BitchWitcher's Profile

I was so excited to fall in love with The Low, Low Woods, so it frankly quite sucks that it just ended up being very "meh". The other Hill House comics already out have blown me away every issue, but this one just wasn't it. It's a highly expository issue with little meat to its bones - art and writing wise. The two main characters, Vee and El, are endearing but we don't get much insight into them and the little we get isn't enough. Their predicament is potentially interesting, but the pacing is tediously slow and the art was too lacking in detail to do the heavy lifting while the plot meandered. The cliffhanger at the end is so bizarrely vague I thought I was missing pages for a second. Again, I'm not happy I feel this way about it, and judging by critics reviews I'm in the minority. I'll give it one more issue because I REALLY want to like this and I'd love to support all the Hill House series. Fingers crossed next issue is better!

The art is gorgeous, the banter is witty, and I'm very interested in the new Titans but the plot itself buckles under its own weight, as though trying to fit 6 issues into just 2. I'm hopeful Titans Academy will be a great book with this same team, but sadly there just didn't seem to be nearly enough space for this Future State story to breathe.

In which Diana wakes up to a ruined earth, is betrayed, then beaten, yet her undying resolve to love mankind, flawed though it may be, still causes her to emerge victorious. I loved some aspects of this but was very bothered by others. First of all, either this was crammed with way too many plot developments, or I've become so used to the plot decompression in modern comics that I FEEL as though too many plot developments were crammed into this. Daniel Warren Johnson takes on a very busy tour on Wonder Woman: Dead Earth #1 yet I felt I wasn't allowed to ever stop and smell the roses, so to speak. Because of the hastened pace, it feels as though many things that could've been explained better (or at all) had no time to breathe, and it was only halfway through the book that I stopped feeling as though I was playing catch up with the plot. It does seem to be leading to some pretty interesting places, however, so I can't wait for the next issue out in February. As for the art, I'd never read a book pencilled by Daniel Warren Johnson before, and while I love his different style, a couple of things bothered me a bit. First, his portrayal of Wayne Manor isn't nearly Manor-like enough. It's silly, I know, but I was really stuck on this god knows why. Also, I'm very curious as to why a post apocalyptic world's aesthetic would be half medieval, half low-budget sci-fi. All in all, Dead Earth is a fascinating addition to Diana's story, but it went by way too fast for my taste and didn't expand on a number of interesting things I wish I knew more about.

This is just a nice, done-in-one story that checks all the usual boxes. The trick here is to have master artist Nicola Scott on pencils, which instantly makes every single thing about it better.

Wilson's barely started but already she's doing substantially better than the mediocre atrocity James Robinson commited during his snoozefest of a run. She's not really reinventing the wheel here, but she does pick up on the current WW continuity and steers it towards something potentially very exciting. Diana sounds very much like herself, her interactions with Steve Trevor are both naughty and romantic yet still very much Diana. The only downside is Cary Nord's art. It's serviceable, and it's not distasteful to look at, but I could almost tell which specific panels lost half of their gravitas because of his lackluster arc. If they wanted Wilson's run to have a more classic, simplistic approach to it, why not get Chris Samnee or Doc Shaner? Oh well. Either way, this is worlds better than what we've had since Rucka's departure, and G. Willow Wilson seems on track for an awesome run.

Del Duca and Filardi's art is gorgeous, and Watters' writing makes both Jon and Yara even more interesting than I already found them. Solaris, Jon's sassy cybernetic sun nemesis, is also an awesome villain. If there's one thing to be nitpicky about, it's just that as a Brazilian there are some language issues in Yara's storyline. One character is named Soasa - a last name that does not exist, but was probably meant to be Sousa - and São Paulo is mistakenly referred to as São Paolo once or twice. Yara also exclaims a sentence in Portuguese at one point that isn't something I've ever heard someone say, but I'll blame Google translate for that. Anyway, other than that this is another Future State winner.

Sorrentino's art was twisted, evocative, and spooky as always, and Lemire did a good job tying everything together, but I can't shake the feeling that this ending was a bit too predictable for the tale this incredible team was telling. Perhaps that will be rectified in the upcoming one shot in May, but for now, while I greatly enjoyed this series, it feels like a bit of a disappointment.

Tom Taylor gives us a great new squad full of personality, plus his usual apt handle on already well established characters such as Waller and Harley. A few emotional moments involving the new characters felt a bit unearned since we'd barely gotten to know them, but given Taylor's proclivity for fictitious bloodbaths there was no way everyone was coming out of this unscathed. Redondo and Lucas are an amazing art team as they've been since Injustice. The Squad is back, and I haven't been this excited for Task Force X in a long, long time!

Somehow, James Tynion's done it: he's made me very interested in Punchline and how her journey will differ from Harley's. He also succesfully shows how different and mature Harley has become (well, mature in her own way.) Also, the Alfred hallucination sequences are a knife to the heart this time around, while still imbuing Bruce and the plot with hope. Lastly, as usual, Jimenez's art is gorgeous especially when paired with Tomeu Morey's beautiful colours.

Like the first Death Metal one shot, Guidebook is surprisingly additive to the main event while also throwing in some fun side stories that may not he crucial to the reader's understanding of Death Metal but do expand the world Snyder and co. are creating. The main story by Snyder, Tynion, Williamson and Mahnke is simultaneously the most important story while also the least interesting. It does what it needs to do by contextualizing how the Death Metal world came to be, and ends in an interesting cliffhanger. The pacing, however, was a bit too fast for me and ended up losing whatever emotional aspect it could've had. The Harley Quinn story by Zdarsky and Randolph is one of the silliest and most entertaining ones, and makes me hope that these two are the creative team for Harley's inevitable post-Death Metal relaunch. Becky Cloonan's Aquaman story looks gorgeous, as her art always does, and I really enjoyed the poetic writing as well as the context of what Arthur has been forced to endure since the Batman Who Laughs took over Earth Prime. Vita Ayala and Dan Panosian's Diana and Poison Ivy story is my favourite, as it turns an odd couple of characters into perhaps the most emotional moment Death Metal has provided yet. Panosian's art has also never looked better. Finally, Priest and Eduardo Risso's Batman and Jonah Hex story was a bit confusing what with all the talk about dangerous potential of milk, yet the constant dark reminder that "All Light Dies" paired with Risso's dreary and stylish art gave me chills from start to finish. The Black Lantern oath has sadly never been more relatable than in 2020.

Tomasi/Walker: 5/10 Great art, pointless story - if one can even call it a story when really it's more of a Batman's rogues gallery recap. Bendis/Marquez: 10/10 Probably the best thing Bendis has done at DC so far outside of Naomi. Someone give him and Marquez a Batgirl ongoing STAT. Fraction/Zdarsky 10/10 Obviously. What did we expect? I'm a sucker for anytime Bruce and Joker get downright Freudian with each other, and this may be the best example of that yet. Also, honourable mention for Joker grafitting an alley with the following quote: "Every alley is a Crime Alley if you believe in yourself!" Indeed. Rucka/Risso 9/10 Again unsurprisingly great with a team like this, and a really topical and inspirational entry in this anthology. Tynion/Rossmo 9/10 A surprisingly sweet story that also happens to be spooky and action-y. Rossmo draws the cutest Robin I've seen. DeConnick/Romita Jr. 8/10 A nice short thriller that actually puts more focus on Bruce than it does Batman. Not groundbreaking, but very entertaining. Wolfman/Lupacchino 6/10 I didn't feel strongly about this one either way. It's not necessarily bad, but it's too compressed to be interesting. Feels like Wolfman tried to fit an annual's worth of plot into 15 pages, and the plot wasn't all that to begin with. Morrison/Burnham 8/10 A darkly hilarious tale of a poor concerned Gothamite who intends to be the saviour of his crime besieged city. Until he remembers, oh right, there's Batman. King/Simonson 8/10 It's a simple enough story, but as usual King manages to deconstruct Batman even in a few pages, and he uses a neat time-looping plot device to do it. You mileage will vary with whether or not you enjoy King's Batman. I mostly do. Snyder/Reis 10/10 Snyder makes the most out of a few pages to show just how deep the (super weird but also adorable) friendship between Batman and Gordon is. Jurgens/Nowlan 7/10 It's an interesting prelude to whatever shape the Generations event will finally take on next year, but I'm guessing it wasn't meant to be read as a one off because it doesn't really work well that way. Still it got me interested in Generations, which I guess is what it was meant to do. Tamaki/Mora 7/10 Saddled with tying into not only the ongoing Joker War, but also the next Tomasi Detective arc, Tamaki crafts a good story that probably isn't half as great as it could've been if she had been allowed to just do her own thing. Oh well. Overall, it's a great anthology with mostly amazing stories, a couple of mediocre ones, and a whole lot of creative teams I now wish had a little corner of the Batverse to call their own.

Not having read any past stories about the Black Mercy, I found Loveness' script quite chilling. From the very first page it's clear something is about to go very wrong, but Loveness cleverly intersperses the rising tension with interesting questions both about the Justice League's personal lives as well as their impact, good and bad, in the world. Rocha, Henriques and Fajardo Jr. clinch a great script with incredible art that is very DC house style but with a twist all its own. I'm glad this art team is staying on even after this filler arc is done.

Plot wise Tamaki continues with her apparent modus operandi of taking things slow, but the buddy dynamics of Diana and Max Lord are so fun, I barely care. Steve Pugh and Romulo Fajardo absolutely kill it in the art department. They elevate the humour and even have some beautiful, surprisingly moving shots of Diana watching the sunset. So far this is not a complex Wonder Woman story, but it is an incredibly fun one and I had really missed that before Tamaki took over.

Another win for DeConnick and Rocha. While I would've liked for Aqualad's confrontation with his father to be a bit more significant, the fact that it was Manta's own father, via the AI Manta himseld built, who ended up confronting Manta was also a stroke of genius. "I am a machine" he says over and over again, yet DeConnick makes us feel his pain even through his robotic repetition. Also, Rocha's redesign of Mera's outfit is gorgeous and I hope it doesn't go away once she's given birth. It's a bit less practical looking than Stjepan Sejic's design that skewed closer to Amber Heard's Mera, but the swaddling green fabric and the golden thigh highs Rocha came up with have a glorious simplicity all of its own.