlines from the opposite direction with a couple of sexy boots stepping into them like they’re supposed to indicate a slipstream. What?

The leg in the second to the bottom was it for me. The force lines go up (near the foot), the baddie is kicking up, not out. But Rogue is moving to the right. What?

Wrong. All wrong.

So they battle, Rogue gets in some hits, baddie gets in some hits, Rogue goes crashing through a window and then we get this:

Keeping it classy, I see. Thanks Marvel. Cause showing a woman’s bra when she’s been in a fight and lost is what cheesecake is all about! Frankly, I took one look at this and thought about mailing Rogue a nice brochure for Enell.

So at this point I’m kind of two minds: the Rogue bits were meh, but the Lady in Pink is hawt. The colors are gorgeous, but the drawing is irritating. (Also, whoever does the inks for the eyebrows keeps leaving out a chunk of Rogue’s left eyebrow. Weird.)

Then we come to this, the US Bank portion of the issue. We’re tooling along, having a massive street showdown with lots of yummy explosions and baddie fights on Castro street and we come to this page:

At first, I thought Well, the artist traced some photo of Castro and just included a building logo in the prime center top position for verisimilitude. And then, when the logo appears right next to the baddie’s head, I thought Huh, that’s odd. And then we get to the next page.

And my eyes rolled forever.

I slapped the poor issue shut and ordered myself a consolatory cappuccino. Fortunately, I wandered into a local small comic shop and they hooked me up with a much more promising title. Batwoman! Lesbian socialite by day and crime fighter at night. Sounds good to me.