Saturday Splash Page #94

 

"Malpractice," in Terra #2, by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Amanda Conner (artist), Paul Mounts (colorist), Travis Lanham (letterer)

This mini-series came out in late 2008. I don't actually know what prompted it. There was the original, New Teen Titans Terra. The traitor, the Judas Contract, creepy relationship with creepy-ass Deathstroke, all that jazz. There was a second Terra, who looked a lot like the first, and got killed a year or so prior to this mini-series, by Black Adam when he declared war on the entire world for some reason I no longer remember.

And then this, with a Terra who looks very little like the first two. Who comes from a subterranean civilization which she defends from threats both native to that realm and from encroaching surface world dwellers. Who doesn't seem to want to associate with anyone or explain anything. She's all about that world-saving grind, 24/7, or however they measure time underground.

That can only fly so far, and Palmiotti, Gray and Conner do offer some backstory when she runs into Geo-Force, who is at least a natural person for a team-up, given his connection to the previous Terras. That's mostly in issue 3, which is when Conner gets to show us what Terra's (or Atlee, as that's her real name) home looks like. It's a giant cavern, with a lot of tall narrow buildings and bridges presumably formed from existing rock formations. A lot of their technology seems to be biologically based, as Geo-Force gets helped by some floating jellyfish thing that rewires his neural interface. It fits with how the society is presented, as watching the surface world warily, concerned about humanity's track record of using technology in the worst way.

Geo-Force ends up helping her with a guy that wanted to be a great underground explorer and stumbled into something he didn't understand. Even after the guy, who is acting out of grief and anger because, again, he's a stranger in this world, causes a lot of damage, Atlee's hope is he can be helped and restored. Which helps establish her as someone with a lot of compassion and an optimistic outlook on things. Of course, I feel like she got sucked in some "teen heroes forced into gladitorial combat" thing I vaguely remember from Teen Titans of that time. That would seem to do a lot to blunt someone's optimism about humanity. Or maybe I'm confusing that with whatever Terror Titans was.

But Conner, Gray and Palmiotti would make Terra a major supporting cast member in their Power Girl series that came out in 2009. That had its rough moments for the character, but built up a big sister/little sister relationship between the characters that was usually a lot of fun to read. We'll get to that when we get there.

What I Bought 12/30/2015 - Part 2

Hopefully you had a good night celebrating the new year, or not celebrating if you didn't want to. And hopefully I didn't come down with something from the party I went to.

Harley Quinn and Power Girl #6, by Justin Gray, Amanda Conner, and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Stephane Roux, Moritat, Elliot Fernandez, and Flaviano (artists), Paul Mounts (colorist), Marilyn Patrizio (letterer) - It's a good Star Wars homage cover, as those things go, I guess.

The sham wedding of Vartox and Power Girl does not occur, because Harley says something that somehow triggers all three of them being shunted into some weird, artificial location Vartox set up as like a fantasy world where they are married, complete with alcoholic 60s-style domestic Power Girl, and bunch of irritating kids. Much punching in all directions ensues, Peej eventually shames Vartox into just using the ring to send them home without a ceremony, and doesn't even wait to hear his dramatic monologue about the burden of his affections, and that's it.

I was trying to decide how I felt about this mini-series now that it's over, and I'm not sure. It's very much something I read in the moment, but it doesn't leave much of a lasting impression. Kind of just slides off my brain. Power Girl punching Vartox through buildings repeatedly was nice. Vartox having essentially a holodeck fantasy in a pocket dimension seems about right for him. You can almost squint and see it as his practicing to try and be a good husband in the hopes that'll happen some day, but no, it's just creepy and a bad idea all around. I'm curious about the fact they used four artists on this issue. There's no real rhyme or reason to them. It isn't one of those things where they move through several different worlds, each illustrated by someone different. I think Moritat does that page where Peej initially hits Vartox 9and the two before it), and then it shifts to Fernandez when Robo-Kara starts swinging, and I think stays with Fernandez the rest of the way. Either they handed pages off to whoever could get it done, since it's already a month late, or they just wanted to let everyone who'd been involved up to then get a little work in.

Maybe this would have worked better if it was shorter. 4 issues of, "Harley and Power Girl run into some weird thing in Vartox' world. Harley makes enthusiastic inappropriate comments while Power Girl is angry and/or exasperated," was probably enough. Cut some of the chaff with Oreth, or the Harvester of Sorrows (that scene where Harley goes nuts for 5 pages really sticks out as an unusual bit in this whole thing). I was thinking yesterday it was an extended Looney Tunes cartoon, with Harley as Bugs Bunny and Peej as Daffy. Which doesn't seem entirely right, but Harley's the one who seems able to adjust and manipulate the rules of the setting, and Power Girl's the one who is continually frustrated. Which would make Vartox Elmer Fudd? Or maybe the Abominable Snowman that was based on Lenny from of Mice and Men. "And I will hug Power Girl, and squeeze her, and call her George. . ."

Rocketeer at War #1, by Marc Guggenheim (writer), Dave Bullock (artist), Ronda Pattison (colorist), Gilberto Lazcano (letterer) - Cliff's right arm looks too small. Otherwise, it's a solid cover.

Cliff turned the rocket pack over to the government when he enlisted, and the government, in its infinite wisdom, promptly put a trained, highly skilled pilot in the infantry (but he also works as a mechanic at an airfield?). Seems sub-optimal. Cliff's fighting in North Africa, and keeping busy, first rescuing a British pilot from a burning airplane (after she'd saved by him by strafing some attacking Nazis). Yeah, Molly's an attractive lady British pilot, naturally. Then he stopped some Nazi agent from stealing a Magnatron Navigation System from an airplane, that doohickey being a key component of the rocket, that's being adapted for use in aircraft I suppose. By the end of the issue, Cliff's reunited with his rocket, because apparently no one else can use the thing without killing themselves.

I notice Guggenheim is going with Howard Hughes as the rocket's designer, rather than Doc Savage. Stevens made it Savage, but the movie used Hughes, and subsequent writers seem to vary. I think Mark Waid was firmly in the "Doc Savage" camp, based on that mini-series he and Samnee did in 2012. Guggenheim's Cliff is less stupidly jealous than Cliff usually is. I expected him to get a little more steamed when his buddies grabbed the photo Betty sent him and started hooting over it. I was a little surprised he volunteered to hand the rocket over. I would have figured him for approaching the government to let him use it to help the war somehow, and them requesting he turn it over, so then he enlists.

On the last page, when Cliff has donned the rocket pack again and takes off, Molly is standing right there next to the general, with some other soldiers looking on. This after the general described things to Cliff as 'the toppest of secrets'. Granted, the project to mass produce rocket packs is apparently a collaborative effort, because there was a Soviet lieutenant present at the test flight at the start of the issue, but it still seems not in keeping with something being top secret, to have the guy zooming around as the Rocketeer in broad daylight in front of all sorts of people.

Bullock's art seems to shift a lot over the issue. Sometimes he's using a very fine line, and some of his faces remind me of Tim Sale's work (though usually more Bruce Timm's). Other times he goes with much thicker lines. I'm not sure if Pattison's coloring plays a role in that. I'm guessing it did on the page where Cliff pulls Molly from the burning wreckage, which I thought was the best looking page in the whole issue. Just some really good work with the lighting and shadows from the flames. It almost looks like Bullock went very sparse on the number of lines, and let Pattison's colors do a lot of the work themselves. Using shading and tone to help the eye infer lines that aren't that, if that makes sense. There's a phrase for that I'm sure, but it escapes me. At times though, the art feels flat, or characters in the same panel don't feel like they're in the same panel. I can't pin it down, but something feels off to me. There needs to be more shading, the lighting being portrayed isn't right. I noticed it more near the end of the issue, like maybe Bullock had to simplify things because he was running behind.

I'm not sure if I'll buy the second issue. There was some dynamic element I was wanting from the writing and the art that didn't appear. It isn't bad, and there's elements I liked, but I'd have preferred they just skipped right to those. Maybe Cliff being in the Army proper will pay off down the line, but why not have him working as an instructor to other prospective pilots of the rocket, and then he has to go on an actual mission? Did we need the sequences of him being a regular soldier?

What I Bought 11/10/2015 - Part 2

Related to Monday's post, a couple of days ago Amazon recommended I buy a dutch oven. Which was kind of sweet, that it assumed I can actually cook. Really it was just confusing, but at least it wasn't insulting.

Atomic Robo: The Ring of Fire #3, by Brian Clevinger (words), Scott Wegener (art), Anthony Clark (colors), Jeff Powell (letters and design) - Since I'm buying through an online thing now, I should have gotten the subscription variant cover. It was more dynamic.

Ultra has, by appropriating scientists and funds from wherever they please, gotten their giant robots up and running and combating the Biomega. They're sort of winning, though the Titans are getting trashed in the process, and thousands of people are still dying in the battles. Robo and his bunch are working with China's defense industry to build Robo a new body, and devise their own plan to save the world. The former involves a different design of Tesla's as a power source (since no one knows how he built an atomic heart for Robo that small and that efficient). The latter seems to involve supersonic nuclear torpedoes. Hopefully that's a viable plan against the Biomega version of Krakoa, the Living Island, because that's now a problem.

I understand why the Tesladyne bunch would have misgivings about working in the labs of yet another government super-secret science facility, and would be worried their work could be used to further possible nefarious schemes. Even so, I wasn't entirely comfortable with Robo's new power supply being a device which lets him siphon up to 1% of China's nuclear energy output from anywhere in the world, while neglecting to mention to the country in question they did that. Feels distinctly dishonorable. Though I have to wonder if the military has video cameras in the labs, and how the countermeasures Broughton designed can stop lip-readers. Not a problem with Robo, but Broughton is a human, speaking with a human mouth in English.

Speaking of Robo's new look, it's not bad, although his neck having a collared look will take some getting used to. And just offhand, I feel like it isn't as expressive as his old look. Wegener had a real knack for getting across emotions and reactions on a character with not much in the way of facial features. Just going by this issue, it wasn't there. Maybe because Robo tends to show emotion when things start going wrong, and they haven't yet. I wish Wegener could have gone nuts with the Titan designs, but they're being built for the military, and sticking to a standard design would make sense. He gets to have some fun with the Biomega, though, so it all balances out.

Harley Quinn and Power Girl #5, by Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Justin Gray (writers), Stephane Roux (artist, pages 1-9 and 19-21), Flaviano (artist, pages 10-18), Paul Mounts (colors), Marilyn Patrizio (letters) - Vartox, it's generally considered polite to ask before introducing tentacles into the, well, I'm not sure what to call that. Hot tubbing, I guess.

The Harvester of Sorrow is a giant head that drives people mad and then feeds on the suffering. He's also so large communication is basically impossible, but his pores do serve as an easy way to get rid of Oreth. Harley decides to try getting inside to wreck things, gets captured, and ends up succeeding in her plans when the Harvester tries to feed on her sorrow, and gets a helping of the Joker, which drives it nuts. And also Harley, who rips the mustache clean off Vartox' face. Ow. Then she kind of snaps out of it in time for everyone to reach a safe distance from the explosion, and when Vartox returns, facial hair restored, he proposes to Power Girl.

I have absolutely no idea who the guy in the leather jacket and sunglasses was that Harley imagined right before charging into the Harvester. Was it Hal Jordan? The sunglasses were green. OK, the Internet tells me it's from a Bollywood film, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, which doesn't really explain anything, but I guess makes sense considering we're talking about Harley. I should stop expecting this mini-series to make sense. Like what the inner Joker in Harley was? Something the Joker actually put in her, or just the impulses that he would encourage, but which she mostly suppresses or redirects these days. If we're working off the origin they gave her in the first new 52 Suicide Squad book, he threw her into his vat of toxins, which had to do something to her mind. And that might just be the part she remembers, but not all that happened necessarily.

Flaviano and Mounts did combine to make her look suitably scary in the pages afterwards. The laughing while crying, the almost rictus grin where the teeth are clenched. The way she pounces on Vartox, but she jutting out her lower jaw in an aggressive fashion, even as she sort of tousles his hair. It's maybe the closest I've seen Conner and Palmiotti come to touching on Harley's portrayal in other DC stuff of the last few years. She's hurting people, but not restricting it to "bad" guys or whatever, but also allies. She only has limited control. So it becomes less funny and more terrifying how unconcerned she is with what she's doing.

What I Bought 10/20/2015 - Part 1

Six books for four weeks. And four of those books came out last week. It's a slow, sad time here, but oh well, make do with what we have. Quality, not quantity, I hope.

Harley Quinn and Power Girl #4, by Amanda Conner, Justin Gray, and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Stephane Roux (artist, pages 10-22), Elliot Fernandez (artist, pages 1-9), Paul Mounts with Alex Sinclair (colorists, Sinclair for pages 18-20), Marilyn Patrizio (letterers) - In another second, Power Girl will open her eyes, realize she was only dreaming about (insert character of your choice), and throw up in Vartox' facial hair.

Evil Vartox appears to have Power Girl on the ropes, only to be freed of the mind control by the purring of a caticorn that decided it liked Harley because she lured out a giant, carnivorous fish for it to eat. Vartox tries to explain where he knows Power Girl from, though no one bothers to explain to him this isn't that Power Girl. Oreth Odeox arrives with his gun-toting space nuns, which accomplish nothing, though he does blast Vartox' clothes off, which is much more an impediment to the bad guy than to Vartox. All seems well, but a force called the Harvester of Sorrows is about to arrive, and that will probably be bad.

Back when Annihilation: Super-Skrull was going on '06, someone explained to me Harvester of Sorrows is a reference to a Metallica song. it was used to refer to a planet-destroying weapon there, and I assume it'll be much the same here, though probably a much sillier one, given the tone of this series. Having both Power Girl and Harley to interact with Vartox is a good plan, since Peeg tends to be disgusted with him constantly, whereas Harley just keeps egging him on. It's a bit different to have a character who pretty much encourages Vartox to be himself at all times, but if anything, she's pushing him to be more Vartoxish than normal. And he's the sort who doesn't need much pushing on that score.

This was a fairly good issue, maybe because I felt like it tried moving the story forward a little more, instead of wasting so much time on drug hallucination sequences. Not that there's much of a plot, but at paying lip service to it is nice. I still wouldn't say any of the jokes made me laugh, though some of the expressions Roux gives Vartox are pretty great. His big grin when Harley compliments his "evil" wardrobe, and his haughty look when he's lecturing Oreth while wearing no clothes in particular. Power Girl said Harley had no shame, she just as easily could have been speaking of Vartox.

Starfire #5, by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Emanuela Lupacchino (pencils), Ray McCarthy (inks), Hi-Fi (colors), Tom Napolitano (letters) - I notice the rest of the sea life as unsure of how they feel about what's happening as I was. Good to know.

Kori has some drinks with the killer guy, they trade toasts, she touches his hand, and someone gets a flashback of his life. Wherein we learn he was a doctor with the power to cure cancer, except it made the tumor in his head grow, which eventually made him the crazy serial killer he is now. He flees, Kori doesn't follow, and isn't sure whether she should tell the sheriff. About the serial killer. Kori, you're an immigrant, not an idiot, c'mon now. The guy her sister hired to find her is approached by the Citadel, who want Kori dead, and they captured the guy's wife and kid. The guy agrees, but only after blowing up one of the Citadel's ships, which might have had said wife and kid. O-kay. Little nuts, though I did appreciate his wife's smirk after the Citadel guys started freaking out. I guess you don't marry a dude like that unless you're prepared for that sort of thing.

Back on earth, Kori goes to her interview at the aquarium, but a lack of experience leaves her out of luck. Isn't that always the way? You need experience to get the job, but need the job to get experience. Anyway, Kori does wind up getting the job, because the bounty hunter guy shows up and kills all the other applicants. I'm JOKING! Actually, she makes out with a sad dolphin so she can speak its language and find out why it's sad. The ability to communicate with sea life gets her the job. There's a big party, the sheriff seems to have been roped into Kori and Atlee's trip to visit Atlee's home (whenever that happens), but when Kori gets home, she finds Dr. Killer waiting, having already attacked the sheriff's brother. Oh, and one of those jewels she had was an egg, and hatched into a star-thing that flew off. It spoke in musical notes, so maybe it's from the same sector as that one Green Lantern? Probably not.

So the dolphin thing. It seems weird, but I know this is because I associate kissing as primarily a romantic thing - and not something done with animals - whereas it isn't that necessarily for Kori. It has been at times - I'm pretty sure she wasn't kissing Boone in issue 1 just to learn 'more English' - but that needn't always be the case. So I wonder if this wasn't Conner and Palmiotti trying to drive that point home in a particularly direct fashion. She wanted to communicate with the dolphin, that would enable her to do so, so she did it. Still, not something I was expecting to read in a comic this week.

There are certain panels where Kori's hair looks like something Lupacchino drew separately, then cut and pasted into place. Note I'm not saying he isn't drawing it, just that there's something about it that makes it note seem to be part of the same picture. Like the hair and her face aren't interacting like they should. The panel on page 3 where she makes her toast in particular. Something about the color of the hair (which I guess would be more Hi-Fi's doing than Lupacchino's), or especially the dark line around the outside boundary of her hair compared to all the lines inside the mass of her hair, just really make it feel like it came from something else. Of course, the dark line might be McCarthy's doing, in which case I need to stop blaming Lupacchino. So someone on the art side of things is making Kori's hair look out of place.

31 Days of Scans - Favorite Not-So-Canonical Romance

This is not a good category for me. I'm usually pretty much OK with romances the creative teams put forward, assuming they do the legwork to set it up (and don't crap all over a different pairing I like in the process), so I don't spend a lot of time musing on hypothetical pairings. The one exception is not from comics (not originally, anyway), and that's Buffy and Spike, because Season 6 napalmed that pairing for me, then salted the Earth it stood on. I would rather see either character (but mostly Spike because I hardly give a damn about Buffy) with any other character. But that's more suitable to a hypothetical "least favorite canonical romance", and like I said, I don't really consider it a comic book thing.

To the extent I do consider possible pairings that haven't been romantically involved, it's usually characters already established as being friends. It seems logical enough to me that they were friends, then it became something more. The thing is, I can't shake two concerns. One, that there are so few legit platonic friendships in comics that it kind of stinks to turn one into yet another romantic pairing, and two, since I'm usually thinking of two female characters who are friends, that it's just some pervy thing on my part.

But you know what, I did think of one pairing that's never happened in continuity that intrigues me.

Power Girl and Dr. Mid-Nite.

For whatever reason, Dr. Pieter Cross is one of the costumed types Power Girl hangs out with the most in recent history from what I can tell, albeit almost exclusively in comics whose creative teams involve Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray and Geoff Johns to varying degrees. But that's fine.

The two get along well, which is not something one can always say about Power Girl and other characters. The Doc is not threatened by the fact Kara is vastly more physically powerful than he is. Peej respects Mid-Nite's skills as a crimefighter and as a doctor. They seem to have an easy rapport. I feel like most characters' reactions to Power Girl's straightforward, confident personality fall into three categories: Mildly exasperated, admiring, irritated. Cross, probably from experience dealing with patients, just seems to accept it. He can enjoy talking to her, but if she starts to get defensive about something, he doesn't press. He recognizes that won't get anywhere with her.

Also, he's a moderately well-off guy with a strong community spirit, and Karen is a CEO who ran a company that tried to develop super-science that was helpful to the average person. I think the mutual interest in trying to improve the world outside punching things would provide some common ground, but there's enough differences they wouldn't overlap too much.

Also, Dr. Mid-Nite is a low-profile enough hero I don't think there's much risk of Power Girl becoming "Dr. Mid-Nite's Girlfriend", which is pretty important for the character, especially since she's largely avoided being a supporting character to a male hero up to this point. The nature of the threats they tend to face solo are different enough that, again, there wouldn't be too much overlap. They could each still have their own worlds, so to speak, and connect when and where it made sense. Plus, the adventures of Ollie the Owl and Peej's cat!

Power Girl and Mid-Nite react to this idea with predictable weariness in Power Girl #7. No, wait, they're reacting to the arrival of Vartox. Either way, the script is by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner is the artist, Paul Mounts the colorist, and John J. Hill the letterer. And the Doc had better consider his words carefully, or this thing is over before it begins in JSA Classified #1, by Geoff Johns (writer), Conner (penciler), Palmiotti (inker), Mounts (colorist), Rob Leigh (letterer).

What I Bought 7/22/2015 - Part 1

As promised, I ventured to the store and purchased comics, obtaining most of the ones I sought. They were missing a couple, but I’ll find those somewhere else and tack their reviews on later, maybe next week.

Harley Quinn and Power Girl #2, by Amanda Conner, Justin Gray, and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Stephane Roux (artist, pages 1-18), Elliot Fernandez (artist, pgs. 19-22), Paul Mounts (colorist, pgs. 1-18), Alex Sinclair (colorist, pgs. 19-22), John J. Hill (letterer) – Harley, you’re partially obscuring Peej’s boob window! How is she supposed to distract these guys when you do that? I guess she could just punch them without them being distracted first. Seems inefficient, though.

That’s what she spends most of the issue doing, trying to smash Oreth’s considerable army, while Harley flees from a cheerful killbot out to sew her orifices together. While Harley succeeds in transforming her foe into a cheerful pile of rabbit-shaped robot junk, Peej is overwhelmed by numbers, until a super-powered strike team of Vartox’ exes arrive to lend a hand. This team tends to bicker a lot and pointlessly shout their names, so it’s pretty much the ‘70s X-Men (albeit dressed more like the Mike Grell-drawn Legion of Super-Heroes). At least they don’t constantly describe their powers out loud. Harley shows up with a spaceship so they can rescue Vartox, who is busy being transformed into something by Oreth.

I’m guessing the chief bad guy is going to wind up have a lot of repressed urges he needs help getting in touch with. Good thing Harley’s a licensed psychiatrist. I was just joking about that, but I could see that being how this problem is handled, with liberal doses of trying to smash the problem with a hammer thrown in. Because it’s still not at all serious, from Power Girl telling Harley not to blow anything up, especially crap (and Harley didn’t blow anything up), to the XGF arguing about whether the one guy on the team should even be there, and him arguing that calling it an Ex-Girlfriend Force isn’t fair to him. Peej’s expression in that panel is great. She has her eyes shut and this sour expression, and you can tell she’s about to start hitting people if they don’t change the subject.

It does highlight a difference between pre- and post-Flashpoint DC. I think pre-Flashpoint Power Girl would have been exasperated, but she’d have rolled with the absurdity of all this, whereas this Power Girl just seems massively frustrated by everything about this world. Part of that is the old Peej had met Vartox, so she’d at least have context for some of these comments. But in general, she seemed at least a little more inclined to accept things were odd and enjoy it. Current Power Girl is a little more focused, but consequently much more easily aggravated by distractions.

Starfire #2, by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Emanuela Lupacchino (pencils), Ray McCarthy (inks), Hi-Fi (colors), Tom Napolitano (letters) – And on that day, Starfire learned parrots don’t like it when you try to remove their feathers to clean them.

Kori gets an introduction to severe Earth weather as the hurricane hits the island. She manages to get her landlord and her grandson to the school where everyone is hunkering down, then gets plastered with a big sign, which knocks her into some odd fellow’s bathroom, where he is hunkered down. He (and his pugs) go with her, but only because the Sun Goddess told him the Mistress of the Winds would be coming. I can’t tell if that’s going to be significant later, or if he’s just a random oddball Kori meets once. Sheriff Stella’s brother heads out in the middle of all this to try and rescue a couple in a busted boat, and they all get sunk. Fortunately the sheriff found Kori, and after a brief detour to rescue that freaking parrot again, Kori heads out and rescues them all, though it was a bit of a near thing with Gabe, who is possibly smitten with his rescuer. The storm passes, families are reunited, but Kori’s new home is destroyed. Wow, that didn’t take long, and this is why I don’t have much interest in living in coastal regions. Also, some odd thing crawled out a hole in the ground, looking for someone, and he at some poor guy with really obvious tan lines on his arms and legs. Possibly even worse than mine, which is impressive. Nice touch there by Hi-Fi, I assume.

One thing that concerned me about Conner and Palmiotti’s writing on Harley Quinn was that at times they seemed to just be throwing everything they can think of at the wall. The end result is that there are so many different things and characters around, most of them don’t really get developed. It still works to an extent there, because the title character is so scattershot herself, but I’m hoping a similar approach isn’t going to be taken here. Now that Kori isn’t going to be living at the trailer park, will we see Tina and Boone again, or is their part in the story done already? It’s too early to say for sure, and I feel pretty confident Stella and her brother will be regulars in the book, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

I’m curious how they did the rain in this issue. It’s a bunch of thin white lines, and so I don’t know if that’s something Hi-Fi did, or if Lupacchino drew all those in over the rest of the art, and it was understood not to color those in. In the places where they overlap other linework (a person’s hand for instance), you can still see that linework, but sort of faded. So maybe it’s not about not coloring those spaces in, but coloring them in with white? I don’t know, it was just something I noticed on the two-page splash on pages 2 and 3, and it got me wondering. I will say the characters don’t look like they’re inhabiting the same space as the hurricane. I feel like their clothes, and especially their hair, ought to be showing more effects from being in this storm. I’ve been drenched to the skin plenty of times in storms that are likely nowhere near as fierce as what those characters are supposed to be experiencing, and clothes sit differently on you in those situations. OK, Kori’s wearing some alien fabric, and she’s solar-powered, so maybe it’s different for her, but that doesn’t explain all the Earth folk. I mean, the poor joker who gets killed by the subterranean creature is wearing a shirt that ought to be clinging to him by the time he died, you know?

What I Bought 7/2/2015 - Part 1

Remember how I said 10 books over 4 weeks was pretty sorry? Now it’s 5 books over 3 weeks. Months with 5 Wednesdays are frequently disappointing.

Batman Beyond #2, by Dan Jurgens (writer), Bernard Chang (artist), Marcelo Maiolo (colors), Dave Sharpe (letters) – I can’t think of much to say about this cover. I feel like Batman should be trying to stop the cyborgs shooting at people rather than fleeing? Inque should maybe get her hip back out of sight, because it might ruin her element of surprise?

Max and Barbara try to keep Tim alive while cyborgs gather all the new arrivals for “processing”, which is to say Brother Eye pumps them full of drugs and scopes out everything they know, leaving them grinning, mindless husks. Lovely. Max gets caught, and before Babs and Tim can escape, Eye has their faces from Max’s memory, and his chief overseer at this place is Terry’s old foe, Inque. Tim’s first attempt to fight one of Terry’s rogues doesn’t go so well, because apparently he left his brain back in the past. If water proved to be a weakness of hers in the past, it stands to reason she’d be prepared for you to use it. Maybe he should have used Mad Stan as a warm-up? He gets captured, Barbara gets captured, and a shadowy figure on the Moon Eye is using for a host body demands they be processed.

I feel like Brother Eye must have moved the Moon closer to Earth for the picture on that first page. Both bodies seem too large for our vantage point. Either the Moon should be smaller, if we’re close to Earth, or vice versa. Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe Brother Eye really did hook the Moon up with an independent propulsion system. Darkseid has one for his world, Ego was forcibly given one, it’s all the rage with planetary-level threats. Chang and Maiolo are still using the panels with a blank red background, and the figures either in all black and white. They even stepped up usage, since there are about 15 panels in this issue like that. I still like it, it’s a very cool visual effect, the panels really grab the eye, but I worry they might be overusing it. There was a nice bit on page 8, at the bottom, where as Max is being interrogated, over three consecutive panels, the view keeps zooming in, and the colors shift from the more normal scheme in the first one, to the red-heavy style in the third, with the second in-between, heavily orange, but still with other distinct colors. I guess to symbolize her resistance being worn down, and the third panel being the point where she (and Tim and Babs by extension) are sunk, because the best lie she could manage didn’t take. I will say, I don’t understand why they tried to play Inque up as this shadowy, unseen figure for half the issue, considering she’s right there on the cover. It wasn’t exactly a surprise when she attacked Tim and Barbara. Catwoman would have been a surprise. Inque just on the cover as a ruse, to throw the reader off.

I’m still not sure this is going to be what I was looking for. The potential is there – I would have been fine with Tim gradually working his way towards a Big Bad he discovers is causing a lot of misery, just not immediately, I guess. Also a little concerned about Max now. Not really excited for Jurgens to take a weedwhacker to Terry’s old supporting cast just because Tim’s in there now, so hopefully this isn’t the start of some trend. Maybe she can bounce back from it?

Harley Quinn and Power Girl #1, by Amanda Conner, Justin Gray, and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Stephane Roux (artist), Paul Mounts (colorist), John J. Hill (letterer) – Harley’s hairstyle is just bizarre, even for her. It’s like a Marge Simpson split in two.

The entirety of this mini-series already took place between two panels in Harley’s ongoing series, but we hadn’t gotten to see what happened. Now we do, and the answer is, they wound up back in the pre-Flashpoint DCU, ran into some creepy Yoda-guy with a pet Hydra (I feel like these are jokes about Star Wars and Marvel both being under Disney’s umbrella now, but I could be wrong), then stumbled across one of Vartox’s headships. The ship, once it realizes one of the heroines is Power Girl, is only too eager to take them back to his homeworld, which has fallen under the boot of some uptight jerk named Oreth Odeox. Upon arriving at Valeron, they’re immediately shot down, then nearly charged with being prostitutes, until Harley “accidentally” blows the guy’s head off with something she took from not-Yoda’s weapon cache. About that time, Vartox’ chief science guy shows up, we get some discussion of how this is definitely the universe where Peej helped Vartox save his planet, then more of Oreth’s goons show up.

It’s all entirely goofy, but that’s fine. I’m not sure whether it’s Roux inking his own work, or if it’s Paul Mounts colors, but I really like Roux’s work more now than I have in the past. When I’d see it on Birds of Prey, there was always something about it that threw me off (there’s one cover with Misfit and Black Alice on it I’m thinking of in particular). Expressions were exaggerated to a comical extent, but it was trying to look realistic. The overall presentation clashed in my head. Not the case here. Harley’s expressions in particular are fairly exaggerated, as she tends to talk with her entire body, lots of hand gestures and such, but it works really well. Maybe it’s the silly tone of the book, or Harley’s character in general (though Power Girl has some excellent faces as well), but the whole thing just works.

I see why they titled this issue “Extrastellar Exploitations”, given there are more than a couple of panels that provide a pretty decent close-up on Power Girl’s rear end. They still work for conveying relevant information, but they probably didn’t have to be angled that particular way, you know? Or maybe they did, given this book. What the heck, right?

Also, I probably shouldn’t be surprised Vartox had Power Girl androids made, but I am a little bit. I thought he regarded her too highly for her assistance to his people to resort to pale imitations. Though I’m sure whenever Harley and Peej meet one, Vartox will insist it was done as a measure of respect for her.