It almost completely slipped my mind Wednesday was 4/20. I don't smoke weed, but I know a lot of people that do. Guess I figured one of them would mention it. Oh well. Anyway, here's one book from this week, and one book from last week.
The Batgirls - all three of them - draw out the Saints and defeat them in less than 7 pages. That's barely over a quarter of the comic. Usually takes most teams at least a half to defeat the Saints, but I guess times are tough since Drew Brees retired. I think we're meant to take it that this is how it goes when the Batgirls are ready and fighting on their terms, but it comes off as pretty underwhelming for a threat they were trying so hard to avoid for the first 4 issues. The pacing of the fight is weird, too. Cass decides to play chicken with the Saints (who are driving an A-Team van, basically). One panel of the Saints recognizing this, one panel of the big guy insisting he's happy to oblige, next panel they're panicking and swerving. Feels like it could have been presented in a more interesting way, but Cloonan and Conrad wanted more pages to spend talking about Tutor's backstory.
Anyway, the Saints are off the board for now (July's solicit says they'll be back by then), so the trio splits up. Cass and Steph head to what's left of Arkham to confront the Tutor, while Barbara (in civilian garb), goes to visit her old psychiatrist chum. Too late, the girls figure out Charles Dante was the Tutor's shrink in Arkham and Barbara's out cold. In the meantime, Tutor's assembled an army of people, which Cass intends to fight alone, while Stephanie squares off with the Tutor.
There's a sequencing foul-up, where Barbara is telling the others where they're going and you're supposed to turn the page and get a full-page splash reveal of Arkham Asylum. Except they screwed up and put the page that would follow that first, so we see the girls jumping the fence and snooping through offices, then back outside the gates staring up at the asylum. Great hustle, DC. Maximum effort there.
I can't keep up with the redesigns to Barbara's Batgirl outfit. There was the "Burnside" outfit, then they did one that I thought ditched the cowl and just went with a mask, and now she's back to the pointy cowl like the Burnside look, but they ditched most of the yellow except the chest emblem and the cape lining, and added a lot more black, including the cowl. Just looks weird against the blue of the costume.
I feel like the creative team is trying to set a quick pace here, but I'm not sure it's working. The narration boxes that are from someone who isn't any of the Batgirls definitely aren't working. I think it's a narrator, but I don't know why they think we needed that. Spend more time on the characters's thoughts! Maybe I was always supposed to recognize the Saints as little more than an annoyance. At the end of the day, they're just three fanatics who think they serve a higher purpose, while Tutor and Spellbinder are controlling an army. Although at the end of the day, Tutor's just a deluded pawn like the Saints. Something's not working right for me with this, and it isn't the character interactions, I enjoy those. The pieces are there for me to dig this more than I do, I'm just less sure it'll happen before I give up.
So, Detective Finch killed a man, chopped him up, and stuffed him in his fridge. Or more accurately, the dream demon Stetson is hunting took control of his body and did that. So, his need to find and question Stetson just got more urgent. Stetson, meanwhile, is talking with a different dream demon about her target, who tells her this creature wants to become human, somehow. Finch shows up, the conversation goes south very quickly, so her guys drug Finch and they jump inside his mind.
Inside, they find a version of Finch on the floor, weird things growing from his chest, and the same marks as the creature from the previous issue. Stetson frees a very of Finch from that form, but he's not much help. May not matter, because Valkira left a message for Stetson.
After the first issue, I thought Stetson had been used as a child by Valkira and killed her own mother. Now it sounds like Valkira may have controlled Stetson's daughter and the child wound up dead. I don't know how much of a difference that will make. I guess Stetson would be driven by feeling like she failed as a parent, rather than anger at something that terrorized and used her as a child. Does one make her more reckless than the other?
There's indications Stetson's mind isn't entirely secure. During the conversation with Finch, Robins shifts to this almost psychedelic color scheme from one page to the next, while it seems like Stetson is just doing exposition for Finch. But she's actually fallen asleep or nodded off mid-conversation. So who is telling her to ignore the ostrich? Is it just a response to stress and trauma, or part of Valkira's plan?
Cardinali draws Stetson looking like ten miles of bad road at all times. Either slouched or with her shoulders drawn up to her ears, frequently scowling and deep shadows under the eyes. Not bothering to disguise the bruises from her work. So I could believe the character just rarely sleeps and is showing every bit of that. If she wants to make sure to meet Valkira on her terms, she might try to avoid sleep so the demon can't get in that way.
I'm also curious how much Finch will remember of what's going on in his dreams when he wakes up. The guy in the first issue didn't seem to recall Stetson shotgunning the clown. That could be a complication. So could the body in his fridge, for that matter. Gonna have to do something about that eventually.
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