Comic Reviews

This week the Kingpin of Crime gets his Trump on; Tim Drake has a word with himself; mutants and aliens get therapy; and after months of uncertainty we get branding confirmation that Jennifer Walters is still female.

Daredevil #595

Mayor Fisk part 1

Marvel just does not do subtle satire, does it? I mean, they even have Foggy Nelson explain to the reader that no one who voted for Fisk was under any delusion that he wasn't the Kingpin of Crime but they liked that he was a political outsider. Just about the only thing they don't do is make him a Republican, instead making sure to mention he ran as an independent.

Meanwhile, Mayor Fisk has ordered he DA's office and Matt Murdoch in particular to start preparing briefs on how to hold vigilante superheroes accountable. Its not a comfortable situation as any reasonable person probably would prefer people who cause massive property damage on a regular basis to have some accountability and it ties in with the recent Supreme Court arc about bringing the heroes into the legal framework. We get Matt in full hothead and pissed off mode which means he falls for approximately one hundred percent of Fisk's plans through the whole issue because Matt Murdoch can always been relied on to make things worse for himself. Its an interesting angle that continues to use Matt's new position as a prosecutor to good effect and I look forward to seeing where it goes, though I hope that Fisk stays mayor for a while to come because that's the sort of angle that has a lot of juice in it.

Detective Comics #968

A Lonely Place of Living conclusion

Given her presence on the cover I was hoping to see a Steph/Tim reunion but sadly not. Instead we get a big long fight between various elements of the Bat-family and evil future Tim. Its not badly written or drawn but there is a lot leftover for future stories and in the typical infuriating time traveler way evil future Tim keeps banging on about how Kate will do “something” without going in to the sort of specifics that might help prevent the something even though his murder plan fell through.

Still, he does say the something will happen in a few weeks so we might get to that sometime within the next year.

Runaways #3

Find Your Way Home part 3

Okay, this is a SPOILERS one so skip down a bit if you don't want to know why I liked it...

…

I like that Karolina said now when Nico, Gert and Chase came into her life and asked her to abandon it. I like that she felt guilty about it and had to chant affirmations at herself whilst crying after they left. I like that she's shown as conflicted and unhappy with her decision but that the narrative is firmly on her side about it. I like that she is putting her own needs first here. Chase never recovered from Gert's death and Nico has her abandonment issues from the break-up of A-Force (such a good title...) but Karolina is in college, she has a girlfriend and is making headway with therapy. Much as I like the character (and please let that girlfriend be Julie, please please please) I think showing all this is a very positive thing.

I also liked that there was acknowledgement that getting Chase and Gert back together would probably be a mistake. He was always a little older than her and now there's an age gap of years that makes things horribly creepy if they tried to reignite their actual relationship.

Generation X #8

Speaking of superheroes moving on, after far too many years an X-book gets back to seeing what Husk is up to. Last time we saw her was back in the dying days of the Wolverine and the X-Men title when she'd started being the school's guidance counselor. Now she's completely outside the X-Men, taking her PhD to become an actual psychiatrist. What's more, she's started talking with her proper accent (and less annoyingly written, I hated the old phonetic way the “hayseed” characters were written, its more contractions and the odd apostrophe now).

Also, nice to see the likes of Mercury, Dust and Hijack are now low level leadership figures amongst the student body.

She-Hulk #159

Jen Walters Must Die part 1

I am so very dubious about that title change. Nostalgia is one thing but... ugh, nevermind, still the same writer so there's hope. That having been said...

Now, its not like Tamaki's run on this title was without humour before, in fact it was pretty damn funny, but there's a different flavour to the funny in this issue. There's a restaurant that sells “burger cake” and a professor who is a stereotypical airhead blonde. Maybe that's the “Legacy” angle for this title: to go a little more towards the oddball humour of the original She-Hulk run (okay, okay, pedantically it was the second run but no one actually cares about the first one).

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the change. On the one hand it is a pretty minor change but I hope that it doesn't come to dominate the tone of the series which up to now I've really, really liked. Time will tell.