Week of 11/11/09 – Batgirl #4
November 13th, 2009
How big is the friggin Bat-Universe right now? There feels like 7 or 8 Robins running around. And now the Bat-Females are multiplying with each new crossover. The latest Batgirl, Stephanie Brown, is featured here, hear her roar evil-doers! The art of Tim Levins & Lee Garbett wasn’t mind-blowing in this issue but made for some good splash pages and as we all know, I do love me some splash pages.
My main problem with the whole Bat-Team concept is that Batman as an institution doesn’t jive with team play. As the comics have told us over the years, and as the recent movies have beat into our skulls, Bruce Wayne is just a guy but the Batman is a symbol. He works alone. No one knows who he is. He leaves in the middle of conversations. There is no angle to work on this guy.
But now there is a friggin baseball team of amateurs out there with bat symbols stitched to their chests. If you want to hurt the bat, if you want to lure him into a trap, if you want to remind all the pretenders that this is Gotham God Damnit, just grab one of these Bat-yahoos and murder him or her. Did we learn nothing from Barbara?
Ok, I’m done.
Honorable Mentions:
This was so close to being Panel of the Week. The new Punisher Max series is bringing back the Kingpin in a big way. Here Frank rescues a mob goon who recently had his head squished by the Kingpin. He asks Frank if he’s dead:
Am I the only one that wants to know more about how the Hand works? Where do they recruit from? Where do these assassins hang out during down times? I think the Hand’s top ten guys should get their own book where they talk about working for Murdock and how they all get killed all the time. Anyway, having an army of Ninja must be so cool:
I wrote about Eric Canete recently in his work with Cybernary 2.0. I do love his style. It fit well with the inclusion of the now omnipresent Deadpool in this issue, Spider-Man #611. Here Spider-Man is fighting Stilt-Woman. Yeah, you heard correctly:
Warren Ellis is Warren Ellis-ing again with SuperGod. The premise is man will create a higher power in the absence of one. In SuperGod India creates a super-being governed by an artificial intelligence called Shiva. Shiva rocks the super hero outfit equivalent of a mullet. Super hero pizzaz up top, military practicality on the bottom:
Finally we have Enders Game Command School #3. This paragraph has spoilers. One of the defining moments in the original Ender’s Game book was when Ender is forced to defend himself against an older and much larger boy. Ender finishes the conflict by stunning and disabling his opponent and then continuing to hammer on him until he knows he can no longer be a threat. At once cementing his status as an effective military commander and destroying his image of himself as a compassionate human being. Chris Yost and Pasqual Ferry do an outstanding job on this scene:
[...] post: Week of 11/11/09 – Batgirl #4 Leave a [...]