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The covers to Detective Comics #854-857. All art by J.H. Williams III
Update!
My main man, A. Tannenbaum, wrote a great review of issue #854 in the comments section of our Livejournal page. Never one to let a good post slip past, I promptly cut and pasted it in the comments section here. I spend my day trawling comics reviews online, and this is easily in the top 5 I've read for this book.
(Note: In the review, you'll come across a lot of seemingly random references to Jaime Hernandez' Locas stories. This is because (1.) this was the work that caused us to first meet online, and (2.) dude loves the Terry character.)
Enjoy!
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Detective Comics' Delectable Covers
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3 comments:
Comments I
Thanks for posting those. I've seen a lot of the art online, and I was so interested that I actually did something I haven't done in ages: I went out and BOUGHT a comic book. You see, for a long time I have gotten by with collections, often borrowed from libraries. Moreover, I never bought superhero comics anyway; the whole suit thing always seemed improbable to me. I read war comics (DC only, couldn't get into Sgt Fury), MAD (when it was good), Creepy/Eerie, the Spirit, and like that.
My impressions:
1. The art...well, yes, it IS beautiful. The colors (by some guy named Stewart) really enhance it. Williams reminds me at times of Al Williamson, because he combines a strong, fluid line with excellent shading.(The daytime scenes here tend to be very linear, with relatively little modeling, but the night scenes and Batwoman scenes use contrast to great effect.)
Williams does a great job of placing and emphasizing significant background details. In Kate Kane's apartment we see an electric guitar, posters for punkish bands, a menorah, weights, and pictures of nude women. All these objects tell you things about Kate as a person that would take reams of dialogue or exposition.
I also like the fact that Williams doesn't overdo Kate's physical beauty. She's very attractive, but she's not a Playboy Playmate type. She doesn't have Power Girl cassabas, for one thing. She has the trim body of an athlete, with no pornstar baby fat anywhere. One nice, small touch---Kate has a rather short nose, as many Jewish women do, not the classic equiline Cleopatra nose a lazy or unobservant artist would give her.
My only real complaint about the art here is that it gobbles space. There are too damned many two-page spreads, and this truncates the story. At times, the thing looks more like the storyboard for a movie than a comic book. Unlike Jaime Hernandez, Rucka and Williams haven't yet mastered the art of economcial story-telling.
2. That leads to another complaint: the story and indeed the entire book are TOO SHORT. Maybe memory is playing me false here, but the comicbooks I read as a kid either were longer or seemed longer--perhaps because the creators knew enough not to waste space. But aside from the two-page spreads an additional four pages are lost to ads--big, colorful DC house ads that pull the eye away from the story. The "Question" story with Renee Montoya had its points, too, but as a result we get not one but TWO truncated stories to frustrate the reader. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but to me this felt not like a comicbook but more like a comic pamphlet. I've been away from the comicbook scene for a very long time, and if this kind of thing is standard now I don't like the change.
3. The story (or half-chapter, really) is good and clearly has the potential to get better. Rucka is a good writer and he can write women who are both convincingly tough and convincingly female. Tara Chace in Queen & Country is a terrific character, and I think Kate Kane can be just as good.
Kate is tough, all right. She doesn't fool around or deliver long speeches: when she wants to take care of a villain, she pulls a piece and shoots. (She doesn't have any 'powers'--she doesn't need them.) She's very self-assured as Batwoman; she's always smiling a rather Joker-like smile. The baddies are afraid of her, and you can see why: she has a sadistic streak, as does Batman. But while Batman's sadism is cold and surly, Kate's is playful and almost erotic. Rucka called her "a succubus," and with her pale skin, red lips, and sly, intimate manner (even while she's beating someone up) she's very vampiric too. One hesitates to say this openly, but both her look and her manner recall the lesbian femme fatale archetype. You can just as easily see Kate as a supervillainess, maybe more easily. She clearly enjoys her work in a much more open, relaxed way than Bruce Wayne ever did.
She has one encounter with Batman. She clearly respects him but she isn't awed by him at all and she one-ups him neatly when he tries to give her some advice. As a lesbian, she is utterly immune to his smoldering maleness. She has a sense of humor, too, which Batman does not.
Yes, she's a lesbian, but as Rucka promised no big deal is made of the fact. In her red hair and leather top, Kate looks like the kind of pretty, stylish, and flirtatious young dyke you'd see in a punk club. (Hopey or Terry would hit on her in a second.) She has a rather prim, butchy lawyer girlfriend, but the lawyer dumps Kate because she assumes that Kate has been sleeping around at night. Like every super, Kate has to sacrifice some things for the sake of her super work, but her lesbianism doesn't enter into it. The same sort of thing was always complicating the relationship between Peter Parker and MJ.
The one thing I didn't like about Kate was her angstiness. She has some emotional moments with her father as she recalls her past pains, and at one point she even HUGS him. (In my universe, SUPERHEROINES DON'T HUG.) Yes, Tara has a lot of angst too, but this has only been slowly revealed. Tara, being British, keeps the hugs to the minimum, never cries, and drowns her sorrows in drink, work, and (very rarely) men.
Kate's sufferings at the hands of the baddies do fuel her vengfulness and sadism, but at this point I'd rather see her being ANGRY about that than sad. And I could do entirely without an emo-inducing shot of Kate's face after the lawyer dumps her. You can't set someone up as a tough nut and then have them turn soft on you in the very next scene.
4. I think the time is right for someone like Kate. A punk superheroine, a sort of Debbie Harry or Joan Jett in a batsuit, is a great idea. Hmmm, maybe she could team up with Angel and Alarma. (She reminds me of Alarma quite a bit.) If Rucka soft-pedals the angst and lets Kate's playful, punk side loose, it could be the next best thing to a superheroine version of Hopey Glass.
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