A little more on Superman Unchained

I reviewed Superman Unchained, Scott Snyder, Jim Lee, Dustin Nguyen and Scott Williams' Superman story line, for Robot 6 this week. You can read the piece by clicking here. Overall, I thought it was a pretty great Superman story, despite all the quibbles one might have about how it was marketed and sold, from its goofy title to it's ridiculous number of variant covers (58, by my count) to a few plot points that, were I an editor, I likely would have suggested changing or even just tweaking.

The biggest "problem" with the book is, however, also one of its virtues—Jim Lee's artwork. I like Lee a lot more than many critics who have been reading and writing about comics as long as I have, but sometimes he works on particular projects better than other times, and sometimes he meshes better with particular writers than he does with other writers. And Snyder and Lee aren't the match made in heaven that Frank Miller and Lee were, nor does his style seem to fit that of Superman Unchained as well as it did with All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder, or even "Hush."

One could say that Lee's artwork is the main reason this book was such a big deal in the first place, and there's probably something to that, but I found it quite interesting how low the sales of the book slipped during its run. After the first issue or three, it was being outsold by Snyder and Greg Capullo's regular old Batman monthly, despite significant incentives in the form of so many goddam variant covers.

I don't think that's necessarily because Capullo is more popular than Lee now, and may have more to do with Batman being more popular than Superman, but I do think its significant, and I wonder if the market doesn't more eagerly embrace a talented, punctual artist who meshes well with his or her writer more readily than it does a superstar artist with a bad reputation for hitting deadlines these days.

Anyway, I had a few more thoughts about Superman Unchained I didn't quite fit into the review in anyway that wouldn't have made what probably wasn't all that well-written a piece read worse still, so I thought I'd pull them out and address them here.

1.) JIM LEE'S DESIGN WORK As talented as Lee may be, and as popular as his work may be, I don't think anyone's ever claimed he was the world's greatest costume designer...at least not since he was drawing the X-Men for Marvel in his pre-Image days. I know a lot of people have claimed the exact opposite regarding his costume design skills, however, as is evident from the less-than-enthusiastic reception Superman, The Justice League and so many of the New 52 superheroes got when their new costumes started being unveiled (And, those with longer memories my recall his redesign of The Huntress' costume during "Hush" or his Green Lantern Kyle Rayner redesign in those long ago, pre-Green Lantern: Rebirth days. See also the entire WildStorm universe).

He brings some pretty lousy designs to play in this storyline. The first time I rolled my eyes was when I saw what Lois Lane was wearing to the office. I guess I'm not sure what material her glove-like dress is made of, but it's tight enough you can see her abs through it, so it sure doesn't look business casual. Also, that color!

The bigger disappointment is in the look of the new character, who is a Superman analogue who has worked closely with the United States military in secret since the late 1930s. He is basically a Superman analogue who made different choices than Superman, and while they attempt to be friends—or at least allies—it's clear from his first appearance he's going to end up spending most of the book in conflict with Superman.

Snyder gives him the not-very-friendly nickname of "Wraith," which was mean to be an acronym of "William Rudolph's Ace In The Hole," which makes me wonder what they called him upon first meeting him, before they knew he'd be their "Ace In The Hole," or their "Aith," as it were (Because he's been "invisible" all this time though, the name does function as an appropriate one for him).

Here's our first look at him:

Lee draws Wraith as big, gray and monstrous in proportion. He has the big, broad face of a Mongul or a Darkseid (particularly as Lee draws Jack Kirby's evil god), and that gray, rocky skin further suggests Darkseid...and, of course, Doomsday (Lee has created at least one good guy with that very visage, if not the glowing red eyes, in his WILDC.A.T.s character Maul, the guy with horns that grow out of his shoulder blades.)

It's never discussed, and you can only see it very clearly in a few instances, but the pattern of red energy that covers the character forms the shape of an Eagle clutching talons of arrows around his chest. Turns out that even in the New 52, a world without a Golden Age of superheroes, Superman still wasn't the first guy with superpowers to wear a logo/sigil on his chest!

Lee has Wraith change shape to various degrees in various situations throughout the book; I think these changes are meant to suggest his body adapting to different circumstances and/or reflecting his moods and mental states, but at several points throughout the book he grows spikes all over his body, making him look still more like Doomsday.

The Superman analogue that Geoff Johns, John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson are confronting the Man of Steel with over in Superman meanwhile, looks perfectly human, save for a weird head of hair, and doesn't look much more inherently evil than Superman or any other superhero might. Superman may or may not end up coming into conflict with that guy, but his nature isn't so thoroughly telegraphed as Wraith's is.

Also, at one point, Wraith puts on this stupid looking armor/girdle, that renders him immune to a "synthetic mineral" that works on Wraith the same way kryptonite works on Superman:

That image is by Nguyen, not Lee, but note how stocky and Darkseid-like Nguyen draws the character, as if he's working from a description of "Darkseid, but nude, save for a goofy glowing red 'armor' that looks a little like football shoulder pads or something."

Wraith's not the only one who puts on armor during the course of the storyline. Batman appears throughout, and most of his scenes find him wearing a specially-designed "stealth suit" that renders him invisible to Superman's many super-senses. And what does a stealth suit look like?

Well, it glows bright yellow, for one thing.

I might have gone for an all-black Bat-suit, either one that rendered Batman as completely featureless shadow, with a cowl that covered his eyes and mouth as well, giving him a creepy, feature-less face (think Black Panther without eyes), or at least an all-black suit, with black triangle lenses for eyes instead of white or yellow ones, and a black bat-symbol over a black bat-suit.

At the very least, I wouldn't have had it glow.

But then, I'm not a comic book artist or a stealth suit designer.

Then there's a scene where General Sam Lane and the military forces he commands attacks The Fortress of Solitude with these neat giant dog droid tanks bristling with anti-Superman weaponry. Superman meets them in a suit of armor with special weaponry of his own and he looks like this:

I think his plan was to make the soldiers laugh so hard that they would be incapacitated long enough for him to round them up at super-speed, but it doesn't work, and he's forced to fight them using his shield and laser ninja sickle and wire thingee.

Poor Superman. And to think, people used to laugh at your mullet!

2.) WONDER WOMAN Much of Superman's expected supporting cast appears, playing roles of various importance—Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, General Lane—and, of course, Batman plays a pretty big role. Essentially, Batman's there for Superman to bounce ideas off of and to supply him with research and development help (The stealth suit is used to answer a question regarding whether or not one can elude all of Superman's super-senses, and it's Batman that makes the Wraith kryptonite for Superman).

While various Justice Leaguers get mentioned in passing, particularly near the climax, where every nuclear weapon on Earth is launched at the same time and, later, when an alien armada prepares to invade, the only other Leaguer to appear on-panel aside from Batman is Wonder Woman.

She's instrumental in a scene in which Wraith attacks Batman in the Bat-cave (see above; and note the panel before has Batman asking Wraith, "Penny for your thoughts?").

Wonder Woman's relationship with the Man of Steel and The Dark Knight, as individuals and as a pair, has been portrayed in many different ways over the decades, and she's been romantically entangled with both...just barely with Batman during Joe Kelly's run on JLA (and in the Justice League cartoons), and she is currently dating Superman in DC's comics.

My favorite version of the trio's relationship is the one suggested in the Batman: The Brave and The Bold cartoon, where the three of them are essentially super-best friends. Wonder Woman is just one of the guys...not by being essentially guy-like, but because the three friends' relationship has nothing to do with their genders at all. It's a little like they just swapped out Robin Dick Grayson for Wonder Woman in the relationship suggested by all those fun old World's Finest comic book covers, you know?

As I mentioned in my Robot 6 review, Snyder focuses on Superman's relationship with Lois Lane throughout the book, most intensely at the climax, where he gets a few pages with Lois and only a few short words of strategy over a Justice League communicator with Wonder Woman. Now, Superman's relationship with Lois is just one of great friends here, and it's possible that Superman's keeping his game face on with Wonder Woman at the moment, but it's an odd note to strike.

In fact, I almost wonder if the book would be better without Wonder Woman in at all. She only gets a few lines, lines like:

•"They accessed silos around the world. It's bad."

•"I'll do what I can to help Green Lantern. Still, we're looking at a sixty percent stop rate at best."

•"Superman...it's Batman's servers, they're picking something up in the current running through the cave. An energy pattern."

•"Is it Wraith? Does he have some link to the Earthstone?"

•"So what do we do, Superman? I can tell you have a plan by your tone. Whatever it is, we're helping."

And that's it. Those are all of Wonder Woman's lines in the whole book. Even in the scene where she plays the most prominent role (above), stopping Wraith from kill Batman, she's just playing the role that anyone stronger than Batman could have played. She could have been swapped out for Cyborg, Green Lantern or the New 52 version of Aquaman in that same scene. And she doesn't have any lines at all throughout it.

Superman shows up shortly after to save her from Wraith.

So I'm a little torn. It's nice she's in the book at all, but it's weird how little she has to do, or even say. During the Trinity's fight with Wraith, for example, Batman fights Wraith one-on-one for about seven pages, before Wonder Woman saves him, fighting for about three pages alongside Batman, until Superman arrives for the next issues Superman vs. Wraith throwdown. Throughout it all, Batman gets all the quips.

3.) THE VARIANTS So yeah, they went a little super-overboard with those, huh?

That said, there was work from a lot of my favorite superhero artists, some of whom just don't seem to get the amount of work they deserve from DC anymore (provided they even want it, of course), and many of whom probably could have really made Superman Unchained sing in a way that Lee couldn't.

These are broken into various categories, and it was especially fun to see the first appearance and Golden Age versions of Superman. Gary Frank, for example, is hardly one of my favorite artists, but I did love his Golden Age style cover, from the look on Superman's face and the particular costume he wore, to the look on Lois' face as she cheers the bemused Superman on in his fight with a lion.

It was also great to see favorite characters I haven't seen in their original, superior forms in so long, like Superboy as drawn by Tom Grummet and Steel as drawn by Jon Bogdanove.

These are probably my favorite of them all though, because each suggests a super-compelling story all on it's own. There are a lot of great covers in this massive variant cover gallery, but these are the three I wish had stories to accompany them:

Especially that Super-Noah story. I love the idea of Superman going back in time to save the dinosaurs be relocating two of each to a different planet, thus saving their lives but also not altering the history of life on Earth. And who else would be there with him but Jimmy Olsen?

And Amanda Conner's...oh boy, that's gotta push a lot of Superman's buttons in some rather uncomfortable ways, huh?

Finally, I just wanted to highlight this wonderful Sean Murphy from the "Superman Reborn" era:

Murphy is maybe the all-around best artist Snyder has collaborated with in the last few years (On The Wake), and I'd love to see the pair work on something again soon. I just wanted to pull this one out though to note how cool Murphy's version of the very 1990s Superboy is. It's tweaked just enough that that particular costume looks like it would work out just fine today, and doesn't seem the least bit dated.

Review: Justice League Beyond: Konstriction

There's a scene during the denouement of this trade when the now-elderly Bruce Wayne finds his successor Terry McGinnis unconscious and naked as a result of the climactic, apocalyptic battle. Wayne tosses Superman's cape over him, like a rescue blanket, and when another character asks where he got that, Wayne says he took it from someone who wasn't using it anymore.

The appearance of Superman's cape here is sort of emblematic of creators Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs approach to their sprawling next generation Justice League story: No opportunity for a wink, nod or elbow to the ribs to DC fans is passed up, even when it comes to something as innocuous as using Superman's cape as a minor prop.

Set in the world of the 1999-2001 Batman Beyond cartoon, where a retired Bruce Wayne coaches college student McGinnis through an ear piece as the new Batman of Neo Gotham, Justice League Beyond includes an extrapolation of the 2001-2006 Justice League cartoon continuity as well (exhaustingly so, in the case of at least one of the back-up stories, which I don't want to discuss here).  The new Batman fights alongside a new Green Lantern, the daughter of Aquaman (Aquagirl, naturally), the son of Green Lantern John Stewart and Hawkgirl (Warhawk...not Hawk Lantern or The Green Hawk) and the original Superman and Big Barda, whose alien origins have kept them relatively young...they just dress a bit different in this generation.

The driving conflict involves the Kobra cult, which is employing a magic book and Boom Tube technology to summon a world-ending, giant super-serpent monster, an invincible Ouroboros, which rampages through the Multiverse for practice before turning its attentions to Earth.

Along the way, the League visits Dinosaur Island/the setting of the War That Time Forgot strips, New Genesis, Apokalips, Neo Gotham and Metropolis. The now elderly Amanda Waller and Jimmy Olsen are involved. All of the Fourth World characters of New Genesis and Apokolips unite with the League to try and make a stand against the serpent, most getting little more than cameos, but Highfather, Darkseid, Orion, Bekka (who Nguyen and Fridolfs previously drew in the Alan Burnett-written "Torment" arc for for Superman/Batman), The Female Furies and Mister Miracle having relatively large roles.

Cameos are made by Aquaman and Lex Luthor...and Kamandi, The Challengers of the Unknown and Atlas. Cadmus is involved early on, and Etrigan the Demon appears near the climax. The book reads an awful lot like a love letter to Kirby's contributions to the DC Universe and character catalogue.

Nguyen and Fridolfs, who co-write the story with the former pencilling and the latter inking, do a fine job of toy-box storytelling, perfectly structuring their story from a standard introduction of the characters in action to an ever-escalating threat, with the serpent defeating an entire planet of super-gods being the second act. The artwork is superb, and their voracious inclusion of as much of the DC Universe as will fit is appreciated, given the opportunities it presents them to draw their versions of, say, Steppenwolf or Oberon or a Batman Beyond villains or dinosaurs or what-have-you.

Several of the characters get new, temporary costumes, with Batman wearing a caped-version of his red-and-black uniform, Aquagirl putting on battle armor and Barda wearing a nicely modified version of her original, Kirby-designed armor (She usually just wears her Kirby-designed casual outfit: An interdimensional bathing suit).

The artwork is perhaps at its most fun during the scenes with the New Gods, as Nguyen's character designs seem to take their cues from both Mike Mignola, who drew many of these character's during 1988's Cosmic Odyssey (Particularly stout, brick wall of a Darkseid), and Bruce Timm's cartoon designs (Particularly for the Female Furies).

At the climax, as the U.S. Air Force Squad nicknamed "Hal's Hellions," the Green Lantern Corps and Thanagarian Hawkpeople join the Justice League in fight to the finish with the world-destroying snake-monster,  Batman flies a Bat-plane into action and remarks "Now this feels like a Justice League!" I was thinking pretty much the same thing; despite the new and different setting and the variations on so many of the characters, this story featured the ever-escalating stakes, world-building synthesis of generations of comics-makers and trivia-conscious care-taking that so many of my favorite Justice League stories have.

*********************

One complaint though: Jimmy's signal watch should go "ZEE ZEE ZEE" not "BEEP BEEP BEEP" though.

Okay, two: "Konstriction" is a pretty lame name for this storyline; it sounds awfully small given the scope and scale of the story. It's sorta about a Justice League vs. Kobra conflict, but it's more about all the heroes in the universe vs. an apocalyptic threat, in which case, I don't know, Justice League Beyond: Ouroboros might have been better. Plus, "snake eating its own tail" is pretty much a perfect symbol for a superhero story like this, isn't it? A comic book extrapolation of a cartoon adaptation/extrapolation of comic book heroes and concepts created generations ago?  This was a lot of fun and very well-made, but it's still a sterling example of serpent-devouring-itself comics-making.

Just how evil is Darkseid?

Well, he'll neither wear pants nor will he cross his legs; you'll just have to deal with it.

Twelve thoughts about Superman/Batman: Torment

I’m either a glutton for punishment, or have some crippling addiction to Superman and Batman that I cannot resist reading about them, but despite how little I enjoyed Michael Green and Shane Davis’ Superman/Batman: The Search for Kryptonite, I didn’t let that stop me from reading the next available Superman/Batman trade from a local library, Superman/Batman: Torment by Alan Burnett, Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs.

This one collects a six-issue arc that ran right before Search For Kryptonite (Well, right before the fill-in issue right before Search for Kryptonite), and right after Mark Verheiden’s short, nine-issue run that kept up title founder Jeph Loeb’s crazy shit happening at random formula, but was somehow even worse, operating with an attitude that wasn’t merely continuity-lite, but continuity-adverse. Although it was Pat Lee’s artwork on the Metal Man retcon/reboot that finally caused me to drop the title).

So, given what came before and what came after, I just sort of assumed that this was going to be a rough read and expecting the collection’s title to be more or less literal.

But, to my great surprise, this was actually pretty decent. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have liked it nearly so much as it was originally being serialized, as it does have to do with Jack Kirby’s New Gods, which, at the time, were in a weird state that varied from title to title (DC hadn’t used any of them for a while, to get ready for Final Crisis, but then apparently decided to use them everywhere during Countdown, killing them all off in preparation for Final Crisis). And also, if I read it in that format, I would have been paying for the privilege.

But as a trade, after Final Crisis, read for free from the library? It’s really not bad at all. It’s probably Burnett’s best DCU work (not that he’s done much) and maybe, just maybe, the best arc of the series’ existence, but it’s hard to say—I mean, Loeb’s the good writer on this book, so quality is pretty relative.

Although this was much, much better than The Search For Kryptonite, I am going to address it in the same format as I addressed the last collection of the series, and continue this weekend’s lazy, list-making review technique (I did write at least one real, paragraphs-and-everything review this weekend though! There’s a Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead #1 review at Blog@).

1.) Dustin Nguyen is a really good artist. Superman/Batman has been blessed with some of the industry’s more popular artists, many of whom are actually quite good at what they do. That’s why Shane Davis or Pat Lee’s work kind of stuck out as being particularly bad, I think. I don’t know that Nguyen is quite as popular as, say, Ed McGuinness or Carlos Pacheco, but he’s certainly good at what he does. I haven’t got a single complaint about the art end of things here; it’s easy to read, many of the designs are rather inspired, the action is lively.

Nguyen seems to have taken some cues from Mike Mignola, as his Darkseid has the bulk and square-ish shape Mignola gave him in Cosmic Odyssey. Nguyen’s Batman also occasionally reminds me of Mignola’s, in certain medium to long shots of Batman in costume.

2.) Hey, how come this collection doesn’t get an introduction? Green’s Search For Kryptonite had an introduction to it, as did Green’s Lovers and Madmen, but here? Nothing. Lame.

3.) That’s Killer Croc? Okay, well, there’s one design I’m not overly fond of, and that's Nguyen’s Croc. He doesn’t look much like himself, although perhaps that’s not as much Nguyen’s fault as DC’s somewhat lax stance on character design. Croc was pretty radically transformed in Batman: Hush, either given plastic surgery or somehow mutated by Hush to make him look more like a crocodile, and that look has mostly stuck. Nguyen’s version seems like something of a compromise between the pre- and post-Hush looks, but his Croc also has craggy, stalactite-like spines all over his back that make him look like an entirely different character.

Burnett refers to him as reptilian too, which didn’t use to be the case—he was just a big, strong guy with a skin disease, not a crocodile/human hybrid—and uses him in a somewhat strange way. He’s hired by a mysterious villain to steal something from Lex Corp, which is more of a Catwoman-y job than a Croc one, you know?

4.) I like the messy hair Nguyen draws on Clark Kent.

5.) There’s a really nicely-executed page of Superman freaking out while sitting at his desk, seemingly beat-down by his own narration boxes. I thought that was a very effective scene. And kind of amusing, given this title’s traditional over-use of narration boxes, although I doubt that was the intent here.

6.) The Scarecrow working with the Desaad and traveling to outer space just doesn’t seem right. I love The Scarecrow, and the prospect of him taking on Superman is kind of interesting, but he doesn’t quite seem to fit in well with the sci-fi aspects of the story. Once he’s on a planet-sized warship in outer space, the clash between Superman and the New Gods and this rag-wearing Bat-villain seemed particularly discordant.

7.) Oh hey, this is the book with that cover. I’m not sure if you remember or care or not, but issue of this series was originally solicited with an image of Batman standing behind Bekka, his right hand resting between her throat and her breasts. When it finally came out, however, the hand was removed, and was now hidden by Batman’s cape. Apparently, his hand was too close to brushing her breasts on the cover for DC’s comfort.





The pair do make out and maybe more in the story. Batman does strip her naked and lay atop her on the floor kissing her for a while. But apparently the cover was a little risqué. In the back of this trade, there are a series of pages showing Nguyen’s roughs for the covers, and there are four different versions of the cover, with Batman’s hand on her neck, her stomach or simply on his batarangs.

8.) Wait, Bekka? I had no idea Orion was even married. I guess he doesn’t talk about his wife very much in his appearances in other books, does he?

9.) Batman is “aroused beyond all reason.” When I got to this part, I remembered that Batman’s secret Canadian girlfriend Rachelle Goguen had a pretty amusing review of this issue (With lots of scans! Check it out!). In a nutshell, Bekka is a goddess and, like all of the New Gods and New Goddesses she has a power of some sort, and hers doesn’t seem all that useful—the men around her really, really want to have sex with her, and she really, really wants to have sex with them. The more hardened the heart, the stronger it is, which is why she married Orion. And you know, Batman sure is heard-hearted, so the pull is strong. The only way they can get past it is to have sex, which they don’t want to do.

This whole conflict is kind of interesting, in a Well I’ve never seen THAT before kinda way, and Burnett does try to use this as an opportunity to describe how sad and lonely Batman is in life, but man, is it ever silly. Plus I guess Batman must have an erection for, like, the whole second half of this book? I guess it’s a good thing he wears that long, flowing cape.

10.) Oh yeah, Superman dies. So what’s Desaad up to here? Well, Darkseid lost his Omega powers, and is kind of sad and depressed and sort of losing it now. When we first see him, he trips. Desaad has found the late Highfather’s magic cane embedded in the Source Wall, and the plan is to have a brain-wiped Superman retrieve it for them and use it restore Darkseid’s eye beams. Once that’s occurred, they zap Superman with it, and he finds himself in The Source. But first he has this crazy hospital scene where various characters appear and pay their respects. Starro brings him a basket of cupcakes.

It’s pretty amusing, but seems pretty out of place with the rest of the story, which is about the evil of the evil New Gods and Batman’s unreasonable arousal.

11.) The second to last page is pretty awesome. After Desaad and Darkseid are defeated and the heroes make it back to Earth, Orion picks Bekka up on the flying elliptical machine he travels around on, and gives Batman a pretty dirty look.

Once they’re back home on New Genesis, they apparently sex it up for a while, and there’s a neat couple panels of Orion putting his belt and helmet on, and Bekka lying naked in bed, asking when he’ll be back from making war on the gods of Apokolips.

I really like the banal domesticity of their life, as if Orion’s a neglectful husband about to go on a business trip again. Except his business if flying over to the next planet to beat up Kalibak and Granny Goodness.

12.) The last page is super-dumb. Once Orion flies off to work, Bekka thinks to herself, “As long as he returns, all will be right. Thoughts of Batman will pass. They must.”

And then she notices a pair of white, triangular eyes I the shadows of her room. A black hand stretches out of the shadows, and there’s a “CCHHHOOOO” sound that makes Bekka glow and say “AAAARRHHH!” while a “FSSSSS” appears. In the very last panel, a burning scrap of the sheer cloth she had wrapped herself in floats out the window, and someone off panel says “So begins the end.”

Because I read a lot of DC comics and a lot of reviews of them and pay attention to creator and editor interviews on Newsarama, I knew that around this time some mysterious stranger was going around killing all the New Gods characters in the DCU. I didn’t read Death of the New Gods or Countdown, so I don’t remember who it actually was—it was revealed to be Infinity Man in one comic I read, but maybe it was Darkseid posing as Infinity Man…or something…?

But there’s nothing in this book to give the scene any context; there’s no “To be continued in Death of the New Gods” or anything, no foreword or afterword to make sense of the scene.

If this was the only DC comic you read in trade, I can’t imagine how this scene plays out. Did Batman, who was in her thoughts in the previous panel, who wears black gloves, who sticks to the shadows, and who has white, triangle-shaped eyes, travel to New Genesis to take care of their problem by incinerating Bekka? Did Darkseid, the villain of the book, return from what could have been his death to get revenge on Bekka?

I thought it was the latter for a while, and then remembered the whole New Gods Killer plotline from a year or so ago. At any rate, a pretty strange note to end a book on.

Delayed Reaction: As The Crow Flies

Batman: As The Crow Flies (DC Comics), by Judd Winick, Dustin Nguyen and Richard Friend

Why’d I Wait?: It’s a Judd Winick DC Comic.

Why now?: Because the Columbus Public Library has absolutely everything in trade these days. After reading the first volume of Under The Hood, I wanted to check out Winick’s first Batman story to see if he wrote better stories when he wasn’t resurrecting long (and unequivocally) dead supporting characters.

Well?: When I originally read the solicits for Batman #626, the first chapter of “As the Crow Flies,” I thought pairing Batman villains the Penguin and the Scarecrow was a pretty inspired idea (and felt a twinge of pity for poor Judd Winick and Dustin Nguyen, the oncoming creative team that had the unenviable task of following the Jeph Loeb/Jim Lee “Hush” and Brian Azzarello/Eduardo Risso “Broken City” teams on the Batman monthly).

The Penguin was not only named after a bird, but loves birds, and many of his earlier crimes revolved around stealing birds or committing bird-themed crimes. The Scarecrow took his name from something that’s whole reason for being was simply to scare birds. And yet despite the obvious crossover that presented itself between the two characters, I don’t think any writers had ever exploited it (at least, not since I took up temporary residence in Gotham City).

Though Winick did use them both in the same story, he doesn’t really play with that dynamic at all, and putting the volume down, I was a bit confused as to why the story was entitled what it was. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the story, which doesn’t even contain crows, literally or figuratively.

As for the Penguin and Scarecrow pairing, Winick simply has the former hire the latter, and their dynamic is exactly that of the weird one he built up between the Black Mask and Mr. Freeze in “Under the Hood.” Instead of two Batman archvillains working together or fighting one another, Penguin hires the Scarecrow as a hired gun in what has to be the most expensive and convoluted protection racket in the history of organized crime—To make threats of violence against hoods in his organization even scarier than actual violence, the Penguin hires the Scarecrow to provide him with fear dust which, like his fear gas, will scare the beejuzus out of whoever gets a whiff of it.

Both characters seem awfully out of character, and either one could be replaced with just about any other character in Batman’s rogues gallery to tell the exact same story. The Scarecrow takes an awful lot of crap from the Penguin for no discernable reason, and the Penguin’s bully act seems out of place directed at the Scarecrow, a character that has long ago eclipsed the Penguin in threat and relevance in Gotham City.

If the instilling-fear-through-fear-dust plot seems overly silly, I am withholding one bit of info because it’s something of a spoiler, but it involves a gigantic scarecrow monster that breathes fear gas and tears people to pieces which, you may rightly guess, is actually Jonathan Crane, The Scarecrow, turning into some kind of weird were-scarecrow.

It doesn’t make much sense on a story level—turning a brilliant if mad scientist into a rampaging monster is a bit of a waste of a brilliant if mad scientist, isn’t it? Why not inject a hired hand with the monster serum?—and makes absolutely no sense on a creative level.

The essence of Jonathan Crane’s character is that he’s a psychiatrist and scientist who becomes a criminal to further his studies in fear; his modus operandi is evoking terror through psychology and chemistry. Why turn him into just another monster? It reminds me of the update DC’s Bat Office did to Killer Moth during the “Underworld Unleashed” crossover. The Killer Moth was a lame villain whose very lameness made him fairly unique, but they turned him into a slavering moth monster named Charaxes, essentially making him indistinguishable from slavering crocodile monster Killer Croc or slavering bat monster Man-Bat among Batman’s rogues.

If the story was another sub-par effort on Winick’s part, belonging near the bottom of the Batman barrel of stories currently available in trade, at least Nguyen and Friends’ art is superior. As dumb as a were-scarecrow may sound on paper, they sure make it look cool on paper, particularly when it shows up to interrupt a meeting the Penguin is holding (Matt Wagner echoes the scene and design on one of his covers, which is used as the cover of the trade). They also do a nice Crane, who here has long hair, and an exceptional Robin, who actually looks like a young teenager here, instead of a short man, which is how far too many artists draw the Boy Wonder.

I used to think every comic book writer had at least one good Batman story in them, but after reading two of Judd Winick’s so far, I’m beginning to think that may not be the case. Perhaps every comic book writer exceptJudd Winick has at least one good Batman story in them, or else Winick simply hasn’t written his yet.

Would I Travel Back in Time and Buy the Individual Issues Off the shelves?: God no. In fact, I wish I wouldn’t have even bothered getting it for free from the library and reading it.