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Comic book stuff. WIF does DC think they're doing?! A review/summary of some recent Batman comics, and some stuff about Superman, too...
I read Defective Comics* 850 last night. Oh, and Batman 681 (the end of RIP) just now. Wow. Mind-blowingly craptacular.
850 is the end of "Heart of Hush", starring Hush, the villain created for the annual Gotham Event of the Decade!! Year!! a couple of years back. In his secret identity, he's Bruce Wayne's (freshly retconned into existence) childhood best friend turned famous surgeon. Another attempt (after Black Mask) at creating Batman's mirror image/opposite number. His costume consists of a trench coat and a bunch of bandages wrapped around his head. His powers include the ability to turn himself into Batman's equal simply by deciding to be so, the Riddler Factor** x 10, and the preternatural ability to make a comic book exponentially worse with every panel he appears in.
*And why has no one (as far as I can tell) used that one before?
**Coined by Dave Campbell, it's a villain's ability to get away with stuff (and thereby pose a credible threat for precisely as long as the plot requires) purely because the writer is on his side.
Heart of Hush purports to be part of this summer's Gotham Event of the Decade!!, Batman: RIP, but actually has absolutely nothing to do with it (except that it was published at the same time as RIP was ongoing in several other titles). Instead, Hush decides to strike at Batman through his heart, by kidnapping Catwoman and, using technology developed with the help of Mr. Freeze, separate her heart from her body. (The technology being used to keep both heart and body alive for a few hours.) Too heavy-handed? Too literal? Too godawfully stupid? Not for Hush.
DC 850 is the conclusion of the 3-issue story arc, and it is painful. Batman, having found Catwoman at the end of last issue, radios some other heroes to come pick her up and save her life while he goes to confront Hush (who is going to attack Alfred and the rest of the bat-crew). Hush, having surgically altered himself to look like Bruce Wayne (ow), arrives at Wayne Manor to find Alfred cleaning his clock. The clock in this case being the grandfather clock which serves as the entrance to the Batcave. Alfred fails to be taken in by the ruse and immediately turns on Hush. What tipped him off? Alfred's years of training? His time as a secret agent? The fact that he's been Bruce's closest ally and surrogate father for so many years and knows the man better than he knows himself? The fact that the surgery is so fresh that you can still see the stitches (which rip open a few pages later)? Nope. Alfred informs Hush (and us) that his brilliant plot was foiled because... Bruce called ahead. (Ow.)
But Hush is young and strong and a Genuine Supervillain and Alfred is old and frail and just a supporting character. So, after making Hush's face bleed with a single punch, immediately following up by slapping the gun out of his hands before he can even finish drawing it, doubling him over with a solid kick, and then holding the gun on him (having apparently caught it midair during all this) - you can tell how effective Hush really is, can't you? - Alfred is quickly overwhelmed. And then Hush proceeds to deduce the location of the entrance to the Batcave. Because (a) Alfred was in that room when Hush arrived, and Bruce would want him able to access the safest room in the house (b) Alfred tried to lead Hush away from that room and (c) Hush found Alfred working on the clock. Brilliant strategy, Bruce. And Alfred. So much for your experience and intelligence. (Oh, right. Forgot. Canceled out by the Riddler Factor.) ... Actually, as I'm typing this, I'm realizing that maybe we're supposed to realize that Alfred was caught in the act of fleeing to the Batcave. It would make more sense, but it wasn't really made very clear by the narrative. So I guess I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one and leave off the "Ow."
So Hush finds (one of) the entrance(s) to the cave. Which, really... not such a big deal, considering that he already knew Bruce's secret identity and basically everything else about him. And I'm pretty sure he had a traitor working in the cave in a previous storyline. But apparently this is a big deal to him because now he boasts that he'll be able to strike at Bruce any time he wants (as if he couldn't do this before, whenever the plot called for him to be able to do so). All of which entirely ignores the cave's (and the mansion's) vaunted security systems (which posed a challenge even to Catwoman, arguably the best thief in the DCU). Right. Anyway...
Hush finds the entrance to the cave. Turns a gun on Alfred, and of course, Bruce chooses that moment to Arrive In The Nick Of Time (crashing through a window, of course) and save his butler/father. The fight quickly falls down the stairs into the cave... and it's a nice moment. Hush looks around in wonder, and we get a good look at the cave. Cars from all the movies (and the old Adam West show), various souvenirs/trophies, all sorts of neat stuff.
(There are also flashbacks to Hush's origins and talk of the girlfriend who was retconned into existence this year and who is now the new Ventriloquist. Talk which, of course, occurs as Hush is walking past a glass trophy case with an old Scarface dummy in it.)
But now... back to the fight! Batman jumps down on Hush and is promptly shot, knocking him into... Jason Todd's memorial case. Again. How does this happen every single time there's a fight in the cave? Batman ought to put some extra traps and security near the case, with perhaps more stuff triggered by the breaking glass.
As Bruce suddenly finds himself having difficulty extracting himself from under a bit of glass, Hush pulls both guns on him. But! Batman is saved in the nick of time by the other nice moment in this book. The floor starts to shake. Hush catches Alfred poking at some controls. "I don't know what you hope to accomplish, but it's far too little too - Oh. ... Oh, no..." Hush turns around to find...
The t-rex robot (one of the cave's earliest and most recognizable trophies) bearing down on him!
And then, in the very next panel, he stands calmly in place and empties the clips of both guns into its head. Which causes it, in the very next panel after that, to fall down and die. Let me reiterate. The more than life sized t-rex, built entirely out of metal, is killed in a single panel by a few rounds from a pair of handguns. Handgun rounds which would probably do little more (in the movies/comics, if nothing else) than annoy a flesh-and-blood t-rex. How does Hush do it? Pure amped-up Riddler Effect power. He all but says it. "You won't win this way, Bruce! Not like this! ... NOT LIKE THIS!" (In other words: "This is too easy, and it's still the middle of the issue. Therefore, I must win.")
And, before the dust settles from that, Robin and Nightwing show up. As if Bruce and Alfred couldn't handle this. But no, he is Hush, a big league super villain (because the hype has declared him so), so he cannot be defeated quite so easily. How does, however, accede the Boy Wonders' tag-team assertion: He can't beat all of them at once. (Especially now that he's out of ammo.) So he retreats, choosing as his mode of escape (brief moment of squee, even amidst all this painful idiocy)... the Whirlybat. (Batman's late Golden Age/early Silver Age personal helicopter thingy.)
Batman, conspicuously sans cape, jumps after him. Hush taunts him a bit about how he never thinks ahead (WIF?) and always attacks rashly, without studying his opponent's weaknesses. Uhm, what? No, seriously. What? This is Batman we're talking about. Studying his opponent's weaknesses, attacking with everything planned out at least five steps ahead, leading into a trap specifically designed to exploit those weaknesses (even if the enemy isn't even aware of what those weaknesses are)... it's pretty much what he does. It's what's seen him through more fights than I can count, against enemies who would otherwise be too powerful to even consider facing.
But, anyway, Batman lets him get a good hit in (getting slashed across the arm with a batarang) and then points out that he left his cape behind for a reason. He drops away as Hush's bandages (which he replaced a few pages back, for no reason whatsoever, out of one of the cave's first aid boxes) get tangled up in the rotors. (Something which never happened while Batman was flying around in that thing with his cape on. And, really, given the strength of the downdraft the rotors are producing, there's no way the bandages should have been sucked up into them.) There's no way the bandages should have done anything but torn under those circumstances, but, inexplicably, they cause the poor old Whirlybat to explode, with Hush trapped in the seat. Something Batman apparently anticipated and had no qualms about. (WIF?)
Quick wrap-up in the cave, and we zip over to the operating room, where a team of superheroes and nurses replace Catwoman's heart and declare that she should pull through just fine (if not necessarily well enough to be jumping over rooftops). Oh, and Zatanna gives her a magic healing potion to help her recovery.
Bruce shows up to visit her recovery room bed and confesses to her that she is his one true love, the only woman he's loved, the only one who has gotten through to that part of him after his parents died. So much for Silver St. Cloud. And all the other girls. And, really... he was a child when his parents died. What he's basically saying is that she's the only person he's loved... which is a real slap in the face to Alfred, Dick, Tim, and a bunch of others.
Anyhoo, he finishes his confession of love and leaves the room... just as she informs him that she's awake and heard the whole thing. He leans down to kiss her, and we cut to two months later, where Selina is convalescing in some tropical location. (All of this, BTW, directly contradicts the last issue of Catwoman, where they basically agree that they like each other well enough, but they're not in love, and really, she's just in it for the thrills. And then she drives off into the sunset.) She's recording a video to Hush, just in case he's still alive. She confesses that, unfortunately, her happy ending with Bruce only lasted for a night. Which seems to imply that they spent the night together in her hospital bed, while she was still recovering from heart surgery, and then parted ways. Which... WIF?
So she talks to Hush and explains how she decided to revenge herself on him by taking what he cares about most - his money. Working with some friends (on both sides of the hero/villain thing), she's stolen every last cent from him. Hush does see the video (I guess she made arrangements for it to be left in one of his old hideouts?), having of course survived certain death. He gets pissed off and wanders sadly off into the foggy Gotham streets as Catwoman's recorded voice concludes with a quotation from Dorothy Parker: "If wild my breast and sore my pride, I bask in dreams of suicide... If cool my heart and high my head I think... 'How lucky are the dead.'" How cheery! What a lovely thought on which to end.
The whole thing is a string of stupid plot holes, wince-worthy moments, cliches, and melodrama. With a couple of nice moments, just to highlight how much everything else sucked.
This masterpiece brought to you by... Paul Dini. The brilliant writer who was one of the driving forces behind Batman: The Animated Series, and who has pulled off some pretty cool TAS-like stories in his recent run on this very title. They can't all be winners, of course, but... dang, I expected something miles better than this from him.
Meantime, over in Batman, we've been getting that Event storyline I mentioned earlier. "Batman: RIP". I'm told that they'll actually be (temporarily?) ending Detective Comics now. It's one of the longest-running titles in the industry. As I mentioned, they're up to issue 850. There haven't been a steady 12 issues per year (some had more, some might have had less), but that comes out to about 70 years, give or take.
The stories leading up to this introduced us to the Black Glove society, a group of super-rich gamblers who, finding themselves bored and with more money and power than they know how to use, get together to gamble on people's lives in games of their own devising. We were also introduced to some heretofore secret (and failed) attempts by a semi-corrupt faction within the GCPD to create a new Batman. Five officers subjected to trauma, drugs, and training so that they can stand ready when and if Batman dies. Because, really, Gotham's criminals aren't afraid of anyone else. The program was led by a certain doctor from an old forgotten Silver Age story.
In that story, Batman finds himself trapped on an alien world - a world on which Robin is dead. His only companion is a magical creature who bears a more than striking resemblance to Bat-Mite (Batman's answer to Mr. Mxyzptlk). Only it turns out that the whole thing is a bizarre dream created by Batman's mind after he has spent several days strapped to a chair in an isolation room. We're told that he volunteered for this experiment run by the space program (designed to give a better idea of the effects of living in deep space). (Why they'd consider Batman's mind to be typical enough to make a good representation of an astronaut's reaction is beyond me, but hey, it was the Silver Age.) Batman explains to Robin that he had volunteered, knowing it would drive him temporarily insane, in the hopes that it would give him better insight into the mind of the Joker and other Gotham nutjobs. Robin was dead in the dream because that's Batman's greatest fear, and the magical companion was the representation of what was left of his sanity.
Now it turns out that the leader of the Black Glove is that same doctor, now going by the villain name of Doctor Hurt. During his time watching Batman in that chamber, he learned his secret identity (and basically everything else there was to know about him) and even placed in his mind posthypnotic triggers that would overwhelm him and drive him insane when invoked.
But (in direct contradiction to Hush's statement in DC), we're told again and again that Batman has prepared himself for every humanly conceivable eventuality. Including the possibility that someone would take over his mind. He established the personality of the Batman from that alien world (complete with magical imp/voice of reason) as a back-up in case his mind were ever attacked, and he prepared himself immunity (or, failing that, antidotes) for every conceivable poison, etc etc. In short, we're told, the human body is more or less universal, and there are a finite number of things that can be done to it. Batman has obsessively prepared himself for each and every one. (Ow.)
Anyway, the posthypnotic stuff is triggered and Batman's mind is toyed with and this doctor shoots him up with heroin (and possibly other drugs) and dumps him in an alley. And taunts him and leads him along and blah blah. It's all pretty stupid, really. Oh, and there's a girlfriend involved. A woman we're introduced to just in time for Bruce to fall in love with her. She's used as bait, of course, and then it turns out that she was working with the bad guys the whole time. Except that, in this last issue, we're told that Bruce knew that... but figured it out a moment too late (because, in direct contradiction of the DC story, he admits that he fell in love with her anyway). There's a lot of craziness and running around and characters you've never heard of before (and hopefully never will again) and the Joker is kind of around and kills a few people. Batman is knocked out and buried alive, but still manages to come out of it all (as Joker and one of the Glove members had bet). And finally, it all comes down to a confrontation between Batman and Hurt. It's revealed that Hurt is, in actuality... not Thomas Wayne, Bruce's father (as he'd been hinting and Bruce had been flatly denying), but... an obscure actor who starred in the movie The Black Glove and had, at one point, been a double for Thomas Wayne.*** Wow.
***Back in an old retcon/flashback story, he tried to use the resemblance to frame the famous doctor, but was foiled, in the dramatic climax, by the heroics of Bruce's father... at a costume party which he attended in a stylized bat outfit. It's that costume, stolen during a brief fight in the cave, that the actor is wearing in the final pages of RIP.
Batman, in direct parallel to the climax of the DC story, ditches his cape (and this time the mask, too) and jumps onto Hurt's escaping helicopter. Hurt's pilot (one of the Batman substitutes he created) tries to shake him off, the copter blows up, and... that's it. We get a full-page shot of Nightwing holding the cape and cowl, with the flames in the background, the girlfriend's plane is attacked by an army of mutated human/bat hybrids (created a while back in another set-up story), and suddenly it's six months later, and there's been no sign of the Batman. Oh, and one of the bad guys thinks Robin is dead, too. A batsignal flares to life, we get a one-page flashback epilogue which takes us back to the night Bruce's parents were murdered (in which we're informed that if Zorro were a real masked vigilante, he'd be locked up in Arkham), and that's it. Batman is dead. (Until shortly before the next movie comes out.) I don't know where they're planning to go from here, and... I frankly don't care.
Meantime, over in the Superman titles, the writers have decided to lift the worst, most nonsensical idea from L&C and bring it to the comics. Sort of. Kandor, the miniaturized Kryptonian city that Superman has kept in the Fortress of Solitude all these years (after rescuing it from an alien collector), gets returned to full size. (Except that it's a retconned Kandor which now includes a sizable number of Zod loyalists. And a government that believes that individuals, no matter how powerful, can do whatever they want and it'll all turn out okay. A government led, of course, by Kal-El's uncle, Zor-El. Father of Supergirl. The explanation for why we've never seen these people in all the years Kandor has been in Clark's care? Those were alien cities inspired by the original. This is the real Kandor. The fact that it's always been explicit that the Kandor in the Fortress was an actual Kryptonian city filled with kryptonians? Fuggedaboutit.)
Suddenly the world is flooded with thousands of kryptonians. It's an intriguing premise, I suppose, but the first couple of issues have not been promising. There's a secret government agency plotting to kill Superman using whatever tools they can. They basically create a supervillain and give him magical enhancements (Superman being not-invulnerable to magic) and back him up with blasts from a secret satellite. The villain beats Superman practically into unconsciousness, a single blast from the satellite knocks the breath out of Supergirl, and... Krypto, seeing his master hurt, manages to singlehandedly defeat the villain while withstanding repeated blasts from the satellite. (WIF?)
Jimmy Olsen gets his one one-shot special in which he discovers the conspiracy, comes up against a new generic supervillain, and learns (in a lovely bit of further retcon) that the other superhero he used to hang out with was actually a government-created clone (who is now living in a trailer park in a little town on the Mexican border).
And then the Kandor thing happens. And the kryptonians arrive in Metropolis to greet the president... just as Doomsday crash lands at their feet. Literally right in front of them. (WIF?) Turns out, of course, that he was sent by the government conspiracy. But, of course, he's no match for an army of kryptonians. (Even though Doomsday is supposed to be immune to kryptonian powers now.) They kill him brutally, before Clark's eyes. And celebrate. (Except that Doomsday's power is that he can't be killed... he just comes back, immune to whatever killed him last time. But they seem to be trying to retcon that, too.)
Oh, and the government conspiracy? Which, BTW, is, of course, using Lex Luthor as one of its tools? It's led by none other than... *drumroll* General Sam Lane. Lois's father. Who was retconned back from the dead just for this.
Is it any wonder that I'm dropping all my DC Comics orders from here on out?
Completely unrelated:
R2-D2: The Aquarium??
And, to go in it...
Home aquarium soccer training set?? (Also includes equipment for basketball, football, and other tricks.)
Something very fishy about this stuff.
I read Defective Comics* 850 last night. Oh, and Batman 681 (the end of RIP) just now. Wow. Mind-blowingly craptacular.
850 is the end of "Heart of Hush", starring Hush, the villain created for the annual Gotham Event of the Decade!! Year!! a couple of years back. In his secret identity, he's Bruce Wayne's (freshly retconned into existence) childhood best friend turned famous surgeon. Another attempt (after Black Mask) at creating Batman's mirror image/opposite number. His costume consists of a trench coat and a bunch of bandages wrapped around his head. His powers include the ability to turn himself into Batman's equal simply by deciding to be so, the Riddler Factor** x 10, and the preternatural ability to make a comic book exponentially worse with every panel he appears in.
*And why has no one (as far as I can tell) used that one before?
**Coined by Dave Campbell, it's a villain's ability to get away with stuff (and thereby pose a credible threat for precisely as long as the plot requires) purely because the writer is on his side.
Heart of Hush purports to be part of this summer's Gotham Event of the Decade!!, Batman: RIP, but actually has absolutely nothing to do with it (except that it was published at the same time as RIP was ongoing in several other titles). Instead, Hush decides to strike at Batman through his heart, by kidnapping Catwoman and, using technology developed with the help of Mr. Freeze, separate her heart from her body. (The technology being used to keep both heart and body alive for a few hours.) Too heavy-handed? Too literal? Too godawfully stupid? Not for Hush.
DC 850 is the conclusion of the 3-issue story arc, and it is painful. Batman, having found Catwoman at the end of last issue, radios some other heroes to come pick her up and save her life while he goes to confront Hush (who is going to attack Alfred and the rest of the bat-crew). Hush, having surgically altered himself to look like Bruce Wayne (ow), arrives at Wayne Manor to find Alfred cleaning his clock. The clock in this case being the grandfather clock which serves as the entrance to the Batcave. Alfred fails to be taken in by the ruse and immediately turns on Hush. What tipped him off? Alfred's years of training? His time as a secret agent? The fact that he's been Bruce's closest ally and surrogate father for so many years and knows the man better than he knows himself? The fact that the surgery is so fresh that you can still see the stitches (which rip open a few pages later)? Nope. Alfred informs Hush (and us) that his brilliant plot was foiled because... Bruce called ahead. (Ow.)
But Hush is young and strong and a Genuine Supervillain and Alfred is old and frail and just a supporting character. So, after making Hush's face bleed with a single punch, immediately following up by slapping the gun out of his hands before he can even finish drawing it, doubling him over with a solid kick, and then holding the gun on him (having apparently caught it midair during all this) - you can tell how effective Hush really is, can't you? - Alfred is quickly overwhelmed. And then Hush proceeds to deduce the location of the entrance to the Batcave. Because (a) Alfred was in that room when Hush arrived, and Bruce would want him able to access the safest room in the house (b) Alfred tried to lead Hush away from that room and (c) Hush found Alfred working on the clock. Brilliant strategy, Bruce. And Alfred. So much for your experience and intelligence. (Oh, right. Forgot. Canceled out by the Riddler Factor.) ... Actually, as I'm typing this, I'm realizing that maybe we're supposed to realize that Alfred was caught in the act of fleeing to the Batcave. It would make more sense, but it wasn't really made very clear by the narrative. So I guess I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one and leave off the "Ow."
So Hush finds (one of) the entrance(s) to the cave. Which, really... not such a big deal, considering that he already knew Bruce's secret identity and basically everything else about him. And I'm pretty sure he had a traitor working in the cave in a previous storyline. But apparently this is a big deal to him because now he boasts that he'll be able to strike at Bruce any time he wants (as if he couldn't do this before, whenever the plot called for him to be able to do so). All of which entirely ignores the cave's (and the mansion's) vaunted security systems (which posed a challenge even to Catwoman, arguably the best thief in the DCU). Right. Anyway...
Hush finds the entrance to the cave. Turns a gun on Alfred, and of course, Bruce chooses that moment to Arrive In The Nick Of Time (crashing through a window, of course) and save his butler/father. The fight quickly falls down the stairs into the cave... and it's a nice moment. Hush looks around in wonder, and we get a good look at the cave. Cars from all the movies (and the old Adam West show), various souvenirs/trophies, all sorts of neat stuff.
(There are also flashbacks to Hush's origins and talk of the girlfriend who was retconned into existence this year and who is now the new Ventriloquist. Talk which, of course, occurs as Hush is walking past a glass trophy case with an old Scarface dummy in it.)
But now... back to the fight! Batman jumps down on Hush and is promptly shot, knocking him into... Jason Todd's memorial case. Again. How does this happen every single time there's a fight in the cave? Batman ought to put some extra traps and security near the case, with perhaps more stuff triggered by the breaking glass.
As Bruce suddenly finds himself having difficulty extracting himself from under a bit of glass, Hush pulls both guns on him. But! Batman is saved in the nick of time by the other nice moment in this book. The floor starts to shake. Hush catches Alfred poking at some controls. "I don't know what you hope to accomplish, but it's far too little too - Oh. ... Oh, no..." Hush turns around to find...
The t-rex robot (one of the cave's earliest and most recognizable trophies) bearing down on him!
And then, in the very next panel, he stands calmly in place and empties the clips of both guns into its head. Which causes it, in the very next panel after that, to fall down and die. Let me reiterate. The more than life sized t-rex, built entirely out of metal, is killed in a single panel by a few rounds from a pair of handguns. Handgun rounds which would probably do little more (in the movies/comics, if nothing else) than annoy a flesh-and-blood t-rex. How does Hush do it? Pure amped-up Riddler Effect power. He all but says it. "You won't win this way, Bruce! Not like this! ... NOT LIKE THIS!" (In other words: "This is too easy, and it's still the middle of the issue. Therefore, I must win.")
And, before the dust settles from that, Robin and Nightwing show up. As if Bruce and Alfred couldn't handle this. But no, he is Hush, a big league super villain (because the hype has declared him so), so he cannot be defeated quite so easily. How does, however, accede the Boy Wonders' tag-team assertion: He can't beat all of them at once. (Especially now that he's out of ammo.) So he retreats, choosing as his mode of escape (brief moment of squee, even amidst all this painful idiocy)... the Whirlybat. (Batman's late Golden Age/early Silver Age personal helicopter thingy.)
Batman, conspicuously sans cape, jumps after him. Hush taunts him a bit about how he never thinks ahead (WIF?) and always attacks rashly, without studying his opponent's weaknesses. Uhm, what? No, seriously. What? This is Batman we're talking about. Studying his opponent's weaknesses, attacking with everything planned out at least five steps ahead, leading into a trap specifically designed to exploit those weaknesses (even if the enemy isn't even aware of what those weaknesses are)... it's pretty much what he does. It's what's seen him through more fights than I can count, against enemies who would otherwise be too powerful to even consider facing.
But, anyway, Batman lets him get a good hit in (getting slashed across the arm with a batarang) and then points out that he left his cape behind for a reason. He drops away as Hush's bandages (which he replaced a few pages back, for no reason whatsoever, out of one of the cave's first aid boxes) get tangled up in the rotors. (Something which never happened while Batman was flying around in that thing with his cape on. And, really, given the strength of the downdraft the rotors are producing, there's no way the bandages should have been sucked up into them.) There's no way the bandages should have done anything but torn under those circumstances, but, inexplicably, they cause the poor old Whirlybat to explode, with Hush trapped in the seat. Something Batman apparently anticipated and had no qualms about. (WIF?)
Quick wrap-up in the cave, and we zip over to the operating room, where a team of superheroes and nurses replace Catwoman's heart and declare that she should pull through just fine (if not necessarily well enough to be jumping over rooftops). Oh, and Zatanna gives her a magic healing potion to help her recovery.
Bruce shows up to visit her recovery room bed and confesses to her that she is his one true love, the only woman he's loved, the only one who has gotten through to that part of him after his parents died. So much for Silver St. Cloud. And all the other girls. And, really... he was a child when his parents died. What he's basically saying is that she's the only person he's loved... which is a real slap in the face to Alfred, Dick, Tim, and a bunch of others.
Anyhoo, he finishes his confession of love and leaves the room... just as she informs him that she's awake and heard the whole thing. He leans down to kiss her, and we cut to two months later, where Selina is convalescing in some tropical location. (All of this, BTW, directly contradicts the last issue of Catwoman, where they basically agree that they like each other well enough, but they're not in love, and really, she's just in it for the thrills. And then she drives off into the sunset.) She's recording a video to Hush, just in case he's still alive. She confesses that, unfortunately, her happy ending with Bruce only lasted for a night. Which seems to imply that they spent the night together in her hospital bed, while she was still recovering from heart surgery, and then parted ways. Which... WIF?
So she talks to Hush and explains how she decided to revenge herself on him by taking what he cares about most - his money. Working with some friends (on both sides of the hero/villain thing), she's stolen every last cent from him. Hush does see the video (I guess she made arrangements for it to be left in one of his old hideouts?), having of course survived certain death. He gets pissed off and wanders sadly off into the foggy Gotham streets as Catwoman's recorded voice concludes with a quotation from Dorothy Parker: "If wild my breast and sore my pride, I bask in dreams of suicide... If cool my heart and high my head I think... 'How lucky are the dead.'" How cheery! What a lovely thought on which to end.
The whole thing is a string of stupid plot holes, wince-worthy moments, cliches, and melodrama. With a couple of nice moments, just to highlight how much everything else sucked.
This masterpiece brought to you by... Paul Dini. The brilliant writer who was one of the driving forces behind Batman: The Animated Series, and who has pulled off some pretty cool TAS-like stories in his recent run on this very title. They can't all be winners, of course, but... dang, I expected something miles better than this from him.
Meantime, over in Batman, we've been getting that Event storyline I mentioned earlier. "Batman: RIP". I'm told that they'll actually be (temporarily?) ending Detective Comics now. It's one of the longest-running titles in the industry. As I mentioned, they're up to issue 850. There haven't been a steady 12 issues per year (some had more, some might have had less), but that comes out to about 70 years, give or take.
The stories leading up to this introduced us to the Black Glove society, a group of super-rich gamblers who, finding themselves bored and with more money and power than they know how to use, get together to gamble on people's lives in games of their own devising. We were also introduced to some heretofore secret (and failed) attempts by a semi-corrupt faction within the GCPD to create a new Batman. Five officers subjected to trauma, drugs, and training so that they can stand ready when and if Batman dies. Because, really, Gotham's criminals aren't afraid of anyone else. The program was led by a certain doctor from an old forgotten Silver Age story.
In that story, Batman finds himself trapped on an alien world - a world on which Robin is dead. His only companion is a magical creature who bears a more than striking resemblance to Bat-Mite (Batman's answer to Mr. Mxyzptlk). Only it turns out that the whole thing is a bizarre dream created by Batman's mind after he has spent several days strapped to a chair in an isolation room. We're told that he volunteered for this experiment run by the space program (designed to give a better idea of the effects of living in deep space). (Why they'd consider Batman's mind to be typical enough to make a good representation of an astronaut's reaction is beyond me, but hey, it was the Silver Age.) Batman explains to Robin that he had volunteered, knowing it would drive him temporarily insane, in the hopes that it would give him better insight into the mind of the Joker and other Gotham nutjobs. Robin was dead in the dream because that's Batman's greatest fear, and the magical companion was the representation of what was left of his sanity.
Now it turns out that the leader of the Black Glove is that same doctor, now going by the villain name of Doctor Hurt. During his time watching Batman in that chamber, he learned his secret identity (and basically everything else there was to know about him) and even placed in his mind posthypnotic triggers that would overwhelm him and drive him insane when invoked.
But (in direct contradiction to Hush's statement in DC), we're told again and again that Batman has prepared himself for every humanly conceivable eventuality. Including the possibility that someone would take over his mind. He established the personality of the Batman from that alien world (complete with magical imp/voice of reason) as a back-up in case his mind were ever attacked, and he prepared himself immunity (or, failing that, antidotes) for every conceivable poison, etc etc. In short, we're told, the human body is more or less universal, and there are a finite number of things that can be done to it. Batman has obsessively prepared himself for each and every one. (Ow.)
Anyway, the posthypnotic stuff is triggered and Batman's mind is toyed with and this doctor shoots him up with heroin (and possibly other drugs) and dumps him in an alley. And taunts him and leads him along and blah blah. It's all pretty stupid, really. Oh, and there's a girlfriend involved. A woman we're introduced to just in time for Bruce to fall in love with her. She's used as bait, of course, and then it turns out that she was working with the bad guys the whole time. Except that, in this last issue, we're told that Bruce knew that... but figured it out a moment too late (because, in direct contradiction of the DC story, he admits that he fell in love with her anyway). There's a lot of craziness and running around and characters you've never heard of before (and hopefully never will again) and the Joker is kind of around and kills a few people. Batman is knocked out and buried alive, but still manages to come out of it all (as Joker and one of the Glove members had bet). And finally, it all comes down to a confrontation between Batman and Hurt. It's revealed that Hurt is, in actuality... not Thomas Wayne, Bruce's father (as he'd been hinting and Bruce had been flatly denying), but... an obscure actor who starred in the movie The Black Glove and had, at one point, been a double for Thomas Wayne.*** Wow.
***Back in an old retcon/flashback story, he tried to use the resemblance to frame the famous doctor, but was foiled, in the dramatic climax, by the heroics of Bruce's father... at a costume party which he attended in a stylized bat outfit. It's that costume, stolen during a brief fight in the cave, that the actor is wearing in the final pages of RIP.
Batman, in direct parallel to the climax of the DC story, ditches his cape (and this time the mask, too) and jumps onto Hurt's escaping helicopter. Hurt's pilot (one of the Batman substitutes he created) tries to shake him off, the copter blows up, and... that's it. We get a full-page shot of Nightwing holding the cape and cowl, with the flames in the background, the girlfriend's plane is attacked by an army of mutated human/bat hybrids (created a while back in another set-up story), and suddenly it's six months later, and there's been no sign of the Batman. Oh, and one of the bad guys thinks Robin is dead, too. A batsignal flares to life, we get a one-page flashback epilogue which takes us back to the night Bruce's parents were murdered (in which we're informed that if Zorro were a real masked vigilante, he'd be locked up in Arkham), and that's it. Batman is dead. (Until shortly before the next movie comes out.) I don't know where they're planning to go from here, and... I frankly don't care.
Meantime, over in the Superman titles, the writers have decided to lift the worst, most nonsensical idea from L&C and bring it to the comics. Sort of. Kandor, the miniaturized Kryptonian city that Superman has kept in the Fortress of Solitude all these years (after rescuing it from an alien collector), gets returned to full size. (Except that it's a retconned Kandor which now includes a sizable number of Zod loyalists. And a government that believes that individuals, no matter how powerful, can do whatever they want and it'll all turn out okay. A government led, of course, by Kal-El's uncle, Zor-El. Father of Supergirl. The explanation for why we've never seen these people in all the years Kandor has been in Clark's care? Those were alien cities inspired by the original. This is the real Kandor. The fact that it's always been explicit that the Kandor in the Fortress was an actual Kryptonian city filled with kryptonians? Fuggedaboutit.)
Suddenly the world is flooded with thousands of kryptonians. It's an intriguing premise, I suppose, but the first couple of issues have not been promising. There's a secret government agency plotting to kill Superman using whatever tools they can. They basically create a supervillain and give him magical enhancements (Superman being not-invulnerable to magic) and back him up with blasts from a secret satellite. The villain beats Superman practically into unconsciousness, a single blast from the satellite knocks the breath out of Supergirl, and... Krypto, seeing his master hurt, manages to singlehandedly defeat the villain while withstanding repeated blasts from the satellite. (WIF?)
Jimmy Olsen gets his one one-shot special in which he discovers the conspiracy, comes up against a new generic supervillain, and learns (in a lovely bit of further retcon) that the other superhero he used to hang out with was actually a government-created clone (who is now living in a trailer park in a little town on the Mexican border).
And then the Kandor thing happens. And the kryptonians arrive in Metropolis to greet the president... just as Doomsday crash lands at their feet. Literally right in front of them. (WIF?) Turns out, of course, that he was sent by the government conspiracy. But, of course, he's no match for an army of kryptonians. (Even though Doomsday is supposed to be immune to kryptonian powers now.) They kill him brutally, before Clark's eyes. And celebrate. (Except that Doomsday's power is that he can't be killed... he just comes back, immune to whatever killed him last time. But they seem to be trying to retcon that, too.)
Oh, and the government conspiracy? Which, BTW, is, of course, using Lex Luthor as one of its tools? It's led by none other than... *drumroll* General Sam Lane. Lois's father. Who was retconned back from the dead just for this.
Is it any wonder that I'm dropping all my DC Comics orders from here on out?
Completely unrelated:
R2-D2: The Aquarium??
And, to go in it...
Home aquarium soccer training set?? (Also includes equipment for basketball, football, and other tricks.)
Something very fishy about this stuff.
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But the stories in the other 8 or 9 months of the year tend to be much better.
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Sounds like I'm lucky I stopped reading the S books years ago. :)
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Should mention that as part of this whole New Krypton thing they killed off Jonathan Kent (again). The defeated Brainiac got off a parting shot while Clark was distracted half a world away by the sudden (rather noisy) emergence of Kandor just outside the Fortress.
We got a brief funeral scene in the next issue, and then he's been busy with all the New Krypton stuff. But the solicitation for an issue due to be released two months from now tells me that they'll finally be dealing with that whole "mourning" thing. Yay.
But yeah, good call. There was some nice stuff for a while there. And All Star Superman was fun (even if the art was rather ugly). But DC just seems to be going down the drain. Final Crisis is about the bad guys triumphing and wiping out most life on Earth (and enslaving what's left). Batman just got (temporarily, I assume) killed off. And Jonathan Kent. They just seem to be destroying whatever they feel like.
Including any sense of continuity or permanence. Conner Kent (the "Superboy" created by government cloning) died in the last Crisis, but there's an indication that they just brought him back. (Or maybe it's a clone...)
Over at the DP, they brought back Cat Grant (now with implants and a midlife crisis) to be the comic relief (of sorts). And Lana Lang got herself fired as Lexcorp CEO by using Lexcorp resources to help Superman (there's a special termination clause for that)... and now turned up at the DP as a columnist. Having "adopted" Supergirl as a niece in her new secret identity.
I think that about covers the news. Aren't you glad you (sort of but not really) asked?
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