Three books this week, and the store actually had all three. That's nice. In other news, I've been going like crazy at work the last six weeks, trying to get a lot of inspections done since it sure as hell seemed like no one else was going to. I have a couple more weeks of that to go, and then I'm hoping to glide through the last six weeks of 2023 on mental autopilot. The fun will be in seeing precisely how that plan goes belly-up.
Culver and Burnham give us a flashback page to start, helpfully explaining that Immortus has combined with the form a thought-being took with the unwitting help of the late Dorothy Spinner. I really did appreciate that, since I had no idea if there was any significance in Immortus suddenly having candles floating around his skull prior to this.
The team is stretched thin between this and the Brotherhood of Evil attacking their home, but The Chief gets the idea of convincing The Quiz to switch sides by letting Crazy Jane speak with her. Inside a shared thought-space, they aren't standing in the middle of the battleground having a polite chat. I don't know if the space Chief and the other alternate identities hang out in being a subway station is something Culver and Burnham came up with or something pre-existing, but I like the map that I assume charts the connections between them.
While that's going on, Negative Man's convincing Mento to really cut loose with his powers. He assures Mento he won't go to far because he has his family to help, but the book hasn't sold that. We've hardly seen anyone interact with Mento through 7 issues, mostly the Chief implying Mento and Niles Caulder are chafing at the restrictions they're facing now that they aren't in charge. That sounds less like family and more like wardens. Maybe if we'd seen Beast Girl coming down to visit and chatter with Mento, something to show he was really treated like part of the team.
Mento keeps General Candlemaker (not his actual title) slowed down long enough The Quiz banishes it to The Bleed and then leaves, uninterested in making friends at this time. I can respect that. "I did this job with you because it was necessary, now leave me alone." Then Peacemaker shows up with his knockoff Sentinels and Degenerate offers to stay behind and give the others time to escape.
So they still don't know the caterpillar thing is a double-agent, but there's other things that didn't get much time, either. Most of the new characters are still ciphers, nothing's really been done exploring Rita and Flex Mentallo's relationship. Presumably all that would be for some follow-up series, and in an attempt to entire us, Gen. Candlewax lands on Danny the Street, being tortured by *the most exhausted aggrieved sigh you can imagine* the Batwoman Who Laughs. Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh.
It's not like it's even a good character design, which I think Burnham is more than capable of, because the new characters are distinctive and at least visually interesting, even if we don't know spit about most of them. But the whole, "Character Who Laughs" shtick doesn't allow for much variety. Dull, monochrome costume, stupid spiked helmet thing, and she's wearing a Kirbytech-looking yellow glove thing. As you can see, the last page had the precise opposite effect I assume the creative was shooting for.
2 comments:
The Batman Who Laughs (and I assume, by extension, the rest of the Who Laughs family) is just ripping off Judge Death and I'm genuinely surprised no one's put a stop to it yet. 🤷
If someone can, I wish they'd get off the stick and do it already.
I looked up the Wikipedia on Batman Who Laughs to figure out why "Batman, but he's crazy like Joker" is such an existential threat to the multiverse and boy, was that a mistake. I think part of my brain caught on fire.
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