What I Bought 4/17/2014 - Part 2

Moving on to DC, one book leftover from March, and the only one of those Convergence books I’m going to end up buying.

Harley Quinn #16, by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Chad Hardin (artist, pages 1-15, 20), John Timms (artist, pgs. 16-19), Alex Sinclair (colors for Hardin’s pages), Paul Mounts (colors for Timms’ pages), John J. Hill (letterer) – Harley and dynamite is not an advisable combination.

Harley is going to reduce her stress by interviewing 80 applicants to be her crew, selecting a dozen of them, finding a place for them to live, and getting it renovated and furnished. As a plan to reduce her responsibilities, this would seem to fall under “spending money to make money”. Or perhaps burning money to make money. Anyway, after the interviews, and the battle royale, she’s got her group, and their all decked out in her colors, to represent her values and honor. That’s a little terrifying, but sure, why not?

So we’ll see how this goes. Harley as a leader is not something I see ending well, and I’m more than a little suspicious of Holly, the blind, wheelchair-bound girl with an alliterative name that made the cut. Holy crap, it’s Barbara Gordon in disguise, isn’t it? Or it’s a reference to Matt Murdock, one or the other. I shouldn’t be surprised someone in the Bat-family would be keeping an eye on Harley, especially after she went on that date with Bruce Wayne.

I like the idea of the movie posters in the theater being those homage variant covers DC did a couple months ago. I saw the Batgirl/Prince one, and the “Superman and Doomsday are Bill & Ted” for certain. Might as well use them for that. Also, I loved Ivy’s sad face at the ketchup covered fries. Not sure why, maybe because it plays off Harley’s energetic attempts to get still more ketchup out of the bottle. By the next panel, Harley’s trying to use a knife to scrape it out, and looks perfectly content at that moment, while Ivy looks just slightly repulsed. I wonder if it’s because she objects to eating potatoes, or just hates seeing them in ketchup? 

The humor is still broad, and nothing made me laugh out loud, but I smiled at quite a few of the lines in there, and I appreciate the effort, anyway. The creative team is clearly just doing whatever they like, making any jokes they choose, from one about a particular apparatus a woman brought to a recent movie based on a book, to a gag about poor, mistreated letterer, John J. Hill. If they aren’t going to loosen his collar, they could at least give him a clean shirt.

Batgirl: Convergence #1, by Alisa Kwitney (writer), Rick Leonardi (penciller), Mark Pennington (inker), Steve Buccellato (colorist), Dezi Sienty and Tom Napolitano (letterers) – If there was only going to be one, you knew this was it. And it’s your fault it’s only the one Internet! You did too good a job telling me how dull and repetitive most of the other books were!

Steph gave up being Batgirl because of something that happened at the zoo shortly after Brainiac whisked away the city. Brainiac either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, because a year later, he tags her to fight for the survival of her city against the Catman of Flashpoint. At least she has Tim and Cass with her, even if Tim spends all his time running her down, while Cass just can’t figure out what to do to help. The answer is nothing, really. Steph’s been out of costume for a year. Unless Cass can use the ole Ariashikage Mindset on Steph, nothing’s going to fix that inactivity. Especially now that Gorilla Grodd’s in the mix.

So first off, I’m not sure I buy Steph giving up being Batgirl. Considering all the crap she went through and was put through, and she kept on as Spoiler, it seems unlikely. But fine, unprecedented situation for her, being trapped inside an unbreakable dome, produces an unprecedented response. And I do like that’s she continuing to help people in her own way, which involves being fairly clever and good at understanding what motivates others. Cass can read a body, but her life experience is so different, there’s no guarantee she can understand what she sees. And Tim seems to have ventured too far down the Bat-path, where people are abstract collections of traits to be analyzed and managed. I don’t particularly like Tim here, but Steph and Cass’ interactions feel roughly on the money. Cass has never held back what she thinks when Steph pressed her on it, but she’s still cared about her. And Cassandra keeping Steph’s costume, but never bothering to wash it was perfect. I laughed.

This is. . . not Rick Leonardi’s best work. Maybe he was rushed, or maybe Pennington is just not an inker well-suited to him. I know his work looked a lot better when he was inked by Jesse Delperdang on Cass’ series. There are still good panels or pages here, but a lot of stuff seems unfinished, or overshaded in places. There’s one panel on page 2 where Tim looks really gaunt because of the shading on his cheeks. There are sequences where the shape of Steph’s face seems to shift considerably from one panel to the next, and in one panel her face consists of two dots for eyes and nothing else. Not even a hint of a mouth or nose. Leonardi's artwork was actually a strong selling point for me on this, so it's kind of a letdown. 

No idea what happened to the font there at the end.