Okay, I have eight books to reviews here, but I’m not going to. I’ll do a handful of capsules and then I’ll rant about Catwoman #14. Ready? Let’s light this candle.
Justice League #14: Pretty much the same as the last time I reviewed Justice League. You have the Cheetah, with Tony S. Daniel not pissing me off.
Nightwing #14: Again, the same as last time; absolutely stupid tie-ins to the Joker plotline, and I am ready to go back to the regular writer. I almost didn’t read this but I got bored and I wasn’t going to take it off my pull for one issue so I had it.
Captain Marvel #7: Dexter Soy is back, and he was sorely missed. The resolution to the time travel arc kind of annoyed me, but we’re back to the fun character driven book that I fell in love with. Oh, and Monica Rambeau shows up — wearing her Nextwave costume! Oh, Nextwave is love.
Hawkeye #4: The isssue’s fill-in artist, Javier Pulido, isn’t David Aja, but he’s delivered an issue that fits in with Aja’s style well enough. I don’t know what else to say other than to buy the heck out of this book.
AND NOW, THE MOMENT NOBODY HAS BEEN WAITING FOR:
Catwoman 14: You may have heard that the Joker’s face got ripped off at the start of the New 52, and now the Joker is back and wearing his old face as a mask. This is how he looks as drawn by Batman artist Greg Capullo:
Greg Capullo’s Joker
This is what I like to call “terrifying.” This, on the other hand, is the Joker as drawn by Rafa Sandoval:
Rafa Sandoval’s Joker
It is… not terrifying at all.
Okay, so the Joker looks crappy. Other than that, Sandoval seems well acquitted to the rest of the book’s art, although in some cases his layouts are outright confusing. But he draws cheesecake well. So let’s talk about that.
The premise of the current Joker arc, “Death of the Family,” is that the Joker is going aroudn to all the different Bat-family members and threatening them as a way to toughen up Bats himself. Now, look, we know that the Joker isn’t going to kill Catwoman in her own title, they’ve got issue 15 to ship next month and they can’t well do that if she’s dead. So the trick is to come up with a way for the Joker to threaten our heroine even though we know she’ll be okay. Some writers can pull that off — Scott Snyder is amazing at it, Gail Simone is doing an admirable job in Batgirl… Ann Nocenti is terrible at it.
At one point the Joker says, “I just thought of another way to skin a cat.” Turn page, and it turns out the idea is… “strip poker.” Yes, the Joker tortures Catwoman by undressing her several times. I’m serious, this is the actual premise of a comic book. At the end, we get the “twist” — the Joker is “in love” with Batman, and is going after Catwoman as a rival! So much so that he takes her clothes off and makes her wear different ones!
So, yeah, this is possibly one of the more sexist comics imaginable, made all the weirder because a female writer penned it.
Nocenti’s three issues into her Catwoman run, and from what I understand wasn’t exactly covering himself in glory before her, but someone that has a clue what they’re doing needs to start writing this book soon, and from all evidence Nocenti isn’t that person.
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